It has been fascinating watching how the discussion on Spheres of Influence has evolved … and even more fun jumping from comment to comment and blog to blog to see how the spheres of influence actually work.
There were links to WebMetricsGuru (actually two trackbacks … perhaps this is something to do with web metrics), comments by Eric Kintz, BobG, Karl Long, Craig Lefebvre, Mack Collier, Nick Rice, MindBlob (whoever he may be), Ed Lee, Toby as well as my good self … not to mention the earlier suggestions and contributions from Ariel, Bryan Person, Matthew Peschong, Lewis Green, Stephen Downes and Seth Finkelstein, and there were clearly some email conversations also occurring. Now, some of these blogs I know and read myself … while others are new to me — and it is clear that there are some fairly high profile bloggers and some relative newcomers all contributing their ideas and energy to this topic. What is PARTICULARLY interesting is the way that the topic has encouraged this diverse range of people to contribute.
It is one thing to read a blog, but quite another to comment … and this goes way beyond influence, as does the result. Clearly the discussion has generated a piece of great new knowledge … but the EXPERIENCE of the process was what made this interesting (see also this from David). As Glen Drury, VP at Yahoo! says, "Wisdom is not online. For one thing, not every book is online. And secondly, some knowledge is only experiential" …
It is the experience of knowledge creation that is part of the excitement of blogging … not the size of your sphere of influence, but how well it taps into the zeitgeist of new knowledge.
The idea is that we should get back to books and offline practice to be interesting and new online!
The problem is that Internet is a kind of a desease that is not easy to cure…
So there’s one way to survive- to read books online in online libraries. Why not?