New Media Education

If you haven’t noticed, every Wednesday for a little over a month now, I’ve posted a short lesson about what I do. Sometimes they’re anecdotes or How To’s or links but they all relate to a collection of ideas that are slowly creating a new industry. An industry that it’s not quite too late to get on the ground floor of. I guess for now we have to call that new media.

When Seth Godin wrote about two simple web businesses that he thought might be lucrative, I laughed because I get paid to do both of them by multiple companies. Or if that’s not enough, Fred Wilson just tried to hire someone who likes to comment on blogs. That’s what I’m talking about.

Last month, literally as I walking into a meeting a total stranger emailed me an article about the person I was about to meet with. It had been published for like 20 minutes. The meeting was a total secret so they could have had no idea. I was blown away. I can’t even put a number on how much that email was worth.

But then I remembered, for the last year and a half I’ve been publishing every good thing I’ve come across for free. God knows how many times I’ve emailed writers that I like with pieces I figured they would like. It was only a matter of time before somebody returned the favor.

I sort of fell into it and got really lucky. Tucker sat down and taught me everything. But if he hadn’t, I would have kept doing it anyway, slowly figuring it out by trial and error. I would have had to do it without the benefit of somebody else’s toys.

So every Wednesday for the foreseeable future, I’m going to try and talk about the things I’ve learned and am learning. It’s helpful to me because I finally get to articulate them and hopefully, it can be helpful to everyone else. Later on down the road, it will all make more sense when the official announcement about this is made. If you want to get a jump on it, start with all the books in the Internet/Strategy section of my reading list.