As influence slides down The Long Tail

I recently began wondering whether The Long Tail could get fatter.  Could the wide end reduce in size?  Could the narrow end get thicker?  Is there an inflection point in the tail that could slide further down the tail and pull that center of gravity along with it at the expense of the wide end making a Flat Tail?



This question appeared to have some legs to it this week when we were Slashdotted.  The InfoWorld story on Ajax was picked up in a Slashdot post yesterday and highlighted prominantly for a most of the day.  A year ago, we were seeing traffic spikes to the tune of about 40,000 to 50,000 page views for each story picked up by Slashdot.  This story had about half that as you can see in this traffic report for that page.

I asked 'Hemos' whether there had been a decline in traffic or a shift in audience at Slashdot, and he said that all was still progressing nicely at the site.  But could it be that the influential contributors to Slashdot have launched their own blogs and have begun speaking from their own domains rather than via the slashdot.org domain?  Could the Slashdot audience be sliding down the tail and pulling the inflection point of traffic along with it?

If a mainstream media company thinks about its position along the curve as one of influence rather than one of page views and traffic, then it might be able to maintain the right kinds of relationships with its customers and even foster a distributed community.  Being influential along a big chunk of the The Fat Tail is better than watching your customers disappear entirely.  The controlled community model may still work at powerhouses like Slashdot and Wikipedia and Craigslist.  The rest of us need to reach down the tail and federate the conversations that are already happening out there rather than try to recreate them on our own domains.

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