I’m going through some self-enforced downtime as far as blogging is concerned. Whenever I start building up momentum with longer posts I start getting too many ideas queued up and overdoing it and not getting sleep and turning into a workahol-addicted zombie.
Some might say it isn’t work but I say it damn well is. It’s super-gratifying work, but it’s work nonetheless. In my defense I was thinking of writing something satirical (like this) — making a case that the whole social networking and new media craze is going to blow over and we can all get back to normal… hmm…
Think of the fools on Twitter: wasting time and creative talent talking about opportunities to innovate and improve the city we live in — out in the open where anyone, from anywhere, can see!
Back in the real world we should be organizing that energy into pre-meetings so we can schedule a series of meetings to hammer out a formal city hall proposition for thousands of dollars to cover the costs of initiatives to demonstrate how creative and innovative and technology-oriented we are. That takes months people — if not years — before we start seeing a return on investment (and do you have any idea how much websites and CD-ROMs cost?)
Reality check 2.0: stop screwing around with social media so we can get down to the labourious challenge of connecting and publicizing London as a cutting edge city full of passionate and creative people…
But if only there was an easier way…
(This post is turning out to be a demonstration of how hard it is for me to resist blogging. I began with the intention of writing a few sentences to say I’m cutting back and I now I’m already all the way into precisely the post I was trying not to write.)
For more on the subject (taking my jokester’s hat off for a moment), Charlie Rose has been in San Francisco interviewing a lot of the Silicon Valley bigshots. The videos are online: check them out.
I just watched the Evan Williams interview — which I’ll admit was a little boring. The Twitter co-founder and CEO, creatively brilliant he may be, is not a natural salesman.
Marc Andreessen’s conversation though, I couldn’t recommend more highly. If you had to make a list of five people who influenced the web’s evolution, Andreessen would certainly be on it — and he comes off as someone easygoing you’d enjoy having over for a beer. He created the software you’re probably reading this on right now (not just the program, but the concept of a web browser); more recently he was an early investor in Digg and Twitter, and he currently sits on the boards of Facebook and eBay among others. (When he talks about all of his famous high-tech friends he isn’t just dropping names.) The conversation runs the full gamut of what’s happening with the web today. If you follow TechCrunch and all the rest there won’t be anything new here, but Andreessen makes an exceptionally genuine and compelling case for this stuff — and the number of points he touches on (and how easily he does it) is impressive to witness.
The conversation with Google’s Marissa Mayer is pretty informative as well — more for depth than breadth. She basically decides which Google products to promote. If you want to understand how Google keeps generating new ideas and why companies like Facebook and Twitter can be so vital without actually making money (and why so many sites say “beta” beside their name) [and why it isn't just ok but essential for the rest of us to learn when and how to employ the same attitude], this interview is the place to start. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was on the next night but I haven’t seen that yet.
[Update: Gah. How could I forget Jeff Bezos showing off the Kindle 2 and talking about the new and interesting turns Amazon is taking... E.g. watch for Amazon auto parts, coming soon.]
Not much new there for social media pros but I certainly enjoy listening to any one of these successful high-tech entrepreneurs — especially as I’m in the process of trying to “innovate early and innovate often” myself… taking chances with video and whatnot, starting to invest a little more financial, social, and emotional capital in my own enterprises.
This site will get a new theme and a few upgrades in the near future. (This one’s only temporary.) I also have a few entirely new blog concepts that may or may not come to fruition — most of which I’d like to collaborate on and eventually move on from. There’s a lot of room in London for more mission-oriented blogs with local relevance, a lot more opportunity for public participation, and a lot of need for people at all levels to buy in… Stay posted…
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