Robert in Seattle

Wow! I went to the Blog Business Summit early this week on Monday and Tuesday. It was serendipitous that it was held in Seattle so I didn't have to fly all over the place to get there. Especially considering that a lot of folks coming in from New York and Boston were completely snowed in and couldn't even get out. It'll likely be held somewhere else next year and I sense that it might not have the same early-stage chemistry as this event captured. So thanks to Steve Broback and gang for choosing to have it here this year!

There's little doubt that there's been a tremendous amount of buzz building around blogs and blogging these days. Especially with all the traditional media attention coming out of the last election. Many of the attendees and speakers have been at it for quite some time already. For me, it's another fascinating phase in the evolution of high tech (is that a passé term this day?). I remember discussing my own recollections of real movable type (lead type, NOT the blog program for all you kids out there!). Leaded type eventually gave way to phototypesetting equipment used for layout in paste-up for publishing. Eventually all of this gave way to a new revolution called desktop publishing as originally pioneered by Apple with the MAC. So we finally get to this point and what happens? We end up having a defining blogging moment when Dan Rather and CBS introduced phony documents into the presidential election that turned out to be generated on a computer-based word processor with super- and subscript that a regular typewriter out of that period could not have produced! The bloggers were all over this one and traditional media followed. All this in a relatively-short span of about 15 years or so.

It's a real privilege to have been around this long in the technology industry; I remember the big-ass IBM and Honeywell mainframes in their own environmentally-controlled rooms. I remember my first Commodore 64 and Trash-80 (er, TRS-80), eventually landing me in front of a 35-pound green-screened Compaq luggable. I still remember logging in to Delphi (at a blazing 300 baud!) and trying to impress my wife on what I was actually doing (she wasn't impressed!). This quickly gave way to Compuserve and AOL and the old Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's) all the way to where we are today. In between, we ended up registering domain names, creating our own personal web pages and using e-mail. And now here we are creating simpler blog pages with running commentary and news feeds in real time. Yikes! What's a boy to do?!!

Back to the Summit: Of course, there were a lot of the usual suspects there. Some of the early adopters have found some fast-buck ideas to capitalize on the phenomenon in the short term as blogging goes mainstream. Some of them will likely do well by being there first. Of course, the usual followers will come in late and in droves to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Other folks that I met were truly in it for the love of the medium and they're the ones who will continue to usher in the best of the best new ideas to come (you know who you are). Like all else, this is very much about tracking patterns and seeing the interesting anomalies that pop up from time to time. The best new ideas seem to come from that quiet place where all things good converge in real time and then just magically happen.

This leads me to predict that 2 years (or less) from now, blogging and blogs will not look at all like what they look like today. They'll have evolved to another stage in which it's so completely integrated into our day-to-day interaction with computers that we'll think back and wonder how we ever got along without it (well, for most of us anyway). Much like fax did when it took the market by storm over 20 years ago and much like e-mail did when it quickly supplanted fax. In listening to many of the ideas discussed, I think a lot of them will simply go by the wayside, much like all things dotcom have in the past.

Sometimes you can spend a lot of time climbing the ladder to success only to find your ladder propped up on the wrong wall.

The people you pass on the way up that ladder might be the same people you'll need to help you on the way down.

Live in the moment rather than for the moment.

Some days, it's really hard to tell if you're running away or if you're doing the chasing.

If you had to make a choice, which would you choose to be? Innocent and young in an old body or wise and old in a young body? Do you know the difference between childish and child-like?

Crisis & Opportunity 

The Chinese character for Crisis is the same one used for Opportunity.

Geez, it's been strange entering the second half of my life and still not completely sure of what I want to be when I grow up. Still, the last half-century has given me some experiences to make an occasional judgment call that has even surprised me. Some recent discussions with friends have revolved around living IN the moment as being much different from living FOR the moment. I see living in the moment as an acquired skill that comes out of one's life experiences, allowing you to savor the moment while bringing your complete and entire being into that conscious moment in time.

Living for the moment can be so -- so -- well, momentarily gratifying... so fleeting...