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.