Rise of the Branded Buccaneer

Sometimes you have to leave a community to find community.  Remember back in high school, there were the cool kids, the jocks, the nerds, the in crowd?  There was also a flip side to that coin.  There were the troublemakers the "out" crowd so to speak. 

In a strange way, we haven’t changed much in the way we participate in community.  It’s still a bunch of cliques.  Online, you have the bloggers, the chatters, the lurkers, and the perverts, the sports nuts, the beta testers, and the socialites, and the coders and nobody really wants to try to grip what’s going on. 

It’s in our nature to define ourselves with groups and gangs of like people.  But we rarely ever stop to consider who we are first.  We just identify and target one area that we most want to look like rather than stop, look in the mirror first and determine what it different about us in the first place and what our personal destination is.

Maybe there are Internet loners too of every category.  People who are not defined by one of the groups, but who are defined by their character and who they are.

I think there are. 

There are those few people who, yes they are in some of the different groups mentioned above, but they still stand out as being unique in their community.  The are the defining leaders of their community. 

The Rise of the Branded Buccaneer.

Those of us who have been on the Internet over the last few years blogging and writing about different topics cannot ignore that branding one’s self is the new wave of marketing.

The problem with this line of thinking is that you are are going at it alone if you let the tidal wave of ambition lead you there.  I don’t see a problem with branding one’s self.  I see a problem with the idea of trying to steer a ship of community without understanding the community you are steering. 

Before we became wise in the idea of networking, we saw the Internet as a way to share knowledge.  Now we see it as a way to express ourselves.  Tomorrow we will see it as an Identity.

We don’t have an Internet, we have a swarm.

We all have individual ideas and thoughts that conglomerate our web presence.  We are all a node of some social community.  We are social creatures after all.  But we move in loosely defined groups that range over the web like a swarm of bees, all individuals, all with our own needs and wants, but defined so closely with a group that all of our own needs have but vanished within the complex framework we have designed.

to be continued…