Is there really anything new? You could make an argument that people are getting rich online because they’ve taken old things and adapted them for our current technology, but there aren’t a ton of NEW ideas around anymore.
This whole idea has been hitting home with me recently as I watch my web stats and track CD sales. Every once in a while I’ll Google my name to see if there are any new links to me that I wasn’t aware of before. I’ll also monitor the inbound links page on my web statistics. The things people Google and then end up at my page are funny sometimes.
Lots of links come in from “Hacking the Staples Easy Button” because of my little project last year. Click the button on the right side of the page if you must know. I also get a fair amount of what I’ll call “how the heck?” links. People will search for a random string of words that happens to be in a blog post I’ve made or they search a few words that I’ve written in a song. When that happens, I’ve learned to not assume they are searching for my song necessarily.
The searches “Pain is a Megaphone” and “Maybe tomorrow but not today” will bring up my songs, but coincidentally they also bring up other artists who happen to have used these phrases in their songs. People who are much more well-known than I am.
We all start somewhere, though. I was looking at the Wayback Machine at archive.org. You can see what youtube looked like when it was first launched. Not pretty. In fact, they went through about 3 or 4 design iterations in that first year (2005). Maybe more that I didn’t find. Seems like they’ve gotten the hang of things now, though.
I’m going to go and try to write something new.
Popularity: 4% [?]
