2007 April 13

You are not funny and are deflating the blogosphere’s value

UPDATE: Jon Gordon from ~~Minnesota Public Radio’s~~ American Public Media’s FutureTense has audio interviews with both Ed Kohler and Robert Scoble.

UPDATE2: On April 16th, Jon Gordon delivers a FutureTense with snippets from the interviews above as well as one with me done a couple of days prior.

As a fellow Minnesota blogger and technoweenie, the Technology Evangelist guys are in my news aggregator. Reading Ed Kohler’s post this morning, “Technology Evangelist Podcast to Replace Imus” I thought, “Nah” but then thought “Hmmm….maybe CBS is that desperate to get user generated content creators into the fold” but still didn’t buy it. Turns out, of course, it wasn’t true.

Here’s the deal: To all bloggers attempting to be taken seriously…stop trying to be funny….’cause you’re not! The whole April Fool’s joke thing isn’t working anymore since 99% of them aren’t funny anyway. The other issue? If you’re going to do an April Fool’s joke, do it on April Fool’s day and NOT the day before or after….or any other day for that matter.

The key to humor is timing. Respected people like Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble broke the unspoken timing rule this year by delivering their ~~incredibly side-splittingly funny~~ attempted humor early and it backfired (not hugely…but my trust in them has gone down a notch). They weren’t the only ones (just the most visible that I read) and it bugged me so I wrote “Why there are no technoweenie, geek or propellerhead comedians“. It’s not that I don’t have a sense of humor but I use it elsewhere instead of on my blog where I’m trying to have the value I’m delivering taken seriously.

Kohler has posted his act of contrition. But how will I know what to believe in the future when I read him? Do I wait to see if he was just kidding or maybe just stop reading him?

As I’ve studied the shifts occurring due to our increasingly connected world, I’m primarily focused on disruption, removal of inefficiencies and, most importantly, on new ways to create and innovate.

Of the 90 or so thought leaders whom I read daily in my news aggregator, one such group of thinkers is at Futuretext led by founder, Ajit Joakar. On April 5th, they’d pointed to a McKinsey and Co. brief report online entitled, “How
Businesses are Using Web 2.0. A Global Survey” and I flagged the article…which I just got to reading this morning. I’d heartily recommend you register and read it (free reg) or subscribe to the entire McKinsey Quarterly site ($150 per year).

But in my typical parallel thinking and associative neural pathway adventures (i.e., Attention Deficit (ADD)), I saw a link to, “Creation nets: Getting the most from open innovation“. Reading it I had an “Aha!…I’ve read this before” moment and it led me to this post from May of last year by John Hagel on Edge Perspectives…one of the thought leaders I follow.

In that post is a link to a working paper (PDF) entitled “Creation Nets”. Penned by John Hagel and John Seely Brown, it will give you a solid understanding of the same themes running through Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and one of my favorites A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. Though the term “creation nets” hasn’t really become the meme that people point to, I love it. Why? Because creativity most often comes from careful analysis coupled with flashes of brilliance, the taking of risks, or having something completely unexpected or accidental inform or guide the outcome.

From the post by Hagel: Thereâ€™s a lot of talk about product innovation and there is some attention to process innovation and business model innovation. But most executives do not fully understand the institutional innovation that explains the emergence and growth of creation nets. We hope that our article will make a contribution to building that understanding. As usual, we have developed a more detailed working paper (PDF) that amplifies the themes introduced in the article.

What are the implications of this for you and why should you care?

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