Long Tail of Content

World Wide Web is vast. And overwhelming. It has so much of content. Content that is factual information, exciting ideas, deep thoughts and so many tools. Tools for using the content itself, for doing some fun stuff, for doing some serious stuff, and for doing nothing too.

In isolation, a piece of content is useful or useless. Interesting or boring. Relevant or irrelevant. Factual or baseless.

In isolation, a piece of content is either of interest to you or not. And if it is of interest to you, you should be able to reach it. Grab it and consume it.

Everyday I go to the World Wide Web looking for information that is of interest to me. I look for the new information that has been created now and may be of interest to me. I do this by surfing popular sites like CNET, InfoWorld or by subscribing to the RSS feed of popular blogs. I also go around looking for information that has existed for some time now and I have suddenly become interested in it. I do this by going to Google and keying in words that I feel represent objects of my interest.

More than half the content that I tend to reach is not relevant to me at the moment I reach it. And I don't think I ever reach more than 1 percent of the content that is relevant to me. 1 percent is a randomly chosen number that signifies smallness of the relevant content that I reach Vs the largeness of the relevant content that is actually available.

When I do Google, it shows me that the results for my search are in 5 digits or 6 digits. I hardly ever go beyond page 2 and never beyond page 5. I look at only those pages that are popular.

I follow mostly the popular websites and subscribe to the RSS of mostly popular people.

Going with what is popular has a price. I mostly don't reach what is relevant but not popular. Popularity is a measure of just popularity and not relevance. Popularity merely increases the *chances* of relevance but does not guarentee it. Because popularity of a piece of content, in general, depends on the source of the content, how many people agree with the content, how many people respect the source of the content, popularity of the supporters of the content, the presentation of the content and relevance of the content in the context of overall subject. All this excluding the delibrate attempt to increase content popularity by doing search engine optimization, link exchange, paid promotion etc. So, as you see, relevance of the content is just one of the many factors in determining its popularity.

But I reach the content through popularity index.

And there lies the long tail of content on World Wide Web.

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