Within the bleeding edge are five different personas of early adopters who all spread the word from the epicenter: The Pebble, Swimmer, Surfer, Boater, or with the Fleet itself. It is a cute but telling mechanism to divide how we all consume technology, care of Jeremiah Owyang’s blog post here.

He says: “I watch these early adopters, watch how they break tools, and then I adopt. I mainly want to understand these tools so my clients won’t have to break them, but rather use them right.”

I try to operate on all five levels, depending on the particular tech, but try to be a pebble on many of the networking and security ones. The trick is not to be swept away by a tidal wave of misery when those pebbles sink to the ocean bottom.