Results tagged “anniversary”

While I'm still hard at work at responding to all the requests that have been made, I had to take a moment to mark the tenth anniversary of this blog today.

I could ramble at length about the many ways in which writing this site has enriched my life, but suffice to say that every part of my personal and professional lives has been utterly transformed by the connections I've made through this site. I am thankful every day that some number of people read the things that I write here, and even more appreciative that so many of you find enough value in it to respond, reply, refute or just return over time. I'm particularly thankful to the few of you whom I know have been here from the beginning

To my surprise, many of my most popular and best writings have happened in just the past year or two of my site. In my mind, I always see the peak of my site's popularity or quality having come at some fabled time in the past, but it's my sincere hope that I actually haven't done my best work yet on this site.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for the inspiration. Hopefully these archives are just the first ten years.

(Thanks to Merlin Mann for the photo.)

In two weeks, I'll be marking the 10 year anniversary of blogging on dashes.com. I'm celebrating by making a simple request: Tell me what you'd like to see me blog about. I can't guarantee I'll get to every request that's made, but I am going to try to cherry-pick the best ideas that fit into what this site is all about. (If you're curious what that means, check out my Best Of, or just view the Most Popular things I've written.)

To support the effort, I'm taking off the next few weeks to focus primarily on writing and researching. While it might seem like a weird way to spend a "vacation", running this site over the past 10 years has been among the most fulfilling and rewarding things I've done in my life. So it only seemed natural to me to dedicate even more time and energy to it.

And to that end, if you're in the NYC area and we haven't had the chance to meet up in person, or it's been too long since we've caught up, drop me a line to anil@dashes.com or give me a ring at (646) 833 8659 and if I've got time, I'm happy to grab coffee or a drink with anybody who's a reader of this site. (I'm also open to suggestions of things I should check out in NYC that I might have missed — the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel is already on my list, but I'm open to anything. And you know, parties and meetups are fun, too.)

Thanks to everybody for helping me celebrate my site's anniversary in style, and I look forward to getting even more ideas and inspiration from all of you!

A few weeks ago, as a surprise gift for our anniversary, my wife got us a night's stay at the Revolving Hotel Room, part of theanyspacewhatever exhibition at the Guggenheim.

Created by Carsten H�ller, the room is a remarkable art installation that also happens to be a complete room suite that you can stay in for a night, letting us live the dream of camping out in the museum and sneaking out among the exhibits while it's closed.

I had no inkling of the plan, just being told by my wife when to be ready to go out. Adding to the surreality, the BBC was there to greet us, filming our entrance and initial encounter with the exhibit for their video segment.

I had been inclined to write a Yelp-style review of the stay ("The continental breakfast served in the morning was serviceable, but our room didn't even have a television!"), but since the Revolving Hotel Room is sold out, it seemed as if that would be unnecessary. As it turns out, the signature revolving motions of the platforms that hold the furniture in the room are barely noticeable once you're asleep, though when you're awake it's very easy to observe how quickly you're moving. In fact, that only thing that might have kept the night from being restful was the noise generated by the other exhibit pieces, echoing through the giant open rotunda of the building. But we had a friendly attendant/guide/security guard who, after escorting us through a personal tour of all the exhibits, graciously turned off all the artworks that used bright lights or loud sounds.

Right when we returned from our stay in the room, Alaina posted a brief writeup as well as a photo set on Flickr including some images and video from our vantage point staying in the room. Since our stay was only the third night the room was open, not many reviews or images of the exhibit had filtered out, so we inspired quite a few follow-up stories, from Gothamist's salacious take to Art21's more analytical look. Art21 also hints at the part of the experience that perhaps lingers with me most: The other exhibits we took in.

Being able to see the museum uncrowded and unhurried by the usual crush of competing patrons was the most memorable and distinctive part of the experience. We could take our time, really appreciate the works (as well as the incredible architecture of one of NYC's signature buildings), and form our opinions without the awareness of thousands of people around us. The fact that, to me, many of the works seemed informed by the short, text-heavy world I live in, all a blur of Twitter updates and SMS messages, made the exhibit in its entirety particularly resonant.

The truth is, the Guggenheim as a space makes a terrible hotel. The room was hardly secluded, the amenities were perfunctory, and while the bed and chairs were comfortable enough, the gracious staff was the only part of the experience that compares to the quality of other fine hotels. That being said, I'd stay there again in a second.

Last month marked the ninth anniversary of me starting this blog, more or less continuously updating since then. As I begin my tenth year here on dashes.com, I've made a few changes around the site.

First and foremost, there's a new look to the blog. My incredibly talented coworker Jim Ramsey created the basic theme, which I made a little bit uglier and naturally added some purple to. (Movable Type users can grab the Mid-Century template set upon which it's based.) I also owe a debt to Joi Ito for taking the original photo from which my little icon is based. There are more changes to come, but even at this half-complete stage, feedback is welcome.

Second, I finished something I've been meaning to do for ages, two new listings:

• Most Popular
• Best Of

Both of these archives are exactly what you'd expect, with the Best Of featuring a number of my posts that I've been most proud of over the years, including some that were less popular but that I thought were worth featuring. There's also a more extensive list of all archives, organized into a calendar or by tag.

I've brought back the Action Streams that I had on the site earlier, and will be doing more to incorporate my various online presences into my site here. I don't plan to just dump my Twitter updates and my bookmarks and crap into the stream of posts here unless you folks think I should. (I'm guessing not.) There's also different ads on the site. I've experimented with a number of different advertising ideas over the years without much objection, so I'll likely continue to do so. Unsurprisingly, the ads are provided by SIx Apart Media.

I'll be doing more with giving folks the chance to vote on things on the site, as well. Coming up with my own list of my best blog posts seems a little ridiculous, even for someone who's as shameless as I am about self-promotion. I'd love to hear more from readers about what posts were interesting, or what I should write more about.

But that brings me to the most important point: Thank you! Over the years, I've seen my technical skills decline, my writing skills improve, my frequency of posting drop, and yet somehow the number of readers has consistently increased. Writing for this site is one of the most satisfying hobbies, most rewarding intellectual pursuits, and most unlikely passions that I've had in my life, and the biggest reason why is thanks to the relationships I've formed with people who've read what I write here.

So, I hope you'll take a minute or two to look over the best or at least most popular things I've written, to see if any of it strikes a chord. And I hope we're all still here having this conversation nine years from now.

Five years ago, I said I work for Six Apart. At the time, that sort of thing was a big deal, not because of me, but because so few of us who loved blogging could get a job doing what we loved.

Since then, amazingly, it's become downright common to work in the blogging business. I have literally dozens of friends who work on creating tools and technology for blogs, and dozens more who blog for a living as part or all of their job. I even get to work with the best of them, from San Francisco to Paris to Tokyo. And now I can celebrate the company and industry I support in the city that I love, since we have an office in New York City.

As always, I'm immensely proud of working at Six Apart, even more proud to count such amazing coworkers as peers and friends, and proudest of all of what our community of bloggers has accomplished. When I started working at this company, my hopes were that we'd be able to teach more people about blogs, and that we'd be able to build a sustainable, ethical company that gave a bunch of talented people a great place to work. But in retrospect, I find it almost impossible to believe the role we've played in helping blogs become so common that they're taken for granted.

That's not to say it's been easy. At Six Apart, we've made a number of mistakes, and learned from them. We've all been through a lot of stress, both personal and professional. But even after all we've been through, Mena wrote a beautiful post in my honor, and last Friday offered one of the kindest compliments to me that I've ever gotten, recognition in front of all of my coworkers, a group of people whom I hold in the highest esteem.

But one point that she highlighted last week was that all acts of entrepreneurship are really acts of faith. My title these days (though I often cringe when I say it), is "Chief Evangelist". I've always been uncomfortable with the religious implications of it, but I've become comfortable with the fact that it reflects a bit of faith. This goes back to why I started doing this work in the beginning:

So I make tools that help people communicate. Mostly because I love technology, mostly because I love to try and build things and to get other people to think these things are cool, too. And certainly because I'm hoping to impress my friends and family with the end results. But some small, central part of the effort is because I know I'm privileged to be able to talk to anyone in my family at any time. In the span of a few decades, my father went from not being able to even send a letter to his father for a few years to being able to instant message me frequently enough to pester me.

Our letters to each other used to be the documentation of the lives we'd lived, the entirety of our correspondence forming memoirs for those who weren't accomplished or pretentious enough to formally write out a memoir. I think that, among many other functions, this is one of the key roles that personal publishing can play in our lives. Weblogs and other social media document the lives we live and let us connect in ways that are, despite the cliché, genuinely new.

This is more true than ever. I am glad to have stuck with a company, and with blogging, through both points of ceaseless hype and endless criticism. Well past any point of blogging being "cool" to the insular world of tech geeks, blogs have become enough of the fundamental infrastructure of communication to actually become interesting to the world at large.

And of course, I had some personal goals, too. I wanted to work with good friends, with people I know and trust. I wanted to show people that New York City is, and will be, one of the centers for real, hardcore technology innovation and invention. (We're hiring!) I wanted to bring together the worlds of the two things I have always been passionate about, technology and media.

As is likely obvious from our announcements this week, we're close to being all of the things I'd hoped a company like Six Apart might become. In just the past year, we've damn near reinvented the company, with Ben and Mena and our CEO Chris Alden have been leading some brave efforts to do what few have the courage to do: Reimagine a company that's already successful and growing, and picture it honoring its innovative roots in a way that's actually new. We've invented, launched, and promoted more things that make the web better in the past year than at any time since the beginning of the company.

That kind of creative destruction, the willingness to take apart something that's working in order to make it something truly inspiring, is actually even more ambitious than I'd imagined Six Apart being when I'd joined. And it's the reason that, after five years, the milestone for me is that it feels much more like I'm starting a new job than that I've been at one for half a decade. I can't ask for much more than that.