Waiting for Godin

I had a catch up today with a friend of mine, and while discussing mutual assignments she mentioned she had used a quote from Seth Godin to explain something that was pretty common knowledge to anyone who had been around the Web-block awhile, but non-obvious to the new crop of entrepreneurs.

I noted that similar quotes were no doubt available from Plato onwards, via Spinoza and Grouch Marx, Yogi Berra, Peter Drucker and probably Nicholas Negroponte to boot.

She looked at me in that pitying way that very smart women have, and patiently explained that when talking to the New Media/Web 2.0 digerati, using old farts like that will kill an idea, not promote it. When in Rome, worship Roman Gods etc....

Which made me wonder - this is like a conflated Trees/Forests and Old Wine/New Bottle problem - ie an old concept cannot exist until a New new media Guru has re-phrased it. And thus, if it has not yet been re-phrased, it cannot yet exist.

So to progress, we are Waiting for Godin*

Or, to quote another Old Fogey, we are in the situation where those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. (That was from Santayana, but I am now waiting for Seth to re-phrase it )

(*I wrote this post mainly because I've always wanted an excuse to write that.... amazingly enough, Seth has recently written a post on a remarkably similar theme )