Thanks to the Internet, media (news, entertainment, advertising) is undergoing a Darwinian change. It's evolving a Long Tail.

That's the mental model that Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine and Wired.com, evokes as he explains the new opportunities the Web offers to people who want to inform or entertain others, sell them things, or all of the above.

Actually, Anderson used a chart, not a picture of a beastie with a tail, to illustrate his point. At the pinnacle, on the left, are major media outlets – newspapers, magazines, TV networks – who have large online audiences. The trend line then plummets like a steep ski slope, but doesn't zero out. The "long tail" extends on and on, with lots of smaller media sites, sometimes one-person operations, who are getting considerable audiences out of scale with the kind of fiscal and physical investment that "old media" has needed.

Case in point: Kent Nichols, a digital storyteller whose comic AskaNinja.com video website is bringing in 300,000 to 500,000 viewers per episode, as many as some cable TV shows. Nichols and his partner started the site by investing $6 in a black ski mask (to create the Ninja costume), some paint to create a "green screen" backdrop in his apartment, and an old laptop computer and video camera they already had.

The cost of entry is low, low, low. Abundance, not scarcity, is the model on the Web, Anderson says, and that makes all the difference for media there. For example, Wal-Mart, as huge as it is, represents scarcity. Customers must buy what it decides to put on the shelves. Amazon.com offers many, many more choices online. Tower Records can put only a limited number of CDs on its racks (and recently went bankrupt); iTunes and other online music sellers can offer a much broader selection and are booming. And so on. You get the idea.

"The audience is flocking to choice," Anderson says. "There's latent demand for niche products out there." Old video, like 1950s TV shows, and music, that Rosemary Clooney album, can be rediscovered; new artists and their work can find audiences more easily than ever before.

Scarcity of choice is oh-so-20th century. This century is about abundance of consumer choices.

The Long Tail is also changing the way Anderson edits his publication. For the print magazine, he makes decisions about what readers will see. The number of pages is limited and distribution of copies costs money. "I control the horizontal, I control the vertical," he jokes (referencing the old "Outer Limits" TV show). "I have to be careful about what I have in our pages."

But the Web is about abundant shelf space, abundant pages of content. If his magazine is a beautiful jewel, a Faberge egg, the website a scrambled egg. On the magazine, his job is to say "no" to crazy ideas. On the website, it's to say "yes."

That can work, he says, because the cost of trying new ideas has become so low. The "scarcity model" at the magazine is based on "we know best." The "abundance model" at the website is "the audience knows best."

This all sounds great, but Anderson did allow that he doesn't plan to turn his highly popular website wholly over to its visitors. Some stories on the entry page may be chosen by reader vote, but others are likely to remain the editors' choices. Or perhaps each reader may set up an entry page that combines editor input with his or her own tastes and interests.

Much has been said about the Wisdom of Crowds, exemplified by Digg.com, whose readers vote for what stories are seen. But others worry about the Tyranny of the Crowd and want some filters other than sheer popularity. (Digg has been plagued by contributors who learn how to manipulate the site to reflect their selections.)

Is anything legitimately scarce on the Web? People's attention, maybe, Anderson says. There's only so much of that to grab. But it's also being expanded as we consume media more hours per day and simultaneously (think of the teen watching TV, doing homework, and text messaging with friends at the same time).

"It's not about the technology anymore," Ninja Nichols says. Do you have an idea? Put it out there. If you can stand the pain of hearing the answer the market might give you, you can learn and adapt until you find your winning concept.