Event Horizon

One thing I'm learning about life in the RSS/search engine age. They say that if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? This is the Heisenberg principle writ large. (Answer is yes, it did fall, since there's other evidence that would be left behind).

These days, you can hear a pin drop in the blogosphere if that pin is unique enough. Thus, I can refer to evdb.com or to Jared Richardson, and that's enough to get attention. The two are sufficiently unique that entering the names will get the search engines to hit an RSS feed to show up on the RSS reader, and voila, attention.

Admittedly, if Brian Dear or Jared Richardson talked about in the press the way that, say, Tom Cruise or Barry Bonds is, they'd have to filter that out to get the most interesting stuff, or, perhaps much as they do, simply ignore it.

But I do think, in the meanwhile, that it's sufficiently cool that people, especially startups with techie founders, are often listening in the blogosphere for their names to be uttered. I think someone from Zimbra (who makes a kind of better Outlook) wrote a post. It hasn't exactly encouraged me to use Zimbra, but I'm fine with the shoutout.

Brian had a pretty nice post, so I'm happy with that. I'm curious who would write comments. Say, I wrote about Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. But his name is out there so much in sports, and presumably his day is sufficiently busy that he can't possibly read all that's out there. He uses RSS feeds, but he has to be a lot pickier about what he wants to look at.

(By the way, he wrote an interesting article about sports writing in newspapers where he says that newspapers can provide better sports content than the timelier websites, whose articles are merely AP retreads, and offers fans little new).

At first, I thought I would find this bizarrely creepy. I have to think about what words I write, and who might be "listening". Without good search engines, you'd never find my entry. It would be buried among a gazillion other blogs. But now that it's possible, people search for it.

I attended ETECH a few months ago whose theme was the attention economy and while its aim was to harness the attention of the average Joe, guys like you and me, these RSS feeds have a kind of reverse effect. It allows you to draw the attention of people who otherwise wouldn't pay attention to you. This isn't to say that you're likely to hold onto their attention any more than yelling out the name of a celebrity while they pass by you on a red carpet is likely to get their devoted attention, but maybe that's fine.

These days, you can be famous on the Internet for fifteen minutes, or at least as long as it takes for the person reading your blog to get bored and move on.