According to BL Ochman, who is attending Ad-Tech in San Francisco, New York Times "Bought the Long Tail" when it  bought about.com’s 57,000 topics which is a pretty long tail."

The Times, which bought about.com’s 500+ blogs for $410 million a year ago, has been slow - especially in this era of lightening fast changes - to move forward with its about.com blogs, and Nisenholtz says they are "looking at multilanguage opportunities through about.com."

I met BL Ochman at SESNY06 and have been reading her blog ever since; I also interviewed her for www.webmetricsguru.com.

My of my SEO clients have content that lends it self to the long tail of search.  For example, one client has 11 million part numbers, many of those parts are totally obscure, but if enough queries come for the content, collectively, they do well.  The same can be said for another client that publishes editorial summaries, they have many searches on their content which add up to the long tail.