Q & A with Mashable

By Alex Hillman on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 in Community, coworking with 6 Comments

I’m still really impressed by the positive response still coming in from my first post on Mashable, now a few weeks old. The team over at Mashable has also been super supportive…and excited for more.

Sharon Feder, Adam Ostrow, and myself have been corresponding about ongoing posts for Mashable, and they’ve extended an opportunity my way that I’m pretty excited about.

When Sharon came to me after my presentation at BlogWorldExpo in Vegas (co-led by my buddy Jake “CommunityGuy” McKee), her initial concept for me writing at Mashable was something that had me hooked pretty quickly. She liked how I had answered questions during our Q&A/discussion portion of the session, and wanted to harness that.

I’m stoked to announce that Mashable is giving me the opportunity to do a weekly Q&A column on their site, related specifically to social technology and community development (relevant topics for their audience, and my interests).

I’m even MORE excited that the structure of this model gives me an opportunity to mix my own answers/thoughts/opinions with interviews with other industry thought leaders. I’m personally looking forward to regularly connecting with the people who are really making great things happen, online and off, related to the topics we’re interested in.

So why am I announcing this here…not on Mashable. And why am I announcing it before I’ve got my first piece written?

Well it’s tough to do the “A” portion of the “Q&A” spot when I don’t have a backlog of “Q’s”. So we’re going to be taking submitted questions from each week’s comments section, via twitter (just @alexknowshtml in the message, I’ll get it), as well as things coming in through my comment form. Each week or so, we’ll pick one question to focus on.

I truely believe this is a great opportunity for sustainable contributions rather than me running my mouth about what I think is important. Even I get bored of that stuff. So send in your questions and let’s get this party started!

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  • http://danieldelaney.com Daniel Delaney

    That’s great! Congrats.

    Is there a specific topic or focus you’d like for the questions?

  • http://danieldelaney.com Daniel Delaney

    That’s great! Congrats.

    Is there a specific topic or focus you’d like for the questions?

  • http://alexhillman.myopenid.com Alex Hillman

    @Daniel Delaney: I’m open minded, and so is Mashable. The goal here is to widen my horizons while exploring others’ interests and providing valuable information.

    Entrepreneurship, technology, community, code, coworking, culture…are some of my own interests. But I’m just as interested in everyone else’s.

    Ask me questions that are provocative, I’m most likely to answer those.

    Ask me questions that give me a reason to interview interesting people, that’s what I want.

    What don’t I want?

    Don’t you dare ask me how to monetize your blog. Don’t you dare ask me how to get thousands of followers on twitter.

  • http://alexhillman.myopenid.com Alex Hillman

    @Daniel Delaney: I’m open minded, and so is Mashable. The goal here is to widen my horizons while exploring others’ interests and providing valuable information.

    Entrepreneurship, technology, community, code, coworking, culture…are some of my own interests. But I’m just as interested in everyone else’s.

    Ask me questions that are provocative, I’m most likely to answer those.

    Ask me questions that give me a reason to interview interesting people, that’s what I want.

    What don’t I want?

    Don’t you dare ask me how to monetize your blog. Don’t you dare ask me how to get thousands of followers on twitter.

  • http://danieldelaney.com Daniel Delaney

    @Alex Hillman:It seems to me that while the internet has definitely connected us and given us a democratic platform for voice, the amount of content we can physically consume hasn’t changed much. As a result we’ve generated a great amount of extra content… most of which gets undiscovered (thought it might be great) and a lot of which is just noise.

    So, would you share your thoughts on selectivity, noise, and voice? How do you advise we be more selective on what we intake, while not excluding or becoming ill-informed…

    Also, I recognize socially driven news services (like Digg) and algorithmically driven content feeds (such as those in Facebook) have done this a bit. But what about in other spaces… blogs and twitter, for example?

  • http://danieldelaney.com Daniel Delaney

    @Alex Hillman:It seems to me that while the internet has definitely connected us and given us a democratic platform for voice, the amount of content we can physically consume hasn’t changed much. As a result we’ve generated a great amount of extra content… most of which gets undiscovered (thought it might be great) and a lot of which is just noise.

    So, would you share your thoughts on selectivity, noise, and voice? How do you advise we be more selective on what we intake, while not excluding or becoming ill-informed…

    Also, I recognize socially driven news services (like Digg) and algorithmically driven content feeds (such as those in Facebook) have done this a bit. But what about in other spaces… blogs and twitter, for example?