What are the Long Tail Effect and Streisand Effect? How are they related to Web 2.0? Give real-life examples how they take place in Web 2.0 age.

The term of long tail effect originally published on ”Wired Magazine (WIRED)” by Chris Anderson in 2004, which describes business and economic models of some websites, such as Amazon, Netflix and Real.com/Rhapsody. “Head” and “tail” are two statistical terms, and the middle protruding part of normal curve is head; the relatively flat part of both sides is tail, so the mathematical basis of the long tail is uncomplicated. Now from the perspective of people’s requirement, the majority of needs concentrate on head which are called popular. However, others distributed on tail are personalized, a handful of scattered needs form a long tail on demand curve.

The long tail effect’s focus on quantity. When all non-popular market form a bigger market than the prevalent. Yet Pareto’s Law which was originally an iron rule in business is broken by this effect, due to development of the network. Internet provides widely sales level, making 98% of products can have changes to sale. While these products having long effect characteristic not only have earning values for enterprises, but also the total value of these goods can completes with best-selling products. If we want to better use this effect, we should attach importance to Web2.0 network platform. Internet lets us no longer limit by space, and reduces cost of sales. Hence through Internet, buyers and sellers can conveniently carry out a transaction.

There are an amount of successful examples of using the long tail effect.Google is a typical example. Millions of small businesses and individuals never made an advertisement before, or did it on a large scale. But Google has lowered down the threshold, since then the advertisements are not unattainable, they are self-serviced, cheap, and can be done by everybody; on the other hand, for thousands of blog sites and small-scale business websites, it's extremely easy to put advertisements on their sites. Now half of Google's business doesn't come from the advertisements put in search results, but these small websites. Millions of medium and small businesses represent a huge long tail market.

Amazon is another successful “long tail” firm. Amazon’ online bookstore possessing thousands of books, a small part occupies half of total sales volume. Most part of books, although each sale is few, relying on their variety, they hold the half sale volume.

Another key term is Streisand effect. Its origin is very interesting, which about an actress named Barbra Streisand. In 2002, Barbra Streisand unsuccessfully attempted to accuse photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com in an attempt to remove her mansion from the publicly available collection of California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially and it became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the following month. Unnoticed by people before, this website become famous by this reason and attract a number of people to read. 

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon that on the Internet attempting to censor or delete a couple of information unconsciously but causing the information to be widely publicized.

In other words, some people want to attempt to suppress information or comments on the network but they are not successful. Spreading through the media or the network, several unknown information become prevalent, further they create the effect of free publicity. Especially, in this age of Web 2.0, users can upload information file to the Web for public viewing, as well as people can put their photos, movies or documents on the blog.

Along with that many Streisand effect take place on the Internet. For example, management staff in Digg remove several articles concerning with HD DVD key break due to receiving a letter from lawyer of ACCS association. However, the behavior that Digg delete post cause drastic reaction among users. Meantime, password taking domain names, billboards, wallpaper and poetry form appear on wherever. Another popular instance is that the court commanded the MIT hacker to seal，but led to the leaking acceleration.