Check out a blog called Trendsspotting. It’s written by Taly Weiss, a social psychologist who runs a market research firm in Israel. She’s recently wrote about a bunch of interesting topics including:
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Self testing the degree of hardcore Web 2.0 usage.
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Crocs. (There are two pairs of Crocs in the Kawasaki family!)
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Influence of MySpace and YouTube on shopping.
The posting that you’ll enjoy the most “proves” that bloggers are egotists. :-) Between Trendsspotting and TrendHunter, you’d have trends covered. (Trendsspotting focuses on psychological studies; Trendhunter focuses on products and services.)
Note that the word “I” isn’t used in this posting! :-)
Hi Guy!
Very clever, changing “I’ve got a pair” to “My feet are in a pair now,” before almost anyone noticed. Okay, so you haven’t used the word “I”, but you’ve used “my” twice. :)
Ha. Not surprising. Keep up the good posts!
I (not “we”) think it’s quite a leap to conclude that the use of first person singular above a certain percentage in a particular mode of communication (blogging is, after all, a sharing of “one’s” own perspective) thereby leads to the conclusion that “one” is an egotist.
Methinks that egotist is too negative a term anyway.
Perhaps we should just conclude that if we have a blog, we have an ego that likes stroking (and who doesn’t like attention)? At least it’s cheaper than getting attention by spending $500 on a pair of shoes, or a hideous handbag!
Thanks for the heads up on Trendsspotting. I took a peak at the blog. Great stuff. I’ll spend some time over there and read up a little.
I think about myself quite a bit. While I don’t know exactly how much time I would need to think about myself every day to qualify as an egotist, I suspect I qualify. However, I also think about others quite a bit, even folks I only know digitally. Moreover, I’m quite cooperative, and I truly care about others’ ends. Of course, I believe helping others achieve their ends helps me achieve mine, so I often mix-up self-interest with altruism.
And, I really love having great conversations with people who are way smarter than I. Only a few things cure my boredom more effectively than great conversations with wittier and smarter folks. To find those great conversations I read, I hang out with family and friends, I start up offbeat conversations in weird settings with strangers, and I blog 6 to 10 hours a week. I need conversations. And, I believe there are many others out there who could get what they need from me while I get what I need from them. So, even though I blog for mostly selfish reasons and I use the first person singular pronoun like someone who recently read a good translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, I believe at least a few other people benefit from my extemporaneous comments and unpolished blog essays. And, I write with them and their ends in mind almost as much as I write with myself and my ends in mind.
Perhaps we bloggers are cooperative egotists.
Man, Guy. How could you let that happen? (Haha, man, guy. Unintentional.)
Guy, how about www.trendwatching.com, and their springspotter network, are you familiar?
Grande achado do dia: Trendsspotting
Trendsspotting O Trendsspotting trás várias análises de tendências, comportamentais em sua maioria. Diferente de sites como o excelente Trendwatching que trás estudos mais voltados para consumo e modelos de negócios. Via Guy Kavasaki…
Don’t forget fashion trends, we all need to look cool ;)
Here in NYC, crocs are so in, they’re out.
Also, the new thing with crocs is to decorate them with these plug-in jewerly things that you stick in the air holes. You can get them in the shape of a football, cartoon character, gem, whatever. They are all the rage. People were literally lining down the isles of the expo I was at two weeks ago to get them.
Statistics is never ‘proof’, only an indication of trends, and explainable by other contributory factors. This applies to any phenomenon that is not univariate and blogging is not univariate. This is a fundamental thing one has to remember in critical reading during doctoral research (which the writer of the said blog has done). Tsk, tsk…
I am a big fan of your blog but this post is very sad because it this is not “proof.”
In fact, this just shows how the media and unfortunately even educated bloggers like you point at bad and irrelevant data to proof a point that is not supported by the data.
If you don’t even see the flaw in this, then I guess we are all doomed.
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Did you see the quotes and smiley?
The posting that you’ll enjoy the most “proves” that bloggers are egotists. :-)
We are also all doomed if people can’t take a joke.
Guy
Bloggers are egotists. You say that as if it’s BAD??? Oh, I’m so easily confused lately…have I told you about that?