Valleywag has found that Chris Anderson, Wired's urbane editor-in-chief and former Economist reporter, once played bass in a punk rock group, Egoslavia. The gossip blog is even offering the band's Lost Song as a download.
As Valleywag says, "the ex-punk is now riding a wave of publicity well-deserved, thanks to his theory of the Long Tail."
On his Long Tail site, Anderson tops Valleywag with My New Wave Hair: An Apology (and a story) . His band was originally called REM, but was renamed by REM after a showdown with the group that went on to become superstars.
Anderson started on the Long Tail journey with a great article in Wired. I did an Online cover story, A miss hit, published on March 24, 2005, and after Anderson turned the story into a book, Media Guardian followed up with an interview. He's also on a Guardian podcast.
The long tail is based on Zipf Law, which was nicely explained by Jakob Nielsen in Zipf Curves and Website Popularity, on April 15, 1997.
Although most people have managed to ignore the idea since around 1949, it's incredibly significant today because of the number of online businesses that depend on long tail effects -- such as Google, Amazon, and eBay.
