Paul Boutin writes in Wired via Valleywag that you should kill your blog. In my humble opinion, he's right and wrong. You shouldn't kill your blog, but you should recognize the role that it plays in a larger ecosystem of information and if you really want people to read it, you have to get it out into that ecosystem. Saying that you shouldn't write a blog because there are a bunch of professional sites out there hogging the spotlight is like saying that you shouldn't write a book because there are a bunch of professionals clogging up the New York Time's bestseller lists.

You may never have the a spot on their list of the 25 highest selling books, but that doesn't mean that your book is a failure and a waste of time to write. You have a smaller audience than Stephen King. You have a smaller audience than the Huffington Post. But you have an audience, and if you want to grow your business, you want to increase the size of that audience. Getting people to read your blog on your site is difficult. The people who come to your website are more than likely already a part of your network. Getting new people to your site isn't even the important thing to consider. Getting your ideas and your message out into the wild, that's where the honey pot is at.

If you write about Social Entrepreneurship, is your blog listed on AllTop's Social Entrepreneur page? Is there a Squidoo page about your cause? Is there a group of like-minded folks who blog about the same corner of the universe that you do? Connect with them. Blog with them. Link to their blog postings from your blog.

In a couple of years I expect to see someone write a similar article about how you shouldn't Twitter anymore because the professional Tweeters are hogging the spotlight, and you should do the hot new thing instead. Information is information, regardless of the method of delivery. Getting your information noticed is the trick. There are some new tricks of the trade out there, but they shouldn't be seen as replacements for the "old" 2004 blogging way of doing things. They are new ways of marketing your ideas.

Can you sum up what you do in 144 characters? Great! Use Twitter. Do you also have more in depth information that you would like to convey? Great! Use Twitter to drive people to your blog and expound on your ideas there. Do you have something even more profound and/or complex to expound upon? Great! Write a book, get it published, blog about it, tweet about it and see what happens. Become a part of a network of like minded people and share your ideas with them. Get them to tell other people about your ideas. About your tweet, your blog, your book. Put it out there in as many different ways as you can.

Let other people worry about what hot new trend is taking the place of yesterday's hot new trend. You've got better things to do, and lots of different ways to share your thoughts and experiences with the people who are going to help you the most.

This world we live in can be a frivolous place, and that's fine. There's a place for silliness, and as I said in my previous post, there are benefits to time spent just farting around. Sometimes, however, enough is enough. With world financial markets creating a gust of dust bowl nostalgia around the world, I am having a harder time dealing with silliness as a business model.

The developer of iBeer, an iPhone app that allows you to simulate the ingestion of beer without quenching your thirst or becoming inebriated, is suing Coors for making the copycat iPint app. (The developer, Hittrix, also makes the non-alcoholic and calcium free iMilk.) How much are they suing for? $12,500,000. For virtual beer infringement. Really? $12.5 Million? For virtual beer? I can see their business plan now. "We'll make an app that a beer company can rip off, and then sue them when they do! For millions! Then, we'll go after Big Dairy! Muwahahahaha!"

All the great minds that work on application development for the web, for the iPhone and for social networking platforms such as Facebook... and what we keep seeing are things like iBeer. Tim O'Reilly has noticed this, and Om Malik talked about it at the recent Start conference. Most of what is resulting from all of the incredible connective tissue that has evolved for use on the web is frivolous fluff at best. Again, it's not that I mind fluff. I love fluff. And may I just say that if you don't have Social Edge flair on Facebook yet, you really should get over there and grab it?

There are of course serious things that are being worked on, but a lot of that is engineering that allows other people to create things. That's what Facebook Apps are, and a lot of Google's developer functionality and things like Ning. Even Twitter. It's not about the technology but about how we use it. Right now, we're using it to turn iPhones into lighters or to send virtual chocolate to each other via Facebook.

There's more to life than this. We're better than this, aren't we? We are. The media, both new and traditional, have noticed that Kiva is doing something different. It's not about the technology but in how it is being applied. It's about the creative use of the tools that are available to us.  Maybe way, way, way back in the day a group of Homo habilis used tools to help prepare food while Neanderthals used tools to create Pleistocene era virtual food, something like iCarrion, or iDeer.

 So the point of my soapbox rant? Well, maybe that if we start concentrating our energies on creating products and services with purpose rather than with cols hard cash as the only objective, we'd all be a lot richer.