It feels great to read a good book once in a while. And The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is indeed a must book for everyone involved with web 2.0. It tackles the long tail from a cultural and business perspective, creating the first high quality research I, at least, have seen about the subject. I enjoyed the analysis, but just as importantly the exact writing which was filled with finesse.

Short version - the transition from scarcity to abundance drives greater selection and personalization. The shift is responsible for ground shaking changes in the business and cultural climates. Niches become, surprisingly, a source of much greater potential then hits. Data collected from Amazon, Ebay, iTunes, Rhapsody and Google confirms. How do we classify or add to the value chain? For that you would need to read the long version.

Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired and a former senior international journalist at The Economist, not only argues that the future of culture is with selling less of more. He offers a set of practical tools. The classification to fundamental roles (producers, distributors, filters) is eye opening. So is the simple overview of our transition from pre-filters (PC Mag, for example) to post-filters (Techcrunch is the ultimate post-filter for web 2.0 applications). 

The book has been praised by Guy Kawasaki but also critiqued by Lee Gomes of Wall Street Journal. Chris Anderson addresses the critical view in his popular blog, using yet another educating analysis, mathematical this time, by Andrew Odlyzko.

I have a hunch The Long Tail is underway to becoming a 101 text book.