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The Long Tail of Mapping?
I don’t think Joe Francica’s article, The Long Tail of Mapping, quite grasps what the concept of the “long tail” is all about.
As I understood it, the “long tail” — as first expounded in Chris Anderson’s Wired article in 2004, and subsequently expanded through his blog and, just out, his book on the subject.— was an argument about the economics of web retailing: while physical stores had limited shelf space, online retailers (e.g., Amazon, iTunes) could, theoretically, stock practically everything, and might actually do more business selling the bottom-sellers that physical stores wouldn’t have room to stock than the few bestselling titles.
It is not, however, shorthand for ubiquity.
As a concept, the “long tail” is strictly retail, so it doesn’t quite apply to searches for free maps; a “long tail of mapping” would make it easier for me to find maps of places that I wouldn’t be able to find in a local bookstore or map store. For example, in 1997, when I was living in Edmonton but about to depart on a research trip to Paris, I was able to buy a Michelin Plan de Paris before my trip, but to get maps of provincial French cities — Lyon, Lille and Roubaix/Tourcoing — I had to buy them in France. But because Internet mapping doesn’t work the same way as Internet book- or music selling, the metaphor kind of falls apart.
Or am I missing something?
Categories: Miscellany
You’re right that Joe seems to have misunderstood the concept, or at least I don’t recognize it in his post. But I just wanted to clarify that the Long Tail isn’t just a retail or even strictly economic phenomena. You can have a Long Tail of talent (all the software programmers who now don’t have to live in Silicon Valley or Redmond to contribute, thanks to the distributed nature of open source) or services (Google’s AdSense is the Long Tail of advertising).
Best,
Chris
Chris Anderson | 07/05/2006 at 3:52 AM | #
I’ll defer to Chris on the application of the concept (what’s to add?). I think of the long tail as a data-backed acknowledgement of abundance in markets (rather than scarcity or constraint—the limited number of titles Walmart can fit in their bins, for instance; this from Chris’s initial article). This idea could apply to place-names, I suppose. With Google Maps API, the map frame is no longer limited to conventional toponyms (so many replications of Rand McNally). Although I’m not sure it is caused exclusively by the boom in cybercartography, it does seem like we’re seeing a turn from scarcity to abundance within online maps. That is, we’re seeing people create a vast range of obscure maps built to represent long tail data-sets. Chief among the many issues cybercartography emphasizes is the expansive naming possibilities for places and things-in-places. Perhaps it’s just that cybercartographic apps amplify the long tail logics entangled with notions of scale (at least in relationship to place-names). Maybe?
Derek | 07/05/2006 at 8:15 AM | #
Joe definitely scrambled the “long tail,” at least as used by most people in the last couple of years. His definition may be an older one from the social sciences?
One important piece of the long tail that sometimes get left off is how people at the far end of the tail tend to be more committed. So the 50% of customers/users that you can easily serve (with a short tail) don’t care as much about your product as the 50% of customers/users that are spread across the long tail. It may take more effort/time to serve the long tail (providing more obscure or harder to find cartographic resources), but the people that find you and use your resources will feel more strongly about you.
Adam | 07/05/2006 at 10:08 AM | #
His article is all over the map, and not in a good sense. What the heck does the long tail of mapping or GIS have to do with dropping a bomb on al-Zarqawi’s head? As other comments have pointed out, the long tail of mapping is the one-off and niche maps made by an individual or small organization for hundreds or tens of users.
Sean Gillies | 07/05/2006 at 11:27 AM | #