Have you ever heard of Jason Calacanis or Leo Laporte?
If you’re heavily involved in the Web 2.0 or related industries, the answer is yes. If you’re anyone else though, the chance is slim. The problem is.. they don’t seem to realize this. It seems that most people within the Bay-area / Web 2.0 / modern Web technology community live in a bubble that stretches only from Sausalito to San Jose (with little pockets scattered in places like London, Chicago and New York.)
Today I enjoyed listening to the latest episode of TWiT (This Week in Tech), a weekly round-table discussion podcast where Leo Laporte and a varying number of Web industry pseudo-celebrities get together and talk about the issues of the week. It makes for fun listening, but what saddened me is how insular some of these people are. At numerous times someone refers to particular people or events as being either famous or notable within “the technology industry.”
Jason Calacanis - a really fun, and nice, guy, but unlikely to be known by even 1% of people in the technology industry - said something along the lines that Valleywag has changed the face (or style) of journalism within the technology industry. It really hasn’t - at least, not in any industry-wide perceptible way. I’d be willing to bet that 90%+ of people even within the journalistic side of the technology industry are not familiar with ValleyWag at all. This also goes for the people.
An amazingly tiny proportion of people in “the technology industry” have even heard of Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, Leo Laporte, Michael Arrington, Adam Curry, or almost any self-declared celebrity (no matter how nice or interesting they may be) within that bubble. They’re hardly household names even in the Web development industry! It is very easy when listening to them, however, to think that their declarations are really representative of the world or, at least, the world of technology. They’re not. They’re representative of a very quirky, interesting, and fun bubble that sits squarely over the San Francisco Bay.
This is true in significantly smaller industries or communities too. The Ruby community is one I am familiar with. I run the largest and highest-subscribed Ruby blog, wrote a semi-popular Ruby book, and release things into the community quite often, yet I would be extremely surprised if even 5% of the Ruby community, as a whole, are familiar with my name. I’d go so far to say that popularity within a sector is defined by Zipf’s law, which would dictate that only a tiny handful of people in any field are actually widely known (with, say, over 50% name recognition) within it (in Ruby’s case, that’d be only Matz, DHH, and Dave Thomas.)
Of course, you could write this off as mere jealousy that I can’t be a member of this idealistic, exciting, Bay-focused community that I find, honestly, quite endearing. But, no, I’ve given it some thought, and even though it’d something I’d like to be involved with (but can’t), I’m being objective here. They really do think the technology sector revolves around them, and unfortunately this blinds them to keeping their eyes peeled for some of the better ideas outside their bubble.
Apologies to Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte for using their names to title this piece, but it was inspired by things they said in their TWiT episode and.. it helps to make a more general point about name recognition within communities in general.
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