I believe there’s incongruity between the flat world and the long tail concept.

Friedman (The World is Flat) was talking about standardization (flattener) - the production of an animations were done around the world thanks to standardized work flow software and VPN connection; 24/7 call support were done in India thanks to standardized network system transmit voice signal thousands miles away; and you are reading my blah-blah-blah here thanks to people in Netscape sort out the web browsing standards.

It’s all about the standards.

Then come Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, and of course, Seth Godin’s The Small is the New Big. they talked about non standards, creativity (which i think is evil when facing standardization), and of course, small player making big waves in the market. all this happened on the Internet - the flat world.

Irony? to flattern the world you need to standardize things; and when you are living in a standardized world, you tried to un-standardize things.

The world is flat - big players like Microsoft, Apples, and IBM are set the standards in the early age; then small players who lived well under big player’s standard turned big - Apache, Google, Linux; and then again, smaller players like you and me keep un-standardize things on- and offline by the way we use our money and throw out our creativity on blogs, forums, and open source codes.

Speaking of creativity, i think this’s a good one, isn’t? Good dog huh~

Image sourced from Richard Jackson’s Dining Room. the world is flat - now go visit his work showed in France exhibition (21/6 - 31/7) online at here.