Blogger Book Club III: Everyone in the Pool, it's an e-Swim!

By Alex Shapiro

This has been a fun week of whuffie for us all. Our lively discussions about Tara Hunt's book have been picked up and tossed around by a number of other bloggers and sites this week, thus enacting the very concepts of social capital and relationship-building we've been typing about. Full circle! If any of us makes a new professional (and remunerative!) contact that came from someone clicking on the link in our by-line here, well, fess up and let folks know. It's pretty exciting to see positive whuffie in action. The proof is in the posting. Thanks for giving us all a space to hang, Molly. You are the consummate e-host.

For those of us who create, or re-create music, it's clear that the way we work isn't either/or, it's both/and. Traditional methods of building professional relationships that involve physical acts of phone calling, concert going, wine glass holding and... uh... the need to get out of those pajamas and take a shower, will always be important. Pheromones rock! There is no substitute. But all our swirling biochemicals of attraction cannot reach anyone online anywhere in the world at any time of the day or night. Social media gives us the ability to do business 24/7 and open the floodgates of opportunity even as we sleep, while a new client in New Delhi surfs the net and discovers us. Because we put ourselves and our music where it can be discovered. Gertrude Stein's famous quote about Los Angeles, "there is no there, there" can now be smartly countered by Ram Dass's "be here now." The Whuffie Factor reminds us that now, there is here, everywhere.

Molly adds:

As we make towards the door on another book club gathering and say so long, I also wanted to add my thanks to everyone for a really fun week. Appropriately, this was a whuffie-rich experience on the participant level, as well as beyond: people visited often and then spread the word by blog post, by email, by Twitter. They analyzed our analysis and added theirs to the pot.

And as always, if you have comments, complaints, or suggestions related to book club, Mind the Gap, or life in general, or know what book we should read next, please let me know!