The infamous “Echo Chamber”. If you have a blog that concentrates on any topic regarding the web, you are pretty much right in the center of it. It is a term you hear a lot out of the valley. For example, Fred Wilson has 19 different blog posts where he uses the term. My personal favorite is from his post, Outside the Echo Chamber, where he describes his encounter with a typical American:
Our driver said, “why is it that Google is so much better than Yahoo when they are both owned by the same company”.
That type of comment really makes one think. It is challenging to keep perspective about the views of the web outside the “echo chamber” when we are so involved in the web, the innovation taking place around us and the great solutions. As Geoffrey Moore would classify us, we are the innovators and we are the early adopters; there are whole other classes of people AFTER the chasm.
And on that point, does the average person actually care about Twitter? Well, I can’t say that I do either, I haven’t been able to relate to the hype (Renee Blodgett is with on this) so I would welcome some enlightenment about it. But overall, we should understand how the reverb affects us, our immersion in OUR own immersion.
But then again, for every comment like the one above, I get pleasantly surprised by others. Like when my uncle who is trying to price his house said “well, I guess I’ll check out the other houses in my neighborhood on Zillow“.
Other coverage and resource on the Echo Chamber:
- Trapped in the Echo Chamber by Salon.com
- Please Don’t Confuse Blogging with the Echo Chamber
- Web 2.0 Echo Chamber: Another Reality
- sometimes we forget where we are on the curve
