A bit long and sensationalist, but the ideas are sound.
Long story short: where is a power law there is also a long tail. Using the long tail in a smart way has many advantages. Most of them revolve around greater diversity, which can be surprising in a power law environment where we're used to see only concentration.
Eg: few movies are blockbusters, and many are not. Instead of watching only the blockbusters you can invest effort in "mining" the movie long tail for something that matches your tastes very closely.
Some interesting aplications in social sciences.
But the whole point/problem with the "Long Tail" is that it's inefficient. A single person can benefit from a single portion of the Long Tail without trouble, and all the different single persons benefiting from all the different little portions of the Long Tail add up to make something huge; but for one person to mine through the entire Long Tail isn't easy.
It's been the concept of many social networks, from Technorati to Delicious and even to HN - the Long Tail is difficult to mine, inefficient to follow-up on, and generally not worth the trouble when you can keep up with the A-list instead.
I'm sure there are some non-Blockbuster movies that would fit me perfectly and that I'd enjoy them far more than my current "top 10" Hollywood moovies; but, you know what, the effort it would take to locate these, the time wasted watching billions of hours of NON-good stuff just makes it not worth it.
I'm more optimistic. I'd say that since we have the Internet, mining the long tail is finally possible. Yes, we don't have yet the perfect tools to do so, but it's definitely doable, and 20 years ago it wasn't even a dream.
Also I'm more inclined to invest into it: I got much more enjoyment from Evil Dead then from any current blockbuster - 90% of which I don't even watch anymore).
IMHO, the internet enabled us to discover the existence of the Long Tail and appreciate that it's there and is of huge potential, but is ill-suited (at least in its current format) for making use of the Long Tail. I had high hopes for "the semantic web" and unlocking the tail; but that - most unfortunately - amounted to nothing.
