How To Split An Atom

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A full 69% of you think that Beacon was a bit much as far as privacy is concerned. What I thought was much more interesting is that a full 20% of you had no idea what Beacon was.

Considering the fact that blog readers represent some of the more web savvy members of society, it begs the question as to how much of a big deal the Beacon controversy is. Lets take a closer look, shall we?

State Of The Blogosphere

Yes, it was an invasion of privacy.

Worse yet, it was the type of Public Relations blunder that Harvard Business Case Studies are made of.

But, what we all seem to forget is that unlike Newsfeed which fundamentally altered the way that people used Facebook, Beacon is really easy to ignore. If you don’t know what you are looking for, in fact, it is practically invisible. That means that your average Facebook user who signs on in order to check on his photo album and update his status, doesn’t care.

As the year draws to a close, I think this is a fact that we would all do well to remember. Even a perfect storm in the blogosphere is nothing but a ripple in the ocean of mainstream society. If you want a barometer as to how important tech media has become, your best metric is to compare how readily our sound and fury makes its way into the public conscientiousness.

This year, I can’t think of a single event, short of the hype surrounding the iPhone, that has made to cross-over. From payola scandals to Jaiku to Facebook, it seems that the more hype we generate around the topic, the more likely it will be that a week later even we will have forgotten exactly what we were all up in arms about. Is it any wonder why mainstream media still has a hard time figuring out what makes us relevant?

Web 2.0 Roundup

So tell me, how many dust ups can you think of that have made their way into the real world and what do you think this says about the blogosphere’s real influence on society?

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