Making Collaborative Filtering Work for WineLog.net… What is the
Long Tail? Coined (in its current form) by Chris Anderson in his
October 2004 Wired magazine article, “long tail” refers to a
common pattern seen in graphs depicting product demand or units
sold. The graph below is a simple chart of units sold verse the
total number of units in a particular domain. This could
represent, for example, the number of copies sold of each book
in Amazon.com’s catalogue. Image of the long tail, borrowed from
the Wikipedia entry of the same name. Continuing with the Amazon
example, the x-axis would represent all books ever printed, and
the y-axis would represent the number of units sold for each
particular book. On the far left of the graph are large sellers
like the the DiVinci Code or the Harry Potter series. On the far
right are some books only a few people are interested in, with a
relatively low number of sales. The line in the center of the
graph is very important as well. This line represents the cutoff
point a t