Listening to a Gillmor Gang awhile back, Doc Searls stopped the discussion and said something to the effect of "...and we’re a bunch of geeks talking to a bunch of listeners who are geeks." He also said something about "…us doing alot of navel gazing." While I’d bet that the listeners are somewhat beyond just a geek crowd — and that the Gillmor Gang have navels worth gazing at — he nonetheless made valid points.

This next generation of the internet will only succeed if the message is carried beyond just those who are in-the-know or in-the-Valley.

There are about 100 blogs that I follow every day. Many of those are thought leaders in the tech space and many are not. There are people with valuable opinions and perspectives who happen to live, say, in Boston or Atlanta, and don’t show up on the radar screens of the cognoscenti.

I also follow techmemeorandum and Topix among others. So imagine my surprise when seemingly every blogger who was at the invite-only TechCrunch book party for Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s book "Naked Conversations" wrote about it and linked to one another. It was quite a love-fest.

One could argue that having this blog book out there is carrying the message. Valid argument…but I’ve already heard from people that I’ve
asked to follow techmemorandum questioning "What’s up with THAT?" (meaning all the navel gazing buzz around the party and all the cool things that happened there).

I was goofin’ with Photoshop over lunch today and thought it might be humorous to re-purpose something I did before, add a new photo of Robert and Shel and put together a People magazine parody. My point is that — outside of the Valley or a closely knit circle — most of humanity doesn’t have a clue and many are going about their merry way building the next Skype in some place like Estonia.

UPDATE: Hot, Naked Geek pics here.

There are SO many new offerings coming on the scene every week it seems, that it’s increasingly difficult to not only figure out what their value propositions are, but also whether or not you want to invest time, energy and effort in them.

Case in point: I received an invite to the new edgeio site. "edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the edgeio website and through an open set of web services. Our goal is to give publishers of all sizes the means to control how their content is published, discovered, and consumed. By doing so, edgeio provides everyone easy, up to date, access to content from the Internet’s edge.

Anyone with an RSS enabled website can publish content through edgeio. Using tags, publishers direct edgeio to index and organize their content. No more listing fees, complicated forms to fill in, and struggling to keep content synchronized across multiple websites. Just post it, use appropriate tags, and edgeio takes care of the rest."

There was a registration hiccup on the site this morning so I’m waiting to actually try it out, but the value proposition seems cool. Simply tag something you want to list (for sale, etc.) on your blog, and edgeio can watch for it, track it, display it, and "Voila!"…your thingamajig/doohickey is listed. Valuable? YES. Effort, energy and time investment? Yes. Will the blogosphere embrace just one new tag (Listing) if it’s incredibly useful? Probably.

Takes study to figure out the value props of all these different offerings:

• Rolling your own search also is useful (Rollyo). Lots of effort, however, to find all the sites/blogs you’d want to list in your narrowsearch engine AND figure out how to work Rollyo
• Collaborating with documents (Writely), a whiteboard (Writeboard), or a joint collaboration site that does these and other needs (Joyent).

I could go on-and-on but you get the idea: you have to figure out each value prop, learn how to use it, participate in it (registering, uploading/creating content, etc.), and either get others to join or hope others do.

Just like the first dotcom adventure where there were an enormous number of really valuable companies started doing amazing things, it was nearly impossible to keep track of all of them and even to fully figure out what they did.

I fear that Web 2.0 value propositions will never be heard in the noise of all the rest of them out there and never gain the traction they need to survive.