I am starting a new company with a cofounder, and will thus be going dark on this blog for a while, mostly because I just have so much less time. Look for me to start a new company blog soon though; I’ll post news of that here when it’s ready. For now we’re very much in development mode!

We need to make things.
create not because we need to aggrandize ourselves, but because our social and societal DNA demands it, just as we move to create new life to continue our own. We can all create in different ways, although for some of us the burden is (must be) greater. To those with much, more is asked, more must be added.
We need to make things.
We owe our existence to an amazing accident of chance, a cosmic confluence, and every moment is a gift. Our energy dissipates with every passing moment: why give anything less than all we have to the all whom we do not have.
We need to make things…. Not shiny perfect new things but real, honest, flawed but trying, pretty, elegant, lucky, almost, perfect-for-us things. Things that will live on in the world after we do not, but that also live in the world in a way that we do not. Faith and hope are guides but by themselves they are not enough. We need to make things.

Clearly very few people are currently hanging on my every word, disappointed that I haven’t posted much on my blog recently… but regardless, I do promise I will post more soon. I’m working on a few very interesting things that are occupying most of my time, not least of which is moving things along at Consorte Media. Things are going great — I’m currently looking for an entry level online advertising associate, someone smart from a top 10 school who is graduating now would be perfect. Email me at rob at consortemedia.com if you are such a person or know such a person!

The edge is where life happens. That point where something ends and something else begins - sometimes sudden, scary and steep - the edge adds meaning and forces consequence. Believing can carry us a long way, but belief is not enough. Emotion, action and energy: overcome that prickly blue black fear that floats wispily above, a menacing whisper warning us when we drift too far from the fat, juicy center. At the edge you are alive, and you can think differently, see that which is different, those things that are the difference between is and not, before and after, you and I.

Most things we think of as edges are false horizons — those sand-drawn lines we thought we could not cross, we tiptoed up to and then when we were able to cross them we laughed at ourselves and left them behind! Maybe we come to realize, the more we move toward the edge, the more it moves away from us, that our idea of what it was has changed, that we have changed.

Besides - every edge is indeed an end, but also, a beginning.

I have returned to the US - I’m back from visiting South Africa, and so I’ll start posting more regularly (I did actually have wireless broadband access when I was there for a lot of my trip, I just really didn’t feel like posting!).

I had the chance to play at the Arabella Golf club in Kleinmond with Vinny Lingham, it was spectacular (though of course my score was certainly not… those are some narrow fairways!).

Weird. The entry I posted about Tagged.com’s traffic figures is now number 4 on Google when you search for Tagged.com- and I have seen several hundred visits over the last four weeks coming as a result of searches for “tagged.com”, “www.tagged.com” and even “tag.com”. Just goes to show that it’s still possible to have your blog get random traffic (by the way, thanks to Google Analytics for the free traffic analysis!).

“To mourn a mischief that is past and gone is the next way to draw new mischief on.”

Othello, Act I, Scene III by William Shakespeare

So bear with me if I have delays on getting my newfound more regular posting up and running…

I had a good conversation last week with a well-known online advertising blogger, who told me that he detests writing his blog, that he would rather go to the dentist. But, he does it — it’s helpful for his career, and presumably his employer gets value out of it as well as he is seen as a well-known industry figure and resource that they can claim as their own. It made me think a bit more about my attitude towards writing and writing blog entries in particular.

I’m currently reading “Hedgehogging” by Barton Biggs (no, I’m not going to link it, use your favorite search engine!) and he also talks about writing every day as a discipline, as a way to have a record of things that happened and to make him examine in more detail later what he was thinking at the time. Of great value to a professional investor, but I do think this is something valuable and worthwhile for others — in a way I’ve thought sometimes that I could go back through the emails I wrote at the time to remember what I was thinking, what was going on and that’s true to an extent, but you’re not really trying to summarize the important bits and so it is just an unmanageable mess.

I really liked blogging when I was working at Jupiter - I enjoyed it far more than actually writing the longer, more studiously researched reports — and I also liked the interactions that were fostered, the discussion and feedback. I also think we did and do waste a lot of time talking about the same stuff that’s in the New York Times or WSJ and not injecting enough original thought into our writing, so when I do write I want to provide something of actual value, not just some hyperlinks to well-known stories (unless of course you have a different and unconventional take on things).

So dear reader(s?), I will attempt to force myself to find time and write more frequently - just like getting your 30 minutes of exercise every day (studies show…), it is not as painful and annoying as going to the dentist but certainly it requires some effort and I will attempt to extend some in sharing my thoughts with the world on a more regular basis!

Putting a job listing on craigslist in the Bay Area often solicits a flood of good resumes, often just a flood. Speaking of a flood, I was somewhat amused by the following catachresis (mixed metaphor) from a foreign candidate’s cover letter:

I want to get my hands really wet with technology

I have to say, sometimes it’s the small things. I thought this was great, worth a smile.

If you can handle 30 blog postings per day at around 150 words or less apiece, you might be able to be a top blogger, at least if these analyses are to be believed. Well of course it’s more complicated than that, but it appears that blogging for the masses seems to work best when it is short and rapid commentary on other posts and events. Blogging is about rapid and repeated review and contextual repetition of content by (hopefully) smart individuals with (hopefully) interesting points of view.

I’m currently “reading” the audiobook version of recently-released book Freakonomics which is getting a lot of buzz. Excellent - highly recommended for just about everyone who would probably be reading this blog (or any blog I guess). They have their own website as well with a blog (who doesn’t these days it seems?). It’s much much better than Blink (which was kind of a “so-what” experience unfortunately) and I love the graphic of the apple/orange…

Back in 1995, while in college at Dartmouth, I wrote a short story (not a great one IMO but a few neat ideas therein) for an English class. The story was entitled “Source” and explored the concept of a vast program/database into which all humans were ‘encoded’, taken apart piece-by-piece by nanotech machines. Well, read the story if you want to find it all out: but basically I do see certain minor similarities between some of ideas and the Wachowski Brothers’ recent Matrix trilogy. “Source” is actually mentioned in episodes 2 and 3 of the Matrix.

So, here you go in PDF format is my Matrix-esque short story written just over 2 years before this June 3, 1997 draft script of The Matrix was produced. I have not made any changes, this is the original format etc. put into PDF, as faithfully transferred from my old Mac. All rights reserved, etc.

A misspent Sunday: there are several shows on television here in the US that have a strange, guilty-pleasure-type attraction to them. Many of these seem to somehow involve Las Vegas, like American Casino (on Discovery, something between a very clever PR piece and a documentary show about the operations of an actual hotel-casino) and of course the “sport” (not really) of Poker showcased in the World Series of Poker on ESPN. The point of this post, however, is that one of the final table contestants in today’s episode of WSP was Paul Phillips, who on the show is profiled as a “dot com entrepreneur” who didn’t need to work any longer and could pursue the life of a professional poker player. I discovered Paul Phillips’ LiveJournal site which is fascinating reading both about the professional poker player’s life as well as many other random musings. Paul’s postings are very colorful, not least because of his geekish background (former director of r&d for Go2Net before their acquisition by Infospace back in 2000 for lots of overpriced stock).

Here’s one of the type of “anonymous postings” that we all love to read online. This one is by the spouse of an Electronic Arts employee complaining about the 85+ hour workweeks and alleged inhumane treatment. I am not so sure it is definitely from a spouse, but it certainly makes for interesting reading. It reminds me of the days of the dotcom bust when the number one online activity was reading www.fuckedcompany.com to see the latest gossip and layoffs in the industry…