I got a gentle mocking from Eric Norlin today:
so it seems your blog made both the digital id world and network world email newsletters in the same week….which, as far as i know, has never happened before and probably qualifies you for some sort of superstar blog status 😉ps: i like the 4th law.
Imagine unsuspecting readers who fall upon this site. I mean, it has to qualify as one of the more esoteric blogs going. Or maybe not. I don't know any more. The experience of blogging makes you challenge a lot of assumptions. Which reminds me…
I really want to express my gratitude to the people who invented this whole blog thing, I know Dave Winer was a key guy. I want to find out more about what went on in the first blog days.
Funny thing is, although I really liked Dave Winer when Doc introduced me, it turns out I didn't have a clue about what he had really done. It was sort of like meeting Bob Dylan at dinner but never having heard him sing. “Oh, you're a singer – how interesting.”
I say that because I now realize you have to blog to understand blogging – and I hadn't. In my case, at least, reading blogs was interesting enough and increased my level of information – but I saw nothing “revolutionizing” about it.
Yet writing a blog is profoundly affecting my thinking – and I've only done it for a few weeks. I get a lot of feedback and input. And it's input of diverse kinds. Technologies that transform and help us evolve our thinking are truly precious and rare. Blogging is also transforming my relationships with people. I am awed by what its inventors have accomplished. This in turn underlines one more time how superficial and stupid insipid comments about “the end of innovation” really are.
I followed a link recently to a piece on “Alpha Bloggers”. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that blogging is presented as a means to fame and glamour rather than “a means of consciousness”. Too bad.
I've been working on identity matters since the 1980’s. And I've thought of myself as a member of a community of thinkers that extended across many different companies and institutions since the early days of electronic mail. I've grown with that community – learning, sometimes leading, and occasionally being thrown into bizarre opportunities to change what's up. My friends have often been my competitors, and I've been happy and grateful every time they have made an innovation. As competitors we create each others’ opportunities as whole new technologies become more highly valued.
In the past the community I am referring to has been an abstract thing. But I can see now that a person's blog is written for their community – and, to a certain extent, at least in terms of subject matter, by its members. It is a reification (in the sense of making something abstract into a ‘thing’) of the ‘other’ with whom you communicate.
