Stock and Flow:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as inter­esting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people dis­cover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Not sure what to think about this. On the one hand, Return on Assets is falling (via Tim Kastelle’s blog):

Which means we’re moving an emphasis on knowledge stock to knowledge flow:

We are moving from a world where the source of strategic advantage was in protecting and efficiently extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks – what we know at any point in time.  As knowledge stocks depreciate in value at an accelerating pace, the focus of economic value creation shifts to effective and privileged participation in knowledge flows. Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important. Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside, gaining access to the most useful knowledge flows requires reaching beyond the four walls of any enterprise.

But, on the other, it makes little sense to be unbalanced. You need both in your life, apparently:

Here’s a case study: my pal Alexis Madri gal here in SF has got the stock/flow bal ance down. On one end of the spec trum, he’s a Twitter natural and a Tumblr adept. Madrigal’s got mad flow; you plug in, and you get a steady stream of inter est ing stuff every day. But on the other end of the spectrum—and man, this is just so important—he’s working on a deep, nuanced history of green tech in America. He’s work ing on a book intended to stand the test of time.

What to do? What’s fairly clear is that all the personal productivity tips are focused on one or the other. How do content strategists deal with this? How does business deal with it? In my head, Chris Brogan is a Flow guy and Merlin Mann is a Stock guy. (Actually, neither of them are ‘guys’ as such, more ‘people to think with’.)

The worst worst worst thing about my procrastination on the web – my flow – is that it keeps making me happy. I can’t help but compare it with buying stuff (stock) and buying experiences (flow):

… satisfaction with material purchases tends to decrease over time, whereas satisfaction with experiential purchases tends to increase.

There’s probably something obvious I’m missing here.

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