Forget the Rules — The SoCon 07 opening session.

My summary of the opening conversation at SoCon:

Firefox v Explorer, or why do I have to develop for both. yawn…

The most important thing about building communities is :
a) We can make money from it.
b) We can make social change.
c) We can gain audience.

Debate repetitively with passion. To show you have great passion…talk louder.

yawn again…

Waffle House v Gourmet.

I love Waffle House! It’s taken care of me on many a night after 10 pints of Guinness. I also like gourmet. Damn it! I don’t want to choose.
I beginning to see a common theme emerge in these conferences - a deep set belief that there are some sets of rules that need to be followed.

The Journalists believe a piece is only journalism if you follow all the rules of unbiased reporting handed down from the Newspaper wisemen of a forgone era.

Another person believes that if you can’t maake money off it, you shouldn’t start building it. You gotta have a business plan…man.

Tool geeks scream — “You all must use Firefox, because Microsoft is evil and bad!!”

Screw all of these debates. Break the the rules.

Web 2.0, Media 3.0, Social Media, the Interweb(choose your buzzword) is about individuals and communication.

What do you the artist, programmer, writer, director, designer have to say to the world? What’s your Big Idea? Don’t worry about tech, there’s always somebody out there who can help with tech.

Two years ago they told us we couldn’t put a Hot or Not engine on a newspaper site. We did. The site went national.

They said we couldn’t dress man up as a manatee to interview celebrites at the parties. The feature (wasn’t a term like vlogging then) was popular and the celeberties were actually more likely to stop and talk with us.

Have a great and fun idea. F*** the rules.