Leveraging the Long Tail
The Long Tail captures the observation that often demand
(for a product, information or service) is characterized by a
power law, i. e., a decreasing curve with a small number of
highly frequently occurring events and a very large num-ber of events that occur with a low frequency [3, 14]. In the
physical world, the limited shelf-space cuts the growth of the
tail. However in the digital world, with its virtually unlim-ited space, no barrier hinders the growth and thus enables
reaching critical mass of demand even for niche-products.
Web 2.0 sites often especially cater for the Long Tail, for
instance by facilitating community building.
For learning, the interest of Web 2.0 services to enable the
Long Tail has the eect that on the one hand creation and
construction of content but also making content public has
become easier than ever. This allows producing, publishing,
receiving and giving feedback. Again, this is not restricted
to language learning: creating, discussing and subsequently
revising the creations are essential parts of learning as seen
in constructivism.
In addition, social networking can be used to nd peers
with similar interest both for school and college students but
also for vocational learners. Matchmaking between peers
with common interests is also a hot topic in Web 2.0 as
exemplied by services that employ user information to nd
users with similar interest, e. g., based on their browsing
behavior.