Thanks, Steve Rubel!

So why do I like marketing expert and internet rockstar Steve Rubel so much? Here's why...

A couple of days ago Mr. Rubel announced that he had gotten one of the coveted original invitations to join Yahoo 360, a new social-networking service started by that company, and that he had 99 invitations that he can send to others, in case anyone was interested. Now, I know that Mr. Rubel's blog is insanely popular, and that he was probably going to be flooded with emails for invitation requests. But I thought what the hell, and wrote to him anyway - and he sent me one of the invites not even twelve hours later! So, looks like I'm the newest member of Yahoo 360, although I won't be able to actually do anything with it until I can afford to go to an internet cafe and actually tool around with it on a desktop computer, which sadly isn't going to be for awhile because I'm so damn broke right now.

There's a topic I talk about a lot, both here and at main journal, about how the most futuristic tech advances in the world are still profoundly shaped by surprisingly old-fashioned topics. This is yet another example - sure, part of why Mr. Rubel's blog is so popular is that he always has such good information, but an equal part of it is that he's simply a nice guy, always has a pleasant tone in his entries, and does things like sending Yahoo 360 invites to complete strangers. This is what Dave Winer doesn't get, I think, when he complains about how no one in the high-tech industry will let him be a part of their little club; Mr. Winer may have a lot of technical prowess, but his personality is just so grating sometimes that a lot of people in the industry simply don't want him around. How you act, how you say things, is just as important as what you're saying, when it comes to an online project being popular or not; I urge all bloggers to contemplate the subject themselves, and to realize that there's a direct connection between the two.

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