Joi Ito
I just came across the weblog of Joi Ito from a link on Dave's Roller Blog. It seems pretty interesting. This article about being addicted to blogging was particularly interesting, especially near the end:
So I'm supposed to be a professional IT investor. I'm also supposed to be spending my time thinking about my work, not farting around on the Net just for fun. Yossi Vardi said that instant messaging was an addictive drug and he (one of the founders of ICQ) was a drug dealer. So where is the money? Is there any money to be made in blogging? There are blogging tools like Movable Type, Radio Userland and Blogger. There are ASP's for bloggers, there is Blogdex a blog crawler/index... but are any of these things really going to make money?
The last few years of the Internet bubble were riddled with people trying to make money on stuff that should have been someone's hobby. Maybe the core of blogging is this way. Maybe I should be thinking about what social changes blogging causes and what new businesses this enables or makes obsolete?
Maybe I should be thinking about what happens when we integrate P2P, voice, video, IM, home servers and cell phones?
Maybe I shouldn't be thinking too much and should keep blogging until it "comes to me." ;-)
I love how many of us are still in the dot-com mindset when it comes to new technology. "Ooh, hey! This is cool. How can I become a millionaire developing this?" ;-) I mean, hey, this is his job... but still. It's nice to know I'm not alone.
-Russ