Curse Of Being an Early Adopter and Tech Blogger
I woke up to an interesting tweet from Robert Scoble this morning:
How far ahead of the world are all of us? When I showed researchers at HP my live Qikking cell phone they couldn’t believe it.
I found it, first, a bit ironic seeing as Robert recently declared blog comments dead when, as I pointed out, much of the Internet is only now catching up to blogging.
This is the curse of the early adopter. Most of the guys who converse on FriendFeed (including myself) talk about the latest tech all the time. We’ll often try something and move on by the time the rest of the Internet catches on. In a way, this is what makes us good bloggers. We’re the pioneers in tech consumerism and it is often us who can make or break a new company by choosing whether to pass it on or not.
But, I deal with the loneliness of the early adopter curse every day. My audience over on PCMECH is very diverse. We have a crowd of people who are really in tune with technology, and we have a crowd of people who are not. The crowd that is not up to speed makes up the majority. If you say the word “FriendFeed” to them, they go “huh?”. When we do our live streaming broadcast on Wednesday nights on Ustream, we field a lot of tech questions that have to do with technology that was modern a year or more ago.
In a way, running PCMECH keeps me grounded in reality, and that reality is that much of the world is still playing catch-up when it comes to what is happening online. The entire social media, Web 2.0 transition has moved forward way too quickly for all but those of us who do this day in and day out.
Tech bloggers, have you ever tried to explain what you do to a member of your family? I’m sure you have. Your family is more the norm.
I think it is good for a tech blogger to not lose touch with the overwhelming majority of the people on the Internet. It is a good dose of reality. Otherwise, all we’ll do is talk to each other in a big echo chamber.
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Although many bloggers don`t like it, it can be helpful to those readers if you link back to older posts.
When talking about about Friendfeed for example, you could link back to the post where you first mentioned / explained the service.
Besides the benefits for first time readers, this could also increase the value of older posts. Instead of being buried in your archive they could be kept alive longer and bring you some extra revenue by increasing ad impressions / clicks. (although this should not be the main reason for linking back to old posts)