Media Questions

Long Tail Theory:
Long Tail -  The Long Tail or long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a "normal" or Gaussian distribution. A long tail distortion will arise with the inclusion of some unusually high (or low) values which increase (decrease) the mean, skewing the distribution to the right (or left). 
Anderson described the effects of the Long Tail on current and future business models beginning with a series of speeches in early 2004 and with the publication of a Wired magazine article in October 2004. 
Anderson argues that products in low demand or that have a low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, that showed that a significant portion of Amazon.com's sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap that market successfully.
An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."
Anderson has explained the term as a reference to the tail of a demand curve. The term has since been rederived from an XY graph that is created when charting popularity to inventory. In the graph shown above, Amazon's book sales or Netflix's movie rentals would be represented along the vertical axis, while the book or movie ranks are along the horizontal axis. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items.
Some of the most successful Internet businesses have used the Long Tail as part of their business strategy. Examples include eBay (auctions), Yahoo! and Google (web search),Amazon (retail), and iTunes Store (music and podcasts), amongst the major companies, along with smaller Internet companies like Audible (audio books) and Netflix (video rental).
In 2008, a sales analysis of an unnamed UK digital music service by economist Will Page and high-tech entrepreneur Andrew Bud found that sales exhibited a log-normal distribution rather than a power law; they reported that 80% of the music tracks available sold no copies at all over a one-year period. Anderson responded by stating that the study's findings are difficult to assess without access to its data.


Wikinomics:
Wikinomics - How mass collaboration changes everything
According to Tapscott, Wikinomics is based on four ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. The use of mass collaboration in a business environment, in recent history, can be seen as an extension of the trend in business to outsource: externalize formerly internal business functions to other business entities. The difference however is that instead of an organized business body brought into being specifically for a unique function, mass collaboration relies on free individual agents to come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem. This kind of outsourcing is also referred to as crowdsourcing, to reflect this difference. This can be incentivized by a reward system, though it is not required.