Epic Wins on Evoke

I've been on the urgenEvoke network now for 2 full days and I have already experienced 2 Epic Wins! I thought I'd share these with you, and ask if you would share yours with everyone as well. I'm suggesting we use the tag EPICWIN: in the post titles that tell about our personal epic wins. Here are mine:


1. Within minutes of making my first post here, which took me only a few minutes after reading the "missions" and picking one that I had some ideas on, I had feedback from one of the most active members on the site.

Here's my first post w/ feedback:
http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/selfpowering-cordless-mouse

I got this feedback by reading a post my first commenter made, whom I found by using the Leaders tab at the top of the site. This is the leader I connected with first when getting here:

http://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/2p6lv4973vkir

Here's the post I read of his which helped me understand the spirit of the community here

http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/so-you-want-a-bunch-of-po...

To my surprise, after reading that post, and a few of his others which gave me an appreciation for who he was, I followed his advice and made a comment on one of his blogs. I figured it would be like Facebook or other social networking sites, where users are relatively passive. However, within minutes of me making a comment on his blog (note I didn't even send him a message directly), he came and made a constructive comment on mine. Well this was EPIC to me. Here was a person I now knew was an active leader in the community (real world community where he is setting up a non-profit called Growcology), and a well respected member of this community. It was a little like talking to celebrity :) On top of that, I was getting real useful feedback on an idea that I had just come up with minutes before. All of this was epic in the sense that I couldn't get this anywhere else except perhaps in a University if I happen to be in a class when I have this idea, and there are other interested people willing to discuss with me (and these people will likely not have the background that the people here have). Anyways, the quick, quality response, enriched with the fact that I knew something about Nick from reading his other blog posts, all within minutes of joining the site was, well Epic to me, so thanks Evoke :)

2. My second epic win came last night. There was a post made about the "descriptiveness" of the site, as well as the "political" way that points were used. While I think there is some value in discussing this, the real value I found later, was that because this question was asked, it made everyone involved in the discussion, to really think and quantify the value and potential dangers of evoke. The question and process of coming up with your own answer was a great exercise. My answer was that as long as I'm having fun with the process, which is the thought process, and experience of talking about these blogs with others, if that's valuable to me, then if someone else benefits from some end goal they have in mind, there's nothing wrong with that. To me, for this to work well, everyone SHOULD be here to give AND RECEIVE something. That's the only way this will be a healthy society. The moment you get someone just giving or just receiving, it throws off the wh*** balance. Anyways, back to my epic win....somewhere during this heated debate, someone mentions that the creator of the site has actually just commented on the discussion....well this made me really curious...who were they talking about? So I went back and looked more carefully and found that the creator of the site had been commenting along with us. And then I noticed something funny...her name sounded familiar. So I went back to my latest blog entries and realized...she had been commenting on my blogs! Well this was very exciting to me, but something else was bothering me...I realized her name still sounded familiar, and I began thinking about how I heard about this site. It was through another amazing site Ted.com where they have videos of 17 minute talks that they ask experts to put on to get people excited about something cool in their field. Here's the one I heard about gamers which led me to this site:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_wo...

So I remembered this young woman that gave the talk, and decided to go look up here name. Guess what I found?! It was the creator of the site, and the person from the Ted Talk!!!! At this point I truely felt like I had experienced an Epic win, and just as you would if you were excited about beating a video game or something, I proceeded to be a super geek, and called all of my friends, telling them of my epic win....and they in turn told me how cool that was, and that I was a total geek. Anyways, that was just more proof for me that this was indeed an epic win ;)