Traveling down the tail with confidence

Recommendations are key.

3 Broad Opportunities
1. Aggregator (reach both the head and tail)
2. Suppliers (
3. Filters (get the good stuff going: bloggers, PR)

And without filters, the long tail is just noise.

Signal to noise ratio: you need a good filter. Chris's wife likes Top 40 music, he likes house/techno, and his friend likes surf and rockabilly. The Long Tail has something for everyone.

Most of us are niche in some way or another--and so what you realize is, with good filters, you will find brilliant work at the end of the tail that delights you. And you will also find a lot of abysmal work.

Now we've moved to an era of post-filtering past release to market--rather than pre-filter before release. Now we can throw everything out there, and let the market/word-of-mouth/bloggers decide what's cool.

Chris is describing a DVD-burning kiosk vs. Blockbuster: In a kiosk environment, you have an infinite selection and the ability to burn an infinite number of them. So the hits don't sell as well on the kiosk, but the sheer quantity of random materials that people want will outsell the hits by XX%. (Sorry, I missed the percentage).