Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

So it begins…..

I have been building and marketing online businesses since 1992, and I have never had a regular blog.  Never seemed important when I was “stoking the star maker machinery of the high tech throng ” (apologies to Joanie Mitchell).  100 hour weeks, people to hire, budgets to get approved, boards to assuage, teams to motivate, CEOs to placate, and all the rest.  Those people who did blogs either had too much time on their hands or had a business marketing their visions for high tech (like my buddies/classmates Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin … hmmm.. am I allowed to mention these two in the same sentence?) and so used the blogs as a podium to further expand on their visions from a daily and more immediate perspective.  Guy was kind enough to support my first attempts at a blog, but that effort quickly died when he and the folks at Garage Technology Ventures were kind enough to engage me for a travel adventure of theirs called cfares (which is still alive and doing well).   100 hour weeks…no time to blog.

But while I was head down with the yoke around my neck, blogging evolved into the mainstream (as Seth, Guy, and others predicted) and then social media got added into the mix.  Now, if you are going to be anywhere in online, you’d better BE online (so “Hello World!”).  That means exactly what it says – your identity, the creative output of your soul, the thing that Marx in his Hegelian days said that every time you put it forth you put forth a piece of yourself – must be extended into the online realm.  Privacy as we once knew it is gone.  With the web, we have now become the Transparent Society, where much of what we do (and I fear someday all of what we do) is there for anyone in the world to see.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way.  It means we have to be more honest in what we say and do, since there are more ways to check the veracity of what people and organizations tell us.  What would be wrong if private sessions of various government agencies were available online in real time where activities had to be  judged in the harsh light of public opinion?  Don’t you think that might have an impact on how bureaucrats decided how to spend our tax dollars?  What about someone who behaves badly (hopefully not you)?  What they do is no longer as private as it once was – bad actors can be outed in a heartbeat.  I had a personal case recently where someone tried to hijack my email address.  Once I called him on it publicly, he backed down, knowing that his reputation could easily be damaged by his own bad acts if it got out into the Twittersphere.

Which brings me to the story my son told me yesterday – urban legend or not (actually not) - about doctors who were Twittering while they were doing heart surgery.  This is the ultimate example of how more and more everything is being connected in real-time through vehicles like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, wikia, and hundeds of others (264 at the last count -we actually do spend time researching the entire social media universe).  We do not just have presences online, we are being on line.  Just do a search on my online username – arthurofsun.  In Google, depending on the day, you can find between 500 and 1,000 search results from me (searching my name is a bit harder because there are some very famous people with my name), including the 3 comments I made yesterday about Google’s Vincent release.  And I haven’t been online much until now.  And oh, btw, if you look at the entries, they have my age (how dare they), my location, my interests, my profession and other facts that would have been more or less private in the olden days. Try someone who publishes every day like Danny Sullivan (actually nowadays it’s every 30 seconds because Danny has become a Tweetaholic)- he’s got 1.7mm entries.  Give me a year or two and I’ll be right up there. 

All of this is to say there is a fundamental shift going on. We are living and being more online every day.  One of the impacts of this is that now, especially with Twitter and Facebook, everyone has become a publisher.  You get up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, sit at your computer, and the first thing you do is go to Facebook or Twitter and make an entry.  Then if you are like me, or Danny, or Guy, or Seth, or Stephen Spencer, etc. etc. you write 2-3 paragraphs in your blog.  Then you go do your other work – you know, the one that pays the bills? 

So we are now all publishers. Which means the nature of news and what is relevant information has changed utterly.  And that’s where I’m going to leave it for today, because tomorrow I am going to get back up on my soapbox and talk in more detail about why Google’s Vincent release really isn’t a good thing.