The Long Tail

That was a very interesting discussion. This may be off the point a bit but being a person who is libertarian/free market minded, I've been trying to tackle some of these newer, "undefined" (or difficult to define) methodologies expressed in the discussion in terms of how they relate to my overall understanding of the world and the marketplace.

I think the thing that stands out for me the most, and Wired tends to promote these types of things, is that they tend to focus on emergent businesses and attempt to adapt them to a level in which we can understand them. But the larger problem is that the marketplace of ideas tends to rebuke some of these expectations as I gathered the Wired editor was getting at.

To me, I do find value in projects like Wikipedia but I think that the efficiency of Wikipedia is built on an inefficient model. It takes bits of collective knowledge from many to create a larger whole. But what is the long-term incentive of a single contributor watching an article for a long period of time? I'm sure there are some that are long-term maintainers and editors but I wonder what the overall turnover is to accumulate that amount of knowledge. I don't believe the long-term incentive is attractive enough to keep maintainers for a lengthy period of time (as a collective whole). This is where I think the private sector does better although I would need some relevant data from the private sector to confirm – I would be lead to believe that the private sector (Britannica) is highly more efficient on a per contributor basis.