Listen To This Man
Stefan Smalla opens my mind once again with his latest post about BlogShares. I'll admit that when I first heard from fellow Mobitopian Seyed about Blogshares, I was a bit sceptical. It was obviously a great job and well done, but I couldn't really figure out what the point was in terms of usefulness. I guess it's just entertainment value, which is always worth something on the web. But I'm so heads down in my own project, that I wasn't really paying attention.
Stefan, however, points out to me the ingeniousness of BlogShares and its viral nature:
... On Blogshares, you can claim your own weblog and receive free founder shares. To authenticate owners, they have to display a button to Blogshares on their weblog. Thus, everybody does this: Technorati counts more than 1,130 inbound links to Blogshares (keep in mind: the site has been online at this very URL only for five days or so). Talk about viral marketing at its finest.
A technology observation: If you're as bright and multi-faceted in skills as Seyed, such a site is no rocket science. There was no team of developers involved for months: Seyed did this on his own in his free time over the course of days.
A business observation: Implementation is key. Ideas are nice, but bringing them to the real world is so much more. If Seyed wanted, he might actually be able to earn some money on this (right now, with bandwidth costs, he might be losing a little). Well, he will be with advertising shortly already, but there is probably more in there if he wanted to.
Very nice. Great observations and insights. Seyed has done a hell of a job and Stefan once again opens my eyes up. I'm going to see what I can do to think along these lines now... Awesome.
-Russ