A surprising stat - to me - reveals what the Web can do to spread a talk or an idea

When I spoke at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google headquarters in Silicon Valley at the end of September, I decided I would try to share my presentation immediately afterward on the Web. It was the first time I'd done anything like that. It required recording my talk as a video beforehand and posting it to Vimeo, scheduling a blog post on this blog with the text of my talk and using Slideshare to post copies of the Keynote slides I used for the presentation.

Well, in 15 days, the half-hour video on Vimeo has been played 5,716 times. Now, of course I understand that doesn't mean everybody made it to the end. But still, the number amazes me. On Slideshare, 861 people have viewed the presentation. And the page on my blog with the text of the speech has been viewed 8,146 times. It's hard to imagine how difficult it would have been to reach an audience of that size with such a talk only a decade ago, but my guess is I would have had to go on the lecture circuit for a year to reach a similar number of people. And I kind of doubt I would have wanted to do that or that many groups would have invited me. Now, people can grab what I did and use it for their own means. I think this development represents such an improvement. Access. Access. Access.

I'm going to do the same thing when I speak on Oct. 22 at the Webcom 2009 conference in Montreal. My title for that talk is, "Did the Internet kill the Rocky Mountain News? And, if it did, what can we learn from its death.?"

The Twitter answer in 140 characters to those questions is the following: YES and no. Internet the fundamental cause of death. Economic collapse the final blow. Denver could not support two general interest papers.