Josh Dilworth

This is a great read.

And, as I also said in the comments, I love it when personal blogs serve as an outlet for the deeper kinds of thinking/analysis that we are all obviously missing in our daily, professional lives (with all respect to Mashable, in this example).

I’m seriously considering the following — we start a peer-reviewed blog of blogs that is full of minimum 750 word posts (or some such parameter) from bloggers writing in their spare time.

If you think it’s a good idea, lemme know. It’d be something of an EDGE Journal for the rest of us;) And again, I am dead serious. We could have the site designed in a week, with some sort of internal-only voting mechanism (Pligg, etc.) for the peer-reviewed part, and maybe a certain threshold to trigger publishing? The caveat would be that you couldn’t go live with the post on your own site until it went live in the journal site (with a link back to you, of course). I guess then too if you didn’t receive the required number of votes within 2 weeks the piece would be released from the queue and you’d be free to publish on your own. I’d also be interested in other parameters, such as publishing a maximim of 1 post per day, so that can ensure that each article gets the attention and conversation that it deserves.

I think we’d need to limit the number of “members” though, as elitist as that sounds — maybe to something like 50 peeps? Otherwise it lacks the value of curatorship, and the point of the whole endeavor is to establish an exceptionally high-quality destination blog that is a traffic driver and growth mechanism for our personal sites/brands, while eschewing monetization in the name of…just good thinking and writing (that hell, we’re doing anyway, just in a super-distributed fashion). In the best case scenario it ends up prompting us to write MORE of this good stuff.

Just initial thoughts…

Jordan has a great piece up on Peter Shankman’s HARO (Help a Reporter Out). But he leaves out the most important part — Shankman’s thrice daily e-mails are HILARIOUS, and worthy of being published in their own right. Well-deserved attention for a rockin’ service.

In fact, you’re going to see a number of PR-related startups and services emerge over the next 6-8 months — and I think that we know that it’s an industry ripe for disruption…

I’m sorry but this is just freakin’ smart.  How they’ll navigate the compensatory issues is obviously the thorniest obstacle — but seiously, this is a fantastic idea — TC (and others) are in a unique place of knowing what the market has and what the market needs (even craves). Now they can productize that expertise, in the form of an ongoing collaboration with their readers/audience. Even if it fails spectacularly, it will have served the purpose of empowering TC readers and more fully investing them in the community of which they are an ever-more important part. Imagine if a venture funded startup tried to do this same thing (or an established BigCo for that matter). It’s pretty unlikely. And no doubt the fact that Arrington was more or less begging for products like Loopt, Whrrl and Moximity way back in September of 2007 added fuel to this fire.

And — this is yet another example of a trend we’re seeing quickly reach its tipping point, and for good reason — “offline” articulations/actions/shenanigans perpetrated by online communities of practice — that is, finally and truly putting our collective minds to work against a background of shared objectives (at least in principle). There are so many examples of companies and projects coming at this idea from different angles that it deserves another post, but this is again, a great idea, and certainly another example of how the lines between product development, marketing, journalism and sales (and more) are being drawn anew (conflict of interest hawks notwithstanding).

What does it all mean?  Well, who the heck knows. But it is quite interesting (or condemming, depending on how you look at it) that in a sea of instructional video sites and widgemakers, fundamentally viable ideas like a web tablet/cloudbook may not see the light of day until…a blogger and his readers start working on it? I think that all of us will be watching this one closely, not to mention a few others who might like to see TC eat its own words.

Can it really be that hard? I think we’re about to find out…and the announcement is a hell of a lot more interesting, too, in the context of today’s NYT piece on why the likes of Dell and HP are worried about exactly this kind of device.