Online Sales Success

What’s Your Brand Mantra?: Business-Free Zone.

Since I started blogging, I’m starting to feel like a neuron in a vast brain; my thought processes are improving and speeding up with every new connection that’s formed. Yet I just started my weblog a month ago; where will I be in one year from now? Ten years from now?

(I am having the same reaction. I just started blogging Jan 2005 and am amazed at the interconnectedness it fosters)

And just where is this whole blog thing going, anyway? No ideas are truly new; they evolve from prior knowledge. Centuries ago, it took years for an idea to be disseminated throughout society and find a mind who had the capacity to adapt it, refute it or build upon it.

More recently, ideas are transmitted through mass media: books, TV, magazines. They are spread like seeds into the soil of society; however, only a few minds are capable of both evolving the idea and having the connections to mass-publish the updated version, often months or years later. The advent of the Internet helped speed up the process, but not by much. It’s primarily used as a glorified library, and if users don’t stumble across the data needed to validate or evolve their idea– or attract the right visitors to their websites — the ideas can often stagnate.

Now enter the blogosphere, where ideas are born, nurtured, transmitted and evolved — all in a single day. Ideas have a life of their own; good ones seem to create their own connections. I may have a seed of an idea; you recognize it and spread it; someone on the other side of the world has complementary knowledge to expand and evolve it. In brain terminology, neurons that fire together, wire together. The same principle applies to the blogsphere: bloggers who think together, link together. And so the connections form, faster and faster. More pathways for an idea to spread, evolve, mature. This, I suppose, could be called hyper-meme theory: self-propagating ideas combined with exponential pathways that enable rapid evolution (see Thought Contagion for more on memes; it’s a fascinating subject).

And blogging is still in the early adopter phase. Where is it leading us? Could it be a factor that brings us closer, quicker, to the Singularity? (the Singularity is a future time when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we cannot imagine what will happen from our present perspective.) At first I was doubtful; I didn’t know that much about the Singularity, but based on my own personal experience it seemed plausible. I can see a time when a much higher percentage of the population is plugged in to the blogosphere: more neurons, more connections for this growing electronic brain, and an exponentially faster evolution of ideas.

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