I picked up a cool headline from Mathew Ingram's (Globe and Mail) blog : Josh is wrong — geeks totally rule!

Ads by AdGenta.comAnything about geeks ruling usually gets my attention.  Must be a like-seeking-like thing.  Regardless the point of Mathew's article was commenting on Josh Kopelman's article, 53,651 (the number of Techcrunch RSS subscribers at that moment).  Josh's thesis is that he's getting a tremendous number of pitches based on the idea of being like Flickr or del.icio.us ... and based on the massive influx of subscribers a mention (favourable) on Techcrunch can garner.  His closing thoughts are right on the money:

As I evaluate new startups these days I’m finding it harder and harder to see the big ideas that will appeal to a large, non-geek consumer audience.  Thoughts?

Mathew's commentary expands on some of the real geek truisms.  We sign up for betas like trading cards.  Ooh did you get an invite for this?  Hey can you spot me an invite for that?  But, just because geeks swarm to it, does it make it not a good business?

This is a great point, as my friend Paul Kedrosky and others, including VC Brad Feld, have noted. Most of the 50,000 people are probably just like me — they sign up for everything that comes along (as though there were a giant score sheet somewhere recording how many “invite-only” betas we have all managed to get access to) — use it maybe once or twice and then in most cases completely forget about it.

Not all that long ago, most people probably thought Google was just some geeky website with a stupid name, and I was likely one of the 50,000 or so who started using it early on because it was better — qualitatively better — than everything else. Obviously, every Digg.com clone isn’t going to become Google, but that doesn’t mean those 50,000 early-adopter geeks won’t turn out to be right.

So, based on Josh's commentary and question, what's unique out there?  Well if you're basing a business model on toppling Flickr or del.icio.us ... I'd think again.  Getting traction in social networking seems to be one of the hardest things.  I see two areas that are growing, collaboration and tools that allow people to make money via advertising.

The rest?  I think we're all waiting for the next Google or Flickr.

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