Long Tail using Recognition by Crowds

Virginia Heffernan says in NYT

Et tu, YouTube? The mellow Silicon Valley “video-sharing site,� once styled as nothing more than a converted loft space for oddball videos, is looking more Hollywood by the minute. Back in the day, say, six months ago, YouTube was still meant to be pure NoCal: no judgments, no hierarchies, big bandwidth and lots of freedom. YouTube videographers weren’t supposed to get stars on their doors from the powers that be.

I find that most sites that start with the idea to encourage long tail, start using mechanisms to make some of the tail elements head.  Clearly tail can not survive without head.

And about the reward system, she adds:

This value system is not intrinsically worse than the one that determines prime-time television’s crisp, white-collar aesthetic; its mainstream politics; and its chronic oscillation between punchy and sappy. It’s just that YouTube’s not really supposed to have any aesthetic or ideological principles, is it? YouTube’s video superlatives might make you think that Google might one day hand out prizes for best or shadiest Web site. Or that Wikipedia might honor the most brilliant idea. YouTube, Google and Wikipedia should be low-key clearinghouses of shared information. Not prosceniums.