DISQUS

"Why does this all matter? Well, if you are going to do this as a business you’ve got to prove how many readers you have and demonstrate both audience size as well as influence." - above all else, if you are going to do this as a business - you've got to show that you can monetize this audience that you are working so hard to build and I think that was one of Mike's points; "How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch."

Micro-blogging is the substitution of Narrative with "Isative." The death of Narrative has dropped us all into a stream of present-sense impressions sans conclusion. We live now like characters of stories past with no indication of our fate beyond the next Twitter.

http://www.arasmus.com/microblog/2008/11/25/blo...

iLike - that leachy thing that stuck on the side of my iTunes like a limpit? The fact that it was all automatic was a plus, but I still haven't used it more than 3 times at the beginning of my 2 year "usership." I wish them well but its just plain ridiculous to equate my "iLike usership" with say my "Gmail usership" in coming up with a valuation.

Ben - you may already know this but check out Churchill's handling of the Gallipoli campaign in World War One - often described as one of the greatest disasters of World War I. My vote for greatest political leader of the last century would go to Gandhi - but he too, as for most leaders in the last century, was born to comfort.

The collective import of these observations is that these guys did very little work period, but the work they did do had great impact. This leads me to think of two reasons why maybe these rules do not apply to use today: (1) some of these guys (like Beethoven) lived at a time in which the general level of literacy (and therefore intellectual competition) was fairly low, (2) some of these guys (like Winston Churchill) got their positions in society because of the class into which they were born rather than by scaling the meritocratic heights. Perhaps basic competence was sufficient for those placed so highly by birth alone.