welebrities and oat clusters - read this -- both funny and relevant --the best use of 5 minutes likely today - Brian Sullivan

Steve with that you graduate from just friendfeed subscription to my heavily guarded RSS subscriptions, great piece and well crafted! - David Knight

I think the final question is the important one though. Why do you spend time on the web? What do you get out of it? - Steve Spalding

Excellent post Steve, left a comment and not sure what to do now - do some usual work or spend the rest of the day thinking about what really matters. The problem is I will probably follow the crowd myself :( - Svetlana Gladkova

The way I see it is that everyone is a little bit guilty, that doesn't really matter. A handful of people might start changing though if they recognize it a bit better. - Steve Spalding

I think we should do some search for a group like "consious web" or something. And if it does not exist, start it ourselves and help promote worthy online initiatives. Though I feel such projects already exist so we should better help them get more visibility. - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl

I agree, already there are projects like Kiva, Fundable, and probably about a half-dozen others. If anyone out there in FF land has a list of online initiatives that use Social Media (even loosely) I'd love to hear from you. - Steve Spalding

Maybe everyone is a little bit guilty but some people are a lot bit guilty. I keep dropping my "Being John Malkovich" joke here on friendfeed (to deafening silence) but the fact is I see so much blogging about blogging and friendfeeding about friendfeeding that it really does make me wonder if some people have any real-world perspective. - Anthony Citrano

Baseball players talk about baseball, pilots talk about the state of the airline industry, "blog people" talk about blogging. The only difference is that for the pros out there blogging/social stuff should be a means to an end not the end itself. - Steve Spalding

Late finding this one, but glad I did. - Mark Dykeman

I found the article interesting, but won't put a "like" behind it due to the ad on top- really? I'm the 1,000,000 visitor? Jumping ugly ads that no one clicks on should be banished, it makes the page lose cred. - michael sean wright

next time I go into the rotator I'll see if I can filter that one, unfortunately the control I have isn't as granular as you would think. Hitting refresh might fix the problem. Apologies. - Steve Spalding

@Nice: Unfortunately publishers rarely have control over what their visitors see from their ad networks, especially when the visitors are from some country other than US - these visitors often get the 1,000,000 visitors. And there's really almost nothing a site owner can do to improve the situation. Honestly, I don't think the ads you think should result in such hush comments, especially when you see the ads on such excellent posts. - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl

Wow, I'm glad I caught this. Major case of can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees, I think. We get so caught up in the doing, that we forget what we were doing it for. - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

Awesome, inspirational stuff. I'm guilty of a lot of the things Steve mentions, so this makes it an even more essential read for me. - Iain Baker

@Svetlana, point taken, like added. I think though we do have some control, it just takes a little more effort. My frustration was only with the "old style" advertising that some ad networks flash at readers. The article was a work of beauty and simply inspiring, which made the served ad at top stand out even more to me. I'm truly sorry to confuse the two. - michael sean wright

@Nice: True, it may be very frustrating, even more for the site owner than for the readers - especially since the owner rarely is even aware of such ads because he or she only knows what ads are served to the readers in his own country. For example, I have almost no idea what our US readers see when I'm in Russia myself. It really is a major problem with many ad networks - they accept smaller sites and allow low-quality ads to serve maximum impressions but when a website owner wants to have quality ads, he simply is not accepted to the networks working with premium advertisers. That's a difficult situation to get out of for a publisher. - Svetlana Gladkova from twhirl

Lana is right, I rarely know what others are being served. I don't want to distract from the original article but I will say That many of us closely filter the ads we see but we have little control over those we don't. - Steve Spalding

When I read this "The take away is that if everyone is raving about how something will change the world but you just don’t see how — you’re probably right." I instantly thought of Twitter. Yes, some people are leveraging their networks of 10K people on Twitter, but in the scope of people out there in cubicleland, Twitter is not something on their radar...at all. - Chris Bonney