In a conversation with Erica George at the Berkman she pointed out that the demographics of Live Journal don’t always represent one’s experience of Live Journal — the demographics say that teenage girls are the largest users, but if you’re a 25 year old, your social group there may not look that way at all.

Which raises an issue about the way the “long tail” is pictured. Clay’s charts are accurate depictions of his data, but they have a mythic power that’s misleading: The long tail looks like, well, a long tail when in fact it’s a fractal curlicue of relationships. It’s more like a squirrel’s tail than a monkey’s. When marketing folks don’t understand that, they confuse the long tail with an opportunity to do one-to-one marketing, treating each person as a “market of one,” instead of seeing that the ones are in conversation with other ones. [Technorati tags: LongTail shirky blogs EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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