Success Manifesto

Today I went to an panel on blogging, politics, and personal voice. The panel was moderated by Jeff Jarvis and consisted of:

1. John Aravosis - Writer and political consultant specializing in using the Internet for political advocacy
   
2. Cam Barret - Created the Clark Community Network
   
3. Jen Chung - Edits the Gothamist
   
4. Jay Rosen - Chair of the Journalism Department at NYU
   
5. Douglas Rushkoff - I follow his blog and just read his book, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, which I highly recommend. It will make you look at religion in a new way.
   
6. Julian Sanchez - Assistant editor of Reason magazine

The main idea I found fascinating was that the costs of finding like-minded people have been on a dramatic decline as a result of blogs and the Internet. What occurred to me then was that the bottleneck in building strong relationships has moved from finding the right people to perhaps finding the right people locally. While it may be easier than ever to find a like-minded person that lives hundreds of miles away, how easy is it to actually build a really close relationship when you see each other once a year, if that? Wouldn't you rather meet a like-minded person that lives close to you, one that is part of your local community?

It seems that search engines are catching on to this idea as both Google and Yahoo are beta-testing local search services. I guess these moves are not surprising when about 25% of online buyers look for local merchants (Bizrate and The Kelsey Group).

Ironically, it seems that the Internet, which is a global medium, may also have a huge impact on how communities function locally by connecting people that are geographically close to each other in new and meaningful ways. Due to lack of expertise, I will not try expound on what I think this means. However, the consequences for politics, volunteerism, personal happiness, and commerce seem like they could be large, very large.