More on edge cases

Hang ten…

Get. Over. It. Please.

You ARE an edge case. And, it isn’t a bad thing at all.

It merely means that you live your life in an area that – for better or worse – 99.8% of the beings on this planet do not. I would wager that well, under 5% of people living in the USA are online anywhere near the amount of time you are.

It merely means that however “mainstream” or “hip” or “regular-and-not-A-list” you portray yourself to be, you aren’t. You work the party circuit anymore, and you have this insistant tendancy to want to invent new terms for things that have existed for years/decades.

It merely means that NOBODY really reads 840 blogs. You don’t either. But you claim to. (And Robert, it’s disingeneous of you to compare YOUR claim of following 840 blogs to Google’s caching of 10,000 news feeds. Apples annd oranges. ANd yes, it shows how sensitive you are to this term I guess…. since you have to resort to such a poor comparison.

Get. Over. It.

Peace!

Someone who reads everything on google news is an edge case too. “Most people” who go to google don’t read everything. “Most people” don’t read every article or section of a newspaper. So maybe you aren’t really reading 840 blogs. You just say that because it sounds impressive.

The difference between a typical Google News visitor and someone who reads all the entries from 840 different news sources (which themselves might aggregate and filter news from 100s or thousands more sources) is that the visitor to Google News is not reading every news article from Google News. Occasionally, they look at the front page stuff.

I’m not sure where the definition of “edge case” should be, but people like you and I are pretty close to it wherever it is

I’d have to agree with Dave…did you read all of Elizabeth’s post? She wasn’t at all trying to say “Don’t listen to Scoble because he’s a weirdo”. She’s just saying that nobody has enough time to REALLY keep up with 840 independent feeds.

But, here’s how I think you’re pushing the envelope of technology. Right now, you consume this incredible amount of information. Then, you take the interesting bits and blog about it. And, you’re also in a position where a lot of the interesting news is going on right around you. So you’re also pretty qualified to write about that stuff too. The benefit for me, is when I want to get the cool news – I just have to read a few blogs – yours, some TechCrunch, Joel’s, and a handful of others that I care about. I get all the good stuff and none of the junk. And it only costs me, maybe 30-60 minutes a day.

This is what Technorati/Memeorandum are, in a sense, trying to do algorithmically.

Update: some of my friends have emailed me and said “give it a break” and then explained that I am taking too much personal offense. Oh, I see the disconnect. I’m NOT talking about my ego here. I’ve been called far worse than an “edge case” before.

I took so much umbrage because we were talking about FEATURES and not about my ego.

See, when someone says “you’re an edge case” in a discussion about FEATURES what they really are saying is that your feature request isn’t important. That’s bullshit.

All of today’s features started out as edge cases. Developers even have a name for that. It’s called “scratching your own itch.”

And, I know dozens of other people who read hundreds of feeds.

See, if you don’t plan your product for the edge cases it’ll suck. Why is Photoshop so good, for instance? Because they made it for professional photographers. Someone could have said “anyone who needs a histogram is an edge case.” They would be right. Very few photographers need histograms. But Photoshop was designed for edge cases. Why is that important? Cause everyone is an edge case sometime.

You are an edge case and an early adapter. The early adapter part will go main stream. The edge part will not.
The boundary between the two is a grey area.

Only time will tell.

Was called a lot of things when I got my first cell-phone. And they were all horribly wrong. And got called a lot of things when I was hand-coding my printer drivers. And they were right.

You’re looking at little defensive on this one. Drop it and get back to what you do.

He would have been 200 years ago. Only the richest and most powerful in society had access (or thought they needed access) to that.

Well it wouldn’t have been the NYT, rather William Bradford’s ‘New York Gazette’ or John Peter Zenger’s ‘New York Weekly Journal’ as the Times was first published only 155 years ago…

September 18, 1851 – “We publish today the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come.”

And, sigh, you better brush up on your early American history, newspapers were actually quite common to the masses, rich and poor alike, it wasn’t just the well-to-do, newspapers were quite of the democratic sort, for a treasure trove of historical material see Clarence Brigham’s ‘History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820′.

And even, outside of newspapers, a famed pamphleteer, Thoams Paine, started a Revolution with ‘Common Sense’ and ‘The Crisis’, that reached the masses, if you recall.

And around NYT timeframe, the “Penny Press” became a the first mass-medium communicational force, following with the the William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Lord Northcliffe empires. Newspapers reached everyone, rich and poor alike. Indeed Revolutionary, in a sense.

Partisan Press, to Penny Press to Empire Press. Partisan reached the masses in form of a Revolution, Penny in terms of low-price and a broad appeal, and in the Heart era it was simply all-pervasive, inescapable really.

Wrong on dates, and wrong on the history. Sorry.

Wow, Robert, a bit defensive, aren’t we?? Liz was categorizing you, not criticizing you. I think the real reason you’re sensitive about this is that the underlying idea of Liz’s argument is that your behavior is not a good predictor of general behavior, and that hits the core of your predictive rhetoric. This is the myth of the early adopter: they are not good predictors of late adopter behavior.

Most importantly, searching for “Liz Lawley” on Technorati is NOT reading millions of blogs, nor even dozens, unless you actually read them. Just as using the card catalog at a library is not the same as reading all the books in the library.

You can’t use your behavior to predict what will happen. I was talking with Cam Reilly the other day about buying CDs and making personal compilations and he said to me with quite a bit of confidence “People don’t do that any more, they use the shuffle button on their iPods”. 30 million Americans have iPods. I asked him what the other 200 million do. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t have a point. The problem was that his worldview had become so slanted by his early-adopter perspective that I couldn’t really learn much from his statement. I want logic not religion.

That’s the problem with being on the edge. It allows you believe that someday, everybody will be like you. But they won’t, ever. Instead, they’ll probably do something you would never do.

It sounds like all this talk is being generated by different understandings of what activities the label “read” denotes.

Saying “I read X sources” carries little sense… we scan, we skim, we reread, we abstract, and so on.

I prefer more sense from fewer words, than less sense from more words. Cheaper.

Robert,

Can also list something you was an “edge case” and nobody followed you ? Becouse it looks like you are smartest person in the world in your opinion…

Robert you and I both early adopters … I don’t like the term “edge case” too much like “head case”. We’re evangelists. We’re pushing the boundaries and we’re also striving to make RSS, blogging, etc easy and accessable. Of course we’re on the bleeding edge, by being on the bleeding edge we can comment on the industry. I know that very few people read the number of feeds we do (yeah I think I’ve caught up to you), but because you and I both strive to be able to absorb lots of information quickly, we help to improve readers for everyone.

By being on the edge, trying new stuff we see the potential, but also when something is too geeky for most. Look at WP.com vs Blogger … it’s an evolutionary change. I’ve gotten three people blogging on WP.com in minutes. Minutes! Jeez with Blogger I know it would have taken longer. The interfaces, the technologies are just getting better and better. And I think it has a lot to do with the efforts of people like us.

BTW … I didn’t know that Memorandum started with your feed list! I always wondered how I was getting listed on there so quickly!

Focus. In the past few days: MS hits its financial target, Gates pledges $900M to eradicate TB, Google takes heat on China policy, Jobs in position to head Disney, Big Bells continue to try and put toll gates on the Net…

There’s plenty of other things to blog about.

This meltdown is hilarious. You are a true revolutionary Scoble.

Lead the way to the future! You popularized the mouse and the GUI and soon the Tablet PC will dominate computing thanks to your efforts!

Every development team should study your behavior and base products on you! I mean, you were after all the guy who claims to reboot his tablet every single day.

Fact of the matter is that it’s a hell of a lot harder to come up with a new product than it is to be an early adopter of one. Early adopters are certainly important — but your self-important tone is ridiculous.

I search with Google. I guess by your definition, I’ve read 800 billion web pages.

This debate is fascinating, particularly this:

> All of these comments are ‘self-important’ — show me a blog or a blogger or any comment in any blog (or medium) anywhere that is not ‘self-important.’ We would not write/create/post/debate any of this if it were not (including this comment.)

Secondly, the practical part of this debate may be the observation that the edge is not actually as far away from mainstream as is implied in these ‘criticisms.’ Decades ago, Buckminster Fuller tracked ‘idea to mass adoption’ in decade-based units. Today, ‘idea to mass adoption’ can be measured in months.

Robert, you are certainly on the edge, as always — but the edge today is really only about ten seconds (or one click) away from the alleged ‘mainstream’ in Peoria.

* * *

People who read Google News or the New York Times are reading a lot of diverse news, but it is essentially one source, winnowed from many by either human or machine editors.

People who read 700+ blogs or other sources themselves – and I am one – ARE edge cases.

By the way, a couple of hundred years ago Benjamin Franklin, a common man, printed a newspaper in Philadelphia. And his paper was not the only one in town. Reading the newspaper wasn’t just for the rich.

Oh, and not all features start out as edge cases. The ability to correct mistakes by deleting or typing over text in a word processor would be a mandatory feature, without which nobody would buy the product. Hardly an edge case.

Larry – typewriters had not built-in ability for text correction. It was provided by add-ons !

Robert, you need to spend a lot more time outside of your technobubble.

You have this very warped view of the world and what people do. It’s like Gates and that idiotic light table demo. In his world, people clean up after his messes, and handle all his details for him. That’s a necessity for him.

But in the real world? WIth sick people and babies, vandals and nutcases? A big glass table that has to remain clean.

you just ponder that.

It’s not that you’re an edge case as much as everyone you deal with is just like you, and now you think that you and your little geeks represent the planet. You’ve deluded yourself into thinking you are, or even vaguely represent the mainstream.

That’s incorrect.

I’m sorry, but Photoshop IS an edge case. It’s huge, and complex, and does a million things, and most people who just want to take pictures and occasionally sharpen the focus or remove redeye have NO IDEA how to do it with Photoshop, and don’t own that or any other $600 software package anyway.

I read about 150 newsfeeds in Bloglines, and I know for a fact that makes me an edge case. I’m very happy that Bloglines has features for people like me – such as dividing sources into folders and the “display only sources with unread items” feature.

These features are completely absent from the “mainstream” aggregators like My Yahoo and Google Personalized and Live.com, and they probably should be – RSS is just getting traction in the real world, and they need to focus on keeping it simple.

Memeorandum and Google News make it even more simple: they choose the sources for you. I can’t stand them. They’re not designed for edge cases.

I’m personally proud to be an edge case. I pride myself on being ahead of the curve. I know sometimes that will mean I’m investing time, energy, and money in something that won’t even exist in the future – I have owned a $2000 DAT tape drive and a REX PDA, not to mention several different computers made by Atari.

But I also know that there’s a very good chance I’ll be one of the first to try a great new technology (like Google) that would change the world a few years later. And I love that.

Nevertheless, I try to be an Edge Case who still understands everyone else and isn’t off in his own little world, and I consider explaining the technology to those who don’t “get it” yet one of my strengths.

That’s why you should be proud, Robert – not of being an Edge Case, but of being one of the most accessible and friendly Edge Cases out there who isn’t afraid to talk to “regular folks” and explain all this cool stuff to them. Stay on the edge!

Robert,

I think you must visit this webpage to get real information: http://www.internetisshit.org/

Subscribing to 840 feeds is edge case behavior. It’s your attempt to act cool, informed with it. Your examples are absurd. You point to digests, anthologies, etc… Butwhat you do is like going to the library, taking out 1000 books, and routining them two days later, saying, “I just want to make sure that they circulate and I’ve seen them.” (In this case, I mean “edge case” as in nut job, not trend setter or nerd or geek.)

And what’s with this silly “features” cover story when you recount how kids knew you were a nerd in high school, etc… You are getting sensitive because you are a weird nutbag nerd. You aren’t much of a trendsetter or innovator. But a geek. Yeah.