On May 4, 2005, at 8:20 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users.
This indicates a concentration at the top, but is this concentration bigger or smaller than any alternative situation?
Book (and record) stores have always sold a bulk of "best sellers", with a "tail" of less common titles. In recent decades, supermarkets are selling books with a higher concentration of best sellers (a shorter tail), while Internet book sellers such as Amazon.com offer a far longer tail than any traditional book store can afford. This was featured in the October 2004 issue of Wired, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html and is the topic of the www.thelongtail.com blog