The Long Tail has been the latest phenom here in the blogosphere. Its discussion of the choice freedom released by online retailers and distributors should be no surprise to anyone who has been online for more than 2 weeks.
My experience with this Long Tail goes back to the Christmas in 1998 when I bought a copy of Christmas in Connecticut (the original, not the schlocky re-make) from Amazon. Paid duty and shipping to have it sent to Canada. Very few of my peers had ever heard of it, and the only taped copy was an old Betmax version pulled from TV years before.
The whole reason that the Internet retail channel was touted in the first place was for just the reason that Chris Anderson has “discovered” in the Long Tail: all-the-time access to everything in market niche X. So why is the blogosphere heralding this as a new discovery? It has been with us since the beginning. But when someone “invented” a term for it, it is a new idea that needs to be discussed.
It is the original idea behind the commercial Internet. It is not news.
Next story please.