The Buzz:

The Long Tail -- I sure heard this a lot during the conference. The term was coined in an Oct. 2004 Wired magazine article by Chris Anderson, The Long Tail. A quick summary: "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." For example, your local video store can only stock top sellers due to shelf-space but Netflix can offer 15,000+ movies profitably. Your local book store can only stock a limited number of books but Amazon can offer almost anything ever printed, whether in or out of print. Once you get past the best-sellers, you get to the long tail, and there's a ton of value that can be derived there for the first time thanks to the Internet.