Web 2.0 information blog

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, has been discussing a concept he calls The Long Tail for quite some time now.  Many of you have no doubt been reading his excellent blog on the subject, and now finally his long-awaited book about this key Web 2.0 business model has been published.  The actual launch day was just over a week ago (some great coverage of this by Chris), yet The Long Tail has long since emerged into the collective consciousness of business and technology thought leaders everywhere.  It was even prominently cited in Tim O’Reilly’s seminal essay on What Is Web 2.0 (top of page two), where he gives the concept a lot of credit for creating some of the Web’s major successes:

“Overture and Google’s success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as “the long tail,” the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web’s content.” - Tim O’Reilly

For those who haven’t been tracking it, The Long Tail essentially describes the mass servicing of micromarkets, which is primarily made possible, even cost effective, by the delivery system of the Web itself.  This is what the subtitle of the book puts another way as Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More.  And it’s not some obscure buzzword, I’ve found The Long Tail to be an indispensable short hand in describing certain concepts and trends we see emerging in business and the Web these days.  For example, I’ve described Amazon’s innovative Mechanical Turk as a yet another one of their brilliant “long tail” plays.  So too how The Long Tail of enterprise software demand is finally being tapped using Web 2.0 technologies to cost effectively serve previously underserved portions of the enterprise which couldn’t previously justify the the expense, most notably in articles on ZDNet and here.

The criteria to make this list was 1) the site has to be a two-way Web application that primarily harnesses the collective intelligence of its users in some way, 2) it has to be on a steady traffic rise and used by ‘ordinary’ people mostly outside of the Web 2.0 community and, 3) was not clearly a previously known big name portal or social network still perceived to be a major up-and-comer.  The result is what you see below and I hope you enjoy it.  Finally, note this list  — like all my popular Web 2.0 software lists — is entirely of my own creation and any errors or omissions are entirely mine.  And please, no need to post comments about the subjectivity of Alexa traffic charts; that’s a given.  A big thanks to Mark Scrimshire for helping me assemble some of this research.

Our next stop is TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and his excellent new 24 minute Web 2.0 documentary that asks very astute questions about what really seems to be changing on the Web (and sure, Web 2.0 represents networked applications based on architectures of participation, but we’ve had those before; it’s the way we’ve all started to use the Web for forming personal relationships and sharing our content, right?)  In any case, Mike does a great job asking the leaders of Web 2.0 companies about business models, user generated content, and much more.



And speaking of business models, Google itself is muscling in and both skimming off and monetizing the now-galactic presence of tens of millions of Web 2.0 users in MySpace, YouTube, and Digg.  This starts to point to some overarching strategies for making Web 2.0 business models successful that we’ll explore in a moment.