Unfinished Business: June 20, 2011

This bit of Unfinished Business entails a bit of explanation; more so than I hope future installments will require. I will attempt to be succinct.

A Good Will Gesture.
As you likely know, we lost the great Clarence Clemons (left, top), the former saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band last June. I was surprised at how hard I took it. I was even more surprised at how difficult it was for me to verbalize my feelings as to why. I really shouldn’t have been so shocked, though; I’ve had difficulty in plumbing the depths of my affinity for Springsteen’s music for longer than I’ve been writing this blog.

As I’m sure he is to a lot of his fans, Springsteen has always been a borderline spiritual figure to me, not that I think the dude is god or anything, but for the extraordinary quality of his music; for what he stands for, both as a musician and as a human being; the honesty that flows from his lyrics; the raw passion that exudes from every musical pore of his being. It’s hard to summon up the words to describe the feeling that his work conveys to me — and for the longest time I tried, but couldn’t. I just couldn’t seem to do my own emotions the justice they deserved. That fact alone has hindered me from really saying much at all about him in this space; a place I originally intended to be my personal forum on the music and artists I love.

I’ve collected a lot of fond and funny memories over the years, relating to my Springsteen fandom that I’d always thought might make excellent blog fodder. However, before now I’d never managed to find the inspiration to break through that wall; to find the words that adequately described the feeling his music delivers to me. In another aborted post that I started nearly a year ago, I tried, but it simply wouldn’t come together as I’d hoped.

Then last June, Clarence died on the day before Father’s Day. I was devastated. Springsteen’s longtime friend, confidante, and musical partner in crime was a huge part of my affinity for Bruce’s music overall; his wasn’t simply an instrumental contribution that could be replaced by another sax player. To me, he was a major part of Springsteen’s musical appeal. Again, I wanted to render some kind of significant tribute; something significant to me if to no one else. A straightforward bio/career acknowledgement just wouldn’t do. It had to be more. I stumbled, struggled, and came up with nothing over two days.

Then I received a passively 'Willful’ assist from a guy I had the pleasure of meeting at a wedding I attended in 2008, who has since become one of my favorite personal bloggers. Will Stegemann (@betheboy on Twitter) offered a fun, yet poignant tribute to Clemons the day after his June 18, 2011 passing. His post shed the perfect amount of light on the dim confusion of my self-agitated bundle of emotion regarding Springsteen and the loss of Clemons.

Without spoiling the plot, the story delivers a tribute to Clemons as seen through the eyes of a sub-adolescent, as Will was at the time of his introduction to The Boss’s music. Will’s account of his own childlike sensibilities regarding his Dad’s favorite rock ‘n roll band helped to connect the dots of my over-complicated internal analysis of the place Springsteen’s work occupies in my own life. It allowed me stop thrashing about, mentally, and to look at things simply; identifying my relationship to the artist on the most basic of levels. Had I not read Will’s blog that day, there’s little doubt I’d still be wrestling with the concept even now.

Epiphanies aside, I still got hung up in parsing it all out, so the story sat unfinished for months until this week, when I finally decided to wrap it all up.

Melodramatic much? Oh, absolutely! But I embrace my inner drama queen; it’s a big part of what makes me who I am and I have no intentions to change.

I would hope, however, that after all this, you still have the intention to read this back-dated post, started on June 20, 2011, but finished just today:

Here’s to You, Big Man

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Oh-fer-August

Nope…not gunna duuh it…Wudn’t be prudent
Believe me, I know. I know my tendencies. And if you’ve read this blog or have known me for any length of time, you know ‘em too. But I’m not gonna do what I normally do in this circumstance; I’m goin’ a different way.

Once again, it’s been a while — like five and-a-half weeks — since my last post; in baseball terms I did an ‘oh-fer’ the month of August, and as you may know, my oft-repeated wont after such a lapse in content is to come out spewing apologies for my absence, particularly in view of the fact that as recently as June I publically ‘rededicated’ myself to more regular blogging.

Yeah, I know. “Wolf.”

However I’m not feeling particularly apologetic today. In fact, as much as I would like to have done the opposite, I more-or-less voluntarily took a break from social media the past month or so, partially out of necessity — and partially to see if I could really pull it off.

In retrospect, I’m kinda proud of myself for doing the right thing.

The hardest part was reducing my Twitter stream to less than a trickle. To their credit, several people actually did miss me and expressed some concern that I was in fact alright, physically, which I appreciated a great deal.

But no, I wasn’t abducted by aliens or in the hospital doin’ the H1N1 tango.

I was workin’ like a mofo.

I chose to pour all my time into two freelance web design projects I’ve been working on, the proceeds from which are vital to my family’s bottom line. I decided to give them nearly all of my attention and I must say the results have been extremely positive.

I’ll be back with links when everything is finalized (I’m still in the very final stages of wrapping up both sites), but I can’t help but admit that I’m really proud of how everything is turning out.

In the Pipeline
I’ll have to admit, however, I did cheat — just a little. I spent a couple days two weekends ago, writing the lion’s share of what will be my next multi-part post — a miniseries on the death of a well-known journalist who was a longtime friend and colleague of my brother Alex.

Hopefully, shortly thereafter, I’ll have a belatedly-posted, Mowerly Musings piece of as-yet indeterminate length, that really, I’ve been thinking about for most of this long, dreadfully hot and humid summer that we’ve had here in Middle Tennessee. It’s part ‘tolerate thy neighbor’ rant and part moral object lesson; and I hope it sounds as interesting on paper as it does right now, rattling around here inside my head. You be the judge.

Then there’s hockey. Training Camp for the Nashville Predators starts in a week-and-a-half, and the regular season, just a little more than a month from today. I’ll definitely be jumping back up on the Zamboni and previewing the Preds’ upcoming 2010-11 season on my hockey blog as well.

Ohhh…and I may have a few things to say about my daughter, Amy, and a gentleman friend of hers whom we met this Labor Day Weekend...

So yeah, I’ve been away, but it was an absence with a purpose, and my focus on work, I believe has indeed paid off (no pun intended). I look forward to engaging your comments either here, on PMFF, or on Facebook and Twitter.

The summer of my dis-CONtent, for the most part, is over.

Catch ya again real soon.


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Happy Birthday...To You.

Simulblogging
I really don’t have a lot of time to write today, so if you’ll forgive the cross-pollenization, this is a simulblog; I’m posing identically, both to All Your Blogs Are Belong to Us and Pull My Fang Finger.

This is a note directed at you who for the most part only know me as that goofy guy who wears his heart on his sleeve via his mostly sappy-yet-passionate, personal and/or hockey-related blog posts. And hopefully, you also know that I don’t take a lot of things for granted; usually going a bit overboard in my effusiveness on the various subjects I’m passionate about.

So if my PMFF readers will forgive the off-topic nature of this missive, the main reason I’m double-posting today is because I don’t want to miss anybody; I want to let all of my friends, both on Facebook, Twitter, and throughout the blogosphere, know how much I appreciate you, and how humbled I am at the many Birthday good wishes I’ve received this morning.

Yep, today is my birthday, the day I officially climb into the rarefied air of my mid-fifties. I turn 54 today, so I can no longer say with any conviction that I’m just in my ‘early’ 50s. And that’s kinda significant for people who are still in their 20s and 30s, because if they’re anything like me (and I’m pretty confident they are), they look at you pretty differently after you hit the half-century mark, and even more so as you inch closer to 60 — that magical age when everyone more-or-less officially becomes ‘old.’

I’m pretty confident that I’m as good an example as anyone in confirming the notion that ‘you’re only as old as you feel.’ And I do NOT feel any different now than I did, when I was half my current age. Oh yeah, my body reminds me — often — that I’m no longer that 20 or even 30 year-old who used to fly through the air with the greatest of ease as a gymnast, but it still hasn’t convinced me that I’m not the same person.

I only wish someone would tell that to the prospective employers who've apparently been casting my resumes into the circular file after discerning my age from viewing my job history.

Nevertheless I am indeed wiser for the years that evermore quickly seem to pass, which only intensifies my acknowledgment of the wisdom plied by George Bernard Shaw when he penned the lyric, “Love, like youth is wasted on the young.”

However, I know my love has not been wasted, nor my youth for that matter. It has taken me through a lot of stupidity and halfhearted attempts at self-definition, into a wonderful balance of accomplishment and failure; enough of both so as to fully appreciate the difference between the two; never, ever forgetting the path that brought me here.

I love my life, and the people who’ve allowed me to live it so well.

Thank you, my friends, for making this birthday and each one hereafter, a true reason for me to celebrate.

Cheers.

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Get To Know Me...Oh, Wait...You Already Do...

Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself
NOTE: As busy as I am right now, today I needed to cheat a little. This is a two year-old post that really never saw the light of day, but was to be the maiden entry in my initial attempt at blog revitalization, a boy-who-cried-wolf grand reopening of AYBABTU in January 2009. I had previously alluded to the idea in a few posts and on Twitter, and had even secured the favor of two very high-level Twitter users to promote the announcement, but subsequent difficulties with the new blog template, along with a general disillusionment with where I was actually going with this ‘AJ 2.0’ schlock kind of brought me to my senses prior to making a complete ass of myself.

Well now I have a much better understanding of where I fit into this social media jigsaw and I’m ready give it another try; this time without the fanfare.

It’s a sort of reintroductory post that largely assumes that you don’t know me. However, thanks to the recent, huge show of support from my longtime Blogsville compadres, chances are, to most of those who will now be reading it, it’s old news with a bit of a twist.

So if you’ll pardon my posting a re-tread, I’ll take this opportunity to get the most of my limited time this week. I stumbled upon it today and thought it still held enough water to go ahead and post, seeing as how I now actually have sort of re-launched this site. I’ve edited and updated the story for a more current disposition of my circumstances, but toned down some of the rhetoric regarding my once-assumed assault on the social media world (oyeee vey).

So if you don’t know me, please read on. And if you’ve known this blog for years, I’d invite you to read anyway; I have a message for you as well.

I honestly don’t know whether I’m needlessly psyching myself up with this blog relaunch business or if I’ll eventually fall back into old patterns after the excitement wears off, but I truly want to give this renewed commitment a serious try.

I hope you’ll like what you read enough to join me and see where it leads.

* * * * *

Who am I?
Funny; I ask myself that question all the time. And seeing as this is the relaunch/re-birth of All Your Blogs Belong to Us, I figured it might be a good time to reintroduce myself, both to those who have known me in this space previously and to the new friends I will meet forthwith.

I suppose that first and foremost, I'd have to describe myself as a wise-cracker; and when I say a ‘wise-cracker,’ I don't mean to say that I'm a smart, white southern guy — although I have been referred to as a "pseudo-intellectual", I am caucasian, and I do live in Nashville.

But of course, what I really mean is that I like to goof around, drop a few puns, make fun, be made fun of, and generally do my best to make you smile.

However there is most definitely a serious side to my personality, and when it comes right down to it, that's the part that truly makes me who I am.

I like to think...a lot; maybe too much.

I write about what I think, as well as music, my family and my friends.

What have I done?
As far as who I am in real life, anonymity on the web is important to me, although I've given out more than enough personal info to allow anyone to figure out my identity if they truly had the mind to. Nevertheless, I maintain at least a thin veneer of secrecy about my corporal identity, if for no other reason than to protect the guilty — including myself. I used to maintain that for the sake of my corporate life as well; but seeing as I’m currently unemployed, that doesn’t seem to be as important now.

In fact, things have changed so much for me that I actually find myself hoping that a prospective employer will find my blog, given the elevated station of social media currently in the business world. I’d like to think that my experience in this medium speaks well of the overall experience I have as a new media creative, as well as the point that I am whom I appear to be. If you wish to get to know me, just read my blog.

But, oh yeah, back to protecting the guilty; I respect the privacy of my friends and family members, so the names of any and all living persons (with the obvious exception of publicly-known figures) referred to in my stories are pseudonyms. As a matter of fact, my stepsister, who is a huge fan of this blog, has for years been requesting that I create an AYBABTU Scorecard — you know, “ya can’t tell the players without a scorecard”? — so that she can keep track of all our relatives that I refer to in my stories. I really need to sit down and do that. Heck, even I sometimes need to go back and check what name I referred to a certain person as if there’s been any length of time between mentioning them.

I do talk a lot about my family, but I really love to talk about my friends; that’s become somewhat of a trademark of mine.

I often try to let people know how much I appreciate them; not to kiss their asses, but to make them feel special — because they are. I believe we’re all rockstars, in our own certain way, and I like to provide even a small sense of that for those I love in any way I can. Sometimes it's just nice to experience even a little confirmation in this day and age when we often go overlooked, taken for granted, or even abused.

Perspective
As my life has already passed well beyond the halfway point (statistically speaking, anyway — but piss on that — I'm goin’ for the century mark!), I’d have to say that I've had a pretty decent existence. I've had success in a lot of areas, but that success has been tempered by horrible loss — more so than anyone should have to bear.

I’ve a lost an unfair percentage of my immediate and extended family to inherited Early-Onset Alzheimer’s disease, including my grandfather, mother, elder brother; and I’m now in the process of losing the most beloved of them all, my younger brother, Alex, currently in the advanced stages of AD, is currently in hospice, and is not expected to live beyond this year.

And that’s less than half of the victims that this hideous plunderer of life has plucked from only two generations of my mother’s side of the family.

However, strewn amongst the losses, I’ve scored more than a few victories. I’ve enjoyed the success of being an All-American collegiate athlete; lived one of my dreams as a part of the commercial music industry, and for eleven years enjoyed another dream job as a corporate web designer.

I've done some very smart things — chief of which was to marry a woman without whom I would truly be lost: my Michelle (ooh..I feel a song coming on...). I've written a lot about her. We celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary this past March, and I feel like a freakin' Einstein when I consider how special that fact is.

Michelle has given me two wonderfully perfect, imperfect kids, whom I love with all of my heart (I’ll actually be talking about one of them in my next post). Both of our children are grown, graduated from college and gone, but we have a great relationship with them; they are not only my kids, but also my friends. You can hardly imagine how special that is for me to say.

Materially, I've also been blessed to have a lot without necessarily ever making a lot of money. But even if I had made it, I most likely would have lost it all when I literally lost my shirt in the mid-90s.

Wait...did I forget to mention that I've done a lot of dumb things too? Well I have; and a few of the things I did that turned up the temperature of the financial hot water we found ourselves swimming in 15 years ago is at the top of the list.

Nevertheless, working together as never before, Michelle and I fought off the foreclosure of our home; I got three jobs and together we worked our way back to debt freedom — just in time to put our two kids through college (on cash, of course!) at the dawn of the new millennium.

Through all the up and downs, the Internet has defined me, more than a few times. After a ten-year career in the music industry, I launched fulltime into web design in 1995, a career that has alternately been my greatest joy and the bane of my existence.

Where am I going?
As the first decade of the 21st Century fades from view, the Net is smiling on me once again. I am both happy and excited to immerse myself in the phenomenon that is social media; it’s the primary reason I’ve re-launched this blog, although my ancient Blogger template was long overdue for the scrap heap even three years ago sorry, Doug — and you’re welcome, Dylan).

I've always said that I write for an audience of three: me, myself, and I. And for the most part, that remains true. However I'm ready to go beyond myself; to push the envelope a little, and really become a part of the burgeoning, extended web community now augmented by Facebook and Twitter.

But again, I ain’t no ‘Internet Marketer.’ I’m a web designer who merely happens to be a personal blogger; I’ll never pretend to be otherwise. I don’t write to generate business; I write to speak my mind and to order my thoughts. My personal brand is much more about who I am than what I do. I’m the real deal; what you see is me, like it or lump it.

Hopefully you’ll like a lot more than you lump; I’m sorta counting on that, else I’d probably have made the decision to scap this thing and just go to Walgreens to pick up a diary.

Beyond the obvious personal information I’ll blog about, my overall role in this community remains to be seen. However, it’s more than likely going to be equal parts court jester and Wal-Mart greeter, with a just enough pertinent social commentary and tech-info-for-right-brainers thrown in to make my claim of being a webbie appear legit, but not so much as to alienate the casual reader.

If you’ve seen me on Twitter, you probably know that while I may swim with SocMed sharks, I’m much more pilot fish than great white. I’m learning from the best, but have no aspirations to be Chris Brogan Jr.

Seriously though, I may not make you richer, but that’s not my goal. There are more than enough folks out there with far better qualifications than I to fill that bill. My chief aim is to make you smile and to make you think; to make your mind richer. And if I can do that, I think I’ve written a pretty good story.

In addition to the old friends I’ve had for years who are still out there, I'm excited about the new friends I've already met through Twitter and Facebook, and look forward to reaching out even more, hopefully with greater concentration on topically-based subjects, as opposed to my normal inclination to spend the lion’s share of my blog’s energy navel-gazing.

(However if you wanna see my navel, I’ve been told I’ve got a cute one…minus the lint.)

Wanna come with?
If we’ve never met, I look forward to meeting you soon; if we’re already friends, I look forward to expanding that friendship to a place from which we both can benefit even more. I look forward to the changes, and the rewards that lay ahead.

Seeya ‘round!


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A Place Called Blogsville (Addendum, Part II)

By way of explanation, all but one the following screen shots below are no longer available in live web page form, but were accessed courtesy of the cached backup archives of The Internet Wayback Machine project, which is, when you can get the archive to actually return an cached site, another of the things that falls into my ‘greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread’ category. Despite the spotty availability of some of the archived site pages and the inordinate amount of time they typically take to load, there isn’t a more valuable resource on the Net in my estimation, and I wish to express my most sincere appreciation to Bibliotheca Alexandrina, International School of Information Science (ISIS) for this invaluable resource!

With that in mind, in referencing our purposes here I experienced only mild success in pulling together the web site archives from the particular points in time I wished to illustrate. Therefore I cannot say with exact certainty when the site messages below first appeared, only that their messages and design updates appeared by the dates indicated.

* * * * *

Every Picture Tells a Story
They say that it’s always darkest before the dawn, and at Pyra, the fire was just about down to a flicker. 2001 brought with it the realization that the company’s six-person crew was about five more than they could afford.

The funding money they had received a year earlier had run dry and some hard realizations had to be faced. After unsuccessfully attempting to market a paid version of Blogger (Blogger Pro) it was decided that the company would remain in business, but that its operations would be drastically curtailed out of necessity. As Pyra’s CEO, Evan Williams would stay on as the company’s only full-time paid staffer.

The Pyra website told the story throughout the process with updated announcements of the company’s status from March 2000 through May 2002; the frequently-changing homepage became a weblog unto itself.



This is how the Pyra website looked on March 2, 2000 (click to view at full size); still hawking the Pyra app, but speaking in more and more excited terms about Blogger, which had just reached version 2.0. However the wind had already begun to shift.



By May 10, 2000, the website — and the company — was in full re-tool mode, prepping for a full-on, fully optimistic run with Blogger. Oh, and the picture? No, that's not a couple of astronauts in zero-gravity training — it's Meg Hourihan (left) and Paul Bausch burning off some pent-up energy, doing 360s for the webcam. (click to view at full size)



By August 15, 2000, a freshly redesigned Pyra.com began the process of distancing itself from itself, literally. (click to view at full size)

However, the ensuing ‘fall’ season would carry with it a double-entendre. The problems would continue for Pyra, but the money would not.



For “the careful observer” and any other of his friends and readers, who knew where to look, Ev Williams laid it all out in his personal blog, Evhead.com, on January 31, 2001, in an extremely honest and straightforward post entitled, And Then there Was One. (click to view at full size, and in case you were wondering, yes, I did manually photoshop the screenshot into two columns for easier viewing.)

Williams describes in painful detail how the company had laid off all but himself in December, but that some of his team had worked on, for as long as a month for little-to-no pay, in hopes that a new deal with an undisclosed partner would come through. With that reality not panning out he was now going it alone, determined to see things through, to keep the company going, and to continue developing Blogger.



In a more public announcement a few weeks later, in this Pyra.com screenshot from February 12, 2001, Williams glibly channels Mark Twain, announcing the news that the company was still in business, but had indeed incurred, “a major set back” (…and we won’t pile on here by pointing out the misspellings either…). (click to view at full size)



More than a year after turning its full attention to Blogger, on March 30, 2001, the website reinforced that there was “nothing to see here” (except for a link to Blogger.com) and that the Pyra application was no longer being developed (click to view at full size).

This iteration of the Pyra.com homepage was also the swan song of the infamous ‘Pyra Newsletter’ signup box. Funny thing is, in the seven months it was in place on the website, nobody ever got around to creating that newsletter they collected all those email addresses for, as Williams sarcastically pointed out.



Three weeks later, March 18, 2001, the message of Pyra.com is all Blogger and all business (click to view at full size).



By September 2001 The website was again redesigned but remained only as a handbill slapped on the front door of an empty house for another year and a half, with a logo and no other text than that explaining Pyra’s two mottos: 1. “make something good” and 2. “other motto: there is nothing to see here. go to Blogger(.com).” (click to view at full size)



By May of 2002, the site had taken on the appearance that has essentially remained unchanged to this day, that of a one-slogan tribute to Pyra Labs, “making the web more interesting since 1999,” along with the iconic Blogger logo link to the Blogger.com website. (click to view at full size)

Addition By Subtraction
However the great thing about this particular sad story is that it ultimately has a very happy ending. As it turned out, Ev and Meg’s little company was just so far ahead of its time that it simply needed to give the rest of the world a couple years to catch up.

For all the heartache and disappointment experienced by the former Pyra Labs crew, the patience and belief exercised by Williams would pay off in spades.

The paring down of staff allowed Williams the time needed to keep the company afloat, while he worked to stabilize the platform and add servers to address the physical load of Blogger’s continually-rising popularity. Along the way he also managed to negotiate a few small business deals, including licensing Blogger to other countries and forming an important partnership with the website-building software company, Trellix in April 2001.

At the end of June, Williams announced a ‘Moving Sale’ to liquidate all nonessential equipment in Pyra’s San Francisco office. He was taking the business home, servers and all, and would operate things from his apartment, lowering the company’s overhead even more. It was no doubt a humbling experience, yet one that Williams seemed to embrace with a more-than-admirable sense of humor. But over the next twelve months things would turn around dramatically.



By the time I was introduced to Blogger, in the summer of 2002 the homepage looked like this (click to view at full size). Williams’ status blog was brimming with good news, boasting the statistic that Blogger blogs were being added at a rate of 1.5 per minute.

Blogger was co-sponsoring blogging contests with major periodicals, featuring sizable cash prizes; there were ‘Blogathon’ charity events and Blog Meet-ups being planned, along with superlatives about blogging from pubs like The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

In short, Blogger was riding the cusp of a new wave of a phenomenon that was sweeping the nation and the world. Things had indeed turned around, but the best was yet to come

Yes, They Really DO Like You!
Ev Williams’ Sally Field moment came on a historically poignant date in his company’s history, exactly three years after that game-changing decision to commit to the development of Blogger over his original dream, the Pyra project management tool.

It was February 14, 2000 when Pyra’s initial funding round through O’Reilly & Associates launched the official era of its sole focus on application development, and three years later, it would be on that same date that all the hard work would pay off, in the form of both financial reward and the reality of resources for Blogger’s ongoing product development.

Search Engine giant, Google showed its love, acquiring Pyra Labs and Blogger on Valentine's Day 2003.



By the time my TK mates and I moved on to a new messageboard home and I made the decision to venture into the wilds of Blogsville all by my lonesome, the Blogger.com homepage not only had a completely new look, but a new audience as well, with the new Blogger reaching greater heights and exposure than ever before (click to view at full size).

There were newly-created XML blog templates designed under the auspices of Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign, offering the new breed of citizen journalism a place to call home; a place to grow; in an ever-expanding community of newsmakers, journalers, social media mavens, gossip-spinners, mommybloggers and the alike.

Ev and Meg’s Blogger lit the match, but the bonfire of Pyra’s vision was ultimately fueled by Google.

Nevertheless, even a year after the sale, in 2005 PC Magazine honored the success of Blogger and the work of Williams, Hourihan & Bausch (despite the latter two having long since left the company), naming the trio among their People of the Year for 2004.

Still Burning
Ev Williams would stay on with Google for roughly year and a half before again venturing out on his own, first in co-developing Odeo, a search and delivery web service centered on podcast technology, the organization of which would later become Obvious Corp, with a new business partner, Biz Stone.

Odeo was sold to Sonic Mountain in 2006 as Obvious Corp turned its attention to developing what would become the social media dynamo, Twitter in 2007.

Williams currently serves as Twitter CEO while enjoying life with wife, Sara and son, Miles.

Meg Hourihan went on to various other tech projects, including, in the mid-2000s, a joint effort with Gawker Media’s Nick Denton called Kinja, which, by her own description was “one of the web’s first news aggregation sites, an RSS reader without the RSS...a reading tool to make it easier for people to find and read blogs. The other hand of Blogger making it easier for people to write them.”

She is currently between companies, enjoying life as a seriously unpretentious foodie, mother to children, Ollie and Minna, and wife of yet another weblogging pioneer, Jason Kottke.

Paul Bausch, Pyra’s first employee and the man credited with being the Blogger’s primary developer, is still involved in web development at online community MetaFilter in Corvalis, Oregon.

I would again like to thank Meg Hourihan for providing such a well-spoken, thoroughly interesting narrative of Pyra’s increasingly difficult-to-find early history, for use as the basis of this story (and for the honor of her personally proofreading and blessing this post prior to publication).

If you’re a Blogger geek like me, I’m sure you’ll really enjoy the actual audio of that interview, which is still available online as part of Halley Suitt’s podcast series, Memory Lane.

Even though it wasn’t exactly how they planned it, Pyra lived up to their name; they took the weblog flame and fanned it into a bonfire that's still blazing.

Smart technology from some very smart people.

Now a decade later, that motto, do something good kinda seems like an understatement, doesn’t it?


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A Place Called Blogsville (Addendum, Part I)

NOTE: I had originally intended the following to be the opening of my little tribute to Blogger. It seemed appropriate to me to introduce my relationship to this medium I love by first introducing those brilliant and inspired individuals to whom we owe its existence.

And while it’s a well-established fact that the more elevated of standing among those who lead the medium today would suggest that Blogger is now passé by comparison to other, more elite platforms, I couldn’t care less. Blogger is special — to me and to millions of its continued, devoted users.

I mean, seriously; say what you want about a product, but in reality, who is more important — the person who refines it, or the one who invented it in the first place?

And because of that, I decided to go beyond cursory mention and give what, based on my research in writing this account, is the most extensive biographical sketch of the company that founded the modern blogging medium: Pyra Labs, and their ‘accidental’ phenomenon: Blogger.

Ev and Meg’s Big Adventure
As large and everyday-ubiquitous as the Web is, currently, it’s hard to imagine that as recently as ten years ago it was a much smaller place.

It was a world of fertile ground, untapped resources, and breathtaking discovery. It was a world prepping for a huge growth spurt.

Once the near-exclusive domain of nerds, geeks, and academia, the phenomenon of ‘weblogging,’ originally born very early in the decade of the 90s, emerged from its infancy with the growth and popularity of the HTTP-encoded World Wide Web, popularized by the Net’s first graphical browser, Mosaic in 1993.

_{Blogger.com founders (from left), Ev Williams, Meg Hourihan, & Paul Bausch.}

However it was nearly ten years later before the team of Evan Williams, (yes, the same Ev Williams, who would later co-found Twitter), and business partner, Meg Hourihan, would spur the medium to the new heights we know today.

In a wonderfully informative podcast interview she gave to the website, IT Conversations back in 2005, Hourihan discussed the beginnings of Blogger.com — the blogging portal that she, Williams, and Paul Bausch developed — almost by accident.

According to the interview, Williams and Hourihan formed Pyra Labs in 1999, operating out of the latter’s San Francisco apartment.

Their new company’s original goal was to create a web-based project management application targeted at web developers to improve upon the often cryptic and inflexible Microsoft Project. They wanted to come up with an online tool that would make the process of updating a project plan easier and more immediate —across cyberspace as opposed to the more static constraints of updating a physical MS Project file and then distributing it via email or FTP.

Interestingly, what would become Blogger was a sideline component developed in the midst of that effort, which was essentially a ‘throwaway’; a free feature intended to entice potential buyers to purchase their primary product.

Instead, the sideline overtook the mainline.

It is significant to recall that 1998-99 was the crux of the dot-com boom’s initial period of rapid ascension. Thousands of enterprise web sites were being created at that time, often by teams of developers scattered across the country. The Pyra Project’s main focus was to make the management of such efforts easier, more accessible, and more immediate.

It was a great idea, but it spawned an even better one in the process.

BlogStuff
While working in the same room, but not wanting to disturb each other with interruptions to present new ideas that might pop into their heads throughout the day, Hourihan said she and Williams created a simple, internal weblog, aptly named, ‘Stuff.’ Its purpose was to register brainstorming thoughts and other flashes of enlightenment that either one might come up, but in so doing, not disturbing the flow of work in the office.

They later decided that including a similar weblog feature as a standard component of the Pyra application would be a beneficial value-add for their customers, just as it had been for them in developing it.

However, as Hourihan recalled, “through a bunch of…random happenings,” the server that hosted the ‘Stuff’ weblog was a different one than that which hosted the Pyra.com site itself, which had a separate weblog as well.

This would be a problem should they wish to avoid the extra work of posting an entry in both places. So later, for purposes of both internal and external communications, to solve the problem they tasked Pyra’s first employee, developer Paul Bausch, with creating some code that would allow entries written to the ‘Stuff’ weblog to automatically appear the on pyra.com weblog as well. As Hourihan explained, Bausch’s code would become the foundation upon which Blogger was built.

Hourihan described the Blogger ‘Ah-HA’ moment thusly: “Hey, this is kinda neat! You can write something in one place, and it’s appearing in another place.”

But again, the key intent was not to develop a blogging platform, but rather to use this new innovation as an inducement to market the bread & butter Pyra app.

As Hourihan described, the bulk of weblog users at that time were the indeed Pyra’s target audience: web developers. The hope was that once the developers saw how much easier this new ‘push button’ method of weblogging could be, they would then in turn be inclined to believe that Pyra was a cool company that they would want to do business with; purchasing the Pyra project management software tool for use on their web projects, and in general, making the world a better place for everyone.

Som’ ‘bout the plans of mice and men oftentimes going awry…?

By the first quarter of 2001, however, much had changed in the world of emerging web companies. The DotCom boom began its steep slide into full bust mode. Times grew tough for San Francisco internet startups like Pyra.

Pyra’s "Team Implosion"
A change in direction had actually begun a year earlier, in the winter of 2000, when team Pyra, then consisting of four members, decided to seek outside funding for the first time.

The Pyra project management app was still struggling through development. Mucking up the waters further was the fact that the company was actually being supported via contract work relationships that Ev Williams had brought with him from his previous freelance career. One developer worked full-time on the outside contract jobs while the other three continued developing the Pyra app and Blogger.

This model of self-funding “just wasn’t gonna scale,” recalled Hourihan, “unless we kept hiring people to do client work, and that wasn’t really the type of company we were interested in building; we didn’t want to do professional services; we wanted to build really cool web applications.”

Fortunately, by this time, the contacts and reputation that the company was creating, along with the ongoing relationship Ev had with a former employer, O’Reilly & Associates, allowed Pyra to acquire the seed money it needed to really sink its teeth into its work. They could now dispense with the unrelated contract work they’d needed just to make ends meet. It was the opportunity to finally be the company they wanted to be.

The initial funding round for Pyra began on February 14 — Valentine’s Day, 2000; for the company it would be a significant spot on the calendar, not only at that time, but later on as well.

They decided to suspend work on the primary Pyra app, and focus on Blogger, the former spinoff that ironically was receiving increasingly rave reviews, and in fact became Pyra’s first officially released product.

They would build out the team, adding another two people, bringing the total compliment to six, and as Hourihan put it, “see what we could do with it,”

However not all would go as planned. Over the next eleven months the DotCom bubble would finally burst, sending tech stocks tumbling and bringing most startups to their knees, financially. Most tech development went into a deep freeze.

At the same time, from the opposite end of the spectrum, Blogger was facing its own problems. The platform’s tremendous popularity created more traffic than their existing servers could handle, leading to lapses in reliability. New features weren’t being added fast enough, leading to more customer complaints, including, ironically, one that led directly to the development of what would become one of Blogger’s chief competitors, Movable Type.

Mena Trott and her husband, web developer Ben Trott, created Movable Type as an answer to Mena’s frustration over Blogger’s period of arrested development in 2000.

Trott, originally a Blogger enthusiast, confided in Hourihan that she felt such loyalty to Blogger, that she couldn’t bring herself to use a competing product, so she decided to develop one for her own personal use. That effort, designed by Mena and coded by Ben, worked out so well that within a year the Trotts indeed decided (at the insistence of their other friends) to market it as a competing product.

Later, under the umbrella of their new company, Six Apart, the Trotts would additionally develop two other varietal blogging platforms: TypePad and Vox, in addition to the premium Movable Type.


Next: Addendum Part II: Every Picture Tells a Story

Well, I guess Facebook is Good for Something After All

Happy Birthday, Knucklehead
Although I’ve had an account on Facebook for much longer, I’m clearly a Twitter enthusiast when it comes to a preference between the two ubiquitous social media destinations.

Oh sure, FB has more to offer in the way of features and contact messaging, and quite frankly, you really don’t need to wade aimlessly for weeks or months to really ‘get’ Facebook. That’s only one reason why it’s so wildly popular.

However once you get the hang of it, Twitter is so much more immediate, malleable, and interesting in my opinion. You can easily conduct half a dozen conversations at one time on Twitter, though admittedly, that’s stretching things a bit for someone as ADD-esque as me.

But it’s much easer to filter out the noise and cancel out the silliness, gameplay, and other social nonessentials to a coherent online conversation on Twitter as opposed to FB. I prefer it for that reason above all others.

However there’s still plenty to like about Facebook.

Were it not for this, the most successful and longest-standing of all major social media applications, I would be all but disconnected from many of my high school friends and an even greater percentage of my extended family.

I love it for that, and will always maintain a presence there.

But today, I’m particularly grateful for one little bonus feature that Facebook offers, because it gives me the opportunity to extend a greeting to someone whom I care a great deal about.

Today is the birthday of probably my favorite person in all of cyberspace, MakeMineMike.

How do I know it’s his birthday? Certainly not because of my fabulous memory! Facebook reminded me. FB’s birthday reminder app is by far the most useful ‘push’ type of notification (other than, obviously, notifying you when someone writes a message on your wall) that Facebook provides; because if you’re like me, you need to be reminded to go to the bathroom most of the time.

And sorry, they still haven’t figured out an app for that just yet.

Next best thing though is the birthday reminder for those FB friends about whom you might just need a friendly memory-poke.

And given that Mike and I don’t communicate on as frequent a basis as we used to, that’s pretty helpful for moi.

So today is Mikey’s big Day and lest I embarrass him too much further here, allow me to sum up saying that I think of him often, and consider it a privilege to call him a friend.

Happy Birthday, pal. I hope you and Randi are able to go out and have a great time tonight.

Talk to you soon.

:)

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I Think Dylan Would be Proud

No...not THAT Dylan.
I’ll be expanding on this post later, when I have time, but now I’ve got a bunch of stuff I need to take care of in my offline life. I just wanted to take a minute to let those who care about this place know that at long last, actually two full years after beginning this project (and nearly four years after I was goaded into doing it), I have finally upgraded the design of my blog’s template, and will hopefully follow suit in my overall goal to upgrade my presence in this place that has been such a special part of my life for the better part of a decade.

Please look around and note the new, static pages in the horizontal navigation bar above. Two of the pages are merely updated versions of the linked info pages I had hosted myself before, but which now are a part of the blog itself, thanks to Google/Blogger finally adding the feature that Wordpress users had enjoyed for years.

For those previously unfamiliar, the ‘About’ and ‘Greatest Writs’ pages are, respectively, an introduction to my blog and a little bit about me, and a self-appointed ‘best of’ list of the posts I've written over the years about my life, family, and experiences.

Additionally, there are two new pages. ‘What Happen?’ is the definitive recap of how this blog got its name. I've also added a brand new Contact page, with a form from which you can throw out a general comment or message not necessarily pertaining to a post. This is also a great place to call me to the carpet on a typo or other unintentional misinformation that might have slipped through my fingers. I appreciate constructive criticism and welcome any other general comments you might have.

Still Workin’ on it
There are a couple of features that are still under construction, but which will both be completed soon. One is already on display: the Archive Story Index is a long-standing feature I added a few years ago, but haven't done a very good job of keeping current. It now it lists each AYBABTU post from May 2004 through the end of 2007, but I’ll be bringing it up to date shortly.

I'm also in the process of adding a detailed ‘Faves’ page, which will include a blogroll and site description of all my favorite folks on the Net, both from the ‘old neighborhood’ of Blogger.com, as well as the new friends I’ve made in the last couple years through my involvement with the hockey blogging community and on the social media phenomenon that is Twitter.

All that said, I hope you like the new AYBABTU. It’s been a long time coming, but for me, anyway, it's been worth the wait.

finis

Kicking Up Dust...For Reals This Time

Real quick-like
I don't know if you remember, but a little more than a year ago I indicated that AYBABTU was going to be undergoing a major facelift/overhaul/refocusing of direction; an 'AJ 2.0' treatment, as it were.

Well, I got close, but it never happened. Once 2009 got underway, I started seeing the handwriting on the wall with regard to my job security, and had no choice but to pour everything I had into trying to save my job, but to no avail; the choice had already been made — In Minneapolis, not in Nashville.

At any rate I set the blog upgrade on the shelf. Now, a year later and four months since the axe fell on my neck at The Company, I'm re-evaluating the potential role my blog might take for me professionally as well as personally, and I'm highly motivated to get it going again for a number of reasons.

I'll be switching to a similar, but more effective 3-column Blogger template here very soon, with a few (if not all) of the upgraded elements to be incorporated soon thereafter.

A Tarnished Halo
However, my first priority will be to save perhaps the most precious of elements from being lost forever: my comments.

I'll have a LOT more to say about this in a future post, but I know I'm not alone in my frustration over the demise of HaloScan, the erstwhile commenting system that was the first 3rd party service of its kind to gain a strong following among early Blogspot bloggers.

A few years ago, HaloScan was rather quietly acquired by applications developer JS-Kit. Not much was made of it until the past year or so, as the new owner prepared to roll out their own commenting product to replace the sun-setted HaloScan (a fact that while not completely secretive, was far from well-announced to HaloScan users).

Bottom line is, HaloScan is now dead and gone, and anyone who was using it has been being forced to 'upgrade' to the new JS-Kit product, called 'Echo' on a free one month trial. Well, my 30 days are up, and I have no intention of paying for Echo, so I'm in scramble mode, not entirely of JS-Kit's making. I shoulda done this a month ago.

Now for those who chose to always use the free version of HaloScan, this may not have been a huge deal; all they really have to lose is their comments from the past year, as HaloScan 'free' version comments disappear after one year anyway. So chances are, those folks weren't all that concerned about it.

However, if you're like me, and paid the $25 to become a premium HaloScan user to supposedly retain your comments 'forever,' you're kinda scrambling right now — like me — to figure out how to keep from losing the links to all those wonderful conversations you had with your readers over the years. And in my case, we're talkin' nearly SIX YEARS worth.

Therefore I am now in the process of porting my blog's comment system over to DISQUS, which is a supplemental system I've had an account with for years as well. It's a very good system, and has grown exponentially in popularity in recent years as the default commenting tool for Tumbl'r micro-blogs.

All that to say, if you see some weirdness going on over here, or some sidebar elements missing, or u-gigaly fonts on dispaly as you visit over the next day or two, it's just me tinkering and re-installing stuff. Hopefully by this weekend it'll all be in place (for the most part, anyway).

And most hopefully, I will have found a way to reintegrate my old HaloScan comments back into DISQUS, and the conversations we've enjoyed since May 22, 2004 can indeed live on.

Thank you for your indulgence...and don't forget your surgical mask...

:)


* * * * *


finis

Olympic Chillin’ @ O’Chuck’s

Sometimes ya can’t measure a ‘good time’ in 140 characters or less.
This is gonna be relatively short, and I'm duping this post here on my personal site as well as my hockey blog for a couple reasons; one: I just have to make mention of it, and two: I’m simul-posting to AYBABTU because it has as much to do with my personal life as it does hockey.

Sunday night the Nashville Predators hosted another ‘Chill-Out’ Party at O’Charley’s restaurant in Franklin, TN. The occasion was of course the much-anticipated heavyweight Men’s Hockey bout between the USA and Canada at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.


_{“I WENT TO A HOCKEY VIEWING AND A BLIZZARD BROKE OUT.” No, not really; there really was a game on the big screen TeeVee and much hoopin’ hollarin’ and carryin’ on ensued. A disk jockey from 107.5 The River (center) works the crowd.}

Not only was it a meeting of the only two remaining undefeateds in the ‘Group A’ division, as well as a natural blockbuster- must-see match-up by virtue of the natural rivalry between the Americans and their neighbors to the north, the game also featured the local attraction of the Preds’ top defensive pairing of Ryan Suter for the US and Shea Weber for Canada going head-to-head.

To the delight of the packed-house, ‛Sutes’ came out on top.

In a wildly competitive affair, the Americans defeated Canada 5-3, weathering a furious second period shooting storm from their opponents in the first period, then dialed up the intensity to match them in second, and shut them ‛em down in the final stanza, stunning the Canadian Dream Team going away.

If you want a further description of how the game unfolded, I'd invite you to visit my friends, On the Forecheck or Preds on the Glass; they do a much better job of that stuff than I do. Just wait until you’re finished reading here first, aiiight?

The only other thing I'll tell you about the game was that on the USA’s fifth and final goal (an empty-netter by Vancouver Canucks forward, Ryan Kesler), I had the pleasure of leading the room in a rousing chant of, “WE GOT FROS-TIES (clap-clap-clapclapclap), WE GOT FROS-TIES (clap-clap-clapclapclap),” etc.

Yeah I was loud. I was yellin’ at that big screen just as if I was in my own living room and all the people around me were my welcome guests. And the great thing about it was that I’m sure that everyone in that room felt exactly the same way.

What a great group of hockey fans we have here in Nashville! I know, I know, there are great fans all across the NHL, but if anyone anywhere wants to even THINK that Nashville isn’t a vibrant, enthusiastic, knowledgeable hockey market, they would be wrong; dead wrong.

As great as the game was, the party was even better. Gnash was there, as were the Predators EquiplinQ (and no, that’s not a typo), issuing Predators swag to all. Nashville FM radio station 107.5 The River did a great job hosting the prize giveaways during the first intermission (I won a $25 O’Charley’s gift card!). It was loud and raucous and fun.

And as great as the game and the party and the festive feeling that everyone shared, the thing that made it all so great for me were the human connections I made there.

Twitter is great because of the way it diffuses our natural guardedness; it gives us a sense of security to more-or-less be ourselves in a mass group circumstance in a way we most likely wouldn’t if we were in the same situation meeting that same group of people face-to-face.

Heh — let’s be real here. If we were all meeting as many folks as we generally communicate with on Twitter in a real-life sitch, heck, we probably wouldn’t even be heard, for all the people in the room. However, as it is, with Twitter we have the opportunity to be real with the whole Twitterverse on a one-to-one basis.

Given that easy familiarity, it makes expanding those connections even easier when we meet these ‛friends’ in real life.

Seeing Puck City (for the first time)
When I arrived at the viewing party, the room was already filled with hockey fans just buzzing about the game that was soon to start; no seats to be had anywhere. I looked round for familiar faces and thought a few of them registered, but none strongly on the AJ Friend-O-Meter. The waitress who deftly handled the entire room of 50-6o people (which is only a wild guess on my part, there may well have been more than that) was standing nearby taking drink orders from an adjacent table when I decided to be assertive and ask if it would be possible to get more chairs to accommodate myself and the three or four other folks standing there in the door near me.

She politely suggested I go ask the hostess, which made sense. But as I began to duck out of the room to go up front in search of my question's answer, someone called out my name, “Hey, AJ, wait!”

I did a slight double-take in the 3-4 feet in the space of the I had traveled and stuck my head back into the room. “Who said that?” I asked. “Did someone call me?”

The gentleman in the near booth to my right turned to say, “Yeah, it was me. We have a room in the booth if you wanna sit here.”

The man was sitting next to a young woman and another guy across from her, but the seat directly adjacent to his was unoccupied. Of course I enthusiastically accepted his offer. “THANKS!” I exclaimed. As I scanned the faces of he and his party I was trying to figure out the connection, but couldn’t. “How is it you know me?” I asked, sliding my hiney into the booth.

“J.K. Robbins...See Puck City.” And immediately the lightbulb came on. “AH! At last we meet,” I said, beaming.

I was thrilled to meet one of the few remaining Preds bloggers I had yet to run into at one of these Tweetup/Meetup events. J.K. started his Predators blog about the same time as I did mine. We hadn’t met, but I’d commented a few times on his blog, SeePuckCity. He introduced me to his friends, all roomates: the lovely SPC Steph, who co-authors the blog on occasion to his right; Jamie, the gentleman to my left.

Left to depend on the kindness of strangers once again, my new friends came through, big time. We spent the remaining 15-20 minutes before game time about Twitter, the Preds, and our mutual Nashville blog network buddies and acquaintances, and then shared the game together with the rest of the room as if we’d been tight for years.


_{CHILLIN AT THE CHILL-OUT. Left to right: AJ, Jamie, SPC Steph, & fellow Preds Blogger, J.K. Robbins of See Puck City.}

J.K. Robbins is a funny dood. He has a sharp wit (see his version of the viewing party and note his superb snideity in how he describes the EquiplinQ dancers — and BTW, if you’ve never heard one of their radio commercials, you won’t get it; but if you have...brilliant!) that comes across in his writing, but is especially entertaining in person. I knew nothing about him prior to Sunday, save that he was a Preds fan and a smart writer. Now I know enough to know that he’s also a guy I wouldn’t mind hanging out with from time to time.

But I’m gonna stop short of sending a corsage and asking him to the prom...just in case my wife is reading this.

Seriously though, it's refreshing to know that as isolated as we can sometimes make ourselves in social media, all the while convincing ourselves we’re really ‘connected’ because we chat with possibly thousands of peeps each day on Twitter, it’s still that human experience that completes the effect.

If you’ve never attended a Tweetup, you should. You really don’t know what you’re missing.

If you’re a Predators fan and have never attended a Preds Tweetup or other fan event, Gnash will officially come to your house to terrorize your dog.

All the calories, none of the ‘G’
Oh, and speaking of terror, buddy, you don’t know what skeered is until you’ve received the stink-eye from our favorite repelling feline.


_{GNASH WAS EVERYWHERE; the cat couldn’t stand still. He was so active I couldn’t even get a clear picture…geeze.}

Just when I was thinking we were old pals, at one point during the second period of the USA/Canada game, during an especially furious onslaught of Canadian shots on U.S. Goal-keep, the Buffalo Sabres, Ryan Miller, two Americans were trying to wrest the puck from Columbus Bluejackets All-Star forward (and the BJ we most love to hate), Rick Nash.

I shouted out instinctively, “KILL NASH!”

Now if I’d said that on Twitter, there wouldn’t have been a problem. However Gnash, who was standing about six feet to my left couldn’t see the lack of ‘G’ in my real-life ‘tweet’ (and if you knew what my actual speaking voice sounded like you’d appreciate that little euphemism a whole lot more), and...well, let’s just say, I doubt I’ll be on the Big Kitty’s Christmas Card list this year.

But phonetic disparities aside, a great time was had by all.

Reconnects
As an added bonus in the human contact area, I had a chance to spend some time with a couple of great Preds fans I had actually met briefly in person at a recent Preds game, as well as a former co-worker I hadn’t seen for months.

Shelly, her husband and her daughter Raven actually sat in the seats just to the right of ours in Section 329. At the time, we exchanged pleasantries, but never introduced ourselves. But when they walked into the viewing room Sunday night, I recognized them immediately. However I didn't know if they remembered me. We made eye contact a few times, and they gave a look as though they thought I looked familiar, but just couldn't make the connection.

After the game, as I was leaving, I sought them out to say hi assure them that I didn’t have a chain saw and chloroform in my trunk.

I reminded them of where we’d met and we had a great conversation. I discovered that they too are on Twitter, so if you want to follow a fantastic and fun Mom-Daughter Preds fan duo, be sure to visit @dont_puck_it_up (Shelly) and goalies_are_hot (Raven).


_{MY FRIEND, @christinewhite just HATES to have her picture taken…yup…that’s what she told me…just before she said, “Don’t make me sing…”}

My former co-worker, Christine, is one of my longest-standing fellow Preds fans. We worked together forever at The Company — she still does — and I hadn’t seen her since well before I was laid off in November. Chris is another fun and bright individual worth a follow on Twitter (@christinewhite).

All in all it was one of the better Preds outings I’d been to. I hope you’ll make it out to the Gold Medal Party February 28th at Bleachers Sports Grill, also in Franklin, which promises to be an awesome time as well.

Who knows, maybe we’ll be celebrating a U.S. Olympic Gold! And you know, there’s no better people to celebrate with than REAL people.


* * * * *


finis

An Addendum to ‘Seduction’

Anatomy of a Time Sink
Gawd I love etymologyonline.com! And I really don’t know why that is, as I never really was all that hot about English classes in high school (although I did take a Semantics course that I really dug my senior year), but as an adult, etymology has always been a real fascination for me.

Likewise, I’ve never taken a foreign language course, let alone Latin, but one of my most oft-used browser bookmarks is to Merriam-Webster Online. I constantly cruise this extensive online dictionary site for help with word definition, usage, punctuation, and root origin information.

I’m one of those types who would list the dictionary as one of my all-time favorite reads. I’m serious; I could lose myself in a dictionary for hours. I’m fascinated by words. And I’m also fascinated by etymology; the history of words. I find it extremely interesting to find out where words came from, what their roots mean, and how their definitions and connotations have changed over the ages.

The English language, being the amalgam of so many others that it is, makes for a particularly interesting investigation of how our words were formed and developed.

But back to seduction…

So there I was, last Thursday, reading Liz Strauss’s post, when she mentioned the part about getting seduced by an idea. And then, for some reason, a context alarm went off in my head. I thought about the word ‘seduced,’ and for me, the first thought I had was ‘sexual,’ because in our culture, for the most part, sexual seduction is the context through which we perceive that word.

But that just didn’t seem right to me in this case. I fully identified with Liz’s use of the word in her statement. She definitely used the right descriptor. But when I’m ‘seduced’ by an idea; when I’m led away from one idea by a different one, it’s not because I’m thinkin’ sexy thoughts. Where did the sexual context actually come from? I needed to learn more to understand the true meaning of the word.

So first I checked Merriam-Webster, and then EtymologyOnline.com, where I discovered some interesting things about the word seduce.

When placed in a historical context, the interestingly subtle change in the word’s meaning makes for an even more poignant object lesson in human nature.

And for the record, I don’t pretend to be any kind of learned linguist.** This is just a loose interpretation, but one that makes a lot of sense to me.

**For entertainment purposes only; your mileage may vary.

I learned that the moral and sexual applications of the word, seduce (i.e.: seductive/seductress), manifested themselves about 50 years into its first attributed origin of use, in the early-middle portion of the sixteenth century. It was only at this point that its connotation gave rise to the prevailing modern interpretation of the idea of seduction being ‘immoral’ or ‘sexual’ in nature. Quite to the contrary, in its original Latin root components, the word is much more neutral in its moral stance.

The original usage context of seduce was, “to persuade a vassal (a feudal servant or slave), etc., to desert his allegiance or service.” In other words, seduce simply describes the act of leading a feudal slave away from his duty. It does not necessarily insinuate the act to be evil or immoral.

Seduce’s Latin root word, seducere simply means “lead away, or lead astray;” formed by the component parts, se — “aside, away” + ducere — “to lead.”

I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t see any moral judgment there, but I guess it just depends on your point of view.

It’s interesting to note that according to most historical accounts, the early 1500s were the beginning of the end of the feudal system in Europe.

Oh the times, they were a-changin.’

The Middle Ages were over and so was the status quo (seein’ as how we seem to be on this Latin kick). The old guard obviously wasn't too terribly jazzed about this brave new world and its gradual disintegration of the feudal system.

Just as the abolition of slavery in the United States was met with extreme resistance from the establishment that had previously profited from it, the feudal kings and land barons who depended on those vassals to make their land productive couldn’t have been too happy when their way of life began to come to an end.

Again, this is just speculation on my part, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assume that things worked much the same way then as they do now, with the noble and powerful, exerting control over opinion and most likely, language as well.

Is it therefore any less likely that a word, whose original meaning was purely descriptive, and without pejorative connotation, could be ‘turned’ by an establishment that disagreed with its action, than one of modern vintage, such as the word, ‘gay,’ whose ‘recent’ connotation over the past 100 years as a slang descriptor for homosexuality, has forever overshadowed its original meaning and primary usage from the previous six centuries?

It’s an interesting thing to consider, and one that I’m quite sure, if properly fleshed out, could very likely be a common theme in the evolution of our language.

Time sink concluded, now back to the series…

Next: The Difference Between ‘Alone’ and ‘Lonely’

SOBbin’ (continued)

Time Stinks…er…I Mean…Sinks
Continuing to continue the conversation from Liz Strauss’s blog, on Thursday September 10th, 2009, the topic was, as she describes them: ‘time sinks’.

Liz says, ‘time sinks;’ I say, ‘black holes’ — but whatever moniker you wish to use — they’re creative enigmas wrapped in a practical riddle; that which simultaneously robs us of our creative energy while we are in the process of creating, and are often responsible for our being drawn away from those projects that we sometimes start but never seem to finish.

Time sinks can come in different forms; from the legitimate components of the creative process — like brainstorming and refining a project theme, to the practical evils of necessity in getting a job done — like research, or necessary governmental and/or legal due diligence.

For her part, Liz has focused on the spinning and development of ideas as her nominee for time suck numero uno. She invites us to think about the stumbling blocks that the rest of us encounter in comparison, offering,

“Getting ideas is so much fun. Making them happen is where the real work starts.

We lose interest, find a flaw, get seduced by a new idea, or land a job that offers more.

Have you found that the biggest time sink on the web are ideas that never get done?”

This, as are so many of Liz’s topics, just so apropos to my modus operandi, (which is why I’m doing this series in the first place), that it’s simply uncanny.

And then again it may not just be coincidental, but rather a common circumstance that other creative people with short attention spans (like me) experience over the course of everyday life.

However the one thing I wanted to key upon really isn’t any kind of exposition regarding the chasing of ideas down the rabbit hole, but rather my personal version of the time sink phenomenon (which not so coincidentally, I’ve been forced to deal with in the writing of this story).

Seduced by Seduction
Now I don’t consider myself an ‘idea guy,’ although I am called upon fairly often to contribute to brainstorming sessions at work, where everyone comes up with ideas regarding themes and such for the conferences and events our department is involved with.

Generally speaking, however, I consider my strong suit in that area to be a little less than the ‘nuts & bolts’ logistics that are essential in giving a project legs. Rather, I’m the type that is better suited at things like finding a clever turn of a phrase in naming a product or theme, or something else in a similar lighthearted vein.

But while that’s a large part of my external personality, it’s far from who I am as a whole. I might be a goofball on the surface, but my serious side in an equal part of my identity.

I think; a lot; sometimes too much. Oftentimes I’ll become drawn into an internal conversation so much that I lose the direction of my original thought. I’ll suddenly stop and marvel at how far off the track my train of thought had traveled. Does that ever happen to you? Unfortunately I do that when writing stories as well.

So when Liz listed, getting “seduced by a new idea” as one of the symptoms of a time sink, I stood up and took notice. That as much as anything had been the bane of my existence as a writer.

When I first began this blog, there were no roadblocks to my motivation or ability to tell the hundreds of stories that were practically bursting from my head. I’ve always written for myself first and readers second, so there was no concern about making my early blog entries ‘sexy’ for those other than myself. Frankly I never really thought anyone else would read them. I didn’t need to try and make them interesting — they just were — to me, and that was all that mattered.

Likewise, I didn’t need to work for story line material. The compelling issues of my family’s battles with Early-Onset Alzheimer’s disease, the fact that my Dad married my Aunt, and that a little boy from a hick country town in Indiana ended up making good in a place so far away (physically as well as culturally) as Los Angeles is more than enough guts to build a few good stories around.

However my problem with ‘seduction’ began a couple years ago — after my life’s history had pretty much been told. That was the point where I realized how much work this gig can be. And given how much I’ve struggled with it, sometimes I scoff at the notion that I even fancy myself being a writer.

I began to find myself in a consistently frustrating place when embarking on a story: I would begin with guns a’ blazin’ — knowing (or so I thought) exactly where I was going with a thought or opinion. Then two or three pages into the tale, the realization would befall that I was so far off course that I practically had two completely separate stories written instead of just one.

Why it happens is still a mystery to me. It’s not an insurmountable problem if I recognize it early enough to head it off before it ruins the flow of the piece I’m writing. However, the damage inflicted is in the time sink, and the way it affects both the limited amount of time I have to write in the first place, as well as the creative energy the whole re-work process drains me of.

It has caused me on numerous occasions to abandon multi-part series, not because I’ve lost interest, but because I just don’t have the time to go back into them and re-sync my mind into that scenario once again.

And that again speaks to this idea the Liz threw out there, of the ‘seduction’ of new ideas drawing us away from completing projects: I don’t feel as though I ‘have time’ to go back and finish these incomplete stories, why? Because there are now ‘new’ stories that occupy my mind and beg to be written.

See what I mean? It’s a particularly vicious cycle.

BTW, that’s really all I wanted to say about my personal time sink demons. I’m workin’ on ‘em, and as I mentioned previously, this effort to base a week’s worth of posts on Liz Strauss’s SOB Blog topics is in large part an exercise in breaking free of the over-thought that has crept into my writing.

Somewhat ironically, I have an addendum to this story that’s actually an example of the problem (and why this particular post is two full days late). Nevertheless I found it interesting, so I’ll share it as a separate post.

It’s about that word, ‘seduce,’ and its connotation in our modern lexicon.


NextAn Addendum to ‘Seduction’

SOBbin’

Lost Weekend
I've been knee-deep in Facebook and Twitter for the past couple months, and while I've enjoyed myself immensely, I've finally arrived at the realization that in so doing I've been — perhaps subconsciously — involving myself in these new media vehicles not only because they're fun, but also because they're a lot easier than blogging.

As I’ve mentioned before, it seems I’ve hit a bit of a dry patch in my motivation to write lately, due in no small part to the even drier patch I struck about two years ago with relation to coming up with new story material.

Problem is, I’ve pretty much always written only about my life, my family, and my moods. Unfortunately, over the course of five-plus years’ blogging, I think I’ve pretty much told the lion’s share of my life’s story, so the only thing left is my mood — and right now my mood stinks. I'm not inspired; I'm not motivated; I’m not really happy, but I’m not sad either. Usually one of those four things are at the personal forefront whenever I write. But right now, I got nothin’ — zippo; zilch; nada; the big donut.

This past Labor Day weekend brought my circumstance into focus.

It felt like a completely wasted five days to me — I had taken additional vacation days on Thursday and Friday to augment the three-day weekend and make it a mini-vacation. I’d had every intention of making it a blogging vacation. My wife was out of town visiting our daughter in Atlanta; I had four solid days with which to work. One would think I could at least ply a couple decent posts in that amount of time. Instead I got nothing done, apart from posting some photos on Facebook along with my typical Saturday barrage of activity on Twitter. Sure, I had some other tasks around the house that needed attention, and I did them. However I still had plenty of time with which to write if I’d applied myself; but I didn't. I just wasn’t inspired. I just wasn’t feelin’ it.

However, don’t get me wrong; my purpose for this gloomy preface really isn’t about flogging myself for having writer’s block; One positive thing did arise from my lost weekend: the realization of why it was lost in the first place. Things have been coming to a head in that regard for a long time, and as a result I’ve finally realized that I must somehow push back in order to stem the tide.

What I’m experiencing isn’t new or different from what every other writer who’s ever lived experiences from time to time. I just didn’t believe it would happen to me. I’ve needed a reason to do something different, and now I’ve got one. I’m going to experiment with something that hopefully will kill a flock ‘o seagulls with one stone.

I’ve decided to get past my dearth of inspiration by drawing some from another who never seems to run out of ideas, and who actually encourages folks like me to do what I’m going to do; to “carry on the conversation” to venues beyond her own blog; to add ideas and opinions that will hopefully spur others to do the same..

The LIZ-a-nator
Say what you will about the ‘preaching to the choir’ nature of Twitter, but this sometimes incestuous echo chamber of the social media channel isn’t entirely composed of regurgitated material. While some of the medium’s mavens can come off as at least slightly egocentric and self-absorbed, there are still many more who leave even the most personable ‘real-time’ types looking like narcissists.

One of these marvelous folks is Liz Strauss. Now Liz and I aren’t pals, per ce, but I’m certain that if ever we were to meet she would treat me like a dear old friend. Out in the Twitterverse those kind of personal characteristics can sometimes be a mirage, but in Liz’s case, after observing her for nearly an entire year, I believe that what you read really is what you get — either that or she should drop this gig and become a politician, ‘cuz she’s a natural.

Tawk amongst y’selves...
A highly sought-after conference and public speaker, one of the daily irons in the fire of Liz Strauss’s career is the support and evangelization of blogging in social media. She herself pens three blogs, one of which is targeted directly at the support and growth of other bloggers.



Successful and Outstanding Bloggers (or, S.O.B. for short) is Liz’s daily invitation to hack thru the kudzu; an opportunity to apply fresh opinions to fresh ideas and release them into the blogosphere. Simply stated, Liz choses a topic, often one that’s been brewing on Twitter or other social media outlets for the previous 24 hours, and places it on the table à la Mike Meyers’ SNL character, Linda Richman, to “talk amongst yourselves.” The effect can be manifold. First, it extends the discussion beyond its original bounds and potentially brings many more people into the conversation, providing new ways of looking at a subject, creating ideas and story material for others to write about, which can in turn spawn countless other potential conversations.

It’s a great concept, and nobody does it better than Liz. So, considering my current plight of not having anything compelling to write about, I figured I would take the opportunity to exercise my SOB genes and give it a try.

For the next seven days (or as often as Liz updates her SOB blog seven times) I plan to continue the conversation and see where it leads.

Wednesday’s topic was particularly apropos to what I’ve been involving myself with lately: Twitter and Facebook. Liz asked, “What IS Facebook” — not as in a literal definition, but rather as in relation to Twitter as a metaphor for a conversation. Some of the respondents to Liz’s poll related it to a party, whereas Twitter was more like a business meeting, “a huge networking room,” as someone put it.

The opinions were fairly varied, but whatever the analogy, the basic difference thing fairly unanimous: Twitter is the more formal of the two media, primarily because of its more restrictive 140-character input limit. And while conversations are trackable through the use of hashtags and more readily available with alternative Twitter interface apps like TweetDeck, that 140 character limit for responses just seems to create an air of formality that sometimes is hard to break through.

Facebook has no such barriers. It’s threaded commenting interface makes it easy to follow even lengthy conversations in a way that Twitter simply can’t do well on its own.

However the judging the physical merits of the two social media clients wasn’t really the question here, but rather, what they represent in comparison, metaphorically.

Liz Strauss’s initial question on the table was “What is Facebook”? She then refined that by adding, “If Twitter is a huge networking room, what is Facebook?

Allow me now to wax a little metaphorical…

Twitter is indeed a huge room; one whose only networking limitation is your willingness to walk up to someone and say hello. Some folks you encounter may indeed ignore your engagement, but if you’re genuine, and have something worthwhile to say, people are highly likely to return that engagement, albeit only 140-characters at a time.

Personally I love Twitter. I love the rapid-fire tenor of the conversations flying back and forth. It can be challenging to follow the story at times, but it’s never dull.

Facebook on the other hand is more like a large, but private, hospitality suite; big enough to house a large group of your closest friends or acquaintances you’d like to become friends, but intimate enough to hold lengthy conversations with any number of those friends, complete with the sharing of photos, videos, or even a party game or two.

So despite the fact that I still prefer Twitter, Facebook has really been growing on me of late, as I begin to plugin more and more to the lives of former high school mates and family members who are discovering its value as a connection tool.

Bottom line is, both are equally valuable for accomplishing the mission of social media, particularly as potential business applications — but that’s another discussion (and metaphor) for another time.

I promise it won’t be quite as long-winded.


NextContinuing the Conversation