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Craig Kerstiens

Consuming versus Publishing

I’m finding it a growingly interesting balance in consuming versus producing information. I also feel with the increase in availability of information, the barrier to entry in so many areas are shrinking rapidly. I think of some of the areas where the barriers to entry are typically much higher. 15 years ago we would have never seen a 23 year old as the CEO of a company valued at 15 billion dollars. While my vantage point even within the business market is narrow, as I think in relation to technology I still believe it applies across the board. Now it no longer takes 20 years in business , learning from your experiences and mistakes, to have the knowledge and ability to run a large company. In fact, in some cases that may be a hinderance, because you will expect that your previous experiences have prepared you to handle the situation, which you may not view as different. The difference in today’s world is that businesses, the ones that will at least be around in 5, 10, and 20 years are the ones that manage to adapt to change extremely quickly.

But I digress, I’m starting to find it increasingly more difficult to determine what the balance is between creating and consuming content. I read on average 200 blog posts per day, while posting an average of two. I see and read an average of 500 tweets per day, while posting an average of 4. I listen to and watch an average of 3 podcasts per day, and publish none. Meanwhile I find myself having a variety of conversations about all the things I read, yet few of these are web communications, or at best over IM. While there should always be a learning curve in getting familiar with an industry space or domain expertise, and what point should it tip so you can become a publisher of content.

More specifically I’m curious what the current actual positions of those are that consume and those that publish both currently and from a long term perspective. You see because I consume content does it make me more likely to take and readily apply that. Or because I am polishing and publishing content does it mean when I interact with others it will be more polished, perhaps allowing me to sell better.

Really it’d be great to get some sort of focus group stats around this. . . Technorati Tags: content, twitter, blogs, publish, consume