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The Long Tale of 2006. “What makes the long tail so disingenuous is that what happens in the long tail has almost no ramifications on what happens in the head.” With the internet, some of the most popular sites are “places like YouTube and MySpace where large amounts of user generated content drives traffic and then deposits money in hands not of the creators, but instead in the coffers of the large corporate landlords”.
Malcolm Gladwell on “power law problems” like homelessness, auto pollution, and bad cops. These problems have solutions which focus on the small number of hard-core cases, like the 5% of Denver vehicles that account for 55% of the city’s automobile pollution.
Long Tail poster boy Amazon’s tail isn’t as long as first reported. Oops. (But a good oops…Chris is after the truth here, not just a good story.)
MMORPG and the Dunbar number. “Overall, these statistics still support my original hypothesis in my Dunbar Number post that mean group sizes will be smaller than 150 for non-survival oriented groups.”
Comparison of the power law in war. Statistics show that fatalities in modern warfare trend toward non-G7 terrorism patterns rather than those of conventional warfare, independent of context.
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