Reality Distorion Field

People who have been working with Steve Jobs claim that he creates Reality DIstortion Field around him. It's a mixture of charm and exaggeration that makes you believe anything.

But you don't need a person to distort an audience's sense of proportion or scale. I believe that technology and being around tech-savy people has the same effect on people. You slowly become to think that every person knows how to blog, what a troll is and thinks that Jay Rosen has absolutely no life beyond Twitter.

Having RDF on is cool if you work for Wired or CNet: your audience is on the same level. But if you happen to work for Legacy media, you have a problem. When you start up a discussion board and announce it in the newspaper, half of your readers don't know what a discussion board is. The ten percent that try out the board are puzzled because there is just too many threads, inside jokes and evil comments. And every time they try to participate, there is somebody yelling USE THE SEARCH or SEE THIS THREAD YOU STUPID $%$#@!

This applies to even the most wired countries. Even if 90% percent of households have broadband, it doesn't mean people living in those households are geeks. They are ordinary people doing online banking, reading news, checking prices and the saviest bunch might even try online shopping.

Most of the cool web 2.1 stuff is used by geeks (like me) and geeks get bored easily. That's why internet has it's own hype cycle. It helps you out when you feel like you need reality check. According to Gartner, Twitter is oh so 2009 next year so you shouldn't worry too much about tweeting.