Josh Kopelman and Scoble are among those chewing on the Real World vs the 53,651 question.

Out here in the real world, people are just looking for tools that work in real world ways. That's what the Carmany story is about.

Notice that on first reference in my column I call Sandy's Place a web site, and then a diary, and only then a blog. There's a reason for that. Jargon and insidery lingo (and yes, eye-rolling geeks, "blog" is just emerging from those categories in the wide world) that play at Arrington's crib lose people quickly out here.

Geeks matter, they are the canaries in the coal mine. But they can also swoon over concepts and fall in love with technologies and products that will enter the mass market only as components or features of other technologies and products.

I love TechCrunch, I'm grateful to the people who live and breathe this stuff, and one of the cool things about blogging and related phenomena is that they give the wider world a window into that microcosm and the geeks an interface with the rest of us.

A related thought: If you want to create a mass-market product, you need a mass market. But the browser-based searchable Long Tail world is not necessarily about mass markets. So if I'm a VC, or working at Microsoft, some of this stuff may not be for me...but that's far from being the whole story.