You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
1. The idea of celebrity is changing.
Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers, the guy brilliant looks at trends and extracts the deeper implications. I've read his books and now read his blog. The other day I decided to just drop him an email and tell him how much I enjoyed his writing. Five minutes later I got an email back telling me I had made his day.
He's in it for the same thing I am: attention. His blog is not a moneymaking venture (to my knowledge), its a place for him to reflect and think out loud. Just like this one.
Seth Goldstein explains the online road to celebrity like this:
With each search, with each subscription, our narratives expand to tell the story of which team we follow, where we will be taking our next vacation, which conference we are planning to attend. The gestures of our lives are recorded, and we become represented – on “Top 100� lists, blogrolls and Flickr badges of different sizes. And the narratives of our electronic Attention gestures have even crossed back into offline mass media: on CNN’s headline news or American Idol’s SMS voting. We may not be followed by paparazzi, but airtime on national television is a start.
2. Everything is flattening; we're entering the free agent age.
That comes from chartreuse (BETA). If you don't read him, get on it. He understands what's going on without all the hype normally associated with blogging, videos, web 2.0, blah, blah, blah. The way he sees it, "We are all eventually going to free agents and it’s important you have people who around you who realizes that and know how to exploit it to your benefit."
I hung out with chartreuse and Loren the other night, we chatted for a really long time about what's going on in this crazy online world. The two of them are working on a new kind of talent agency.
3. PageRank is the new hot.
Speaking of Steven Johnson, in lieu of flowers and food baskets, he's asking for links to a post about his new son Dean. As he puts it, "I'm titling this post "Dean" for Google's sake. I think it would be most excellent if everyone would link to this page, and drive this post up Google's results for the word "Dean." I think it would help him get a head start in the world to have a lot of pagerank right out of the gate." PageRank is an indicator of future success.
4. It's all about the people.
Over this week I met a ton of different people who up to this point I only knew online. I mentioned Chartreuse and Loren, plus the first likemind.ny went off like a rocket. About 15 people showed up and every single one of them was interesting. It was great to talk to everyone and I expect some big things will come out of it. If you missed this one, we'll be doing the next one soon, I'll make sure to announce it here, but if you head over to likemind you can sign up to stay informed.
More than anything else, though, this week reminded me that there are some unbelievable people behind all these sites I love. Getting to know them is amazing. When you meet a blogger for the first time it's like you get to skip all the garbage. You know what they've been paying attention to for the last six months, giving you common points of interest. Blogs are almost like people filters, helping you figure out who you are connected to an who you're not.