This week the Belgian born jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt would have turned 96. Reinhardt was a pioneer of the “gypsy jazz” genre and according to a recent program on the BBC World Service, gypsy jazz has seen a considerable revival the past ten years. This is in part due to the fact that with the Internet, its followers can communicate more easily between themselves and spread the word to others.

The rise in popularity of gypsy jazz represents the cultural aspect of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. The long tail as put forth by Anderson is primarily an effect the decreased cost of communications and distribution has on business. Or as Wikipedia puts it:

products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters

That is not the whole story, though. The long tail effect is often accompanied by positive feedback. As more people buy a product, more people hear about it, buy it and so on until a possible “tipping point” style epidemic effect means that the long tail produces a blockbuster.

While we’re on the subject, fans of gypsy jazz should check out the Quecum Bar in London or sample Django’s material on the excellent Last.fm.

Chris Anderson, who originally coined the term “long tail“, has a book coming out this year. According to his blog he has finished the manuscript and The Guardian newspaper has it on its “must read” list of 2006.

[The Long Tail is] supposedly the natural successor to the “tipping point” in the field of big business ideas…

And on the subject of the long tail distribution. The blog search engine Technorati tracks about 25.4 million websites. Assuming most of them are blogs, the long tail really stares you in the face when a new blog such as this one is registered on the site:

Technorati Rank: 1,088,376 (0 links from 0 sites)

Presumably, this means that of the sites being tracked, only 1 in 25 has an incoming link. Jason Kottke analyzed the long tail distribution of Technorati’s top 100 - this is the other end of it.