What I liked best about Scoble’s “I am not an edge case!” declaration is how it encodes a deep respect for others’ needs and capabilities. He doesn’t set himself apart like you might expect from someone of his renown. Scoble’s manifesto reminds me of a comment made on Alex Barnett’s podcast about attention by one of his interviewees—I think Nick Bradbury—that “even brilliant users need simple solutions.” Alex continues on that theme with his post attention engines are not just for the geekosphere. His wife is not a geek, but she could use better help finding the information she wants to read on the Web. Many Web technologies could be made relevant for those disinclined to read 800+ feeds in one of today’s news aggregators.
Your potential users and readers may be very different from you in how they spend their time and approach their lives. They might disagree with you. But they still deserve your respect and you can profit by offering it. It’s like Deborah Schultz says:
We can label it any way we want (Cluetrain Manifesto, attention economy, etc etc etc) - but when it comes right down to it, the companies that “win” with me, win because they RESPECT me and I can tell that they respect me in lots of little and big ways - service, pricing, product design. [via Doc Searls]
The best compliment I got last week was when Danny Ayers stopped by twice to leave comments on my OPML project and he assumed that I could understand what he was talking about. FOAF, RDF, Chumpalogica, SparqlSphere: he threw out whatever he thought was relevant to what I was working on. He knew that if it was of interest to me, I could sort it out. That’s respectful. That’s empowering. Thanks, Danny. I haven’t checked it all out yet, but I plan to. Raw has always been one of my favorite reads and now I’ll pay extra special attention to it.
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Most kind of you