Jack Krupansky has written a 28-point memo in response to my partial publication of a preliminary TO. It is long and thoughtful, although I feel some of his questions have been previously answered. For example, Global Neighborhoods is different from World is Flat because Flat World focused on global enterprises while I'm focusing on the startups who might disrupt them. I am not dealing with target audience yet although that will be part of my publisher's proposal. I am simply working on the TOC and that will not be completed until I go to Europe with Rick Segal in October and start understanding what I'll be learning out there.
But Jack posed the challenge that I should more clearly define the difference between a global neighborhood from a global community. Good point.
Let's start with the real world. My general neighborhood is the San Francisco Bay Area. There are portions of this neighborhood where I know the people door-to-door. We have common interests such as traffic. There are other places where a large portion of the people I encounter are passionate, not just about technology, but the portions of it that interest me. I dwell in the social media neighborhood, and rarely hang out in tech neighborhoods where people are passionate about Quicken or for that matter HP engineering tools.
There are also neighborhoods that scare me. I would not walk down the streets of certain neighborhoods and I would be nervous if my wife had to be in one. The denizens of those neighborhoods, likewise would perhaps be uncomfortable in mine. They might get unreasonably bothered by police while they were doing nothing, having the same apprehensions that i would have if hassled by a street gang.
Likewise, I live a few miles from Atherton, a community that makes a clear statement to non-neighborhood residents by high walls and sturdy gates. Those barriers tell me that I am not welcome to wander through without a specific invitation. Likewise, residents there, may be uncomfortable with the lack of such security in my neighborhood.
Almost everything, I've written in these preceding neighborhoods is applicable from my perspective, to online communities. Blogging, for example, is a huge community, perhaps 50-100 million strong and expanding faster than Vegas is into the desert. Most of that communities exists in places where I don't dwell, don't share interests or passion and in certain places, I would feel downright uncomfortable, if not unsafe.
But the neighborhoods where I dwell, are now defined by interests, not geography. I have friendships with people all over the world. I don't just share common interests, over time, I've come to know about them, their families, where and how they live. In this year in which I have been fortunate to travel to so many places,I have written about meeting old friends for the first time. It is an amazing experience. Minutes after Tom Raftery greeted my wife and I at the Cork Airport, we were all chattering like next door neighbors. Yet, Tom and I had met previously on once and that was relatively briefly, while our wives had never met.
[Tom Raftery & me. Old buddies from the neighborhood.]
So, I define global neighborhoods as slivers of global communities. It's where each of us hang out, feel comfortable, share issues of mutual concern. What is different about them is that these neighborhoods exist online before they spill over into the tangible world. They make geography less relevant than has previously been the case. They make the politics between nations less of a barrier than has previously been the case.
Global Neighborhoods also change entrepreneurialism. No longer does every tech visionary, living in some remote corner of Montana, India or Croatia need to move to some urbanized tech cluster such as Silicon Valley. No longer to people with shared vision need to live and work in the same physical neighborhood to collaborate together on a project.
Just what this means and how it plays out from both a cultural and business perspective is that part that I will not even try to answer until I speak to a whole lot more people.
Some of you seem to think that much of this is obvious, or just ho hum. perhaps it is. I think it has enormous significance to a great number of people and is more interesting to me than just profiling a bunch of Web 2.0 companies. There is an abundance of Web 2.0 companies--1600 is one of those conventional wisdom numbers that gets bandied about. From the ones I get to look at, I am amazed at the quality of the teams and the work they are creating.
There are just so many of them, and very few will actually be transition candidates. So what happens? What happens when perfectly good companies attract multinational userbases of a few million people, but don't get acquired by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, don't go public but make a nice reasonable profit allowing a couple of dozen young bright people to make a very nice living?
I don't have a clue what these answers are. I hope I do after a series of visits to places where I meet some more neighborhood friends who reside thousands of miles from my home.
Does this answer your question, Jack?
