Through this video, I learned about The Myth of Innovation, by Scott Berkun, so I bought the book.

The first chapter is about the myth of the epiphany. It’s a subject covered in the video, and I’m only half way through the chapter, but the theme started me thinking about epiphanies I’ve had over the years. I’m going to share them because I think they both show the importance of epiphanies and how none are all that big, but might also demonstrate how small insights can lead to important business model changes.

• When I first joined the online world, I signed up for SPJ-L, then moderated by Jack Lail. Jack constantly struggled to keep the list on target. From that experience, I learned how important it was to manage virtual communities and guide members toward mutual respect and staying on topic for the sake of a healthy community. But the main thing I learned, as I did from Steve Outing‘s Online-News, is how powerful a community could be that is organized around a passionately shared interest.
• When I created RV-Talk for AGI (essentially the seeds of my later business, RVClub.com), I learned that shared passion wasn’t limited to a certain net-friendly demographic. The average age of RVClub.com in 1997 was 55. I learned it was more about people with a shared interest than it was technology.
• When I became serious about blogging in 2002, it seemed obvious early on that what made us all smarter wasn’t the Big-J news story, but the conversation that went on around the story — all of the smart, informed, experienced people who could extend the story with their expertise. From there, it wasn’t big leap to buy into Dan Gillmor’s “journalism as a conversation.”
• When Hollywood came to Ventura to shoot Swordfish, we decided to buy a bunch of disposable cameras (digital cameras were still rarely owned) and hand them out to movie fans. The resulting slide shows were quite popular. I realized then that something that would later become known as UGC had a place in journalism. This realization would be confirmed again after the advent of digital cameras when there was a large fire in Ventura County, a flood in Ventura County and our use of Buzznet for photo sharing.
• One day in early 2004, right after I became director of the Star’s web site, I was running various web site traffic reports. I noticed that there were two big spikes and a couple of small, but noticeably more pronounced, dips in traffic. The spikes were two big local stories, and the dips coincided with the dates of large national stories (one was the invasion of Iraq, which we covered heavily on the web, including using blogs). It was then that I realized that local newspaper web sites had no brand for national news. When the big stories hit, people go to CNN or NYT or WaPo, but not 100K newspaper sites, even local people. From that lesson, I devised the strategy of pushing down generic AP stories and promoting regular updates of local news. At the time, it was pretty much an unheard of strategy for the average newspaper.com.
• Also in 2004, we introduced comments on stories on VCS.com. At the time, no newspaper sites I knew of had comments on stories — though it had been tried before. In an effort to “just get it done,” I supplied an online editor with some JavaScript from HaloScan and we launched comments. Within a few days, we had some great comments on stories about the mother of a murder suspect and a tiger prowling Simi Valley. The comments extended the story and helped make us all better informed. This truly was “journalism as a conversation.” This was the real power of participation. Of course, we would also soon discover the dark side of an open commenting system (racial idiots spewing hate, for example), but that reminded me of the value of community controls, which helped create the system now in place on Bakersfield.com (the primary reason I moved to Bakersfield was to launch a true community site welded to a newspaper site).
• Discovering Clayton Christensen and his ideas behind disruption and innovation greatly influenced much of my approach to just try things, get things launched, don’t wait around for the perfect moment to do the perfect thing. This was a radical change of attitude for me, and one that took me a year to really embrace.
• Two books read closely together welled up into an epiphany about how people use the web. First was The Search by John Battelle, and the second was Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. Everything I’ve been involved with related to newspaper.com design since has been informed by the ideas of the “intention-driven web” and keeping navigation simple and obvious.
• The first-time that I saw the Numa Numa Dance, and knew that millions of people had already watched it, I realized that broadband penetration was sufficient to make video an important strategic consideration. It seems quint now, doesn’t it?
• The first time I watched a video from an online producer for a newspaper (Anthony Placencia, for VCS.com), and I sat there thinking, “this is no good because it’s not like TV,” and then the gentle, slowly set up moment of a boat’s keel touching the water, and really giving the story its gentle climatic moment, I realized, “web video SHOULD NOT be like TV.” The video was far more powerful than anything I could imagine a TV producer putting together.
• When we started rolling out video in the VCS newsroom and reporters became more engaged in the web site than they had been before, I realized video was the gateway drug for journalists that we needed to care about keeping our web site updated. Everybody loves video and the idea of producing video themselves, because we all grew up with it.
• When Jack Lail first shared with me Random This and the power of the Sony Cybershot, I realized that video need not be overly produced to be highly effective.
• After I arrived in Bakersfield and started supplying those same Sony Cybershots to reporters and the feedback from the news room was, “these are great because they’re not bulky like camcorders” I saw the path toward getting reporters involved in video.

Everything else I’ve done in the past 24 months or so have really been epilogue. They’ve been about coalescing and refining these insights.

Maybe Mr. Berkun wouldn’t consider those moments epiphanies, but they were all moments in my career that shape my strategic thinking today.

Here’s a suggestion for other media bloggers: Post your own string of epiphanies and how they’ve shaped your current media thinking.