"Is it time to revise the old saw that everyone in the world is connected by just six degrees of separation? A study from French mobile carrier O2 has found that strangers are more connected to each other than they ever have been." - ~C4Chaos via Bookmarklet
"Election campaigns matter because who gets elected can change reality. But election campaigns are primarily about the realities of voters' minds, which depend on how the candidates and the external realities are cognitively framed. They can be framed honestly or deceptively, effectively or clumsily. And they are always framed from the perspective of a worldview." - ~C4Chaos via Bookmarklet
I've been waiting for the GREAT Lakoff to weigh in on this. Smackdown. - melmcbride
and it is indeed a GREAT take on this topic :) - ~C4Chaos
Lakoff has been instrumental creating a clear story around why Republicans vote against their own best interests. This analysis regarding Palin gets beneath the hysteria. - Sean O'Brien
If more American progressives read Lakoff, they might actually achieve their goals. - melmcbride
Unfortunately Lakoff has a predilection for over-simplification and tautology, resulting in a flawed overall work... (I'd send you to http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06... and http://www.newscientist.com/ch... for alternative reviews of Political Mind). And here, yet again, I come away less than enlightened, having read a lengthy piece. But that doesn't mean I don't agree with the gist of his conclusion. - Christopher Galtenberg
@Christopher - Thanks. Those articles provided a nice counterpoint to what I've read from Lakoff. - Sean O'Brien
@Christoper: thanks for the links. very interesting read. i haven't read Lakoff's book, but judging by the reviews it seems like Lakoff's theory is reductionistic (i.e. reducing everything to neuroscience). i think Drew Westen's "Political Brain" would balance that view since it focuses more on emotion, psychology, and worldview - http://www.thepoliticalbrain.c... - that said, this doesn't take away from the main point of Lakoff's essay: issues are secondary, worldview and framing are primary. - ~C4Chaos
Agreed - and regardless of his current project, Metaphors We Live By is a mind-changing classic - Christopher Galtenberg
"I can give services permission to share the URL-based identifiers of my friends (on a per-instance basis) without the threat of betraying their confidence since their public URLs don’t reveal their sensitive contact information (unless they choose to publish it themselves or provide access to it). This allows me the dual benefit of being able to show up at any random web service and find my friends while not sharing information they haven’t given me permission to pass on to untrusted third parties." - hubfeed
I think part of what I see in Eva's posting is a questioning of whether we need "reference managers" in the traditional sense at all - maybe something more like a browser history, your "reading stream" captured by a browser extension or desktop tool, where you can go in and share, highlight, or reference particular articles-you-have-read with a single click. - Richard Akerman
Well a browser stream plus the record of pushing a 'like' button. I think the bookmarklet model is a great one though - as long as it is responsive.The fact that I've made a little more effort to press a button and drop in some tags is worth recording and using when you then search through everything you've looked at. I'm finding I am using the firefox awesome bar as a kind of 'everything I've looked at' record - anyone else? - Cameron Neylon
Richard - no, that's not what I meant. I meant that people use things that they can use to easily write papers (and maybe collaborate). The tools that do that now are not meant for public sharing, but if that was built into these tools anyway, people would use it. It has to be useful to what they *want*, which is presumably to write papers efficiently. So citing was what I was trying to emphasize. Bookmarking seems to work pretty well with many tools. - Eva
Great post. I agree completely with the concept that the new tools need to be even easier to use than the old ones. Even though I am relatively computer-savvy (compared to my peers) and have an interest in web-based scientific tools with social aspects, several times minor inconveniences in a new software package has caused me to leave something behind that otherwise shows promise. - Jason Winget
More specific to this post, of the new wave of citation managers I prefer Zotero. It integrates best with my browsing habits, and does a better job than Connotea or CiteULike of properly parsing references. The two things I wish it had were: on-the-fly updating of a locally stored Bibtex database (I have to export it every time now) and a community feature, as mentioned here. - Jason Winget
@Jason The Zotero guys have talked about more Zotero server based features for version 2.0 (like sharing, groups etc.), but I don't know what the timeline is. - Richard Akerman
Friendfeed is so weird. More people like *this* than when it showed up in my own feed. - Eva
Network effect. Sometimes 2-3 people see it at a time and it gets shuffled up. if it gets buried, it gets buried forever - Deepak
Jason, Richard; Zotero is developing nicely. The latest release includes sync to a central server and back out to browsers on different machines. I'm sure other features based around this sharing are not far away. I'll be tempted back from CiteULike if the improvements continue. - Neil Saunders
@Meryn - I know, but a lot of people who liked this are actually subscribed to me! - Eva
Eva, this is a great post. I really like the notion of "online storage first, social benefits second". My main reason for moving bookmarks, references, photos, documents etc. to online services was the first reason: everything is in "one place" (the web), no more worries about self-hosting, backup, synchronising between machines, what to do when changing jobs etc. Maybe this aspect is the way to sell it to the sceptical. - Neil Saunders
Facebook has done some negative things to retard its usefulness as a business utility. I chalk those up to being a young company run by young people who haven't had to work in huge enterprises very much. It'll be interesting to see how Facebook grows up as it gets more adult supervision. - Robert Scoble
I personally don't see what Facebook could add to what's there - and what's possible - on the open web. I think no one really likes there platform. Apple, on the other hand, provides with his iPhone platform a much better mobile experience than anything which can be build with (current) open technologies. I think that's the difference, and not so much the market/platform distinction Haque talks about. - Meryn Stol
Facebook is like my memory. I can't remember everyone I meet, but I can find them on Facebook and then look back at their details as necessary. What else could Facebook do? I love how HBS is always trying to monetize things reactively. - Ben Turner
Thoughtful discussion on scientific collaboration markets from David Ritter, CTO at InnoCentive. - Michael Nielsen
Did I read it correctly? The incentive to collaborate requires three things (cash, recognition, altruistic value) in order to be highly successful? I would think that recognition alone would be sufficient, provided that it could be cited in job or even tenure review. But what is the recognition measure? Number of posts? Questions answered? - Todd Harris
Todd, yes, I agree, recognition alone is sufficient, in some contexts. What I found particularly interesting about the post was the emphasis on transactions. Not that I'm sure I agree - I need to think more about it. - Michael Nielsen
I think one fundamental premise is wrong. You cannot "trade" anything with 0-marginal cost of reproduction. You can never make a "transaction" around an idea. I will keep the idea, even if I share it with you. However, you can trade time. If you spend time on my problem, then I will spend time on yours. And you can improve the trading of time by facilitating the currency helping one another eg. "reputation". I'll try to blog a reply to Michaels post that is referenced. - Anders Norgaard
Anders - you seem to be arguing with a straw man. Nowhere is anything like the "fundamental premise" you state ever used. Did you read the post in question? - Michael Nielsen
At the micro-level, recognition is sufficient, but only because it drives some other incentive at a macro level, which is pretty much what you folks are saying. I am actually not a believer in the transactional model at all. For example you might contribute to a piece of open source software because you ran into a small bug, but you need to fix that for your own needs. - Deepak
Sorry. Maybe I am arguing with a straw man. The quote that I found sounded wrong was this "Although Ricardo’s work was in economics, his analysis works equally well for trade in ideas. [...] Unfortunately, science currently lacks the trust infrastructure and incentives necessary for such free, unrestricted trade of questions and ideas." http://michaelnielsen.org/blog... - Anders Norgaard
Anders - read the whole section. The scarce resource here is expert attention, and that's what the market is in. "Trade in ideas" is just a useful shorthand, and I'm not suggesting that scientists have a per-use charge on their ideas, like the record companies selling music. Quite the opposite. - Michael Nielsen
"Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian. People in societies of all types weave narratives, from oral storytellers in hunter-gatherer tribes to the millions of writers churning out books, television shows and movies. And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past." - Cee Bee via Bookmarklet
If you'd like to read more about storytelling in a business context, try books by Annette Simmons or Stephen Denning. - Meryn Stol
"While the HBS bloggers have gotten a few pats on the back from their colleagues, other professors haven't been quick to join them. No one's sure exactly why. Among the theories are that the holdouts fear embarrassing themselves writing off the cuff, or worry that spouting off in the blogosphere will distract them from long-form research." - Hutch Carpenter via Bookmarklet
I know why they aren't blogging -- I have direct experience with this. Harvard profs feel they have enough ways to get published. They aren't interested in another. I think they're wrong, and they don't understand blogging, but that's what I kept hearing from them when I was at Harvard, and thought it would be great to get the profs blogging. - Dave Winer
"worry that spouting off in the blogosphere will distract them from long-form research" -- a legitimate worry. Most bloggers have no idea what the expression "long-form research" means, but they are considerably dependent on that research as a source for their opinionating. - Sean McBride
Sean - 24/7 of having your mind occupied by long form research? Really? You think people can't come up for air? - Hutch Carpenter
Hutch -- it's an individual thing, obviously -- perhaps some big-league minds can handle the distraction of blogging and social media. Can you think of any major scientists, historians, etc. who are also blogging? Major = winners of major academic awards for their work. I can't off the top of my head. - Sean McBride
Note: I admire quite a few bloggers and celebrate the advent of blogging. But one shouldn't confuse a blog post with a new book by, say, Jared Diamond or Steven Pinker. - Sean McBride
I'm not really a follower of well-known scientists nor historians, but if well-known writers can do it, why wouldn't the others? - Marcos Marado via fftogo
Sean, both Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker became famous before the era of blogging. Most of people you perhaps have in mind when saying famous researchers represent the old school, i.e. writing/researching on paper with subsequent min. usage of computer. For most of those famous people computer is means to put their writing from paper or conduct an analysis. Because their character and fame didnt come based on blogging doesnt mean they will never adopt blogging as additional means to spread their work. - Hayk Hakobyan
Talking with Paula (paulasimoes here on friendfeed, History researcher) there sea quite a few historian blogs, podcasts and even at least one social network (for African Historians). So, they do that but of course there are fewer early adopters among Historians than among technologists... - Marcos Marado via fftogo
There are heaps of examples of major scientists with blogs. Terry Tao, perhaps the world's best living mathematician, has an astonishing blog. Two other Fields medallists (the Nobel of math) also blog, Tim Gowers and Alain Connes. Since the Fields is only awarded every four years, that means a large fraction of the living Fields Medallists blog! Economics Nobelist Gary Becker blogs. There are loads of other science bloggers at nearly the same level. - Michael Nielsen
Agree, but 2nd law of thermodynamics claims that the entropy in a closed system will grow over time (if the system isn't in equilibrium), and entropy is also being described as potential information. Maybe the potential information will grow, but the actual information won't? - Amund Tveit
The North Koreans must be hallucinating their asses off! - Ňicķ
To me it seems that if you have a closed system, then the information will criss-cross each other may times, and u will get a lot of noise, but also some modified better information(call it remixing the information) .I love to see these type of philosophical questions. Paul, do keep on pouring this type of philosophical one-liners. - Varun Mahajan
This was especially true in college when we would go out to the cow pastures and collect "magic" mushrooms, and then dry them under heat lamps in our dorm rooms - Kip
can't recall the source, but in college i read a book on systems theory that stated complex systems 'do what ever is needed' to maintain equilibrium. and that real change comes from outside the system. - MikeAmundsen
@Mike which is why a World Government would be a bad thing - Rudolf Olah
Most of the evangelical christians I know affirm this. - Tim Wright
“My high school freshmen English teacher had us write a letter to ourselves, and he would mail it ten years later. That was ten years ago. Can't wait to read what I wrote. He was my favorite teacher.”
I was in 1st grade during the Bicentennial in 1976 and we made a time capsule. We opened it when we all graduated from high school, added more to it and sealed it up again, to be opened by our kids/grandkids in 2076. - Trish R
We're doing something kind of like it. We're writing letters to be be read again at the end of the year in English this year. Not quite as exciting. - Jake (aka Jawee) via twhirl
@Anna, did you get to achieve any of your childhood dreams, overcome your greatest fear? - Hao Chen
@possible248 I like the way you think. :) - Hao Chen
@Hao--I'm doing both those things right now...it's an interesting time! :O & :D - Anna Haro
This is why I keep a hand-written journal. :-) And I actually do go back and re-read them. Used to be every year, but now it's more novel-length. - Lisa L. Seifert
wonderful idea! Do you think you will have the same email in ten years ? Then it would be a lot easier! - JegerPhil - Phil
we're doing something like that here on FF, and with our blogs (if you have one)... the main reason i blog is to see how my own thinking evolves over time. sounds like a really cool English teacher, btw! - .LAGizmoto
I found a letter I wrote to my parents in the early 70's. I have not read it yet. - Russellreno
jeez... i think I'd be a little afraid to read it - Nathan Rein
I've looked up old Usenet posts that I wrote in the early 1980s. In fact, I'll be using one in a presentation that I'll be giving later this week. While the presentation focuses on law enforcement use of the Internet and other technologies, I threw a few general slides in there. The first shows the header for a Usenet post I wrote in 1982 about the then-new "Call of the West" album. The second shows the current Wall of Voodoo MySpace page. Just goes to show there is nothing new under the sun. - Ontario Emperor
in 1982 i was posting on local BBS's with a Vic-20 - Nathan Rein
If you're in an area where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, so to speak, maybe there's an issue, but even then some repetition is necessary, so scooping is just an imaginary problem which affects the uncreative - Mr. Gunn
I know that this will probably not be popular, but I have to disagree. In my experience, the most crucial part is to be creative and get the good idea. If you share those ideas too early, you run the risk that someone uncreative takes your idea, finishes the work faster than you, and takes the glory. In which case it is precisely you, the creative scientist, who has been affected. And by the time you don't get your next grant, the problem is by no means "imaginary" any longer - but your lab might be. - Lars Juhl Jensen
Lars, I don't disagree with that. Especially if you have collected the data for a specific purpose, e.g. you only publish your raw data for a protein structure after you solve it, and perhaps identify a mechanism of action. My problem is with the paranoid fear around "my data" which seems to be a direct result of the publish or perish model - Deepak
and you must be reasonable. You can't keep working on a mechanism of action for 3 years and hold on to the coordinates :) - Deepak
Deepak, we completely agree that there is no excuse for not making data available after publication. But I don't really see that as having to do with being scooped - if you wait until after publication then scooping is obviously not a risk. Am I missing the point here? - Lars Juhl Jensen
Lars, I see two situations. One, where you collect data for the sake of collecting data (a big genome or something). There, you MUST make it available immediately. There's enough in there for many people - Deepak
"You can't keep working on a mechanism of action for 3 years and hold on to the coordinates" actually you can thats what "Deep throat" and all the M15 (5 horsemen) did.. they scooped every darn bit of data and retained the same coord's for over 25yrs ! - Peter Dawson
In the other situation too, in an ideal world, I would consider releasing the data. The only reason we hold on to it today is that we have a "first past the post" publishing model, so my previous statement fell into the trap I advocate against. We are trying to fit into an existing system, rather than changing the system. For the case you describe, how long do you hold on to the data. Until you submit? Until it gets published? 6 months? - Deepak
The attitude I've seen from some scientists towards "scooping" borders on obsession. And that's the part that really makes me worry, cause it's all about the publication or finishing a thesis and not about good science anymore - Deepak
Peter, you can do it. It's just not the right thing to do - Deepak
I fully agree that the problem is that science is so focused on publishing today. If it was not a matter being "first past the post" then there would indeed be no reason to hold onto data. I always try to make data available as soon as the paper is published - but there has been cases where collaborators did not agree to that. - Lars Juhl Jensen
Lars, in that case, we have little to disagree on :) - Deepak
I also agree that if the primary purpose of a project is to produce data, then the data should be made available as early as possible. - Lars Juhl Jensen
I still maintain that scooping is very real, though ;-) (But I hate it too!) - Lars Juhl Jensen
Another case for using CC licensing on some datasets. Protection against slimy #$(#*&(@#*$&@!)# - Deepak
I've recently spoke to a person from structural genomics center, who opened my eyes on the fact how many enemies you can gain after publishing a paper from "somebody's else" data even if release (for example coordinates) was couple of years ago. Such people call it scooping and will make sure everybody in the community know how bad person you are (aka bottomfeeder). It's all crazy - Nobel prize washes brains of otherwise smart people... - Pawel Szczesny
Well, Pawel, that's exactly why this fetish about scooping is so stupid. Everyone here reading this is not only more creative, but more technically skilled, which is why I think most people here have little fear of someone taking their idea and doing more with it than they could. - Mr. Gunn
Actually, the use of CC licenses on datasets is a bit problematic. The problem is that CC licenses are based on copyright law and as such they legally only cover "creative works". It is clear that a scientific paper counts as such, it is equally clear that facts of nature are not covered by copyright, but as far as I know it is unclear if data sets qualify as "creative works". - Lars Juhl Jensen
Pawel, I also cannot comprehend how someone can find it unfair that you use a data set that they themselves released. Thankfully, I have not run into such individuals in the microarray / protein interactions field - otherwise I would have a lot of enemies by now ;-) - Lars Juhl Jensen
AFAIK sequencing community has unformal agreement that people hold off others data for six months (NIH funded projects cannot put sequences "on hold" at NCBI). There's nothing like that among crystallographers. And that's the only reason my idea for bug tracking service for scientific data was put on hold - I've been warned that I shouldn't do it as long as I have academic affiliation (or success rate of my colleagues grant applications is going to decline). Strange, isn't it? But true. - Pawel Szczesny
Lars ... good point, and actually part of the reason for the "open data" premise. We just need to figure out an appropriate attribution mechanism - Deepak
I thought crysallographers also had informal "not until published" agreements in place? - Deepak
Deepak, I think it's rather "not until I squeeze every possible bit out of the coordinates" and possibly originates since DNA story (no other field has so strong sense of ownership). Anyway, I've just mentioned that as an example what "scooping" means to different people. My guess is that all kinds of different attitudes towards data ownership could be easily addressed by removing manual labor from the data generation pipeline. I dream about virtualized and automated laboratories... - Pawel Szczesny
The "to be published" remark in released coordinates is extremly abused rendering an "not until published" agreement in my opinion useless. - marcin
Pawel, that would be one aspect. The crux of the matter, though, from where I sit, seems to be in the system. Take away the publication pressure and my most hated word loses all meaning. - Deepak
I sincerely hope what Neil says can become reality one day. Its a rat race, esp. in biology research and I cannot understand why 2 people cannot come up with the same idea, incommunicado. That said, there is a dark underbelly to this term, exemplified by the Watson & Crick saga. Publication pressure and massive egos don t help science either. - Aarthy
Deepak, you've just given ultimate solution, mine was a partial one :) - Pawel Szczesny
we had a discussion about this with respect to release of DNA sequences as well this morning and the suggestion was even there, which is often given as the example of good practice, these social norms are abused. I'd be interested in Matt Wood's take on that. - Cameron Neylon
The question is. Do we prepare for the 5% of negative cases that will arise in whatever model you choose, or focus on the 95% of honest scientists? - Deepak
I once talked to a lady from sequencing lab in US. Jumping on her data before this unformal 6 months time span happened few times, but I was told overall they do not worry much (and they write publications as fast as possible). She was more concerned about her employees missing opportunity for a good paper than about somebody making huge discovery they would miss. - Pawel Szczesny
Scooping is just a consequence of the normal step-wise progress in science and the saturation of certain fields of research. To say that it doesn't exist is either because you are lucky to work on an open field or have your head buried in the sand. It happens, too often for comfort. Also, to say that only the uncreative worry with scooping is unfair, to say the least. In wet labs, the main limiting factor is often the experimental system (project turnover of 2-3 years), not the researcher's creativity. - Ricardo Almeida
A report with far reaching consequences and a clear eye into the future. Thanks!! - Aarthy
This is something that should be posted every two weeks. We tend to focus on things that make us more efficient in the current system, instead of questioning its foundation (publication pressure) and seeking long term solutions. - Pawel Szczesny
One person is not as smart or smarter than all of us. The western ideal of the lone genius (be that one person or one organization) is nothing more than a romantic notion one that works to support non-disclosure. Your suggestion has merit in that data disclosure would potentially encourage deeper peer review, more comprehensive analysis and richer understanding. Kudos on presenting a compelling and cogent argument. The future is not proprietary. - Dave Martin
Science is, as such, generally not proprietary, at least not the life sciences. However, we do have a tendency to be protectionist about our data and as many remind me, it's not always because of choice, but because people need to work within the confines of a publish or perish academic research system. There's enough people who want things to be different, many active in academic science (unlike me). It's easy for me to write down something. The change will have to come from within, and it will - Deepak
One problem is that in academia, we train young scientists to believe that they own the data that they generate. This explains, amongst other things, resistance to open notebooks. The notion of "my personal notebook" is deeply entrenched. We need a mental shift away from "I generated this and it's mine" to "I uncovered what was there already and now it's everyone's". - Neil Saunders
I suppose we need a balance between the two. We need the humility to realize that what we are doing is a lot bigger than any individual, and the pride in our work to have a sense of ownership and desire to make it as good as it can be. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost some of those values - Deepak
That's the same Bill Joy that proposed a moratorium on Molecular Biology and Nanotechnology studies because they would end up creating tiny replicating machine-virus? - PauloNuin
Yep, same fellow. I believe I once called him a luddite. That said, he has his moments. Also founded Sun along the way - Deepak
I remember a lunatic, who was at the same time a professor at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Sao Paulo, almost got into a fight with some biologists based on Joy's article. - PauloNuin
re Neil Saunders - sure it's everyones, just after the publication gets accepted :) - Rajarshi Guha
I wouldn't spend too much time making appeals to lofty high ideals, it boils down to the incentive system. The instant NIH grant admins take into consideration the number of data sources you've made publicly available when making awards, pretty much overnight every bit of data academics can find will be made available. Write your congressmen, get the NIH to require it. - Daniel Kluesing
My argument is that the grant system is part of the problem and needs change. That kind of approach (looking at number of sources) is completely bogus. - Deepak
Using Wikia Evolution, you can add and rate URLs directly from Google or Yahoo, and those contributions will be immediately incorporated into Wikia Search. - Atul Arora via Bookmarklet
"Many Startup enterprises are trying to sell solutions for problems created by other startups’ products. And in the line, there’s the next startup waiting to tackle the problems this new solutions generate." Definitely yes. - nik
social media / real life ... it is all just the mind in action ... there is no system external to the mind's awareness of it, technology is just (very roughly) providing stepping stones outside for what the mind is already doing inside ... - Gregory Lent
Gregory, exactly! What I want to show with this distinction is that there are a) problems that are self-referentially social media generated and b) problems that arise outside of social media. I just hope that the next Twitter or FF mashup aims at problems of type b). That would be a nice starting point to cross the chasm to a more mainstream user base. - Benedikt Koehler
I disagree, of course, but I always like your thought-provoking posts. - Louis Gray
This phenomena has indeed taken place over and over. What startups do can rightly be called creating blue oceans - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... - and then hope that it would appeal to masses. But it doesnt necessarily because A-bloggers and tech-savvy adopters are not that many and final destination must be masses. Google, Facebook, all big names appealed and met a main need which was intrinsically there. "Branched-off" needs is what most of these startups try to address... - Hayk Hakobyan
Louis, explain why you disagree then, helps the discussion going. - Alexander van Elsas
The Silicon Valley mantra is that 9 of 10 startups will fail. It's an accepted way of life. It's also part of what happens when you take risks. When you take great risk, you can get great reward. The process of reaching out to early adopters is essential for technology products especially, who can help be your extended QA team, extended Marketing team, etc. before taking it to those who need customer references. - Louis Gray
Aha, but there we do not disagree at al Louis. 9-10 might fail, and early adopters are key. The point I'm making is that if your ultimate goal is to go mainstream you should be very careful about who your early adopters really are. If your early adopters are all in Silicon valley, then you are likely pushing a tech solution, which is fine, but doesn't solve a mainstream user need. - Alexander van Elsas
If your strategy is to be mainstream then you should get early adopters that aren't just tech focused. And you will find those likely outside of the vacuum I mentioned. It's harder initially but it will pay off. We tend to think that there is just one breed of early adopters. That's not right. There are many. Robert S is a tech evangelist, the best early adopter you may find in this part of the world. In contrast, there are many early adopters that aren't tech focused but user focused. Big difference. - Alexander van Elsas
Am I way out in left field in thinking this angst-ridden zeitgeist is similar to the roll-up of the dot.com era? Developers late to the potluck of VC were bringing fancy containers with mediocre content, trying to fit in some hype-defined niche while the money was still flowing. That seems to be part of it. The rest seems to be a saturation level or even boredom when everything starts looking/functioning the same as everything else. - Chris Kim A
@Chris not sure. I think this is simply an easy route to follow. There is this whole tech PR machine/infrastructure sitting here waiting for you to kick start it. It is an easy win, but once you are sucked in, its even harder to get out. I'd be careful to rely just on this circus here. You need to pick your early adopter group with care. - Alexander van Elsas
why do you think Apple skips the tech early adopter crowd and spends so much time coddling Mossberg, Pogue, Levy and Wildstrom? Although these journalists personally lean tech early adopter, their audiences largely do not. - Jon Price
I commented in another thread: @Paul Buchheit there are always good examples of companies that succeeded that way. There are way more companies that make it on their own without this tech community. One needs to choose carefully imo. FF seems to have take the "Scoble" route it seems. Which can be fine and a very smart thing to do. But that doesn't mean it's always the best path. There are many alternative paths which can be very successful too. Just think about Easyjet, Gary Vaynerchuk Wine TV? Google Ads? - Alexander van Elsas
