long-tail on S Anand

15 years of Dilbert searchable

Fri, 22 May 2009 07:17:47 +0000

The Dilbert search index now carries 15 years worth of Dilbert comics — over 5,500 strips typed out. This is mainly due to the contributions of BFMartin (over 6 years worth of strips) and Paul Dorman (over 3 years worth of strips), myself (over 3 years worth of strips) and a long tail of contributors.

You can search the strips here. While you can find strips as far back as 1989, you won’t see the images earlier than 2002 because geek.nl (whose images I’m shamelessly hotlinking without permission) only holds images that far back. But once you know the date of the comic (say 1991-02-03), you can visit the Dilbert official site at dilbert.com/1991-02-03/ and see the strip.

Dilbert started around 20 years ago. So we’ve covered 75% of all the strips, and this is in just 8 months after starting this collaborative effort. A couple of lessons I learnt from this:

Crowd sourcing beats going solo if you’re building content. It’s a no-brainer. There will always be only one or two people more passionate about something than you.
The long tail is not very big. There will only be one or two people more passionate than something about you. Don’t expect the long tail contribution to be the significant. The value comes from being able to attract “the big fish”.

Comments

Thejesh GN 27 May 2009 7:57 am: Thanks for the search engine.

The Long Tail of information sharing

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The Long Tail of information sharing. Even on Wikipedia, fewer than 2% have contributed over 100 articles. Over 85% have contributed fewer than 5 articles. A Wiki inside an organisation is unlikely to reach critical mass, left to itself.

Comments

Arun 28 Apr 2006 6:10 am: But I imagine, many in the 85% probably contributed stuff that the prolific guys never thought of. For instance, I know one guy who put up something on Ananth Pai (Tinkle, Amar Chitra Katha), and i doubt he probably ever added anything else. But you are right about wiki in an organization. Do you know an organization where a wiki has been used effectively?
S Anand 28 Apr 2006 10:22 pm: No, not offhand. We were planning to recommend it at one of our clients’, but I’m not going to do that any more.
sathish 30 Apr 2006 2:39 am: if the organization strength is large - runs into many thousands or lakhs - I think the required critical mass might be acheived.. for smaller companies and small teams too, it might make sense - since, every one is liable to participate - especially product documentation - it would be easier make/correct and change.
Arun 30 Apr 2006 6:02 am: Ah, ok.
S Anand 30 Apr 2006 8:45 am: A colleague just reported that his current client is successfully using a Wiki. So may it’s not impossible after all…
Madhu 2 May 2006 12:24 pm: wiki is all about scale i think. The sergery brin special lecture at UCB is a case in point. You can access this at google videos

10 for 10

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 12:00:00 +0000

A list of 10 trends to keep an eye on over the next 10 years. Includes the Long tail, Ajax, PDAs, Tagging and RSS.

Long tail of software

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 12:00:00 +0000

The long tail of software.

The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the long tail: queries asked a little over once a day.

Search is a long tail business and that is the source of its power and profit. Read Chris Anderson’s Wired article

Comments

Arun 17 Mar 2005 8:44 am: Excellent Articles
S Anand 17 Mar 2005 9:33 am: Jason has another interesting post on the long tail of paypal
S Anand 17 Mar 2005 10:11 am: Chris Anderson has a website about the long tail