Talk about a mashup -(if I understand the meaning of the word) - Seth Godin directs us to buy the Long Tail (which I already have) and sends us to Chris Anderson’s Squidoo Long Tail page.  MY tounge hurts thinking about this.

So far, I’m on the the 4th Chapter of The Long Tail but I read it spurts - nothing that I read so far is any different than what I have heard about the Long Tail for the last year or two - I’m hoping I get to something I did not hear about later on in the book.

One thing I have noticed about the Long Tail -  it differs depending on what kind of business your in.  For example, for site search, the Long Tail is all the 3, 4 and 5 work queries that have been searched for once or twice a month (there are usually many of these).  However, I came accross other meanings for the Long Tail while I was at an IAB Conference recently - for social media the Long Tail could be the variety of places that advertising can appear (like all over the place).

What makes the Long Tail possible, as a business model, is being able to order fullfill every single request for something - no matter how small (enough people want even obsurce things).