Here are links to each post in my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

0- Cards on the Table
0.1 – The Cover
0.2 – The Introduction
1 – The Long Tail
2 – The Rise and Fall of the Hit
3 – A Short History of the Long Tail
4 – The Three Forces of the Long Tail
5 – The New Producers
5.1 – One Big Virtual Tent
6 – The New Markets
7.0 – A Teaser
7 – The New Tastemakers
8 – Long Tail Economics
8.1 – A Note on Networks
9.1 – The Short Head Part 1
9.2 – The Short Head is Alive and Well
9.3 – The Short Head Part 2
10 – The Paradise of Choice
10.1 – A Short Note
11.1 – Living in a Niche Culture (1)
11.2 – Living in a Niche Culture (2)
12 – The Infinite Screen
13 – Beyond Entertainment
14 – Long Tail Rules
15 – Coda

Or you can download the … Continue reading

First, welcome to readers from progressivebloggers.ca, where I am now an affiliate (just).

If you are coming here for the first time, let me catch you up. I’m in the middle of a chapter-by-chapter, nearly page-by-page critique of Chris Anderson’s book about "the future of business" called "The Long Tail". I’m doing it because the book is widely read, influential, enthusiastically pro-market, and also sloppy and wrong wrong wrong. If you want to see the beginning of the series, go here. If you want to see them all in descending order, go here.

I usually try for about three chapters a week, but I only got two done over the last week, so here’s a bonus teaser for the next chapter, which is Chapter 7. It’s a little thing – one sentence in the middle of the book – but it says something about the author’s cavalier attitude to facts.

Chris Anderson says:

Dell spends hundreds of millions each year on promoting its quality and
customer service, but if you Google "dell hell" you’ll get 55,000 pages
of results.[99]  (I put page numbers in square brackets)

At ten results per page (the default) that’s … Continue reading

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 6 – The New Markets. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here. You have to read upwards, in usual blog fashion. When I get to the end I hope to put these all together in one big file for download.

Bored of this yet? Well that’s just too bad, because this blog is nothing but The Long Tail until I’ve gone through the whole thing, repetition and tedium be damned. So if you don’t like that, come back in about three or four weeks if things go according to plan.

Still here? Great. Glad to have you. It is time to cast your mind back and recall that Chapter 4 spelled out the Three Forces of the Long Tail and that Chapter 5 was about the first one: Production. Chapter 6, today’s subject, is about the second force: distribution. And whereas Chapter 5 was bolted on to the side of the Long Tail hypothesis, Chapter 6 is right in the middle of it. It’s about Internet aggregators, in particular Amazon, … Continue reading

This is a part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, although it doesn’t discuss any one chapter. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here. You have to read upwards, in usual blog fashion. When I get to the end I hope to put these all together in one big file for download.

It’s time to take a breather and stop turning the pages of The Long Tail. I hope I’ve made the point now that there are a lot of problems with the book, a lot of places where (as John said) "It looks like his theory has become so obvious and inevitable to him that he sees the ‘revolution’ coming even when the facts seem to point in the other direction." It’s time to step back a bit. After all, even if much of The Long Tail is fluff, what about the idea at the heart of the book? Even if it takes only a few sentences to state instead of 240 pages, it could still be a penetrating insight that holds up despite the sloppiness of the supporting material. So the … Continue reading