Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter–the small crew that three years ago launched the world’s fastest-growing communications medium–announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for “retweet,” and usually cite the first author by user ID.

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In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site’s mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor.

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It had taken the better part of a decade, but Reed Hastings was finally ready to unveil the device he thought would upend the entertainment industry. The gadget looked as unassuming as the original iPod–a sleek black box, about the size of a paperback novel, with a few jacks in back—and Hastings, CEO of Netflix (NFLX), believed its impact would be just as massive.

Called the Netflix Player, it would allow most of his company’s regular DVD-by-mail subscribers to stream unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix’s library directly to their television–at no extra charge.

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My, my, Wired magazine’s looking thin these days. Only a month or so ago I remember looking at a big fat dollop of paper, all health and bouncy. Today, however, when I went to get my post, my first thought went something along the lines of “Wow, this feels really lightweight.”

You might almost say it was gaunt.

The next thing that popped into my brain was “why?”

Knowing the way the magazine industry works, with lead times of around three or four months, I had a little theory: The January issue of Wired was put together in September or October–in other words, after the financial crisis. Was it the victim of the credit crunch?

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Over the past few weeks there has been a flurry of reappraisals of the Long Tail, most of which center around the question of whether it creates bigger blockbusters or smaller ones (more concentrated markets or less concentrated ones).

My predictions have always been that massive increase in variety plus massive improvements in “filters” (tools to make it easier to find new stuff that’s right for you) would tend to reduce the blockbuster effect and redistribute attention over a wider range. And, indeed, that’s what the data I cited in my book showed, where online markets of books, DVDs and music saw between 20 and 40 percent of the demand shift to products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores.

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