The Long Tail

Chris Anderson has finished his book on the long tail. I wonder if he wants his sales figures to lie somewhere in the middle of that tail or if he'd prefer something closer to a bestseller in the powerful head?

One curious thing about this long tail metaphor/diagram is that there is a tail and head, but where is the body exactly? Anderson "solves" this problem in his first post by calling the head the body, and helps himself out visually by using a curve that appears not to be an actual power law, but instead a distortion of one..

So in some ways Anderson has reached the end of this long tail, although I suspect the blog will continue on. But at this juncture I'm left wondering if Anderson's project is less about celebrating the long tail as a whole and more about exploiting the growing tail of distribution in order to find oneself in the powerful head of income.

All that said I still think Anderson sometimes is digging in interesting stuff and the blog to book model that he's help pioneer is quite intriguing...