One of my first posts on How I Became Financially Independent in 5 Years “Stumbled” a few days agoright after I started blogging and I got my 15 minutes of fame. Yes, actually a few days of glory. I’m pretty sure the above story has now been read by more people in two days than I’ve gotten the entire science read in my entire career.
So what is the idea behind stumbling upon it and similar sites? The problem facing net surfers is that the internet has received a dynamic component from blogging, news reporting, etc. Since search engines are designed to index static parts of the web, they are no longer the best tool for finding the most interesting content. Instead websites are quickly grouped into what we can call “new” lists. Users then vote on the “new” list which creates a second list called “popular”. Many users only read the short “popular” list and vote for that thus increasing the numbers. So if something makes it onto the “popular” list, it can quickly become more popular as an avalanche begins. Of course it all depends on the first snowball. It’s like asking the question: Why is Paris Hilton famous? What are you famous for? He is famous for being famous.
I think most of these posts are only interesting to other bloggers because they are all about traffic, eyeballs, SEO, etc. However, there is an important observation about the whole community here. If popular acceptance is determined by a single trigger (at a time when something was not popular) what does that mean? It is the same as the origin of weather systems. Here, the wings of a butterfly can start the process that eventually turns into a hurricane. Of course there are many butterflies that flap their wings all the time and do not cause storms. However, if we focus mainly on storms, we may miss many butterflies. I enjoy exploring the “butterflies” and find a lot of wisdom in “junior” blogs and “forgotten” posts just by trawling the web. Maybe I’m old school that way? But I find the same structural flexibility when it comes to investing. A lot of thinking is based on what is popular. Ever wonder why so many people seem to get the same idea at about the same time and go on to do the same thing? Is this because of the experts? Or is it because of thinking the same way about the same information? Either way, this leads to dynamic play and bubbles that can eventually generate huge profits in the market (as long as you’re in front of the crowd). It can also lead to big losses (if you find yourself at the back of the crowd).
Try to read a new list rather than a popular list even though it is more work. You never know what gem might turn up
An even better suggestion is to ignore the “news” and start reading history instead. It is especially impossible to measure the importance of current events if they are all considered. However, stories are more popular than “context” or history. As hard as it is, try to spend 90% of the time reading history, only 9% of the time reading the news and maybe only 1% of the time reading anything popular. I didn’t manage to do that well myself, but I know a boy who managed not to go to newspapers and magazines for a whole year. I think doing so will create the impression that popularity is only a small part of the universe of events and more importantly that the “new” events are not really new and most of them are not very important as most of them have happened before. .
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First posted 2008-01-16 07:42:20.
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