Tangents around persuasion

Scoble’s piece on persuasion, saying in a nutshell that the best way to be persuasive is to admit that there are alternatives, and that yours is not perfect and flawless, is dead on. The only thing I can add is that my favorite way of finding out whether a store practices that sort of honest, open persuasion is when I’m looking for some very specific item that they don’t have: I ask them where else I should look. If they just give me a blank look, as though they thought they were the only store on earth, they are either liars who know all of the competition but fear to even speak their names, or fools who’ve never even thought about what the competition sells. When I find someone whose response is to grab the phone and call around, they’ve just become my first stop for anything.

So, since I don’t have much to say about the post itself, but I’m in a “can’t shut up” mood, I’ll talk around the edges, and off on tangents, instead.

Scoble says he wrote the piece as a substitute for a BloggerCon II presentation. As I’ve said, if you have something to “present,” I’d much rather have you write it out, maybe even do a little editing, and then when you have it mistake- and stumble-free, put it up on the web where people can comment and question and you can answer. Reading Robert’s post in my aggregator, I was delighted: he made me think, and clarified some things I had vaguely thought about before. Once I’ve thought about it a bit more, I may have comments or questions for him, that I’ll put in the comments for his post. But if I had paid hundreds of dollars to fly across the country and rent a bed, just to hear him read his post, and have people ask the very first questions that popped into their heads, and him give the first answer that popped into his head, I’d feel cheated. Badly.

If, as people always tell me when I complain about the idea of presentations, conferences are all about hallway and dinner conversation, not the presentations, why not have a conference where the presentations are just blog posts with comments and IRC channels, and the conference is just a room full of comfortable chairs and couches with free WiFi and drinks and snacks? Or, several rooms, so separate conversations didn’t drown each other out. In fact, how about a room for each participant, since they will be conversing through the comments and channels? Come to think of it, I already have a room with a chair and a couch that I like, with snacks I like, and nobody to look shocked at my ragged sweatshirt and coffee stained sweatpants.

In linking to Scoble’s post, Tim Bray said:

It’s probably superfluous for me to point to anything by Scoble, since I suspect our readerships have pretty complete overlap

That’s a very big mistake, that I constantly make myself. I very rarely link to anything that Sam Ruby or Mark Pilgrim post, on the assumption that nobody would read me without reading them as well, when in fact when I think about it I know that nobody who reads me because of Whole Wheat Radio reads them, and there are probably other people who read me for some other reason, who don’t read them, some of whom have no other connection to them. As a poor substitute for really seeing the overlap between Bray and Scoble, I looked at Tim’s Technorati cosmos and then at the first four that looked like they were there because of a blogroll link. Things get a little muddy since so many people are only listing a few recently updated blogs from their blogroll, but of those four, zero also had a link to Scoble.

I say this to myself over and over, with little effect, but still: there is no blog so popular, or so similar to yours, that it doesn’t need your link to an interesting post.

8 Comments

Comment by Michael Fagan #
2004-04-18 13:15:25

I agree. At the moment I read both yours and Tim’s blog (and Pilgrim’s, for that matter), but not Scoble’s. Fortunately, many of the blogs I read are written by bloggers who read Scoble’s blog, and thus point in his direction when more relevant/interesting/whatever than usual :-)

I doubt any blogs overlap completely in readership.

 
Comment by Manuzhai #
2004-04-18 14:17:04

I read about 70 blogs now (actually, 65 feeds – some of them are blogmarks, some blogs, one’s a cartoon – but still) and I don’t think I’ve found a lot of articles more than five people I read linked to.

This one from Scoble is one of them.

Relating to your idea of a conference: isn’t that the way Foo Camp was set up? Certainly seems that way.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-04-18 22:22:01