Leveraging The Long Tail To Build A More Useful Health Knowledgebase

An important new book hit the shelves yesterday from Wired editor Chris Anderson, called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.  While this book focuses on a significant new trend taking shape impacting Internet commerce, OrganizedWisdom is leveraging this trend to help more people get better health information on the thousands of issues and conditions impacting them.

What is The Long Tail? According to Wikipedia: 

The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of statistical distributions resembling the accompanying graph. Anderson argues that 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, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include the online retailer Amazon.com and the online video rental service Netflix. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, successfully tapping in to that long tail market is often enabled by the distribution and sales channel opportunities the Internet creates.

As Publisher’s Weekly describes in its book review:

Anderson declares the death of "common culture"—and insists that it's for the best. Why don't we all watch the same TV shows, like we used to? Because not long ago, "we had fewer alternatives to compete for our screen attention," he writes. Smash hits have existed largely because of scarcity: with a finite number of bookstore shelves and theaters and Wal-Mart CD racks, "it's only sensible to fill them with the titles that will sell best." Today, Web sites and online retailers offer seemingly infinite inventory, and the result is the "shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards." These "countless niches" are market opportunities for those who cast a wide net and de-emphasize the search for blockbusters.

So what does the Long Tail have to do with healthcare information and OrganizedWisdom?

For years now, we have seen a similar trend in healthcare information as more and more consumers have been searching the Internet to learn about various diseases, medical conditions, medications, treatments and so on. Consumers now have readily available access to professional medical information on virtually any health topic. The problem, however, is that much of this information often comes from the same data set, created by the same few content distribution providers. For example, as searches on WebMD, Yahoo Health, AOL Health, MSN Health will show, you can now type in any drug, any disease or treatment, any ailment, and chances are you will get the same content almost word for word from the same licensed information sources. The good news is that there is consistency of information out there. While there is a great knowledgebase of information written by a few hundred medical professionals, what is missing is the collective wisdom from the millions of patients, doctors, health associations, and friends and family members who have real life experience with these same diseases, medications, treatment centers and health issues.

At OrganizedWisdom, we believe we can help more people by combining the collective wisdom of millions of people who have experienced thousands of health issues, with the same professional health information that these other big health providers share online. And in so doing we can create a Long Tail of better health information on thousands of health topics.

 We don’t want to focus on only the top 20 most popular health topics of the moment because that is where advertisers are spending money that month. We want to provide useful information to everyone who needs information on the thousands of health topics that get no attention, that go under recognized, that no one ever hears about or sees on the homepage of WebMD (WBMD), Yahoo Health (YHOO), AOL Health (TWX), or MSN Health (MSFT).

Together, we will develop a more useful database of health knowledge, by organizing the collective wisdom of The Long Tail so you can get better information of any health topic, not just the most reported health concerns of the day.