Comments on: Chemistry’s Long Tail

By: Bill Carroll

Bill Carroll — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:12:22 +0000

Didn’t see your comment until just now, and I agree with it. I’m hoping that as we get the ACS Network running and populated it helps some of us who are not blockbusters find one another more easily.

By: Rich Apodaca

Rich Apodaca — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:27:30 +0000

Chemistry is a Long Tail activity – take away the aggregators and the system stops working. Services like CAS and Beilstein are to Chemistry what Flickr is to photos:

http://depth-first.com/articles/2007/08/27/the-long-tail-and-chemistry-why-so-many-acs-meeting-talks-are-uninteresting

By: Bill Carroll

Bill Carroll — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:51:10 +0000

Thanks for your comment–your experience is exactly what Chris Anderson is talking about. And I think it has application–even in Chemistry–well beyond just your CD experience (I’m an i-Tunes user myself for the same reason).

By: crlytle

crlytle — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 18:01:01 +0000

For a long time, the extra expense of shipping costs kept me returning to the “brick and mortar” stores for music. Two separate factors collided to get me onto the long tail: inventory and population. Population is an easy one: if you’re not in an “alternate time niche,” it’s a zoo getting anywhere or parking anywhere. Inventory means the hassle of having, let’s say, five area outlets (in various malls, etc.) and carrying inventory only for three. The ever-repeated phrase “just let me call the XXX store” drove me nuts. If you won’t keep it in stock, don’t sell it. Friends tell me this comes from two factors: the high cost of inventory and the Deming/WallMart concept of just in time delivery.

I was in the process of unwillingly collecting a PILE of CDs, of which I was interested in only one (two at most) songs in each CD. Along comes my son, who introduced me to iTunes. Gone, all gone: driving, malls, not in stock, shipping costs, mountains of CDs.

I’ve turned into a “longtailer” without even realizing it. Now, if they could just digitize songs w/o the occurence of those pesky, short gaps of silence.