The gold rush of 49′ had swarms of people headed west to find gold. The promise of wealth had people "panning in every river bank" everywhere looking for those gold nuggets. A few found them, more did not and went broke trying.
Today the social web mimics the gold rush, swarms of people looking for value (and the golden nuggets) from tools, relationships and the related conversations.
Steve Gilmore writes "In a gold rush the cost of anything surges to meet the demand. Some call these events bubbles, but the real price of a hamburger in SIlicon Valley today is how much you can get done while eating it. Take Twitter, the steam engine of this revolution. It's an iron horse of infinite speed, streamlined to take text and tiny urls and push them onto the bus through the Gtalk pipeline."
"Value is created not by the mechanism of sending but the algorithm of receiving, a hybrid filtering based on maintaining discovery through Tracking your own identity while following and notifying the stream of a subset of your core peers gated by the volume of the flow relative to the real-time stream."
"The product is like panning for gold: separating the nuggets from what we called fool's gold then and the bloggerati now. But the winners could afford the 50-buck burgers and the houses overlooking the Pacific, and eventually new money became old. In recent weeks, the anger at this new wealth creation has been focused on the most visible of these prospectors, with Times articles about bloggers slumping over in their chairs, cartoonists committing Twittercide, and TechCrunch running the table."
"I'll skip the logic of why this isn't happening and focus instead on why we're fools if we ignore this. First, the business processes we think we will have a hard time implementing with these loosely coupled on demand services are not the ones we will be working with when we get there. Swirl the pan and let the sand stream out, then look at what's left."
How Do You Find Real Gold?
The social web is swelling with rivers of conversations and tools that change daily, or should we say hourly. Just like during the gold rush word of new "findings" spread quickly sending millions to a new "site" promising to be the latest and greatest. Just as people get settled into "panning" the new "river" another word comes: "Hey this river has larger deposits and they are passing out a new "pan" that catches a lot more "nuggets".
Due to our conversational world gold rushes happen at incredible speed. A simple post can bring thousands of people following whatever it is someone just discovered and shared. The problem is there is more "fools gold" in them rivers than their is "real gold". Real gold last and appreciates in value. Sounds a lot like genuine relations. Hmmm, maybe the real gold is those we associate and learn from and with. Maybe it is uniting and finding the real gold together. Then again that would take organization and collaboration. Some will and some won't.
If you will then why not link with united relations, start here. If you won't then be careful how much time you spend chasing "fools gold", you may go broke. Fools gold only makes no sense. Sounds like Adsense
To learn how to pan for gold the right way start here.
What say you?
You want more?
Get a PDF of this article here or..... read "Show Me The Money" here