Day: April 10, 2003

I received an email this morning inviting me to submit a video about my blog for possible inclusion in a television pilot about blogging. Quote:

“We want to bring this phenomenon of personal expression to television for the very first time, and have been scouring the web for appropriate sites. Your web site seems like a potentially great fit for the show.”

Scouring? More like scraping, it seems. A potentially great fit? I’ve been blogging for two weeks this round. Somehow I’ll bet every single person who received this email is a ‘potentially great fit’ — call me cynical, but…

Here’s the full text of the email. Judge for yourself. Have others received the same email? I’m guessing hundreds if not thousands of these unsolicited emails went out to any bloggers who happen to use Radio Userland, or who post their plaintext email on their site.

I didn’t start a blog to become famous on TV. I started a blog as a personal record, a chance to practice what I preach, an opportunity to add my voice to the conversation going on between the dozens of interesting bloggers I read now. I would like to be ‘famous’ for my words and ideas, or way of expressing them. But I think of that as ‘locally’ famous, among a small community of people whom I know and respect for their ideas, even if I’ve never met them.

If they were going to send spam, why not at least show the sophistication to point people back to a blog? 😉

Scoble comments on how hard it is to get people to accept something new. He’s certainly on target, speaking from experience: his job title, often enough, has been evangelist (and he clearly thinks of himself as one, regardless of title). He mentions the Mac, digital cameras, and Tivo — I certainly am waiting on that last one, despite the resounding testimonials of several personal acquaintances. Personal proof of his main point.

“It’s the evangelist’s core problem to overcome. How do you change the world when so many don’t want to change?”

Earlier, I wrote that products are easier than services, but that’s only relative. Anything new is a challenge. If something is an order of magnitude better than the current state of affairs, it still takes time. If something is entirely new (is there anything entirely new?), it takes even more. If it’s not that different than the current alternative… then push on style and design and cool. What other options are there?