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Running Mischa Barton's nipple a close second for most overexposed item on the Internet, Wired editor Chris Anderson's The Long Tail is the perfect example of a tidy thesis stretched out to book form and embraced by the usual subjects (i.e., bloggers, and the people who try to understand them). Anderson's theory, for the two of you who may have missed the book party and every single website of the last two months, is that while brick-and-mortar commerce is reliant mainly on big hit items, the Web, with its infinite capacity for niche marketing, can focus on things that do much less volume but which will, over time and in aggregate, wind up selling more than the big hits. (Take a second and read that sentence again, we know we sure are.)

It's a compelling theory, except for the part that it's sort of, you know, a bunch of crap. The Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes takes a look at some of Andersons's numbers and discovers that, well, not so much: "I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn't have any examples of this actually occurring. At Netflix and Amazon, two of his biggest case studies, misses won't outsell hits for at least another decade, he said. None of these qualifications are in the book."

Gomes looks at any number of Internet companies and discovers that if we are seeing a shift to the long tail it ain't happening yet, and, if it ever does, it's going to be a while. So is this a case of irrational exuberance over the possibilities of new technology fueled by industry evangelists who offer unsubstantiated potential over verifiable statistics? Probably not; America's business community is too smart to ever fall for something like that.

It May Be a Long Time Before the Long Tail Is Wagging the Web [WSJ]

UPDATE: Anderson responds on his blog. Yes, of course he has a blog.