One Way Street

I'm often impressed by some of the things Seth Godin has to say, and I've linked to a few of his blog posts here in the past. One of the things I'm less than impressed with is the fact that there's not a way to post comments on his blog.

I've had both Scott Adams and Mark Cuban respond to things I've written in the comments on their blogs. If that doesn't show off the power of the Internet, I don't know what does. The great equalizer of the Internet puts us all on the same level.

It doesn't work that way for Seth, though. He recently posted about an app he'd like to have. He called for someone to develop a non-linear presentation application that would run on the iPad, although it would work as well on any PC.

The funny thing is, what he's looking for pretty much exists already in Prezi. Now, Prezi doesn't exactly match what he describes, as he's still thinking in terms of slides and Prezi has gone to a slideless presentation design. Well, they claim it's slideless, although, you could possibly call it a one huge slide with everything on it presentation design, but it's nonlinear, nonetheless.

Maybe Seth has seen Prezi. Maybe he hasn't. With any other person that throws out an idea like this, I'd just make a comment on the blog post and point them to this existing product that closely matches what is being called for. Seth could then comment back that he's seen it, but it doesn't work for him. Or he might exclaim that he's going to go buy a bunch of stock in Prezi. Instead, he locks himself off from feedback, in spite of his persistent call to listen to one's customers.

To take it a step further, in his call to develop this killer app that he wants to buy, he set up a wiki for people to go collaborate and work out the design for the app. That's cool, until you see that he set up the wiki, and right at the top explains that he just set it up for everyone else to use to collaborate on, but he's not going to come back and check on the process or participate at all. He just wants to buy it when it hits the iTunes store.

Welcome to 1995, Seth.