Recently while reading Robert Scoble's blog I came across a link to the Wired article entitled The Long Tail. The article is focused on the entertainment media industry and how the Internet has fundamentally changed some aspects of it. The salient part of the article is the following excerpt

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

Given the recent launch of MSN Spaces I've been thinking about the lesson of the Long Tail in connection with blogging and blogging software. A lot of the hype and spilled ink about blogging has focused on the "high end" of the curve or the so-called A-list of blogging. The most recent being the Newsweek article entitled The Alpha Bloggers.

The most notable explanation of this phenomena has been Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality which begins with

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

Although a lot of the meta-discussion about blogging either by the media or by other bloggers tends to focus on the so-called A-list there is the Long Tail to consider. Many research studies on blogging tend to indicate that a large number of weblogs have a readership of 10 people or less. To most bloggers, a weblog is a way to share their lives and experiences with their friends, family and colleagues not a way to become the next Robert Scoble or Doc Searles.  

When MSN Spaces was launched there was some negative feedback from certain popular bloggers most notably from Robert Scoble in his post MSN Spaces isn't the blogging service for me complaining that the service did not have enough features aimed at power bloggers. Mike Torres had a good explanation of our feelings on these sentiments in his post Is MSN Spaces for everyone?  where he wrote

So, who do I want to see using MSN Spaces?  I want my mom and dad to use Spaces.  I want my sister to have a space for her friends.  I want my in-laws to use Spaces to share holiday photos with all of us privately using Messenger-only access.  I want my old classmates to find me via my Space (this has already happened twice in two days.)  I want the (appx) 150 million MSN Messenger users to feel as if they have a place to express their feelings to the 10-15 people they care most about.  I want the (appx) 187 million Hotmail users to view Spaces as yet another way to keep in touch with loved ones for free.  I want college kids to post pictures of their classmates falling asleep in class from their mobile phones, and instantly have all their friends alerted in MSN Messenger - even if they are in another country.  I want people to use Spaces in ways we hadn't even thought of (note: not surprisingly, this is also already happening.)

That was our bar - real people, real experiences.  And we are ecstatic with the progress we have made.  People are excited about the level of integration into MSN Messenger with real-time notification and contact cards.  People are excited that we support RSS 2.0 and Trackbacks.  People are excited about the fact that MSN employees are finally blogging (we were before, we just didn't get linked to!) and engaging in an open discussion with our users. 

This is exactly how I feel. I've been interested in blogging and XML syndication because I've seen it as a way for people such as myself who are disconnected from friends and family to keep in touch. I want my mom to keep up to date with what's going on in my life by reading my blog. I want my friends from high school reading [some parts of] my blog. I want my kid sister blogging.

This means the prioritization of features that favor A-list and geek bloggers was lower than those that we felt and still feel make it easier for everyone to start blogging instead of just the alpha geeks and early adopters. As we continue to improve the service the questions we tend to ask ourselves are "Would this feature be useful to my mom, my spouse or my friends?" as opposed to "I wonder whether Robert Scoble or Doc Searles would like this feature?". I think we are on the right track and a majority of the feedback we've gotten as well as our sign up numbers seem to bear that out.

Remember the lesson of the long tail...don't just focus on the popular.