Long Tail 3D Mental Images

Long Tail Toroid Evolution in Second Life Simulation

I’ve been toying with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail ideas for a few months now; turning them over in my head and trying to resolve some perceived discontinuities: “cult” items, functions of Time, aso. All this in order to arrive at a more complete unified theory, I guess. I’ve even used Second Life as a way to help visualize and discuss these ideas (see above image). Last night I finally grabbed some time to model and render my latest 3D models which I collectively call the “ecoToroid” (I went 3D after seeing those “signal to noise” graphs; and especially that “Sales vs Stuff” image).

As I commented on The Long Tail blog, I’m guilty of not giving this the attention it probably deserves; especially in trying to figure out what this thing looks like in a historical context – I’ve already modified my 3D models once and I could see where they could use more thought and further modification (maybe even reverting back to something more like what I had originally). Perhaps later when I have more time. Anyway, instead of trying to explain what I’m thinking, I’m just going to post a couple of images and see what happens. Maybe these will spark ideas in someone else’s mind. Maybe not. But I figure it’s better than letting these things sit on my hard drive.

The Long Tail Curve as a Partial Section of a Time Dependent Function - Obscurity vs Distribution

Three Long Tale Sections at Distinct Points in Time

I also thought I would open up the comments on this entry. Typically I don’t allow for comments simply because the spam I get is too much bother to deal with on a blog as obscure as this one. There’s also the fact that I need to mod the code so the comment block width works on all browsers; right now you can type well outside the boundary in IE I think – sorry about that. If you want to leave a comment, I’d suggest typing it in a text editor and doing a cut ‘n paste. Hopefully in the near future I’ll fix this page so it’s a little nicer. Til then….

(edit: O-kay. Seems as if opening up one post to comments opens up the others, even though their commenting has been closed. Must be in the WordPress code but I just don’t have time to find out. Having just mass deleted about 500 spam comments, looks like it’s time to close the door for a bit. Oh well.)