Anil Dash

Humans create the web, but we've largely abdicated the act of organizing web content to software. That could change.

• Twitter this week made its new Lists feature broadly available. As they've been described, Lists, allow you to enumerate a collection of some of the Twitter accounts that you follow, and then easily read updates from just those accounts. Others can view your lists, and choose to subscribe to them as well. But Lists are also available for other applications to use, modify and share. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, this means Lists are a way to tag an arbitrary set of realtime web feeds. You could look at the lists that I've been added to as a set of tags describing my Twitter feed.

• Much of the precedent for the idea of sharing (non-realtime) feeds comes from the world of outlining, and in particular Dave Winer's work here in creating OPML. Though it was designed to generically exchange outlines, OPML is the most popular format today for sharing arbitrary lists of feeds. (The computer science folks balk at some of the technical aspects of OPML but it's a bit like Churchill's comments on democracy — it's the worst format, except for all of the other alternatives.) What's interesting about having an established format for exchanging feeds is that there doesn't really need to be any changes in order for the format to accommodate realtime feeds like Twitter accounts. In fact, a few weeks ago, I moved about 150 the noisier, less pressing Twitter accounts I follow into Google Reader, by exporting them as an OPML file. Twitter became more pleasant to use, and I could still keep up with all of those folks by dipping into my feed reader whenever I want to.

• Lists have a few traits that make them more interesting than they seem; we can think of these as the Laws of Lists. First, you have to be signed in to Twitter with a valid account in order to create them. (This seems obvious, but it's important.) Second, by adding a Twitter accounts to a list that you create, you follow that user's updates, at least while viewing that list. This combination of authentication and requirement of relationship is a very good recipe for reducing spam.

• One of the earliest hopes for organizing web information was the human-edited directory. Efforts like the Open Directory Project still exist, but the model focused a lot on having defined editors for topics and a hierarchy of who could edit the site. That's a stark contrast to the default-open editing permissions of projects like Wikipedia, and is probably the most significant difference between the "human-edited" and "user-generated" eras of the web — we've always had people contributing content, the difference was in how much we trust them. Similarly, more outline-focused directories of content emerged, like Halley Suitt's Top Ten Sources, which is now defunct, but was based upon the idea of curated lists of feeds by topic. In each case, trying to scale a team of editors to keep up with the rate of growth in new sites on the web has been a losing cause. But we've seen sites like Delicious demonstrate the value of tagging individual pages or posts on a site — a new generation of directories could demonstrate the value of tagging entire streams of posts, or as we call them, feeds.

• Of course, you can't talk about directories and lists on the web without talking about Yahoo. Yahoo's original sin was in trying to create a human-edited directory of the web, and before they unfortunately achieved their goal of becoming the only successful web portal, the directory was Yahoo's signature element. (Until recently, Yahoo had maintained a page with the directory in a format resembling its original state, but even that is basically a blog now.) Instead of embracing authentication and relationships to prevent spam submissions from overwhelming the site, Yahoo leaned heavily towards requiring payment for inclusion of companies in the directory, limiting its utility. Human edited directories became mostly a footnote in both Yahoo's, and the web's history.

That fundamental history of being made by humans is some part of Yahoo is trying to evoke with its Y!ou and Yahoo campaign. But of course, it's a pretty good sign that a campaign isn't going to hit its mark when a completely unknown brand like HTC can launch virtually the same campaign as a household name like Yahoo, yet both companies think their message is going to resonate.

The truth is, if Yahoo wanted to help people reimagine the web stalwart at its best, they would do well to look to their roots in a human-edited or user-generated directory. Thinking of Yahoo at its peak of influence a decade ago, it becomes clear that instead of trying to insert their ubiquitous exclamation point into you, Yahoo should look at the story of The Matrix. I don't know if the brothers Warner or Wachowski would be inclined to license the property, but the only way to truly resonate with people in a narrative of Yahoo vs. Google is by adopting this theme: Man vs. Machine.

Just as in the Matrix the humans had originally created the machines that undermined them, to some large degree, Yahoo begat Google. And Yahoo would do well to suggest that the most human way for the web to evolve is if we all work together to organize it ourselves — a mission that happens to fit in well with Yahoo's largely-mishandled acquisitions of Flickr and Delicious. I'm not sure that the marketing folks at Yahoo are going to embrace that narrative, but an interesting opportunity definitely exists around the larger concept.

We all have the ability to create and exchange curated collections of feeds, using hubs like Twitter's Lists as connection points. We can extract the descriptions from those collections to form tag clouds about individual feeds. If we want to embrace hierarchy, we can organize the collections into a hierarchy by inheriting the category structure of sites like Wikipedia. If we're worried about spammers, we can now use widely-available systems of authentication and defined relationships to define who has the authority to create lists in a particular context. And of course, the ability to aggregate all of the distributed content from a defined set of feeds in realtime has now been commoditized, where i would have been exorbitantly expensive a decade ago.

In short, we can learn from Twitter's Lists to resurrect one of the web's original ways of organizing itself: Human-curated directories. We're used to exploring photographs or individual web pages by clicking on tags that were assigned by the creators or their community, and it will be just as valuable and useful to be able to explore entire feeds the same way. Open formats and APIs for exchanging this data already exist, so I can't wait to see a few enterprising hackers build the tools that let us revisit the idea of web directories. I love computers and robots, but I love humans even more, and I think we can do a pretty good job of guiding each other to the most interesting feeds around.

Update: Since this post got a lot more readers than I expected, it's become clear to me that the title was unintentionally vague. I thought it's amazing that a technology I still think of as fairly advanced, virtualizing operating systems on the desktop, has become commoditized enough that free, open source tools are very mature. When I said "for free" here, I meant that virtualization is available at no cost, not that Microsoft's giving Windows licenses away for free. Sorry for assuming that was obvious!

Pardon the uncharacteristically nerdy post, but I thought I'd write up a handy way I'd found to run Windows 7 in a seamlessly-integrated virtual machine under Mac OS X 10.6. I started with these basic components:

• A MacBook running Mac OS X 10.6.1 (Snow Leopard)
• A license for a full install of Windows 7 Ultimate
• VirtualBox 3.08 for Mac OS X

If you're like a lot of geeks that I know, you have a Mac as your main machine, but often need to drop into Windows to check things like browser compatibility or to use some particular Windows applications. I happen to just really like Windows 7 (it's on par with Mac OS overall for me, with some parts being better, such as the Windows Taskbar being much better than the Mac's Dock, and of course some parts being worse.) Some of these instructions may be obvious, but I hadn't seen a writeup anywhere, so here goes.

Here's what you'll need to do:

1. Install Windows 7 under Boot Camp, following the normal instructions. All of the Vista drivers for Boot Camp worked fine for me, and the install was actually pretty quick.
2. Download and install VirtualBox. This is an open source virtualization system that runs on Mac OS, a lot like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, but available for free.
3. The tricky part: You'll need to do a little bit of geeky stuff. First, eject the Windows boot camp disk in Finder. (It's usually called "Untitled".) Then, launch Terminal so you can enter two commands.
   • sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s3
   • VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename win7raw.vmdk -partitions 3
4. Start up VirtualBox, make a new Windows 7 machine, and browse to win7raw.vmdk in your home directory to choose the virtual hard drive for the machine. Your Windows install should boot up. It'll fuss for a little while as it installs new drivers.
5. Once that's done, you can optionally install the VirtualBox Guest Additions software to let your Windows install completely integrate with your Mac OS X environment.

While it's not quite as seamless as some of the paid alternatives out there, I've found it was very easy to do (under an hour total, and only 15 minutes or so if you already have Windows installed), works very well, and is speedy enough to use regularly.

As always, your mileage may vary, and comments or corrections or feedback are welcome. I was too lazy to do screenshots of the whole process, but if you want to turn this into a complete gadget blog-worthy writeup, I'll be happy to link to it. If you really liked this how-to, you can buy WIndows 7 from Amazon and I'll make a few bucks.

Most of my career has been dedicated to communications, either in making tools for enabling it, or in trying to practice the art myself. My friends tend to be people of conscience, so they often question why I waste my time on activities that could be described as "marketing" or even as hype when there are much bigger challenges that my talents could be applied to.

Perhaps the best articulation of why I think communications matters is in this short TED talk by Rory Sutherland:

In short, Sutherland argues that we need to start to value intangible, emotional experiences and that marketing, communications and, yes, even advertising can help bring that about. By starting to place importance on experiences and appreciation instead of objects and consumption, we become more sustainable as a society while also becoming more creative as a culture.

A lot of people offered up criticism when I launched Last Year's Model, asking why I was just encouraging people to talk to each other instead of actually doing something. As it turns out, talking to each other is doing something.

Last week, I found this picture of a group dinner at Guero's restaurant in Austin, TX, taken during South by Southwest in 2002.

At the time, most of us at the table knew each other primarily through the web and through the then-nascent blogging community. But in the seven and a half years since then, many of us have gone on to become entrepreneurs or creators, launching dozens of companies and products. I'm still collecting names and companies in the comments on Flickr, but just a cursory glance shows founders from Blogger, Six Apart, Adaptive Path, Flickr, Gawker, Twitter and more.

I point this out not (just) to name drop — you can click through to the Flickr image to see notes about who was there, read what they've done, or add your own annotations. But I also wanted to highlight one of the most important resources that creative people need to truly succeed: A community of peers.

In the business world, and especially in the technology industry, we focus a lot on the functional requirements of raising money, or on the technical requirements of having certain features or technological capabilities. What I've found, though, is that being part of an active, ambitious, supportive and diverse community of peers is just as valuable, if not more so, than any of the more prosaic prerequisites for success. That's even true in this photo — some of the people whom I met in person for the first time that night or that weekend have gone on to become among my closest friends, the biggest supporters of my work, and have ventured their formidable social capital to support my career. An even more diverse community of others whom I met at similar dinners or other events have played a similar role as well. Yet, at the time this photo was taken, I don't think any of these people had ever taken venture capital money for any project they'd ever done — everyone here had bootstrapped their way to the table.

So, it's easy to focus on the money or the little technological accomplishments, but I am glad I found these old pictures as a nice reminder that we should set aside time for a great meal with smart friends every once in a while. If it's not enough enticement that you're just having a good time, you can also justify it as one of the most worthwhile investments you can make in your future success.

There have been another spate of interesting conversations around the tech industry about what goals a tech company should have, and how they should achieve those goals. Right now, most venture capital organizations and the majority of trade press support an infrastructure that's optimized towards a certain set of results; The question is how we accommodate those who are trying for a different set of results.

One great conversation came from Ev Williams tweeting about tech conferences, and how Twitter would have been received:

I don't think Twitter would have done well at TC50 or Demo. (Likely response: WTF?) Wonder if Google would have. (Search? Yawn.)

I replied, "But @ev, response at TC50/Demo can be determined by reputation & ability to tell a story, both of which your team has." and Ev responded in kind with "Perhaps. But are reputation and ability to tell a story determining factors of success?". At that point, I realized we may have been talking about slightly different things, closing out with the brief observation " Narrative & experience are necessary but not sufficient. They're useful when creating a product, not just onstage."

And the core of it is that TechCrunch 50, Demo, and other tech industry showcase events are really optimized for a certain model of business, following a traditional path of venture capital funding, a certain amount of buzz or attention within a particular community, and (these days at least) an exit route that involves selling to a large incumbent that's interested in that area of innovation. I have lots of friends who have followed this path, and I don't begrudge them their success with it, but I think the logical extension of this path having become well-trodden is that we end up with events that as I mentioned last week, can be fairly criticized as insufficiently world-changing.

Interestingly, that last bit of criticism from Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch, saying that companies that had demonstrated their wares at the TC50 conference had for the most part not been very ambitious, was followed by a thematically similar post by Vivek Wadhwa, asking what value VCs have really brought to the world of innovation. I think the answer to Vivek's question is "It depends." but it's a very healthy sign if TechCrunch itself is questioning the fundamentals of the VC model and startups, and perhaps that skepticism justifies my tentative endorsement of the reigning regime of tech pundits.

But the crux of what I see as this reckoning point for the venture capital industry and venture-backed startups is that VCs are starting to look a lot like record labels. That's not a criticism — I used to work in the record industry, and I've enjoyed collaborating with a number of venture capital firms over the years. In both cases, though, the majority of their work is optimized for a certain model of success. This neatly mirrors Trent Reznor's analysis of what it takes for a new band to succeed:

If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:

• Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) - your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.

If you're forging your own path, read on.

• Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.

As it stands right now, the VC model is optimized for creating new Lady GaGas. I happen to like her work, so it's good that there will be more of those, both in the tech and entertainment worlds. But some people just want to be indie rockers, making a living with the work they love. It's that goal that is underpromoted in our tech trade press, and that perhaps inspires some of the skepticism around what gets hyped up.

That leads, naturally, to Jason Fried's post on 37Signals heralding their new $100 billion valuation. (At least on paper)

37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The financing round was led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners.

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”

I had talked to Jason a few weeks ago when he was planning to write this post, and though timing had it being published at the same time as Twitter's just received $100 million in funding, it wasn't designed to be a pointed critique of any particular company or funding event, so much as an overall pattern of not questioning particular narratives in the tech industry. And perhaps even more, it's a criticism of the fact that we don't question the values and goals that those narratives express.

And that was perhaps the point that was missed in Jason's rant about Mint's sale to Intuit which I blogged about last week. People got distracted by the speculation of whether Mint sold at the behest of the founders or investors. (As it turns out, it was likely the decision of the company's founders.) But the larger point was that, by selling to an incumbent from the last generation, Mint's team was expressing a desire for incremental improvement in an industry, instead of radical revolution. There are merits to both goals, but I know that a lot of us who truly love technology and have had our lives and companies transform by it are hungry to see more people be ambitious and shoot for creating revolutionary change instead of evolutionary change.

It's reassuring, though, that despite coming out on opposite sides of a VC funding story this week, both Ev's questioning of how tech conferences and media evaluate startups, and Jason's questioning of how VCs fund and (over)value startups come from the standpoint of asking: Can't we do more? Can't we do better.

It seems clear that the answer is, yes, we can support different outcomes, ones that optimize for more ambitious or radical changes. But we can't keep following the same path and wondering why it doesn't lead to a different destination.

Here are some interesting recent blog posts and articles, mostly by friends or acquaintances of mine, all of which add up to an interesting narrative.

• Spencer Ante in BusinessWeek documents Mint's sale to Intuit:

Mint.com owes much of its success to one such investor, First Round Capital, which opted to back the fledgling company at a time when other VCs demurred. Indeed, the Mint.com acquisition is First Round Capital's largest exit, beating out the $100 million sale of portfolio company Powerset to Microsoft (MSFT). And although First Round Capital would not quantify the return on its investment, co-founder Josh Kopelman says the Mint.com deal generated the highest return of any deal the firm has done. Previously its best return came when eBay (EBAY) acquired StumbleUpon for $75 million, which generated more than 14 times First Round Capital's original investment. "I don't think this changes our strategy," Kopelman says. "It is continued validation for our approach."

• Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch reminds startups that they're supposed to be changing the world:

I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google. Nothing against Mint, but Silicon Valley wasn’t built on $170 million exits.

Web visionaries like Reid Hoffman and Sean Parker struggled to come up with positive feedback on stage. Robert “I-get-excited-by-nearly-any-start-up” Scoble was so bored he was playing Hangman via Twitter with Paul Carr. Marc Andreessen praised Udorse—a company that he joked would make the world a worse place if it succeeded—because at least it was a new idea. Tim O’Reilly said he didn’t care whether Cocodot, one of the companies he judged, succeeded or failed because it was so meaningless in the world. And Tony Hsieh just said it blatantly: “I didn’t see anything that was trying to change the world.”

In some ways, I feel like Sarah's post is a direct corollary to my own earlier post where I'd suggested that the U.S. Government is the most interesting tech startup of 2009.

The ever-diplomatic Jason Fried of 37Signals riffs on a topic that he and I were just talking about last night, a lamentation of modest ambitions:

Mint’s sale to Intuit really pissed me off.

Why should I care? Because I think it’s indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation. I don’t know the full backstory, but I’d bet this sale was encouraged by a Mint investor.

Here’s a fresh new company that was gunning for an aging incumbent. And not only gunning, but gaining. They had a great product, great design, and great potential. They were growing rapidly and figured out the revenue game. They were on their way to redefining an industry — one that was left for dead by the current custodians.

They were everything their main competitor, Intuit, was not. While Mint was inventing, Intuit was out of it. People used Quickbooks/Quicken out of habit and legacy. People used Mint because they loved it. Intuit was disgruntled, Mint was disruptive.

But here’s what happened: Intuit, last decade’s leader in personal finance, just became the next decade’s leader in personal finance. Mint had their number, but they sold it for $170 million. A big payday for sure, and if that was their two-year goal then they nailed it, but I can’t believe that was the point behind Mint. It had too much potential.

Mint was a key leader of the next generation of game changers. And now it’s property of Intuit — the poster-child for the last generation. What a loss. Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the shit out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?

• Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, talks about the impending era of interesting new NYC tech startups:

There are a bunch of veteran entrepreneurs actively investing in and mentoring seed stage startups. Google has a big office here and many people seem to be leaving to go start companies.

...

New York City has many of the same strengths as Silicon Valley - merit-driven capitalism, the embrace of newcomers and particularly immigrants, and a consistent willingness to reinvent itself. Silicon Valley will always be the mecca of technology, but now that people here are getting back to, as Obama says, making things, New York City has a shot at becoming relevant again in the tech world.

• And Caterina Fake talks about how the connections in our city will fuel this tech renaissance:

Yes. As someone who goes back and forth between New York and Silicon Valley, I see more companies being started in the Valley. But I am seeing some great consumer internet companies being started out here too. Etsy is a great example. Hunch has to be on this list. And Kickstarter, which just recently launched, and is changing the way that creative projects themselves are funded. A promising beginning. There need to be more startups, naturally, and more seed capital, and a hometown newspaper, as Chris also notes. And the CS grads moving into startups rather than financial services companies. I'm optimistic.

Though Caterina is still optimistic about startups in Silicon Valley, I'll offer up that one of the biggest changes in her perspective since saying three years ago that it was a bad time for a startup is that she's spending a lot more time in New York City these days. Finally, my friend Jen Bekman exemplifies the diversity of NYC's nominal "tech" community, in that her startup and company are squarely focused on the world of fine art. As Jen says:

[T]here’s so much else going on aside from technology — the valley might hold the title of the best place for start-ups in technology, but NYC is the best place for many things.

The diversity of experience on the 20×200 team is incredible and inspiring. Everyone I work with has done a bunch of other things aside from technology, and not one of them set out for a tech career to begin with. Among us are photographers, musicians, artists, writers, lawyers, teachers and wine experts. We all love the internet (a lot! too much?) but what drives us most is our love of art and the people who make it.

Does this happen in Silicon Valley? Perhaps, but my time spent there — which I loved, for the record — was about an immersion in technology. Here in NYC it’s about the thing itself.

...

Then again, if you live too long inside the echo-chamber, it’s easy to forget who’s going to be using all this technology in the end. The reality check is important, almost as important as being able to hail a cab whenever I damn well please.

The thread that ties all of these things together for me is that technology adoption happens now because of culture and media, not simply for its own sake or because certain types of capital are available. It happens because a vision is ambitious enough to capture the attention of artist and writers and creators of all sorts, not just other technologists or people within the bubble of the existing tech community. And cities like Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C. and, particularly, New York City, have a decided advantage when it comes to connecting to those in the tech community to the rest of the world. We also have an unparalleled history of ambition (and, yes, ego) to match that potential.

I hope entrepreneurs learn a lesson from the few underwhelming startups that are out there, and realize that the model of making incremental improvements on companies that already exist is a recipe where, even if you achieve your goals, you may not have achieved much of a success. And if everyone around you has similarly unambitious goals, then maybe you need to be in a place where that's not true.

Note: I use, and like Mint.com, and I'm happy for their success and am hopeful that they have a positive impact on Intuit. I am not arguing that their definition of success should be the same as mine, but rather that they may have defined a different set of goals if they had been part of a different community.

One year ago, I wrote a remembrance, as I do every year, of where I'm at compared to where I was on this day in 2001. As a New Yorker, it's a personal ritual, one that I share publicly but do more for myself than for anyone else.

It was startling to see how angry I was a year ago, because I'm not angry today. Writing then, I said,

Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don't see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I'm not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there's a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you're addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother's name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001. Every single day I walk by there and know that blowhards who only ever saw the attacks as a video loop on CNN would never dare pontificate to her about Never Forgetting.

But this year, I am much more at peace. It may be that, finally, we've been called on by our leadership to mark this day by being of service to our communities, our country, and our fellow humans. I've been trying of late to do exactly that. And I've had a bit of a realization about how my own life was changed by that day.

Speaking to my mother last week, I offhandedly mentioned how almost all of my friends and acquaintances, my entire career and my accomplishments, my ambitions and hopes have all been born since September 11, 2001. If you'll pardon the geeky reference, it's as if my life was rebooted that day and in the short period afterwards. While I have a handful of lifelong friends with whom I've stayed in touch, most of the people I'm closest to are those who were with me on the day of the attacks or shortly thereafter, and the goals I have for myself are those which I formed in the next days and weeks. i don't think it's coincidence that I was introduced to my wife while the wreckage at the site of the towers was still smoldering, or that I resolved to have my life's work amount to something meaningful while my beloved city was still papered with signs mourning the missing.

Certainly, some of this is just the nature of growing up. I'm not the young man I was back then, and some of this is just the maturity of being at a different stage of life now. But I find some consolation in the idea that at least one of my lessons taken away from such a senseless loss of life was that I needed to live my own life with urgency, passion, love and obligation to others. I'm not there yet, but I am trying, and I can at least look back at the last eight years and see a bit of progress, in my own life, in the work of those around me, and in my city and my country as well.

If you're interested in taking a look back, I posted on the day of the attacks. I can also offer some excerpts from past years.

In 2002, I wrote On Being an American:

Get annoyed, get angry, be incensed as you are with your sister who always votes the opposite of you, as annoyed as you get with your father who never quite got where you were coming from politically. And come back, shaking your head but still smiling, and enjoy the chance to appreciate those Americans that your reflexes tell you to resent. Be thankful for the chance to have neighbors or fellow citizens who raise your ire or offend your sensibilities. Be thankful that we can sit in a quiet small town and roll our eyes at the inanities of a visitor from a big city.

In 2003, Two Years:

There's other people, who are consumed by their anger, unable to move forward with their lives, and determined to pick the scab and make sure it never heals. They find honor in making sure the pain never subsides, and in trying to make others hurt like they do. We have some of those, and I understand why they have to hold on to their anger. I just hope they see that it's not the best thing for them, in the long term. I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I've been so protective, I didn't want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella's Castle or something. I'm trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I'm lucky to have.

In 2004, Thinking of You:

I don't know if it's distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There's a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that "this is all going to be political debates someday" and, well, someday's already here.

In 2005, Four Years:

I was so defensive because I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn't care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn't honor the people who were actually going through the event.

In 2006, I wrote After Five Years, Failure. At the time, I was feeling resigned to a more cynical observance of this anniversary:

[A]fter all the grief of the day, one of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it's become cliché now, there's simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature.

We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.

In 2007, I was trying to come to terms with the sense of distance that had developed, with Six Is Letting Go:

On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn't only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn't just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we'd put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I'm most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I'd turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I'd be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.

Thank you to those of you who've joined me over the years in remembering, and especially those who were there for me eight years ago today. As I said earlier today, eight years later, I am still thankful for the memory of my city showing its best nature on its worst day. I love New York.

Today brings two announcements of great import to music fans, but they're most notable for who's not involved: The major record labels.

First, The Beatles are announcing a slew of new launches to reboot the band for the digital era, including a branded version of Rock Band and the release of a set of digitally-remastered recordings that ready their catalog for purchase online for the first time. At the same time, Apple is holding their annual iPod advertising event, focused (as is often the case) on music. Most of today's announcements from Apple are focused on the packaging and distribution of digital music, not just on songs and artists themselves.

But what's remarkable is what the confluence of these two events represents: The final decline of the record industry's ability to define the popular narrative about music. With only a few exceptions (such as Reprise, started by Frank Sinatra, and Apple Corps, started by the Beatles), record labels have been started by business people who have a terrifyingly consistent history of exploiting the artists they were ostensibly trying to promote. The labels compounded these affronts by developing a contempt for the new way consumers have decided to consume music in this millenium, hastening the end of the era of the major record labels .

But today marks a clear and unmistakeable milestone, dramatically demonstrating that the only entities with the power to make news about music today are artists themselves (as in the case of the Beatles) or technology companies (like Apple). You could arguably include a few TV shows, as well, insofar as reality competition game shows help introduce new artists. Despite this reality, though, most record labels today still absurdly believe that the media covers something like a new Jay-Z album because of the label's promotional efforts, instead of that coverage having arisen from genuine demand from fans, as demonstrated by dialogue on blogs, Twitter, Facebook or just in face-to-face "hey, you gotta hear this song!" conversations. The reality is that the people who can get excitement going about music these days aren't in the record industry at all, but rather all around it.

It's not surprising, of course — the record industry was remarkably late to realize that we've all cared about the music, not the records or CDs themselves. Thousands of articles and blog posts have been written about that transition, to the point where the record labels' demise has gone from unimaginable to being accepted as an inevitability in less than a decade.

Nothing could be more striking, though, than a day that's all about music but ony features a minor, marginal role for the traditional record companies. They've had a good run, but looking at the larger pattern of today's news makes it clear that their moment has passed.

About seven years ago, Matt Haughey, Paul Bausch and Meg Hourihan ran a very cool early blogging community called Blogroots, which acted as watercooler for conversations about the evolution of the then-nascent medium.

I'd found some links to the site in the Web Archive a few months ago, and sent them around, and then was delighted to see one of them surface on its own again today. Gawker Media's Erin Pettigrew used the initial thread about the launch of Gizmodo (Gawker's first title), along with my post at the time as a jumping-off point for a look at Gawker's success seven years later. I'm a big fan of using the history of our blogs as a record of the lessons we've learned over the years, and I'm glad I wasn't (overly) harsh about Gawker's chances.

As far as advertising on blogs goes, though, I'll admit I've become a bit of a convert to the potential. Today's conversation prompted a quick glance at the numbers for the biggest blog advertising platforms in the U.S., revealing something kind of interesting:

Not too shabby, considering it's only been a little over a year since Six Apart Media launched. Another little trivia note — that first Gizmodo design, which inspired such an interesting conversation, was designed and implemented by Mena and Ben Trott, working as sort of an ancient ancestor of today's Six Apart Services. It's fun to see that everybody involved is not only still blogging, but succeeding at it.

Michael Arrington. Dave Winer. Tim O'Reilly. Jason Calacanis. Add a few names of your own.

Within the navel-gazing little corner of the tech world that I inhabit, the mere mention of these names are among the most evocative things you can say. As much as any of the companies or tech executives they write about, the pundits who opine each day on the profound and mundane developments in the world of gadgets and the web are a surprisingly polarizing bunch. But it's hard to figure out exactly why that's the case.

Opinions are like...

Interestingly, the consensus on lots of these people (at least when they're not in the room) is pretty negative. For almost all of them, I've had someone say to me flat out "That guy's an asshole" when referring to them. Hearing it for years myself (especially when I didn't really know any of them except by reputation), I was inclined to agree. "Who does that guy think he is? What a hack." Prone to bluster, at times self-important, reflecting our entire industry's frequent lack of real-world perspective, I figured the conventional wisdom about these guys was actually correct. Even if I share all of those traits myself.

Recently, I took a look at my personal experience with most of these men, and the few other high-profile tech pundits with whom I have at least a casual acquaintance. And in nearly every case, they'd been pretty much positive. Sure, I've cringed when the work I've done (either personally or as part of Six Apart) has been criticized or, worse, ignored. But it's hard to find a time when a response to something I did was wildly unfair, or when any factual errors weren't quickly corrected. More importantly, they've consistently been generous and welcoming in encouraging me to speak up not just about the opinions I have about technology or tech companies, but about the way that our industry as a whole needs to evolve.

I've had a bit of time to reflect on it because lately, obviously, I've been engaging in a bit of armchair punditry myself lately. Hopefully I'm not quite so hyperbolic as the worst excesses of contemporary tech punditry, but I've unabashedly been trying to be provocative and ambitious in what I'm writing. And I realize the key difference between me and those who have been the harshest critics of the current reigning powers in tech punditry is that the critics have often put the pundits on a pedestal, and then attack them for being in a position of power, not for any particularly egregious problems with the content of what they're saying. I've said it before: We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves.

Call it arrogance on my part, or naivete, but I have never seen any tech pundit on the web as more qualified to opine than I am, and have never ascribed more power to any blogger just because they have a bigger audience than my site, or because they happen to run a conference that people pay to attend. As a result, their shortcomings don't bother me, and it certainly helped me get over the feeling that I should have strong feelings (positive or negative) about a bunch of guys I barely know. When they're doing good, the tech pundits are just another bunch of good bloggers that I read, and when they're screwing up, that just means more room for me to do what I do.

A Little Perspective

Perhaps the biggest lesson has been from my conversations with those outside of the tech industry. I always ask who they get their tech news from, and what their opinion is of those pundits. Nearly every outsider has said they're very pleased with how the prominent tech pundits represent our industry. Those with a little bit of distance from the petty politics of the tech world are uniformly astonished at how much negativity and even contempt those within the tech industry have for our most prominent voices.

Now, I'm not saying there is nothing to criticize about the work of the major influencers in the world of web technology. You may have noticed that the example names above, along with a dozen others I could have added, will mostly fall into the category of American white male millionaires. That's a demographic with whom I have no quibble ("Some of my best friends are...!"), but that I feel we can safely acknowledge our outreach to this group can be considered a Mission Accomplished, and we can now move on to accommodating the voices of additional groups. But most of my criticisms of their work are, I have found, more criticisms of our industry in general. An emphasis on the novel instead of the meaningful, a tendency to overemphasize minor news and downplay bigger stories, a focus on the technical details of a new technology instead of its social impact — I think the blog posts and conferences that we all participate on demonstrate these flaws as a reflection of the faults of our culture overall. I can't judge any individual too harshly for failing to consistently rise above the culture that surrounds them.

I'll gladly call any of these pundits on the carpet for mistakes they make, or for shortcomings in the work they produce. Hopefully, my track record of arguing for inclusiveness will be a positive nuisance to encourage them to follow the better angels of their nature. And of course, I'll be accused of sucking up to them, even though I have no agenda in defending them except to note that the tactic of quietly insulting the tech pundits has not been particularly effective in diminishing their influence.

But as I've begun to (re-)dabble in punditry, I think it's telling that private conversations (and the occasional ranting blogger) direct so much vitriol at the people who lead much of the conversation in the world of technology. it would seem the more effective form of criticism is obvious, effective and relatively easy: Just do better yourself.