I figured that this was a universally recognized trend in the Valley. When you live on the leading edge of the tech, you’ll always be riding these little bubbles. This is true of new programming languages, new hardware and new methodologies in general. Tons of technologies will die in their little bubbles before they reach “the masses”.

So if the various online social activities I’m involved in don’t really build much value outside of personal gratification, where is the value?

Your value is information processing. Somebody needs to live “in the bubble” and “report back” to the real world every once in a while. You don’t always need to be “first to the punch”, you just need to be the “definitive resource”.

If you can separate good tech from bad tech, if you can identify where each tech belongs in various industries, then your brain is ridiculously valuable.

So when all is said and done … who will really end up the winners?

The ones who can actually leverage and manage this morass of information. The job done by Tech Crunch will soon become an “information commodity”, just like hardware is now a “commodity” and software flirts with that status. What’s not a commodity (and likely won’t be) is the technology that converts information in to dollars. Right now, that technology is solely stored in the human brain.

Convert data into dollars and you end up the winner.