I think it’s important to first differentiate between products and ideas. I am focusing this post around products because there are so many poorly-implemented great ideas and equally as many excellently-implemented shitty ideas. This is all implementation.
So what makes a new product great? Here are my thoughts:
1. Products that make a difficult process genuinely and obviously easier.
Something that makes some process exponentially easier is bound to make people excited. I remember when Amazon came out with 1click – they took a multi-step process and made it a single click. That, to me, was super exciting.
There are so many examples in this category, but three that I use every day are Dropbox (sharing and syncing!!), Gmail (speed!!), and Grooveshark (playlists in my browser!!).
2. Something that makes me want to come back.
“Repeat Visitors” is an interesting concept because so many products force these numbers with annoying emails, push notifications and spam.
You should come back because you want to – because there is some feature that is calling you back. It is a rare, rare thing when you return to a site organically. I am totally fine with reminders (bacn, etc.) as part of your product, but just make sure that the reminder has value to the end-user and not just to your traffic stats.
3. Magic.
This is the hardest quality to articulate – the one that so few services actually deliver on. Showing me information or giving me an experience not previously accessible or possible is part of magic.
Maybe an anecdotal example is better. I remember the first time I looked at Twitter, I felt like I could see INSIDE A PERSON’S BRAIN. At least, the people who were doin it right.
Flipboard. Delicious. YouTube. You get the idea.
These products are magic.
I don’t think there’s really any ideas that are truly new — “magic” is all about the technology itself or a new way to layout information or a color scheme or a new twist on a very established idea.
True excitement takes all three – not just one. But it’s also extremely difficult to architect and can’t be manufactured because of all the circumstances that are out of the control of the founders – market timing, early users, etc.
When I am using something new I try to think about it in terms of these three qualities.
While it is extremely difficult to create excitement and amazing experiences, the upside, satisfaction and potential impact are nearly infinite. And that’s why we all keep trying.
MIT is a totally amazing place for startups and entrepreneurship. It’s one of those places where ideas and talent and super-slick technology lives in the floors and walls and hallways.
I heard the other day that they had created a position within the Entrepreneurship Center called an “Ecosystem Hacker” – essentially someone whose sole job it is to hang out at the E-Center and help startups flourish on campus. While long overdue, it seems like a sweet gig for the right person (also one of those positions that never gets advertised).
I sent some questions to the current Ecosystem Hacker Elliot Cohen to find out more details. See below. I wish more universities would create positions like these to help startups grow on campus.
Hope you find this useful. They are hiring someone new this summer I believe, questions/applications go to ecenter@mit.edu.
What does the Ecosystem Hacker do all day?
We organize new classes to fill gaps in the current curriculum. We create new programs to connect young entrepreneurs with mentors and other resources. We organize events to help those entrepreneurs connect, get inspired, and launch new companies to solve the world’s biggest problems. We provide students with the mentorship and resources necessary to succeed.
What kind of programs have you helped organize? T=0, Festival for Entrepreneurs: for the first time this fall we will be throwing a full-on entrepreneurship festival at MIT. Like Burning Man or Woodstock.
Entrepreneurs in Residence: We recruit the best entrepreneurs, angels, and VCs from the community to provide open office hours for students on campus as they work through early stage ideas.
Digital Shingle Project: Designing a dynamic web experience to showcase the wealth of MIT alumni companies – to help them “tell their story”. This is part of inspiring and informing the next generation of entrepreneurs with real stories.
What was the experience like?
I am entrepreneur at heart and always will be. But this has been the best year of my life, as I’ve been able to simultaneously learn a ton about entrepreneurship, build my own network in the Boston area, and more importantly give back by helping to nurture and educate the next generation of entrepreneurs at MIT.
I could have learned about Product Development, Sales, Marketing, or Operations at another startup. I could have learned about deal flow and investmenting at a VC firm. But MIT is the only place I could have learned how ideas and research go from the lab, classroom, or a coffee shop into the world. How do people vet their ideas and decide when to actually take the plunge? There is no other place where you can see 50 different new “projects” every day and watch which ones succeed in turning into companies and which ones fail before launch.
Can I be the next Ecosystem Hacker?
To do this job right you need three things: a technical background, entrepreneurial experience and a PhD in GSD (Getting Shit Done). We don’t care what technical discipline you come from, but you need to have chops in whatever your domain.
If you have any questions or want to apply please send us mail at ecenter at mit.edu. A successful application can come in any form – portfolio, resume, video, or a github ID, but make sure you are proud of whatever you send us! Don’t tell us why we should hire you because this isn’t a job and we don’t hire people. This is a mission and you need to convince us why we need you to succeed.
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Thanks Elliot for taking the time to enlighten. Heart u MIT.
YouTube phenomenon Dave Days brings teenage girls to tears in the same way Justin Bieber does. While he’s not actually a mainstream celebrity, I think he’s the best example of the new media movement toward “person as distribution channel” – a developing trend that has very interesting and potentially significant implications in the world of content distribution.
The New Fame
At the beginning of May, I attended a live-in-concert gathering of YouTube celebrities called the Digitour. I forget exactly why I went, but keep in mind the average age of the audience was about 16 (on a Sunday!). I had no idea who any of the performers were except for the Gregory Brothers, because, come on, everyone saw “Bed Intruders.”
It was at this event that I discovered Dave Days. It was quite bizarre to watch the massive crowd of teenage girls gather in front of the stage and sing along to every single word. After all, he wasn’t famous.
…or was he? After a little research on Dave and his internetting, I realized that if “celebrity” is some combination of influence and reach, Dave Days was doing better than most movie stars. His YouTube page has a cumulative view count of over 270 million, more than mainstream uber-pop-stars like Ke$ha.
The weird part is that he is not famous in the way that we traditionally define fame. His Wikipedia page was deleted on June 10 because apparently he’s not significant enough. And according to his YouTube page, he’s unsigned.
What he does have, though, is an enviable distribution network that he has (mostly) complete control over. The network was built from scratch starting with YouTube and now spans Twitter, Facebook, DailyBooth, and MySpace.
Person as Distribution Channel
What I mean by “Person as Distribution Channel” is that, with the rising popularity of social platforms, we are moving in a direction where a specific person can have as much impact distributing a piece of content as a more established network. I don’t think we are there yet as many of the platforms are still quite nascent – but it’s definitely up for debate.
Remember, the cost of distributing a piece of content digitally is now close to zero. You can post a video or an article or a photo through a plethroa of free services. The cost is in building the audience/fan base. Pre-internet (and pre-social platforms), all the barriers were at the entry point — starting a television station or a radio station or a magazine was a pain in the ass, but once you had gone through the process, there wasn’t that much competition on the other side.
Now it is super easy to set up a “channel” for media. The hard part is differentiating yourself and gathering the people who are actually interested in whatever it is you are putting out there. This takes much longer because there’s so much competition. The whole “I have nothing to watch” ailment is all but eradicated. Instead, the problem is “I don’t know what’s good” – and with that comes a precipitous rise in what internet people call FOMO, or “fear of missing out.”
The other interesting shift is that “launching” a piece of content doesn’t really mean anything. When Dave Days posted his first video, I am sure probably about 200 people watched it. That no longer means that you are talentless and should stop making videos, it simply means that you need to spend more time creating and experimenting with different audiences. Additionally, you have no idea WHEN people are actually going to find or encounter your content. It could have flat views for months, get posted to the right message board or blog, and then all of a sudden blow up (see: “Boxxy”). The process of building up organic inbound links and embeds takes time as well. But when people do end up in Dave Days’ universe, they most likely aren’t watching just a single video – they will go through and drive up the view counts of several, so in a way each new viewer can have exponential impact if you have lots of content.
I should mention the web series “The Guild” here. They went through the same process of building an audience organically over time, slowly building up a network across many sites and pushing content through all those channels. Because they put in the time to build up the audience, they are in the powerful position of owning all the intellectual property for the show and not having to answer to a studio.
Another data point is littlemonsters.com – the as-yet unreleased social network that Lady Gaga is building. Forward-thinking celebrities are beginning to realize the power of truly “owning” their fans/audiences and building web products that give them a channel where they *really* have absolute distribution control.
Dissecting Dave Days
After a totally fascinating experience at the Digitour, I spent a few hours analyzing Dave Days and his various profiles across the internet. Here’s the narrative I pieced together, some of which may or may not be accurate.
He started by putting out a mix of pop-punk cover songs, comedy and videos about his obsession with Miley Cyrus. In several videos, he sings to a cardboard cut-out of the pop star. The quality of the videos is just above-average-enough that they stand out among the other webcam-on-my-desk videos that teenagers like LonelyGirl15 were famous for.
People liked these videos so he made more of them. And then the key move – he did a very good job encouraging his new fans to subscribe to his YouTube channel and check out his profiles all around the social web. So if you liked these videos (and what’s not to like?) you could ALSO follow on Twitter, like on Facebook, follow on DailyBooth and whatever it is that people do on MySpace these days.
He racked up so many views and fans that eventually the REAL Miley actually appeared in one of his videos. It took over 3 years (first video was 2007), but Dave Days had “made it.” Today he has nearly 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube, over 170,000 Twitter followers, 232,000 Facebook fans, 62,000 DailyBooth followers, an iPhone app, and a Facebook app. The channels and the audience are starting to yield some revenue, too. A video he did for Pop Tarts is up to 280,000 views, and he’s pushing merchandise like t-shirts on his YouTube page.
And like a smart social media creator, throughout the Digitour he was videotaping the event from the stage (how meta) so that he could post the video for his loyal fans. Volume does play a role, because creators never really know what is going to be a hit and to what degree – put another way, there’s a big difference between 200,000 views and 2 million though both could be considered successful.
Now our friend Dave is at the point where he has so many channels that when he releases a new video, he can guarantee a view count in at least the tens of thousands straight away. And because of the strength of his fanbase and social networks, he’s at #10 on Billboard’s “Uncharted” this week. Although it has been four years, he has constructed his own distribution network that is rising in power and popularity.
If the future is people not only as talent and creators, but as distribution channels that they own and control, it’s an incredibly powerful thing for content creators who have the patience and the know-how to build these networks. Additionally, there’s a big difference between a person and a brand distributing content. While I don’t think we’re at the point yet where there are *enough* people like Dave Days and Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher to really be able to analyze what it means for brands and established networks, it’s certainly a very interesting trend to watch.
And my teenybopper cred officially went up. SWEET.
When I was in second grade, my teacher suggested we all keep journals. Do it every day, she said, and we’d appreciate it later in life. Coincidently, this is exactly the time in my life when I learned how to procrastinate. Meh, I thought, I’ll write something meaningful tomorrow. And so my marble composition books stayed empty, absent of all my brilliant 7-year-old musings.
While I have gotten (slightly) better about it these days, I wonder if long-form is really for me. I am decidedly part of the ADD generation, and believe that creativity is best served in mixed-media short spurts rather than marathons. I have also been following the “quantified self” movement, and while tracking what you’re thinking or doing or where you are at a particular moment is only peripherally relevant (lack of numbers), I believe it fits with the trend of using computers to learn and capture more about ourselves.
It took an awfully long time but I now realize that having thoughts to look back on, from 2 weeks or 2 years ago, is an incredibly magical thing. I always knew this, but it was never enough to get me to actually write or journal or collect or scrapbook or whatever.
Is this a “problem”? In my mind, absolutely. I deeply believe that “everyone is a creator” and until everyone really *is* a creator it’s a problem worth solving. There are lots of ways to blog but pretty much every blogging platform is driven by a very very small percentage of the users. The barriers, both technological and psychological, still have a long way to go.
I prefer blogging from my phone much better than trying to make the time to sit down and write something — the pressure of making the time and then on top of that trying to think of something interesting to say were incredibly discouraging.
This was the impetus for creating MessageParty. I wanted something I could easily do from my phone, that would tell me where I was and let me create a sort of record about what I was up to.
Making creators out of non-creators won’t be quick, but with devices like the iPhone I think it’s getting much easier.
I had this idea about 6 months ago and figured someone would have built it by now. No dice, and it’s kind of early tonight so figured I might as well detail it out.
Has anyone else noticed that eBay is absolutely killing it on mobile? Insanity. Take a few minutes, Google around on it, and then come back and tell me that no one wants to buy stuff on their phone/tablet. Simply not true. While it’s a teeny slice of a gigantic market, that slice is going to get huge over the next 5 years. With younger demographics especially, as they spend more and more time on their phones they’ll do more than just play Angry Birds and send scandalous text messages.
But the movement of ecommerce sites to mobile/tablets is a very different story. Some of the more forward-thinking sites have HTML-5 optimized web experiences, but how many really have amazing native apps? Gilt, eBay, maybe a few others, but honestly I don’t know of too many. As someone familiar with the numbers of your average ecommerce operation, avoiding native apps altogether makes strategic sense. There’s no way that Jennifer’s Jeans is going to shell out $30K or more to get a native app/tablet app made, and then have to go through the trouble of marketing the app and getting people to download it. We’re just at the point where it’s much, much easier to get someone to visit a website than it is to get them to download an app, so your average small ecommerce business is going to stick to SEO, SEM and social media marketing – none of which really work on driving app downloads.
This then seems like a market opening – more and more people want to shop on their phones/tablets but the vast majority of businesses are not rushing to support this demand because it’s not large enough and too hurdle-rich to make strategic sense, and the real tidal-wave is probably still about 2 years away (though maybe if you started in Japan…)
Here is what I propose: a marketplace like eBay, Etsy, Amazon Marketplace, etc. that is completely native to the mobile and tablet experience. There are so many different things to take advantage of – the touch capabilities alone are an incredible advantage in ecommerce. So you’d really need two things:
1. A very innovative user interface and payment system for both the tablet and the iPhone. This is an interesting discussion in itself because, although in-app purchases are amazing, any business that doesn’t make like 99% profit on each in-app purchase (yay, virtual goods) is just not going to want to take the 30% hit.
2. An extremely user-friendly web interface where shop owners could come and upload their merchandise information, photos, etc. Bonus for plugging in to existing ecommerce databases and just pulling directly.
Coming back to Jennifer’s Jeans, now the proprietor simply has to visit the website, upload his/her merchandise and agree to hand over a percentage of each sale to your marketplace. All of a sudden, many of the barriers are gone – the store doesn’t have to go through the trouble of making the application, and you as the marketplace would market the app, benefiting all the stores participating.
There would need to be a theme or angle to the marketplace (“homemade goods” “high fashion” “gadgets” etc.) and you’d need to get 10 forward-thinking small ecommerce businesses on board in the beginning. My guess is that business would be sort of flat for a year or two because marketing within iOS devices is pretty nascent and not the best (though getting better), but given the fast pace at which things change there will be a mobile commerce explosion very soon, maybe sooner than we think. And bonus, you are in the lucky position of not having to deal with inventory or shipping.
Maybe I am missing something, but can someone please explain to me why this hasn’t been built yet? It’s technically non-trivial (my guess is it would take a team of 5 people probably 6 months to get a barely-working alpha ready), but the upside is compelling enough that I would think there would at least be more attempts. Perhaps it’s that the risk of marketplace #FAIL (not the right match of buyers and sellers) mixed with the technical hurdles.
But think about it: this is just like the early web. People wondered if anyone would ever buy anything through the interwebs, and making an ecommerce site was a gigantic pain in the ass and then an even bigger one to get people to actually come to your site. And it happened then, so what’s preventing it from happening now within the iOS and Android ecosystems?
I say almost nothing. And for that reason, I’m excited.
I put together a little re-design of my personal homepage. Am pumped about it – I wanted something that presented my love for New York City alongside a useful collection of links for where I “hang out” around the web.
Here’s the final design:
In putting this project together I realized that all of the social services I use and love most vehemently are all deeply tied to either New York City or the Northeast, no matter where they are currently located. More on that below.
First – the site was influenced by this map of Manhattan (which, if you live here, you’ve likely seen at some point), originally produced by Ork Posters.
The placement of each web service on the map was deliberate and aimed at visually connecting the personality of a neighborhood to the personality of the service. And for the 7 people who think about NYC neighborhoods and web services in the same way I do – would love to hear your thoughts.
For everyone else, here’s the thinking behind each placement:
Twitter + Wall Street: Frenetic, Jumbled, Terse, but incredibly powerful
Foursquare + East Village: The roots of the service were in the EV and the best foursquare tips are still found here; bar-hopping, hypersocial, where-you-at mentality
Tumblr + West Village and Meatpacking: Coolness to a fault
Blog + Gramercy: I currently live in this neighborhood, so it was most fitting to place it there
Email + Chelsea and Times Square: Large, unmanageable, swelling, but ultimately the pulse of everything
Bnter + West Chelsea + Hell’s Kitchen: West Chelsea is the biggest up-and-comer neighborhood in lower Manhattan
Delicious + Midtown: Incredibly useful, but somewhat soulless (post-Yahoo) and unchanging
Facebook + Upper East Side: The center of the “establishment”
Quora + Upper West Side: Hyper-academic, hyper-artistic, hyper-self-reflective
Hacker News + Spanish Harlem: Steadfast, growing like a weed though few people notice, culture-rich but somewhat insulated
MessageParty + Washington Heights: Scrappy, and how could I miss an opportunity to post this video on my blog?
Putting aside the services that were started and headquartered in New York (Foursquare, Delicious, Bnter, Tumblr), Facebook was founded at Harvard and Mark Zuckerberg is from the NYC suburbs. At least one of the Quora founders went to prep school on the East Coast. Y Combinator/PG used to spend half the year in Boston. Most interviews with Jack Dorsey talk about bike messengers in Manhattan as being the main influence behind the idea for Twitter. While I am not saying that all these companies are east-coast through and through, there is certainly elements of east-coast-ness that flow through all of them.
I wonder about this – is there something about NYC/the Northeast that facilitates this sort of idea generation? Sure, we talk ad naseum about venture dollars and startups in New York, but I’d more be interested in theories around specific products. Is it the density and awful winters that somehow push us to want to communicate digitally?
Or is it just that there’s less fear of failure in New York because general survival is such a feat on its own and originality is paramount?
Thoughts for a Sunday.
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P.S. If you’d like your own NYC map, hit up AthenaBelle on 99Designs. I submitted the idea and the design was all her. The whole project took me a few hours total – writing the brief, linking up the image, etc.
Jarod and I were at the office Thursday with our heads spinning finishing up the totally new and improved MessageParty (coming soon), when someone sent him a link to a YouTube video that boasted all of about 30 views – a VC pitch from a girl named Rachel Sequoia called “Share the Air.”
I have no idea who Rachel Sequoia is, have no relationship with her or Spiral Moon Media, have never heard of VCFC, and am still torn on whether this company is real or a product of the startup version of Ark Music Factory.
It’s now five days later and the video has zipped around the interwebs and has over 100,000 views. While that’s nothing compared to your average mainstream viral hit, for a niche video from a VC pitch event it’s kind of amazing.
So how does a video go from 30 to 100,000 views? What sort of traffic patterns create this sort of momentum? This is stuff I find fascinating. Observations below.
–> Real or Fake
The best part about the video is that it rides and incredibly fine line between real and fake. If you’ve ever been to any sort of pitch event, you know that some people who get up at these things have totally ridiculous ideas. But I think the investment community is small enough that surely there would be someone recognizable in the audience. I did quick poll of VC friends and no one had even heard of the event.
Another notable observation about this video is that it came out the day after the Color financing was announced. Sequoia the firm was on everyone’s mind. And then here was Rachel Sequoia. Coincidence? Hmm. She also followed perfectly in the wake of everyone’s new favorite viral star Rebecca Black. In the same way that the big winner in the Rebecca Black meme was Ark Music Factory, I think the same is true for Spiral Moon Media.
One curious thing though was when we saw the video last Thursday, no one had bothered to register SharetheAir108.com. Weird. We thought the video was awesome, and the thought of some asshole domain squatter trying to profit off of Rachel was too much to bear and mostly just wanted to help her out – remember, the video had about 100 views at the time and you can set up a LaunchRock site in about 2 minutes. We had NO IDEA it would grow like this. To be honest, I believe the video is 100% real and we figured it was a great way to pitch in, but we had nothing do with the event or the video. We’ve spoken with Dan from Spiral Moon and apparently there’s more to come from Rachel and the pitch is not some elaborate internet prank. The story just gets more interesting as the days go on! As for the analytics? So far there have been 95,415 unique visitors and 2,321 email sign-ups in the last 5 days (don’t worry we’re not going to do anything with the email list except hand it over to Rachel if she wants it). I suppose this is the yield one can expect from over 100,000 YouTube views.
Additionally, I just received an email from Ashwin Anand, the President of the VCFC and an intellectual property attorney in Silicon Valley. Says Ashwin: “The event was held at the JCC (Jewish Community Center) in Palo Alto, California. The audience was made up of predominately entrepreneurs and middle-aged business men/women as you can see in the video. These were individuals and inventors who have interesting ideas but often lack the platform or distribution capabilities to make their voice heard. The room was set to hold around 80-90 people, and it was completely filled throughout most of the event. All the seats were taken, and there were a lot of people standing in the back…Rachel Sequoia’s presentation really livened and loosened up the mood in the room…everyone was smiles after Sequoia’s pitch. She was, I believe, the 4th presenter of the evening (of about 6-7) and as you might be able to tell from the video, the most unique, upbeat, and entertaining. It was very well received, and afterwards, Rachel received lots of encouraging and positive feedback from people who really thought she did an amazing job.”
–> Traffic Patterns
The video made the rounds on Tumblr before it ever hit any major news outlets. Jarod posted it on his tumblr, I re-blogged it from him, and it got re-blogged around Tumblr for about 2 days before ending up on The Daily What. This series of re-blogs pushed the video from 30 views to about 20,000.
If anything, I think this video shows the viral power of Tumblr. Getting those first 10,000 WTF’s is an important step in pushing something up to 100,000 or even a million. Getting to a few hundred thousand views now seems inevitable, and I think it was those first 10,000 that were the hardest-earned and most important to the spread of the the video.
This post originally appeared in my email newsletter back in November. Thought it was worth posting here.
I am trying to transition as much activity as possible to my iPhone. Things I previously wrote-off as necessitating a computer I am now more willing to attempt on my phone.
I hope that 10 years from now people refer to this period in the world of technology as “mobile 1.0.” Looking around on trains and in public places, the activities that people do on their phones are pretty limited: games, email, messaging, reading the news. Sort of like what people did on the early Internet.
And smartphones are still fairly new and not completely ubiquitous. Service isn’t always reliable. Last weekend at the Rally to Restore Sanity in DC, there was no cell service and no wireless at all.
So where’s it going? To me, the emergence and immediate popularity of an app like Instagram indicates a few things:
1. There are few social products built for the iphone that really “work”.
2. As my friend Nathaniel so eloquently said: “Good products allow you to do something you already do more effectively, more simply, and with less pain. Great products make the experience so joyful that you end up doing more of it. Mint was able to achieve this with tracking personal finances, and Instagram is definitely doing this with photo sharing.”
3. While there is no question much widespread addiction to mobile devices (“crackberry” anyone?), the opportunity for mobile products to really change behavior is only, I think, just beginning.
Will be very curious to watch this market develop over the next few years.
So I decided to do some tests with the ultimate in inexplicable phenomenons: pop music. I was the most loyal of loyal z100 listeners as a kid, but have since lost interest in the minutae of Top 40 hits. That said, the rise to hyper-popularity of certain pop stars in recent years, especially given the complete and utter fragmentation of distribution channels, is fascinating.
One such star is Nicki Minaj, the newest it-girl pop rapper. Minaj is a bit of a contradiction – a rapper who sports pink hair and lacks the “street” background that one assumes is a pre-requisite for a successful rap career. And yet, she is arguably the most successful female rapper in the past year (or 5 years?). So what is it about Minaj that makes her so successful?
The answers on Quora were interesting and thoughtful, and not only that, but they came from people who I would classify as informed and influential in the world of pop music. The accusation that Quora is simply a “Silicon Valley Playground” is, I believe, not entirely true. But could it be that the tech world so insular that we have made the naive assumption that every industry is as narcissistic and analytical as ours?
That said, other verticals outside of tech still have a long way to go in terms of the depth and insight in answers. I was sort of hoping for someone to detail for me the entire history of women in rap music (including the very significant mid-1990s throw-down between Lil Kim and Foxy Brown) and the conditions that specifically led to Minaj’s ability to rise so quickly.
It’s an interesting time to be a female rapper. “Bieberism” and generally bubble-gum style pop has reached fever pitch, and it would seem that the next great wave of hip-hop might be grittier in response, and yet the opposite has happened.
While Minaj may not be the next Lauryn Hill the best part about her is that she doesn’t want to be. She’s received some criticism for not doing her own stuff, though perhaps that has allowed her to leverage the existing fan bases of giants like Kanye West and Eminem to cultivate her own.
I wonder if because this sort of information has no clear answer, no answer will ever be completely satisfying. Perhaps that will ultimately be the downfall of Quora (though I believe that not at all and relish the highly speculative musings that are posted on the site).
It’s surprising to me that people don’t “get” the Quora hype or don’t “buy” the excitement and value of the service. This, to me, makes no sense. Through what other medium can you access this type of expertise? Sure, I could go read a bunch of articles in pop mags and blogs, but they generally tend to avoid pontificating in favor of actual reporting.
And good for them – but I think there’s this whole other kind of information that has yet to be catalogued in any sort of organized fashion. If you have a site that does metric conversions, you’ve probably missed the boat on that, as that information easily translates to a digital medium and was the first type of information to go digital in the early days of the web. Quora is about subtlety and gray areas, and this phase of information categorization is just beginning.
Maybe Quora’s not ready for pop music quite yet, but when they do get there I’ll be waiting.
So I gave the paid newsletter thing a try and realized I really missed blogging. But since I’m not in b-school anymore I moved all my blogging over to http://amandapeyton.com/blog. See you over there.
