The Social Network film and what it says to bloggers, online publishers

28 December 2010

The Social Network was one of my favourite movies of 2010, needless to say it was something I looked at a couple of times. The story speaks volumes to entrepreneurs and geeks, and anyone who has an idea, or knows of one that could be improved, that others might find cool.

It was also a film, that through many of its lines, also spoke I thought, to bloggers and online publishers. While a lot of lines could be quoted in a variety of contexts, here are a few that I thought were especially relevant to writers working online.

I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs.

The blogosphere has its own variation of the final clubs — the undergraduate social clubs of Harvard University — though such things don’t appeal to everyone… I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. In other words always do your own thing.

I shouldn’t have written that thing about the farm animals. That was stupid. But I was kidding for gods sakes. Doesn’t anybody have a sense of humor?

Humour is subjective… anyone who has been writing online for even a short period of time will appreciate this comment.

The internet’s not written in pencil. It’s written in ink.

Ain’t that the truth? Need I say more.

It won’t be finished. That’s the point. The way fashion’s never finished.

If you’re onto a good thing you’ll be doing far more than merely writing and posting articles.

We don’t even know what it is yet. We don’t know what it is. We don’t know what it can be. We don’t what it will be. We know that it is cool. That is a priceless asset I’m not giving up.

Never underestimate the value of cool in the rush to monetise, or turn a profit.

He was right. California’s the place we’ve gotta be.

You might already live in California, but that’s not the point, your blog could seriously take you places and you need to be ready to move with it.

We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re gonna live on the internet!

I suspect bloggers and online publishers realised this well before Facebook came along.

Originally published Tuesday 28 December 2010, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.