It's interesting how when you focus on something you start running into it everywhere. It's an example of the Law of Attraction I suppose. Or synchronicity. I was perusing Seth Godin's book on Small is the New Big and he has a riff on the Digital Divide.
Relevant excerpts:
I think a new divide has opened up, one that is based far more on choice than on circumstance. Several million people (and the number is growing, daily) have chosen to become the haves of the Internet, and at the same time that their number is growing, so are their skills...
Does it surprise you that more than half of the hundreds of thousands of Boing Boing readers use Firefox? That's about five times the number you'd expect. It turns out that a lot of these tech-friendly behaviors come in bunches. Someone who has a few of these behaviors is likely to have most of them. (and no, this is by no means a complete list. I'm sure the blog community will find twenty others and post them in a day or two!)
So what? Why should you care if a bunch of nerds are learning a lot of cool new stuff?
Well, five years ago, geeks pretty much kept to themselves. They'd be sitting in IRC chat, or arguing about Unix vs. Linux, but it didn't spread very fast and it didn't influence the rest of the world outside the tech community.
Today, though, the Net is far more robust and far more ubiquitous than it used to be. And it's bloggers who are setting the agenda on everything from politics to culture. It's bloggers that journalists and politicians look to as the first and the loudest.
I would add that it's not just bloggers. In a knowledge economy the people who ask and answer questions on LinkedIn, the individuals who participate in groups on Facebook, those that voice their ideas, participate in communities of interest, who build a web presence, are who will rise above the rest. How do you stand out in Monster.com when there are a zillion gazillion resumes that all look the same? How do you let people know of your deep expertise?
As the man said, "80 percent of life is showing up."
Let's make a deal here and start showing up.
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