The Red Wire Or The Blue Wire
Earlier today, I twittered about serendipity. I was thinking about weblogs and the web in general and suddenly realized how people simply aren’t linking each other anymore — at least not on any level like they used to.
This got me thinking. I’ve ran and am still running several weblogs. The one that actually has a decent PageRank is getting several mails each week from people asking for links — obviously to increase their own PageRank.
That’s when I saw what had happened. The PageRank craze has made linking not fun. Wow, how could that happen?
Since PageRank, links truly have become “the currency of the web”. Before, linking other sites was something entirely innocent, organic, chaotic. Currency has never been any of these things.
Should we be mad at Google for messing things up? Probably not, after all they merely tried to apply a metering mechanism on something big, random and mostly uncontrollable. Who could blame them?
We’ve witnessed this pattern in other places, so maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Moderation features in web forums don’t work like they’re supposed to because people keep finding ways to manipulate them.
Automated spam fighting mechanisms still don’t work like they’re supposed to because spammers keep finding new ways of fooling them.
Digg.com keeps getting gamed no matter what complex systems they put in place for pushing posts to their front page (or not).
More people need to see this pattern and think about how to deal with the following: no matter how clever your systems are, you can’t eradicate the human element, and you can’t eradicate serendipity. Learn to face it, and learn to find a way to not let it mess with you.
Ironically, this lesson also applies to start-ups. You can plan, strategize and scheme all you want; your start-up’s success entirely depends on “X”.
And, and this is important, this X can have positive as well as negative effects.
It can give you perfect media exposure for a perfect running start. But it can also give you bad users or unplanned downtime.
Most founders seem to spend a lot of time thinking about how to counter the effects of X; but smart founders think about how to live with them and possibly turn even the negative effects into a positive outcome.
It’s all those crappy little start-ups with bad ideas, bad brands, bad implementation, those little places that you read about once on TechCrunch and then never hear of again, that spent so much time on thinking about how to minimize the effects of X that they unintentionally crushed it along with all the good that may have come from it.
It’s easy to crush X with too many rules, too many strategies. Rules create deterministic systems. And deterministic systems can be hacked, bent, attacked. Instead, embrace X as the determining factor in your venture’s success. Allow it work for you.
What is X? It’s serendipity. It’s luck. It’s chaos. It’s randomness. It’s passion. It’s music. It’s today’s news. It’s the weather. It’s your partner. It’s love. It’s energy. It’s balance. It’s the red wire or the blue wire.
