I read an interview with a hot shot venture capitalist back at the very climax of the dot com rollercoaster. The interviewer was skeptical of the amount of investment that the firm had placed in dot com companies. When the VC was asked directly about the Internet and its future he said the words “the Internet is still under-hyped”. While I’m sure his company lost a metric crap load of money in the dot com bubble burst – he was right.
A personal example: A few weeks ago I wrote a piece of advice for valedictorian speeches. This was my seventeenth post on this site. Google picked up the article and for reasons unbeknownst to me the post became the number two search result for valedictorian speeches. Since May 23, 2003 over four thousand valedictorians (or people pretending to be) have accessed the post.
Please indulge me as I do a little math. I assume that I went to an average size high school. My graduating class was approximately one hundred and fifty people. So if these are all valedictorians from average sized schools I have directly given advice to four thousand people who have in turn given advice to over half a million students.
4000 X 150 = 600,000
If you add in all of the non-students attending the graduation exercises it becomes almost ridiculous.
Sure not all of the visiting valedictorians necessarily took my advice, but most probably read it. This blows my mind. I initially had hoped to help the few people that were already going to this post from Google. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine thousands of class elected valedictorians reading my words for advice.
I can hardly grasp what this means in the grand scheme of things (politically, socially, etc). The shift in the power of information is overwhelming to me. All I know is that one hour of my writing ended up affecting in some way the words heard by hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps millions by the time June is over.
Comments
Will - June 17, 2003 12:13 pm
Dan James for President of the Internet.
Alan - June 17, 2003 1:20 pm
I was thinking he should start at Deputy Dog Catcher and work his way up.
John - June 17, 2003 1:55 pm
That's an amazing amount of influence, Dan. One question is how will this change if Google, as is rumored, makes a separate search page with blog results, thereby filtering them out of main page results?
Have you had any valedictorians email you with speeches influenced by your advice?
Dan James - June 17, 2003 3:14 pm
John - I've received about a dozen speeches for critique. Some have been excellent and took my advice in differing doses. Others were a little less inspiring. I'm not sure how the google rumours will affect this (to be honest I've heard that google is NOT going to be seperating blogs). Tangent: It really wouldn't be fair to the general searching public if the best content for a subject was located on a blog but didn't come up during the main search.
John - June 17, 2003 5:05 pm
You're right, that wouldn't be fair. To veer off from that, the thing is that the "best content" is pretty subjective. Google was right on by putting your post high in the results, but is it always that accurate? Here's a personal example. My blog is on the first page under the search results for "stealing hearts at a traveling show" (the new U2 book by their graphic designers). It's listed higher than the post on U2log.com where I found out about the book and higher than the official website for the book. Now, the post on my blog will get you to both of those other sites, but shouldn't Google have listed them first?
Alan - June 17, 2003 5:47 pm
The debloggification is silly when you realize much of the best content is not on sites which are "official journalism" versus "unofficial opinion". Resembles the 1997 offical v. unofficial website stuff when McPigs was surprised to learn that some folks thought that they suck.
Kevin O'Brien - June 19, 2003 3:22 pm
The GobSmack! in that tidbit to me is the fact that after thousands of years of speculation (Plato and his cohort spent some considerable time examining the head of this pin) is that we've actually created a sub-sub-sub-society which is a perfect meritocracy. The impact of your words are directly proportional to the potentcy of the idea and the dexterity with which you use the instrument.
Well, actually it's not perfect... there are those who can't afford a computer... and then there are those who have not developed skill with language who are smarter than many who have... and then there are the bullshitters who can make chicken soup sound like a banquet... Anyway, I guess it has a hint of meritocracy -- or it might just be that the world is way more gullible than even I had predicted and in which case I have no point at all... I doubt if I'll push "post"..woops...........
Alan - June 19, 2003 3:58 pm
Bring back the Kev Train!