I've been thinking about the 53,651 people who read TechCrunch. What, you missed that whole meme that passed through the tech blogs this past week?

Rick Segal wrote about the meme and said it's the paying customers that matter.

Well, for the past five days I've been hanging out with folks who don't read TechCrunch. Maybe that's my mom's gift to me. Get me outside the Silicon Valley or Puget Sound bubbles.

So, I've been thinking about what it'll take to get these folks to try something new. Hey, the iPod still hasn't gotten here, so don't even ask about podcasting, RSS, or tagging. Interestingly enough, blogging has been heard about here. One older lady who visited my mom saw that I was blogging and she said "oh, blogs are the things that's keeping the media honest."

Heh. The things that get heard here in a small town in middle America.

But, back to the lesson. How do we get things out to these people? Well, for one, we need wide-spread wifi here first. Google hasn't set up a Wifi network here in Livingston. That's a business opportunity. Second, there aren't signs extoling the Internet here. I haven't seen a URL on anything in days. I haven't seen an iPod poster in days. I haven't seen a Fry's in days. It's almost like geeks don't exist. Although there is a killer computer museum in Bozeman (I'll try to visit that this week too).

Thomas Hawk wrote about this issue. He taught people to Flickr in New Orleans.

Oh, damn you Thomas. Now you've made it 53,652. Heheh!

Like I said, how do you cause an avalanche? One snowflake at a time. One snowflake at a time.

🙂