As Mom used to say, ‘I don’t care who started it’
: A little more than two weeks ago, I got to thinking that small is the new big and I started making notes for a post about that (yes, I sometimes actually do think before I type). And then I saw two great posts about bad, big companies and good, small ones by Seth Godin that backed up that notion. I linked to them and said I was working on a post called “small is the new big.” Then, before you know it, there was Seth writing a post under that very headline. My fault for waiting too long to write mine. But I linked to his and wrote my small is big post. He wrote another post on the topic; I linked to that and found more legs in the notion here and here. . I linked to others who carried on the riff. And lots of others riffed as well. Yesterday, Fred Wilson said he doesn’t know who started it. I say it doesn’t much matter.
But I just got a most gracious email from Seth saying it’s cool that we had the same thought the same way at the same time. He nicely joked that I could grab the book title.
I wrote back and said, great minds and all that: “If there’s one lesson old-media guys learn in this new medium it’s that we can no longer publish/broadcast/converse/share on our schedule, for somebody’s sure to be ahead of us. But in the end, that’s what so fun and wonderful about this medium, isn’t it: We feel as if we’re sharing brains. And that’s better than hiding them.”
And that is what is so nice about that moment in our very open medium: We were seeing the world the same way and sharing similar thoughts and didn’t worry — as we would have in the old media world — about who was first or who “owned” the idea but only about adding to it.
Seth and I are finally having lunch next week. And that is the best part: Goood ideas make good friends.
