Holy Crap!
I’ve been reading Fred Wilson’s writings for a short time now, gleaning and learning what I can from his insights into the dotcom sphere and a number of web tools that he invests in and that I hold in high regard - some extremely cool ones, like Etsy, Twitter and most of all, Bug Labs (anything that makes my world and my tools more interactive, customisable, educational and hackable, is prime in my book).
So it was quite the mindfuck when I read this following just a couple of mildly bio-nerdy comments I left on his blog. It’s an amazing privilege (even though I’m well aware it’s a ridiculous overstatement of the value of my input!)
Great discussion yesterday about wordpress vs facebook. As always the post was just the kickoff of a wonderful discussion that is 75 comments long at this time. The big debate was whether blogging was truly social behavior and whether a blog platform could “know” anything about it’s readers.
On that there is no question in my mind. This morning I was working through all 75 comments and was floored by this one from PH Bradley. I’ve been marvelling at PH’s words in this blog’s comments for a while now. But enough is enough. Who is this guy? I need to know him, read him, follow him. Thankfully, all that one has to do when faced with that moment is hover over a person’s face in disqus and their profiles (note the plural) will be revealed. Like this:
I clicked on all of them, Phillipe is now a friend on facebook, a contact on linkedin, I follow him on twitter, and his feed is in my reader.
That’s the kind of adult social networking I was talking about in my post yesterday. Or as Phil said in the comment I linked to, comments are the blog’s spinal cord. Indeed.
(so, where can I get a tshirt saying ‘Fred Wilson is my stalker’? Maybe VCwear can help!)
Related:
- The Fred Wilson effect (a.k.a: social networking dividend of an open, public conversation)
- Last week made my head spin. As I continue with my biochemistry degree, I spectate the new media sphere as it twists and turns; I occasionally pass comment on it, either on this blog, on twitter, or in some other forum, for example, the comments sections of other sites. I happened to leave a couple of comments on Fred Wilson's blog, a high profile venture capitalist based in New York primarily investing in young US-based dotcoms. The comments, innocuous though I thought they were, must have caught his eye. He highlighted one, then the other, on his blog - both to give them some exposure because they echoed his own view or provided some new insight, and the second time round, to provide a case study in how social networking is evolving as we find new ways of having adult, mature conversations, in the open where anyone can learn from and join in. Twitter and blog comments are just two venues for open conversation, and open conversation and open social networking is headed somewhere BIG (the topic for a future blog post). The purpose of this post is to continue Fred's case study with hard data. Here are three graphs...
- The birth of the newspaper
- Marc Andreessen has kicked off a series of historical insights into the tumultuous, unsteady births of the different forms of media we experience today; he starts with one that, ironically, appears to be on its way out: the invention of the newspaper. It's kickass, truly. I wish more blogs in my feed reader were like this, occasional high quality posts, not a stream of echo chamber coverage of big media news....
- Conversation platforms will make blogs increasingly redundant
- There are many reasons why people blog. Some, like mine, are experiments in self-expression and a historical log of experiences, opinions and discoveries of personal interest. They’re (primarily text-based) pedestals for the development of a digital ‘sculpture’ of your identity. Visitors are attracted both to explore your unique identity and points of view, and to read and participate in the conversations your posts have sparked. Communities are environments that foster identities. This happens when you abandon anonymity and let people associate your comments (conversational inputs) with a name that they can become familiar with. The easier it is for people to associate your previous comments with your current one, the easier it is for them to understand where you’re coming from, who you are. Identity is all about adding context to your actions. There are lots of other ways of adding context: an avatar (or even a real photo of you); even broader identity context like your facebook profile, a link to your homepage, to other places you’re active – Twitter, other sites, etc. What Disqus, IntenseDebate, MyBlogLog, SezWho etc do is provide a really compelling, web-wide context to your actions on a site: e.g. when I comment here, you...
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