Hugh, Scoble, B5,Web 2.0 & Chasms

Between Hugh and Scoble, we are being treated to some great cartoons and thoughts on whether Web 2.0 is a bubble, just froth or maybe an echo chamber. While Robert used a great many words, Hugh managed to crack me up in about five seconds.

Robert also mentioned fellow blog book author Jeremy Wright, whose B5 Media Network seems to me a classic success story of bringing blogging outside the insular Web 2.0 community where many of us loiter.

So much bubble and froth talk. It's seems to me the issue is not the bubble but the chasm.

To me blogging is growing up and to understand what we face, people should circle back and read or reread Geoffrey Moore's brilliant Crossing the Chasm. The blog marketplace is acting a bit like a bubble.  But the real relevance, seems to me to be that we have saturated the early adopters in three markets--geeks, politico's and American youth.  Word of mouth has generated all that, and now there's probably 100 million people in the world enthusing or complaining about blogs.

The question is can blogging and the social media, leap the chasm from these significant but niche communities and land into the big oceanic repository created by the mainstream. I see lots of evidence that that is the case. Read through the more than a dozen niches that Jeremy's B5 serves and note that B5's growth these days is probably faster than any techcentric network, including Podtech and Techcrunch.

[Jeremy Wright]

My point is this: The blog issue du jour is not bubble but chasm. The next step, as I've written before, is that blogging needs to be less newsworthy and more normal. Blogging is not about a ratings war.  It's about a tool that is important because it scales people's abilities to have conversations. It's a tool like the telephone or email.

And it fulfills its potential when everyday people, everywhere use it for everyday purposes.

Comments

[Jeremy Wright]

While I don't think we're anywhere near actually crossing the chasm yet, I really appreciate the sentiment Shel :-)

[shel israel]

Jeremy,

Perhaps I expressed it badly. I meant it to mean that by not being techcentric, you are using a strategy that is likely to get you accross the chasm faster than other players, because you are dealing with numerous categories that attract everyday people.

[Gautam Ghosh]

Hi Shel

One interesting post I came across recently that's related was Dave Pollard's on why Social Media is getting used so less by people

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/09/01.html#a1630

My take is that blogging is fundamentally different from the phone or email. Because it's "one to many" and because what you feel and think today is "written digitally" it makes people shy away. That's why its getting caught between people who are willing to go out on a limb and converse digitally in full view of the search engines :-)