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Kevin Kellys New Old Book

Kevin Kelly is republishing New Rules for the New Economy – Radical Strategies for a Connected World  as a blog to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the book-publication.

Reading it in 1999 was fun – there were many strategic books around, dealing with business, content, businesses. Most of them were already old when you had time to read them. And the message they delivered to beginners, scepticists or your bosses at that time was – if they liked it or not -: This internet-insanity will be over soon; it’s not going to work and it’s not worth bothering about it.

In 2000 I left the printmedia-publishing house I worked for then and joined the online business. My first job was doing contentmanagement for a big portal targeting german speaking europe (as a first step; multiple languages were von the roadmap) with every kind of content you can imagine, a big shopping mall and a big community in chats and discussion boards. That strategy survived three months…

We built the portal anyway and learned a lot about new rules, new economy and radical strategies…

Blackberry addicted? Or just curious for life?

I heard two colleagues talk about blackberries on Friday; they talked about addiction, changes they bring into our lives and the stress you have checking for mail even in the evening or on weekend.

I think this is not something imposed on us by Blackberry or other mobile email technologies, this is an expression of how we look at life: Are there a lot of dangerous, bothersome, annoying things out there? Are we afraid of what is waiting for us?

Or are we curious for life, are we looking foreward to the things to come? A lot of my life is happening digitally that’s the way to stay in touch, to share something. And looking at work: I want to get things done, getting information earlier leaves me more time to handle things. So I want to get information…

I can’t know everything, I can’t care for everything and I can’t do everything at a time. But it makes me more comfortable to know that I should do something – even if I can’t or don’t want to do it right now. True relaxation is not excluding information, it’s ignoring it…

And efficiency, as we shold know, is not doing as many things as possible, but doing the right things at the right time (this is, once again, why we need information…).

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Applied blogging – why the hell should we blog pt 2

Image via Wikipedia

I talked to a friend yesterday about presenting and spreading new ideas among and audience that is interested, but not yet really ready for it. They are not into the topic , they want something new but they are rather sceptic.

“You should not think about something new, something original”, said my friend. “That challenges people too much – and it’s too much work to shape your idea in a clean and neat way, make it bulletproof and let others try do destroy it.” Is that just lazyness and too much recycling? On the other hand: if your idea is good enough to be made bulletproof, if you spend all that work and time on it – then you should try to sell it.

“I think it is way smarter”, said my friend, “to summarize and comment what others did. There are so many ideas around, famous ideas, and professional thinkers – there is enough to build on. And most people did not get it anyway, the more you repeat it and the more examples and relations you build – the higher the chance that they get excited about what you are telling.”

I think that 98 % of blogs do the same. They tell about what others told, they summarize, they report. So here’s another reason for blogging: It’s a legitimate way to recycle the work of others, to use external knowledge to build your own authority. I think you can go even further: Because blogs usually report things that have been there before, they are a good means to also push new ideas: They are written, they are published, they are usually part of an already ongoing discussion – so the ideas should have some authority…

Is it again vanity? I call it strategy… Know the patterns that rule the world and deal with them.