Web 2.0 and The Long Tail

I was looking for comparisons to Web 2.0 and the Long Tail and was happy to find this one by Joshua Porter.  My comment is, "Almost, but not quite."  Folks disagree on exactly what Web 2.0 means, but I like Ross Mayfield's comment best: "Web 2.0 is Made of People".
To me, the buzzwordy "Web 2.0" is about people connecting more easily, not deeper access to previously-hidden databases.  It's what drives the whole nascent Word of Mouth Marketing industry.  What was unavailable before was a large audience for the personal rants of someone who is not a journalist, the personal photos of someone who's not a professional, the movie reviews of someone who's not a paid critic, the videos of someone who is not a filmmaker. 
It's the same concept as the fact that there is now a market for the author who is not a best-seller, or the TV show that isn't good enough for prime time... just further down the long tail. 
Before, you could only show your wedding pictures to your relatives and friends.  Now, the entire world can see them.  And a subset of those viewers are eager to get ideas from you about your dress, flower arrangements, etc.  While the captive pre-internet audience may have been bored witless, there's a quorum of internet users who are actually interested.
Porter gets back on track at the end of his post when he describes the effect of "increased choice" from the "whole catalog" of "previously unavailable" material.  So true.  And marketers can choose to learn how to participate in this activity, or miss out on the majority of the world's messaging opportunities.

Comments

[Rionn Malechem]

So, what I hear you suggesting is a tool suite that could do an image search crawl and distinguish particular consumer products, sell the locations of images to the marketers of those products, and provide a link through something like netmite to people who want to purchase those consumer products they see in privately posted images, with a commission to the poster.
Interesting.

[Iz]

Um, I wasn't suggesting that... but your mind works in interesting ways, Rionn. I was talking about publicly posted user-generated content, not private anything. I tend to believe private stuff should be just that - private.

[Mike Levin]

What you just described pretty much exists. It's called ShopWiki, and is the epitome of long tail shopping if I ever saw one. Forget the mainstream estores. This grabs listings out of scary-obscure places. It does the image search PLUS product attributes.

And another Web 2.0 tool also exists the helps you build your long tail of search. It's called HitTail, in the sense that it helps you build more hits in your tail. Both are very Web 2.0-ish, and both play off of the long tail concept very nicely.

[warcraft powerleveling]

I never heard of it, :(
will the google rank be effected? I have been working on the ranking of our site offerring powerleveling service, and can hardly touch the field news.

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