First, in the 1980s, it was ponytails, now, in the noughties, it’s longtails. The longtail effect has long been used by statisticians to describe ‘power-law’ distributions, such as the usage of certain words in the English language (words occurring frequently followed by a slowly trailing ‘demand’ curve). But following an article in Wired magazine a while back, the phrase has become the buzzword of choice in management consultancies and venture capital firms. The reason for this is that longtails explain the fragmentation of consumer markets and the shift from mass to niche marketing. For example, due to the aggregating effect of the Internet, it is now possible to make money selling obscure products and services. Traditionally, a book retailer would focus on big sellers because it did not have enough physical space to stock every book ever published. But now, Amazon makes 30% of sales on book titles outside the top 130,000 sellers. Another example of a business making money from low-volume products is i-Tunes. What does this mean for business? One implication is a shift away from ‘hits’. Another is a move away from researching what people want – just put it out there and find out. This in turn means moving away from conventional marketing and media advertising to investment in intelligent or ‘collaborative’ filtering. From a cultural point of view, the trend is also interesting because we may also be witnessing a shift away from ‘shared culture’ (which is hit dependant) to a more individualised culture that is not.