I get annoyed when people try to be profound and they’re really just being flip. I’ve learned that if you want to be profound in the blogosphere just take some conventional wisdom and flip it on its head, regardless of whether it has any backing. For example, "Small is the new big." OK, I agree that in this new distributed world where everyone can join in, being small, nimble, and participating in the conversation is a good thing. But must the phrase be so hip and what does it really mean anyway? Or take this post from Jeff Jarvis, where he describes why content is no longer top dog and it’s about people: "In our media 2.0, web 2.0, post-media, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, open-source, gift-economy world of the empowered and connected individual, the value is no longer in maintaining an exclusive hold on things. The value is in relationships." As one commenter put it to Jeff: where’s the content in this post?
Concluding thought: hipness usually distracts from the beef. Shave hipness and profundity, focus on beef. But wait, what if my idea is really profound? There is no such thing as a new idea, only variations on existing ones.