There aren’t many super-popular magazines, but there are lots of specialised titles. The idea of The Long Tail is that if you add up all of the copies of the specialist magazines, you get more copies than if you added up all the copies of the really big magazines. Many magazines with small circulations equals more than few magazines with large circulations.
I would like to apply The Long Tail to the crane industry. I think that the majority of the cranes in the world are in the hands of small businesses. These companies might not get as much exposure as the big fish of the industry, but that does not mean that they are not important.
So this is why Fleet File, which returns this month, matters. This is our celebration of the small guy. Any company with one crane plus can stand up and be counted. This year, we accounted for more than 47,000 cranes.
If you like Fleet File, you might be interested in a similar initiative, www.kranliste.dk, a listing of all terrain cranes and their customers. Its compiler is crane enthusiast Kristoffer Falk, an accountant by trade, who has managed to track down the ownership of at least 3,000 ATs, by my estimates, without input from any of the main manufacturers.
Both projects are impossibly ambitious. Only a superhuman effort could track down every last crane, or crane rental company: but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.
