“Now, a few words on looking for [lost]Â things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.”

Extrapolating on Daryl Zero’s wise words from the classic film, The Zero Effect, apropos to Chris Anderson’s hot and wired new book, The Long Tail:

1) There is now a lot more stuff available in the world to find, and buy, since it’s now much easier and cheaper to produce the stuff people want, like music, movies, and books.

2) This stuff can now be found anywhere, and everywhere, since it’s now much cheaper and easier to distribute it and make it available and sell it.

3) It is now easier to find the really good stuff that suits one’s tastes, through search and recommendation engines, blogs, tagging, social bookmarking, mailing lists, etc.

The forces behind the long tail are largely technological: cheap computer hardware, which reduces the cost of making and storing information products; ubiquitous broadband, which cuts the cost of distribution; and elaborate “filters,� such as search engines, blogs, and online reviews, which help to match supply and demand. “Think of each of these three forces as representing a new set of opportunities in the emerging Long Tail marketplace,� Anderson suggests. “The democratized tools of production are leading to a huge increase in the number of producers. Hyperefficient digital economies are leading to new markets and marketplaces. And finally, the ability to tap the distributed intelligence of millions of consumers to match people with the stuff that suits them best is leading to the rise of all sorts of new recommendation and marketing methods, essentially serving as the new tastemakers.�

What do we really want? We’re only just discovering, but it clearly starts with more. “What’s truly amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it,â€? Anderson writes. “Again, if you combine enough of the non-hits, you’ve actually established a market that rivals the hits.â€?

Obviously, this is exciting news, and Anderson wraps it all up in the entertaining and anecdotal package that has become his book, albeit sprung from blog, in more ways than one: his Wired blog and popular Wired article on The Long Tail; and Clay Shirky’s excellent article Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. As Shirky points out:

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

Now that we’re in the Digital Age where rackspace – the kind found in Blockbuster and Barnes & Noble – is becoming irrelevant, and online companies can list hundreds of thousands of items, there’s apparently lots of riches to be found in those niches, and selling less of more of these items can often add up to selling a lot of the biggies – the hits. So chances are very good that if you go looking for anything in the world, you’ll surely find something, and chances are you’ll find something you really like somewhere in the long tail.

One has to wonder how much of a hit the Blockbuster will take. How many more MI’s will rake it in? How many more ‘N Sync’s can pull it off? I don’t think Harry Potter has anything to worry about just yet.

As John cassidy recently warned in the New Yorker, “…Don’t assume that giant, exploitative firms are a thing of the past. In recent years, eBay has sharply increased its commission rates; Amazon has admitted charging its customers different prices for the same goods; and Apple Computer has stubbornly refused to make its iTunes service compatible with portable music players other than iPods. Has the New Economy really moved past the familiar “winner take allâ€? dynamic? That depends on whether you’re looking at the long tail—or at who’s wagging it.”

Book Review by Jeff Petry for the P2P Foundation