There has been a lot of action over at David Armano’s Logic + Emotion blog over the last couple of days. It started, for me at least, with this post on the need to put your brand’s audience at the centre of the creative experience … to focus on what will work for people, not what works for the creative and strategic teams that do the work.
Then, in a post on the Sphere of Influence, this discussion shifted to the influence that bloggers have over the audiences (especially those who are also bloggers). But rather than this being a strict hierarchy, with Level 1 Bloggers at the top of the pyramid, I could see that other connections could be made, turning the diagram into something more "like rain drops hitting the surface of a lake". David came back with yet more insight with this post — and a bunch of comments and plenty of additional discussion.
But I think there is still some way to go … perhaps from a different angle. It strikes me that topics simultaneously appear across the blogosphere … in a zeitgeist kind of way — resulting in the emergence of conversational topics that begin, leap and skip from one blog to another. The topic is built upon, added to, criticised and so on …
I see the story or the topic as being like a stone that skims across the water, leaving in its wake, a thousand ripples of varying sizes. Sometimes the stone strikes hard and deep with a well-known blogger, and in other cases it can be a simple trackback direct from, say, the Servant of Chaos blog (ie a small ripple). BUT, the interesting part comes when the ripples meet and multiply, building energy and strength around the story.
That is where it gets interesting … I am looking forward to where this conversation goes next!
PS — To all the FeedBlitz subscribers, sorry for the false start on this post.
S.
Thanks for your comment, Gavin. Your metaphor of raindrops rings true. The conversation is stimulating and David is onto something – particularly for the visual thinkers among us.
Bob
This is a nice theory and I agree that we are all influenced by some ideas online. It’s good when we manage to get the essence of the idea and produce your own vision. Like frogs in a swamp that produce the same sound but different in tone. (Sorry for the comparison)
Fresh ideas come from a real life and not from online. In the Net we just discuss the new that was produced offline. It’s good that sometimes we get fresh streams in our Swamp 😉