On Quitting While You’re Ahead

META-SPLOSION! Yesterday I saw a blog dedicated to a blog - and it was climbing up the Y Combinator front page. JWB’s blog will summarize Joel on Software’s many lessons down to one sentence per essay. While this may not sound like a useful exercise, it’s a great way to index the thousands of essays written by software guru Joel Spolsky. Spolsky recently wrote that he was hanging up his blogging hat.

While he started Joel on Software as a way to drive users to Fog Creek Software, the now famous programmer / blogger finds that maintaining the property requires 1/3 of his time.

QUITTING WHILE THE GETTING’S GOOD


Said Spolsky, “My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear and eye path on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows - how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel.”

While Spolsky’s single channel has earned him a number of contracts and more than 1 million unique visitors per month, his decision to concentrate on new markets is an interesting one. Says Spolsky,”It can’t be about you. It has to be about your readers, who will it’s hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.”

Complaining about Noise is Noise
Streets of Plenty

We just watched the movie Streets of Plenty - a documentary about a coddled College kid who attempts to live in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for 30 days in order to experience homelessness. Given that I’d worked with a bunch of active intravenous drug users through a women’s services clinic in that same area, I was intrigued.

Once I realized the student was approaching the experiment with a “homelessness is laziness” hypothesis, I was bummed out. Obviously, after trying crack and heroin, getting a stomach virus, and sleeping outdoors under a cardboard box, the kid learns that homelessness is not easy. However, despite the sympathetic epiphany, I still can’t get over the fact that he used social services and took a warm shelter bed when someone else could have used it. After all, it was mid-December in Canada.

At least when Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy Trade Places no one loses their spot at the Salvation Army.

I realize I’ve spoiled a great deal of this movie for you, but if you’re interested in seeing the very un-Olympic side of Vancouver (and this doesn’t even touch on the issue of Vancouver’s sex trade) - the film’s 7 parts are available here.

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Gyrobike & The Importance of Pain

I just read an article about the Gyrobike. It’s a $99 dollar bike wheel that provides stability at very slow speeds. In other words, it’s a really expensive training wheel to make sure your kid doesn’t get owwies. You’re going to think I’m a bitch for saying this, but what’s wrong with letting your kid wipe out?

If you’ve never experienced pain or embarrassment, then you probably aren’t a fully developed human being. The first time I went to a tech networking event, a minor web celebrity treated me like shit and I spent the rest of the evening doing shots and then eventually, crying in the bathroom. It was this first humiliation that gave me the resilience to ignore the rampant social disorders of tech industry workers and get to the substance of the human beings standing before me. Today, when someone is being a dick I tell them so playfully and with a smile on my face. Once you learn to recover from unpleasant moments in business and in life, you can rise above them and learn how to become a more productive person. I’m not telling people to send their kids to an island with a piece of flint and a knife. I’m just saying a little bit of controlled pain might be good for everyone.

I’m Wearing Pants…and an Additional Hat

For the last week my usual blogger cave of pajamas and dirty cereal bowls has been dormant. Instead, I’ve been scheduling my ReadWriteWeb posts, showering and making my way to SOMA every morning before 10am. In other words, I am putting on pants.

THE STORY
In 1999, only 2 years after Larry and Sergey had renamed the BackRub search engine to the now search-giant Google, brothers Pirouz and Peyman Nilforoush turned their love of blogging into a business. From a basement in the Toronto burbs, the two decided that in addition to working on their own properties, they’d offer hosting services to a network of indy gaming, entertainment, music and tech blogs. In exchange for all their hard work, they received ad space and revenue share. A decade later they’ve got 200 major tech and consumer electronics partners, deals with major manufacturers like Sony and Verizon and more than 120 million unique visitors per month. That company is now known as NetShelter and I’m happy to say that as of this week, those brothers are my bosses.

WEARING 2 HATS
I’ve just taken a position as NetShelter’s Senior Social Media and Publishing Strategist. While I’ll keep contributing as a writer to ReadWriteStart, my daytime gig will be working under the direction of former CNET Editor in Chief and GM of Yahoo! Tech, Patrick Houston. Patrick is already teaching me about the wonderful world of publishing, and soon I’ll become a resource for publishers like MacRumors, SlashGear, the IEEE and IntoMobile. For the next couple of weeks, instead of producing a ton of public content, I’ll be sponging up everything I can learn from NetShelter’s many publishers and staff.

I’ll keep checking my RWW email, but if you’ve got a breaking story, the best way to pitch them is to email tips[at]readwriteweb[dot]com. If you want to chat about NetShelter, email me at dana.oshiro[at]netshelter.net or better yet, hit me up on Twitter at @suzyperplexus. Huzzah to a new year and a new gig!

Foundry Group’s Brad Feld recently posted a video where individuals in Time Square were asked whether or not they knew the difference between a browser and a search engine. Lucky for search-giant (and now Chrome creator) Google - most did not. The video of the mistaken search engine had the blogosphere in an uproar as the tech-savvy marveled at what they believed to be the stupidity of the masses.

It reminded me of Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans” series in a which a CBC television personality interviews Americans and gets them to comment on fake Canadian factoids. As a Canadian myself, I know how much Canucks love this program. While many believe that Canada’s favorite pastime is hockey, it is in fact making fun of Americans. The stereotype (at least in Canada) is that Americans are less intelligent than their northern neighbors. However, it seems to me that intelligence has little to do with both the Canadian and the browser exercise. It’s more a reflection of the sad fact that most people outside of the realms of tech and Canada just don’t feel the need to care about either subject.

Using a basic web cam on augmented reality markers, the varied space between the two markers prompts different sound and feedback with the idea that the entire process is creating a new type of musical instrument. I think this idea would be even cooler if it were recreated using 3 phones: 1 as the video camera and the other 2 as the markers. In this way you could come together with your friends for a collaborative tabletop music experience.

Intimacy and Search

When a woman is on the verge of tears and you’re having an argument, don’t stop to Google something. It will only make it worse. Don’t change your Facebook marital status to read “Married to Bitch” and don’t start a Twitter thread to rally your friends into the argument. Really intimate moments, especially fights, are best kept offline. Up until about 2003 or so, people actually understood that as common sense.

Did you know that when Larry Page and Sergey Brin first started working on Google it was originally called BackRub? In 1996 a back rub was something tender given to sick family members, colicky babies and spouses. If someone you weren’t familiar with tried to give you a back rub you would have whipped your head around and screamed, “Back off hippie!” or “Who told you to be a pervert?”

The name “Google” is less intimate. It’s the number one followed by 100 zeros. For someone who lives for intimate moments with the people I love, I find it strange to see my identity become so infinitely searchable through other people’s uploads. And I find it even more strange for it to be searched by anyone other than my mom and potential employers. No one’s ever really crossed the line, so it doesn’t bug me that my past thoughts and mistakes are there for everyone to see, it only bothers me that I don’t get to offer more indication as to who I aspire to be.

…Well, that and the immortalized mullet.

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Themed by: Hunson