It’s very scary indeed to see the ‘wrong’ people jumping on these bandwagons. It’s not too different from when your favourite obscure band scores a top ten hit, because how can your heart not break when a bunch of frat boys are rocking out to the Fat Dicks from Hell, drunk on watered down ‘beer’ and failing to understand the real meaning of the lyrics and the significance of that bass line?

But just as with those situations, you just have to get over it. People far and wide are proclaiming that they “get it” when they clearly do not, but time will show them up.

As for capitalising on things, I think that a lot of people sense that commercial efforts at blogging, wikis, RSS, podcasting, etc are not right, but they can’t put their finger on what it is. Very rarely is the error in the fact that it is an attempt to reap financial gain, but a fundamental flaw in the understanding they believe they have into how these things work. Some of the biggest flops in this new media world come from those whose grasp of the underlying principles and implications is about 80% - not bad at all, and downright advanced compared to the vast majority of the population. But in that missing 20% often lies the difference between providing genuine value to ‘consumers’ (blech) and implementing efforts that are overconcerned with processes and short term benefits.