Following the thread of my last post where I wrote that Tech Blogging is like …. Expressionistic Art - its also true that the sheer number of Tech Companies that are being spawned, quickly valuated, then crashing can be seen as another Tech Bubble, much like the one we had in 1999 - 2000, that "popped".

I prefer to think of sheer number of tech startups, not as a bubble, but more as a "furnace" of creativity - where the best ideas and products survive.

I know it can be argued, again, that often, the best ideas don't survive - that it's the inferior ideas that often end up being successful and rewarded - it's all a matter of perspective.

Also, I had a laugh with this tune:

blog, blog, blog it all
blog it if it’s big or small

…blog even if you’re wrong
won’t you blog about this song?

But if your just putting out stuff - it will be uneven - some of it will be very good, while some won't, maybe a lot will be run of the mill - but I feel that it suits us more, especially as bloggers, to blog more, rather than less (not so much for the readers - we're blogging for our own self expression - and the world decides what's valuable, or what's not).

In fact, I wrote a post about this recently titled Interesting post on the value of Blogging and the difference between internal valuation and external valuation where

"…I began to see my work as it's own self validation - that as long as I felt I was growing, it didn't matter what anyone else thought.  At times, I let other people into my world to let them see my work, and to get some feedback on where to go next.   But I found, often, that opening oneself up to getting feedback - meant I might hear things and see things that were not easy for me - and that's been my experience of late - that ultimately, the valuation of anything lies within - in one self - when it comes to self value, self appreciation.

However, when it comes to valuation in the world - which is less important to me now - and this is something I did share with some, including Conversation Agent, valuation comes from the concept of as Social Network - of  a community of influentials that assigns value.

In other words, it's the community that decides, from an external point of view, what's valuable and what's not - while it's up to the artist, or blogger, to decide the value of their work (to themselves).  The valuation we put on our own work does not often translate to the value the "World" puts on our work. 

For example, in an excerpt from my post below on Interesting post on the value of Blogging and the difference between internal valuation and external valuation I am comparing, in a way, Van Gogh's self portrait, worth Several Million Dollars, with my own self portrait - which at this time, is "un-valued".  In my mind, my painting could be as good, in it's own way, at the Van Gogh portrait - but I stress - that it's "in my mind" - not the "World's" opinion.   In the World's opinion, Van Gogh's painting is worth millions of times more than mine - but what created that opinion ….Influentials - Community, often done after the artists and initial critics passed on:

Marshall Sponder, Self Portrait, 2007

"…And I'll end this long post with an analogy - that the value of anything - external value - that is - is set by how it's valued by others (while internal value - is what we assign and should never be influenced by externals).  If I do an artwork, and its sold to an art dealer for 10,000 dollars -that artwork has been elevated to a value of 10K because someone bought it.  But to cement that value - other dealers and perhaps, museum curators would need to agree, and also buy other works.

Van Gogh - Self Portrait Drawing

Here's the thing - it takes influentials in any field to create external value - and while that can be gamed in the short term (IE: the Art Market could be "fixed" to inflate value of certain works or artists) in the long term, it can't be.

When I think about artists who are well known now, I can't think of many that did not emerge through a group, that didn't have friends that also were famous, that didn't have champion art collectors what saw first - and bought low and then sold high.

The point being that internal valuation is from within - while external valuation and recognition comes from the agreement of communities, of social networks, ultimately of influentials -
and that translates, eventually, to large scale adoption, name recognition, etc.

Bringing this all back to the point of the TechCrunch post on Bubble 2.0: The Video - we create what we create - we think it's the best we can do - but it's the world, in this case, the Tech Investors, the User Community - that actually decides value, as far as the external world in concerned.

Our job, as Artists, Bloggers and Tech Creators/Inventors is to produce as much as we can - where the "gems" will come out along with "coal" (which, under sustained pressure, becomes a diamond).