Results tagged “newyorkcity”

Update: Voting is now open. I'd appreciate your support.

Update #2: There's video of my platform speech at this month's tech meetup, if you want to see and hear me articulate the ideas below.

This is a bit outside of my usual realm, but I decided to run for the board of the New York Tech Meetup, the monthly event that's home for the tech, startup and innovation communities here in New York City. Since it's not the sort of thing I have done before, I thought I'd explain my reasoning and offer a few reasons why members of the meetup might want to vote for me.

First, I should mention that there are many other excellent candidates running, and I assume we all share the values of loving New York City and the technology community and we all hope for the best for both of those institutions. Several of the other candidates are friends or associates of mine, and overall we are fortunate enough as a community to be blessed with many good candidates. Given those facts, I'm not going to belabor my credentials as a fan of New York City or of technology.

Instead, I'd like to give voice to a few ideas that are essential to the health, growth, and positive impact of the technology community in New York City. The hope is that these will be qualifications for my election, but at the very least I hope they would be considered useful concepts for whomever is elected.

• I have some experience both as a coder and marketer, as both a hacker and a suit, as an entrepreneur and an angel advisor and the founder of a non-profit, as well as having worked in both the tech and media worlds. Having multiple perspectives is key. It's pretty easy for different segments of the tech community to get elbowed aside by other equally-important factions, and one of the best ways to keep things balanced is by having someone who truly identifies with each of these disciplines.
• We have not been ambitious enough in making NYTM truly reflect NYC. I don't just mean our efforts to be more inclusive by gender or ethnicity, though of course we haven't met (or even clearly defined) goals in those regards, either. Rather, we're often still very limited in the kinds of things we aspire to create as a community, and in the audiences we target our efforts toward. If we keep making applications that only work on $600 smart phones, then we should stop pretending to represent New York when only a small fraction of our city's residents can afford to spend that much on gadgets.
• Let's recognize that we are in competition. We are competing with San Francisco for top talent and to attract the attention of creators who make new, innovative ideas and businesses. We are in competition with the financial industry within our own city, that has dominated the market for technology talent without providing commensurate platforms for innovation by others. Let's acknowledge those competitive drivers, and engage with them seriously to make the case for why the New York technology community deserves the time and attention of the world's talents ahead of any other city or industry.
• There's a "Maker Movement" in technology that's much bigger than just web apps or smartphone apps. From biobricks to makerbots to wearable technology and tech-driven art, we should interpret the word "technology" in its broadest meaning when we go looking for participants and presenters at our Meetups. That diversity of ideas and influences will only help inspire more creativity from everyone who attends.
• We must be a community that is able to hold officials accountable. The tech community in New York is as important as every other constituency. When we are ignored or insulted by politicians who don't know or don't care about technology, we should flex our formidable financial and cultural muscles to make sure that elected officials know there are political consequences to ignoring the values of the technology community. Certainly, we're not monolithic in our individual political beliefs, but there are large and pressing issues that affect the technology community which inspire a broad consensus amongst our membership, and those issues should be as important to city (and state, and Federal) officials as any other influential community's goals.

Finally:

• Let's fix the stupid ticketing system for RSVPing to the Meetup. We can do this.

That's the core of what the New York Tech Meetup community deserves. I can help make these goals happen, because I have the privilege of extraordinary access both within our New York community and in other centers of influence such as San Francisco/Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. I also have been blogging and sharing my ideas long enough that I've earned a bit of a platform for the things that I say, which I would be eagerly motivated to use to serve the New York tech community.

My words here on this site should hopefully also show a track record of having supported all of these goals independently for years before I ever considered running for the NYTM board. If you're hearing my name or reading my words for the first time as a result of this election, you should know that I'm a passionate and unrepentant New Yorker, an advisor to New York-based startups, non-profits and events, and someone who doesn't lightly enter into commitments to a community without knowing that I can do the job well. I am not beholden to any of the large tech companies that dominate our industry, nor am I a member of any political party, and both of those credentials give me the freedom to really say what I mean, when I think it will make a difference.

Everything else you might want to know about me is probably on my about page.

To my fellow New Yorkers in the tech community, thanks for your consideration, and I look forward to talking to you all tomorrow night.

Hey, NowPublic made a list of the 50 most influential web people in New York, and I'm on it at number six. So, thanks to the folks who made the list, and I appreciate the recognition.

However, every time a similar list comes out, I have a number of responses that immediately come to mind, and most of my friends who have to suffer through my ranting reply with some variation of "You're just complaining because you're not on the list!"

But this time, I am on the list. Which means it's a chance to talk about the reasons, good and bad, why these sorts of lists exist, and what purpose they can serve.

Update: Apparently, I'm on the TechCult Top 100 Web Celebrities list, too. Which appears to be even more blatantly link-baiting, though again, the company I'm keeping there is nice.

• First and foremost, organizations (whether they're websites, media organizations, publishers, individuals, institutions, whatever) create these lists to solidify their power and influence, and to promote their own authority. This generally works, with the most exceptional examples like Time's Person of the Year actually acting to amplify the publication's own profile. With that kind of success, it's easy to understand how Time decided to also create a Time 100 list as well.
• For less-known organizations, like NowPublic, having a list like this acts as a phenomenal engine of promotion. People who have a high profile are generally well-known, at least in part, because they put an effort into being well-known. Therefore, putting their name on a list is an extremely effective way to get their attention. On the web, we call this link-baiting, but offline, it's simply called flattery.
• These types of lists can be useful. One of the earliest and most fundamental milestones in the formation of a community is the desire for certain members to recognize those that (appear to) exemplify the values that the community aspires to, or would like to be identified by. Similarly, promoting unsung or less-known members of a community can be a useful method of indicating a desire for a community's values to evolve.
  
• Lists are different from awards. Everybody on them is a winner, of sorts, so there's very little sense of bitterness between people on the list. Similarly, having a large number of people be recognized increases the aspirational value for those who aren't on the list -- it's easy to pick someone on a lengthy list who seems undeserving.
• Creating this kind of content is perfect for the lazy days of summer. Fondly referred to in the publishing industry as "listicles", assembling faux-scientific methods of cataloging potential list members is a perfect task for interns. Here in New York, all of our local media editors traipse off to the Hamptons to sit out the sweltering days of July or August, and by amazing coincidence, much of local media publishes their "Best Of" articles around the same time. It's a credit to NowPublic that they've decided, interestingly, to publish the methodology for calculating influence.
• Pointing out these structural circumstances which occasion the creation of such lists doesn't mean that they're not still flattering and appreciated. It's nice to see your name on something. One of NowPublic's stated criteria for evaluation is accessibility, and as someone who's had his mobile phone number sitting on the side of his website for years, I am happy to see that's a factor in evaluating influence.
• There are, of course, some lists which are really important. Such as the Top 10 Boy Bloggers We'd Let Rub Our Touchpads. Congratulations to Nick Denton and Jason Kottke for being the only guys who are on both the NowPublic list and on this more esteemed accounting.

Thanks again to NowPublic for the recognition, and congratulations to the many friends and acquaintances of mine on the list. With only one exception, it's fantastic company to be part of and I can't wait to see who they pick in other cities and in New York next year.

The other day, I'd been reminded about some of the most striking statistics I'd seen last year, which were from the NYPD crime stats for 9th Precinct, where I live. (That link is to a PDF with stats for last week.) Each precinct in the city files reports every week, and those reports also include comparisons of statistics for prior years.

But what's amazing is the trends in violent crime shown over the past 20 years. CompStat reports show the numbers from 1990 until 2006, and over that time, rapes are down 70% from 41 to 12. Burglaries are down 85%, from 1420 to 209. And murders? There weren't any. In my neighborhood, people don't kill each other. In 1990, they did, 23 times. Robberies over the same timeframe are down 81%, and felony assaults are down 69%. And all of this in a neighborhood where, just a year before they started tracking these stats, we had a police-incited riot that divided the entire neighborhood. Today, there's a dog run and a kids' playground just steps from where the riot began.

Now, of course, that's no consolation to the people who've still suffered from the crimes that do go on, and of course it doesn't account for other precincts where crime is worse. But the fundamental character of what it means to live here is so incredibly different from the perception that so many outsiders have of what it means to live in New York City. You will always have some violent crime -- an overwhelming majority of the personal violence that does happen could fall under the description of crimes of passion, people beating up their romantic rivals or things like that. But the day-to-day threat of random street violence is measurably, fundamentally reduced. Along with the massive improvements made to so many parks across all five boroughs, we are truly in a golden age for public space in New York. These numbers represent just one part of that, but it's an important part.

More from the New York Daily News, and detailed city-wide crime reports going back to 1960 are available here. Choire is also blogging about many of the same topics in his guest posts on kottke.org today.

It's the first year that the anniversary didn't hang over everything I do. I'm still aware of it, I'll always be aware of it, but time and distance and some amount of willful disbelief have dimmed the sharpness of the remembrance.

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.

After that, things were more often cloudy than clear. That day, I knew who the bad guys were, but wanted to know that all of us who were the good guys were on the same side. I miss the clarity.

But I've let it go. There won't be another moment when people aren't picking sides. Maybe it's just human nature, but we're unwilling to accept nuance and tolerate each other despite our differences, except for a very brief window when we're still in shock. Today "Never Forget" only exists as a marketing slogan for various political advocacy efforts. And it's not as if I can forget -- just last week I was listening to a random playlist and the tune that came up was the one I'd used as my solace on the day of the attacks, and my heart still lept into my throat, my chest still got tight. That part will probably never go away. But that's hardly the same as Never Forgetting.

I don't mean to sound bitter; Maybe there's something great about the fact that we are so rambunctious and willful and stubborn that even our greatest tragedies ultimately can't force us to stop being so ornery and human. Maybe staying in that moment too long means never living in the now.

Somehow, though, I still miss the idealism and hope that were the best things that came out of the worst days. I'm hoping that's the part I'll never forget.

From years past:

• 2006: After Five Years, Failure
• 2005: Four Years
• 2004: Thinking of You
• 2003: Two Years
• 2002: On Being An American
• On the day of the attacks: Thank You

I get asked by a lot of people for tips on what to do when visiting New York City, and though I'm hardly an expert on NYC tourism, I thought I'd take the time to write up a lot of the tips and information that I share with family and friends when they come to town. I'm also hoping that people who read this and are inspired or offended by my suggestions or opinions take the time to write up their own recommendations. To start off the series, I thought I'd over the basics, most of which have to do with mindset and expectations about coming to visit New York.

To get in the right mindset about visiting New York City, there are a few things you need to really take to heart, and once you've absorbed these lessons, the rest of your trip will be much less stressful and a lot more fun. (This first post is aimed mostly at people who've never been to New York or don't know much about the place.)

• NYC has a different culture. If you're coming from nearly any other place on Earth, New York City will be different from what you're used to. Culturally, geographically, and socially, it's distinct from any other place in the United States. You wouldn't insist on people at Disney World wearing formal wear, and you wouldn't expect people in Paris to all know English, so if it helps, think of New York City as a city full of Americans who speak English, but just happen to have a significantly different culture than the rest of the country. Once you look at it that way, you can stop being frustrated by your expectations and enjoy the differences.
• Don't go to the goddamn Olive Garden in Times Square. If you come to New York just to experience the same things you can get at home, you'll find them to be... well, completely unimpressive. Yes, we do have really big gaudy versions of the restaurants you eat at back home, but the way fancy restaurants work here is backwards. In the small town I grew up in, going to the Red Lobster was fancy because it was a big national chain. In New York, it's the opposite -- the places we love most are those that are distinctly, and uniquely, of New York City.
• Yes, it's expensive. Speaking of comparisons to home, you'll just drive yourself nuts if you are constantly saying "Hey, that only costs half as much at the Wal-mart back home!" From rent to food to clothing to parking, a lot of the staples of life cost more here. What you may be surprised to find is how often there are very, very good examples of these staples (especially food and clothing) that you can find for cheaper than almost anywhere else. Millions of us who live here started out being broke and barely scraping by, and as a result, there's always a market for cheap eats and low-cost threads.
• Get out and walk. The primary mode of transportation for all of Manhattan and most of the outer boroughs is a combination of walking and mass transit. We really, truly do ride the subways and buses every day, and even millionaires don't own cars. Our Mayor Bloomberg is a billionaire, and he rides the subway to work, and it's not merely populist affectation -- it's just that much more efficient. If you are walking on the sidewalks and get winded because you're not used to hoofing it so much, be sure to get out of the way before you just stop; Pulling to a halt on a sidewalk is the equivalent of stopping your car right in the middle of traffic. Though the subways and buses can look a little tricky, they're actually extremely convenient and inexpensive. But if you're just too intimidated by them, grab a cab -- they're cheaper than taxis in any other American city, they're really speedy except in the worst traffic, and NYC cab drivers are almost always pretty competent at getting you to any common tourist destination.
• It's not a theme park. This one is hard to stress enough. Though New Yorkers are overwhelmingly friendly, this is the place where we live, work, and play, and being treated like zoo animals while we do those things is one of the few things that can make us ornery to tourists. I used to work in the Empire State Building. While I never got tired of being wowed by the building, it got pretty tiring being asked questions like I was a tour guide about where to find bathrooms, or how old the building was, or did I mind taking someone's picture when I was just trying to get to my office. Put yourself in the shoes of those around you, and be considerate of people trying to live their regular lives, and they'll bend over backwards to help you enjoy the city.
• It's safe. I was raised with terrifying stories of how Central Park was where one goes to get mugged, and grew up believing all kinds of horrible urban legends about what happens to people in New York City after dark. The reality is, most places any tourist would go are incredibly safe. Violent crime in New York, as in all of the U.S., has dropped dramatically over the past decade and a half. You should, of course, take sensible precautions (be as aware as you'd be at any crowded area like an amusement park or an airport) but you don't need to go around fearfully clutching your purse, like I see so many people doing in Times Square. The best way to make sure you never have to worry is to spend a little bit of time reading up on your destination and route wherever you go (all of the web-based mapping sites offer nice amenities like displaying NYC's subway stops overlayed on the map) and being mindful of your surroundings.
• The natives are friendly and helpful. Like everyone I know who lives here, I end up giving someone directions or information almost every single day. I don't live in a particularly tourism-heavy part of the city, but there are always people around who are out of their element, and they're fairly easy to spot. (You all dress funny.) If I'm not in a hurry and I think I can help, I'm always glad to answer a few questions, and that's generally true of most people here. It's even a good opportunity to talk to someone who is a little bit different than the people in your usual circle of acquaintances. No matter where you're from, you should be able to find somebody in New York who seems strange to you -- now's your chance to go make a new friend.

Remember a few years ago I mentioned that I was moving to San Francisco?
Well, it's time for an update: I'm moving back to New York City!

There's a couple of reasons why, and they nicely mirror the reasons why I moved to California in the first place. At that time, I said:

So, I'm moving to San Francisco to be even more involved in Six Apart. We're doing all this work with developers and partners because there's still another 99.9% of people in the world who haven't heard what weblogs can do for them. I want to be part of spreading that message, and we're going to need help to do it. I'm also moving because I still honestly believe Six Apart makes the best weblog tools in the world, and we're going to be the the company that brings weblogs to a broad audience.

It's been less than three years since then, and literally millions of people have joined the community of bloggers. A lot of my reason for moving in 2004 had to do specifically with Movable Type: it's the product that started our company, and we'd made some first mistakes in communicating about who it was for, what our plan was, and how things were going to evolve. I wasn't sure if we'd be able to get everybody blogging, but I sure as hell wanted to try.

The first sign that things have changed radically is that the idea of people building entire careers on top of blogs went from a hopeful wish to an everyday reality. The best example? Serious Eats. My wife Alaina helped create and launch the site on Movable Type as its General Manager, and the main reason we're moving back to New York is because running this site every day is her job. That blows my mind.

More importantly, Serious Eats a fucking fantastic community, already. I'm just amazed at the breadth of knowledge that the hosts and members on the site have about almost every kind of food. And I could watch Jeffrey Steingarten's insanity every day of the week.

Serious Eats represents the success of the professional blogging community in other ways, too. Back in 2004 when I wrote my post about moving to San Francisco, companies like Apperceptive didn't even exist. Today, they've got a whole staff of smart folks creating blog-powered sites for a living. I love that other people are getting to do something they love for a living, instead of as just a hobby.

But of course, there's still a lot to do. In explaining what I do for a living, or describing all the chances I get to talk about blogging, I'm frankly amazed at the number of people who don't have the faintest idea how blogging can be a great thing. I'm almost equally surprised that after years of talking about this all day every day, it's still exciting to me.

And I've got a lot of things that I feel are my personal obligation to address. There's the basics, like how a blog can make your life better, or make your job easier. But also, people don't know how deeply all of us at Six Apart care about getting new people to blog, to help them connect with people through blogging. Sometimes I think the strangers who attend the random conferences with me have more of an idea what's going on with Six Apart and Movable Type than the "experts" who spend all day reading blogs. That's something I intend to fix -- we haven't forgotten about our original community or taken them for granted, we just needed to talk to these new audiences because nobody else could do it.

There are other challenges: these days, we've got broadcast TV networks producing shows every week that are scaring the shit out of people, thinking that blogging is just "that thing on Dateline where my daughter puts her home address on the web". I think I can help dispel that fear, too. Perhaps more than anything, being outside of San Francisco means I can work on getting a more diverse crowd of people using these tools to make their jobs or their lives better.

That's where I started with this whole thing, trying to find a way to make real connections using my blog. Some of that is habit for me; I told my Vox neighborhood about my move before I posted it here. So I should mention that there was something of an easter egg in my post on leaving New York. I had said:

That's the part I struggle to remember, that I'll be glad to see how the city's evolved in my absence, and that I've already had a wealth of experiences that would last me a lifetime even if I could never return. This is closing a chapter, certainly, but not closing a book, and in the meantime I have what I've had. I worked at the top of the Empire State Building. I got to shake Rudy Giuliani's hand and say thanks. I got to buy the last mango I bought in Manhattan, and all that it entails. I got to watch the hot dog contest and the fireworks on the Fourth of July. I got stuck on the wrong side of the Macy's Parade on Thanksgiving. I walked through a silent Times Square in the middle of a snowstorm and pushed my way past the crowds in the Square on New Year's Eve. I stayed at home a hundred Saturday nights, knowing that there were tons of people having the time of their life out on the town, and didn't regret it for a minute.

The easter egg is that mention of "the last mango I bought in Manhattan". That mango was what I bought in lieu of an engagement ring when I proposed to my wife. A year later (and now, over a year ago!), we got married. And now that commitment is part of what brings me back home. Pretty cool.

I've written about a lot of things on my blog that I felt were important to me over the years, so it's something of an uncanny feeling to know that I'm writing about the one that's the most important thing I've ever written. On Saturday, I got married.

My wife's name (wife!) is Alaina Browne. Many of you who know me in person have met her and know of her, and a lot of you whom I've never met might know her from her work on A Full Belly or with Mule Design. She's much more than a few URLs, of course, but it's a useful introduction for people who didn't know we were connected.

It's hard to find words to describe something as amazing as what this past weekend was like for me... The funny thing about life is that the most profound things are often the most banal. Our story is unique and at the same time exactly the same as every love story that's ever been. Though this was the most personal thing I've ever been through, it's one of the few events so universal that almost everyone understands it. And I wish everyone could have the happiness we do, and could have as much fun as we've been having.

But there are the parts that are uniquely us, maybe even some ideas that might inspire other people who wrestle with the everyday details of relationships, commitment, family, friendship, and marriage. I don't intend to write about what Alaina means to me, because some things are just for us, but I thought I'd take some notes on them now, as much for myself as for anybody else who'd want to read them.

I've been putting off writing about it because it seems like too much to cover, but then that's probably the whole point. We make obstacles of things by building them up in our minds, when they were never really that big a deal to begin with. And no attempt at writing ever got easier through procrastination.

I'm home in San Francisco now. It's been a week since our stuff was packed into the truck, and 6 days since we hopped on a plane here and 4 days since I've really felt at all settled in. It'll be another two or three weeks until I have little niceties like my CDs or books or, well, a real bed.

In some ways, nothing changes. I'm still a New Yorker, even here, but I don't hate San Francisco and I think I'll grow to like it. The interesting thing, to me, is how much it still matters to me to assert that I'm New Yorker. It's like all things we pick up as part of our identity when we're young: arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and impossible to let go of.

My fascination with New York City started early, as I'm sure most of you can guess. Reading Superfudge and trying to imagine a place where there was a Chinatown that sold little turtles to little boys. (And still does!) The novelty of the then-new pooper scooper law. All the other trappings of something very different than the place I grew up.

It stuck with me on my first "real" trip to the city when I was fifteen. I'd been there countless times before, mostly on trips where we'd take whatever distant relative was visiting from India to see the Statue of Liberty and a couple other checklist tourist traps before heading back home to Pennsylvania. Rote, uninspiring, and tiring.

But at fifteen, I went as part of a school trip and that meant independence, of a sort. I spent most of the day trying unsuccessfully to impress the girl I had a crush on, naturally, but in between I saw a show on Broadway and really looked at the tall buildings for the first time. I walked around Battery Park before the jaunt to Liberty Island and really understood for the first time that all this water meant that Manhattan really was an island, despite its absence of beaches and palm trees. I went to the top of the World Trade Center.

That's where it all circles back, of course. Those towers. The day we lost them was the day I realized I had an obligation to the city. But it took some time to develop. Fast forwarding a few years from when I was fifteen, I'd just arrived in Manhattan, having packed all my belongings into the trunk of my car and being fortunate enough to have no idea what I was getting into. On my second night in the city, I finally ventured out, terrified at what I'd done and not really sure what to do next.

I walked down the block at about three in the morning, when it was too late at night for me to call anybody who would reassure me, and having far too much pride to actually break down and start crying. At the end of my block was a pretty standard bodega, with the usual mishmash of newspapers and fresh flowers and other essentials, and next to it was a man opening up a packing box. The box was filled with fresh mangos, mangos that had probably been on a tree in Mexico 48 hours before. And now, for less than a buck, just a block from where I lived, I could have a mango.

In the little town where I'd grown up, mangos had only shown up in the local grocery store a few years earlier, being considered an ethnic food. My mother had brought them home for us regularly, partially in celebration of their availability, but mostly because they were delicious. And here, now, was this fruit in my hand, in the middle of the night. I'd always been a night owl, but this somehow seemed like a sign, that this crate was being unpacked at three in the morning. This city was about exactly that kind of potential.

A few years later, after I'd been in New York City long enough to feel like I knew my way around, I found myself broke, out of work, recently split up from a not particularly pleasant relationship, and living next door to my ex. Not living in the building next door, mind you. The apartment next door. I was still struggling with my depression, I'd recently dealt with some serious illness in the family, and everyone was telling me that the Internet as a career path was dead. I had hit rock bottom, and I was pretty sure I never wanted to go outside ever again.

But over the course of a few months, it all came back. I spent my time off work exploring the city, meeting new people and figuring out as much of the history of New York City as could be teased from searching out abandoned subway stations or by striking up random conversations with people in Central Park. Through luck and opportunity and sheer neccessity, I got a great job and I started making real friends and finally felt like things were clicking. Nearly every step of rebuilding my life had been made possible just through the opportunities that arise by being in New York City, being smart, and having some bills to pay.

It was around that time that, instead of saying "I'm from Pennsylvania but I live in New York City." I started simply saying "I'm a New Yorker." Even after four years of being in Manhattan, it felt a little false, a little disingenuous, but as with most parts of my identity that I've appropriated from my surroundings, I grew into it pretty quickly. And it seemed the most appropriate way to acknowledge a city that had gotten me back on my feet, by identifying myself as part of that city. Later that year, a friend had called me on my birthday and given me the "If you can make it there..." line and I'd said "After this past year, I think I can get through just about anything."

Six days later was September 11, and it turns out, unfortunately, that I was probably right.

A lot of people made a lot of promises that day, and in the days afterward. I was, and in some ways still am, just unbelievably sad about it. I talked a lot about the attacks and their aftermath, both for the relief of telling my story, as trivial as it may have been, but also to help people understand that this was something real that happened, not just something on TV or something used as a slogan on t-shirts. This was something that happened to my city. And I made a smaller promise to myself.

What I wanted to do was honor my obligation to the city that I felt had sustained me. A lot of people have asked why I dwell so much on promoting New York City, and why I make such a big deal about something that's just, well, a place. "Sure, it's great," they say. "But there are lots of great places in the world. And most of them are cheaper!"

It's not that way for me, of course. Some people have religion, and some people have politics, and some people have art. And it makes sense to me to find salvation in any of those things, to find comfort in singing their praises. For me, finding a city I love was comfort. It was a place I belonged after spending my entire childhood in a place where nobody else looked like me, nobody else was raised in the religion I was, nobody else spoke the same language I did at home, and nobody else seemed to care about the things I cared about. In New York, everybody was just as weird as me, and it didn't stop them from inventing and being creative and changing the world.

And that's why it mattered to me that other people know about it. Though I can't take any of the credit for their moves to New York, I'd promoted the city like crazy to people whom I knew were considering a move, regaling Alaina and Jason and Meg and Kathryn and Lia with stories of how much they'd love it. And that's just the people whom I talk to on a weekly basis. There are dozens more, people whom I knew were probably looking for a place where they belonged, too, even if they didn't phrase it that way.

All of these friends arrived after the towers fell. I promised I'd return the favor to a city that had picked me up and dusted me off, and the engine that's always kept New York City moving was new people, new ideas, new energy. And having extraordinary people adding their energy to the city seemed like the most that could be done to honor its spirit. All I was trying to give back was people I cared about, who I knew would love the city the way I do.

New York will always be a center of art, of culture, of architecture and music and any other kind of expression. But it mattered to me that there be something new as well, something created in honor of everything we lost. Others are far better than me at the more literal acts of creation, so I tried to rebuild by encouraging new people to become New Yorkers and by nurturing the medium that I know best.

Being the geek that I am, part of that naturally meant making New York a world-class city for blogging. When I'd started out, there were precious few people with weblogs in the city. I went to Cam's dinner in late 1999 and all of the known New York City bloggers could fit around a two tables, with room for guests from San Francisco.

Now, though certainly through no actions of mine, there are thousands of people inventing and expanding weblogs in New York. From the various Gawker Media blogs (which are collectively probably the most famous blogs in the world) to the hundreds of regular sites by individuals with something to say, there's certainly no better-represented city in the blogosphere. I'm in there somewhere, too, and it's good company to be in. It feels like I'm contributing to something significant.

And that's why I had so much trouble letting go of living in New York. I'd built up my own sense of obligation to the city, as if I were failing by leaving, as if I were failing the city by leaving. Even if only for a while. But I'm realizing that what seemed to me at first like a high-minded sense of obligation is really just hubris. New York City doesn't need my help. You don't need to help someone back onto their feet if they were always standing. And the city isn't going anywhere.

That's the part I struggle to remember, that I'll be glad to see how the city's evolved in my absence, and that I've already had a wealth of experiences that would last me a lifetime even if I could never return. This is closing a chapter, certainly, but not closing a book, and in the meantime I have what I've had. I worked at the top of the Empire State Building. I got to shake Rudy Giuliani's hand and say thanks. I got to buy the last mango I bought in Manhattan, and all that it entails. I got to watch the hot dog contest and the fireworks on the Fourth of July. I got stuck on the wrong side of the Macy's Parade on Thanksgiving. I walked through a silent Times Square in the middle of a snowstorm and pushed my way past the crowds in the Square on New Year's Eve. I stayed at home a hundred Saturday nights, knowing that there were tons of people having the time of their life out on the town, and didn't regret it for a minute.

So for now I'm a New Yorker who doesn't live in New York. For those of you who email me every time I post about the city, writing to complain about my choice of subject matter, you'll be glad to know that the love letters are likely to be less frequent. For those of you still in New York City, please don't stop sending the invitations to whatever cool little thing you're doing this weekend. I'll just pretend I can't make it due to time constraints.

While hunting for apartments in San Francisco, I was struck how ubiquitous New York City is. I walked by ads for To The 5 Boroughs, which pushed the amazing "An Open Letter To NYC" and showed the Manhattan skyline plastered on walls a continent away. I walked down the street and saw a poster for Spiderman, with the hero crouched atop the Chrylser Building. Maybe I wasn't paying attention, but I'd never noticed superheros swinging from the Bay Bridge when I was walking around Manhattan. Seems to me like my city is following me home.

Leaving New York, we flew out of JFK. That's the same airport my father flew into almost 41 years ago, when he arrived from India. Though I doubt he (or any man of his generation) would phrase it this way, I suspect he was looking for the same thing I was looking for when I arrived in New York. A place to be, a place to belong, and a chance to take some chances. He'd headed west leaving behind everything and everyone he'd ever known, and all I'm losing is the chance to have a good bagel as often as I'd like. But I like to think I've got some of the same spirit my father does, and that part of honoring my love for both him and New York is to chase adventure wherever it takes me.

So for now, it's California. There's no shortage of mythology about the American West, about people travelling to California to seek opportunity or riches. I hope I'll partake in that, though I'm certain I'll be less taken in by the romance of it than I am by the romance of New York City. That's a fair trade, though. The first city I ever loved can get by without me for a while, and I can certainly do with less fawning over my place of residence and more nuts-and-bolts living of life. My obligation to New York won't ever go away, I'll just honor it differently now, and in the meantime I have some quieter but even more important obligations to fulfill.

See you soon, New York.

I'm moving to San Francisco.

That probably bears some explanation. As I'm sure all of you know, I work for Six Apart, which is based in the Bay Area, and they've been asking me for some time to make the jump to the west coast. But I love New York City, as I may have mentioned before, so this was something that I'd been reluctant to do, and I thought it might be worthwhile to explain how and why my position changed.

I should mention, since I'm sure people will ask, that I do expect to return to New York City, both because it's my home and because I have an obligation to the city I love. More on that in a few days. Today, I want to talk about what's motivated the move.

The past week has been really busy. We announced a new product, clarified the announcement, solicited feedback and did all of those things while dealing with an overwhelming response from thousands of users around the world.

But for me personally, this week was pretty rough. The new licenses and prices for Movable Type have been one of my main projects for the past few weeks and months, though of course we all had a hand in reviewing them. And the botched communications about them is something I feel a lot of personal responsibility for. Making mistakes on an extremely public scale is never fun, and doing it in a community that we've helped give a voice to is even worse. As Clay pointed out, people have an emotional attachment to these tools. To use the requisite automotive analogy, if Six Apart were a shiny new car, I feel like I was the person who put the first dent in it, and then a couple thousand people stood around pointing and saying "It's totalled!"

Inside Six Apart, though, I discovered a lot of very positive things. I found that not only do I have my dream job, I have a place where I can make, well, a pretty big mistake and the response is "This is something we can fix." or "What did you learn?". More importantly, I still work at a place that makes a difference. Though they might be saying "You messed up!", the reality is that thousands of people used tools we gave them and the TrackBack protocol that was invented by our co-founders to say how they felt. And we responded, much faster than I've ever seen any software company respond. I'm sure we'll be responding more.

We also got a lot of stuff right. People have wanted to sell services and products like customization or installation or plugins around Movable Type for a long time, and now they can. Web hosts have wanted to be able to license Movable Type for their users, and now they can. Businesses and end users wanted a simple ticket system where they could submit help requests and get an answer, and now they can. Now the list of people and companies that can benefit from Movable Type doesn't end with Six Apart.

But for me, what matters more is the parts internal to the company. The team members here are the best in the world at what they do, starting right from Ben and Mena themselves. I'm not the sort of person who's prone to breaking down at his desk, but when I finally lost it at some point well past midnight on Friday night, it was Mena herself who was still there, still checking in to make sure we were all okay.

And the development and support teams who saw all their hard work and preparation for this version get overshadowed by the response to the licenses didn't begrudge the business team for one minute. Our international offices chipped in, more than carrying their weight while we scrambled to recover. And our development community and a lot of long-time users were as supportive as they've been since the first day Movable Type launched, representing us better than we were even able to do ourselves, and explaining ideas or even, yes, buying licenses. It's easy to find friends when you're popular, but I found a company and community that stuck with me when things were confusing and screwed up.

So, I'm moving to San Francisco to be even more involved in Six Apart. We're doing all this work with developers and partners because there's still another 99.9% of people in the world who haven't heard what weblogs can do for them. I want to be part of spreading that message, and we're going to need help to do it. I'm also moving because I still honestly believe Six Apart makes the best weblog tools in the world, and we're going to be the the company that brings weblogs to a broad audience. Best of all, I'm glad to have made the decision before all the events of the last week, since nothing confirms a hunch like having it thoroughly tested by circumstance.

I think weblogs have already changed the world a little bit, and that's happened while we're only just getting started. So, thanks to everybody who's supported Six Apart and me, and thanks to everyone in Six Apart for being my motivation to make a public (re)commitment to the company. See you guys at the office.

(And any of you who want to join us in either California, Tokyo, or Paris, get in touch. It's a great place to work.)

It probably comes as little surprise to most of my readers that I'm known for being something of a Scrooge. A healthy skepticism over the sincerity of holiday wishes when extended by complete strangers combined with a bone-deep contempt for monoculture leaves me in something less than a purely "Ho Ho Ho" mood most Christmases, despite the abundance of engagingly bad music that characterizes the season and tends to mitigate my contempt. There's even a quieter part of me that suspects that many Christians who take their faith as a personal and serious manner would resent my being asked to participate in any observance of Christmas, and I am wary of being urged to disrespect that.

But this year I've enjoyed the season more as I've come to see it less as a triumph of religious evangelism and more as a triumph of, you guessed it, the ubiquitous cultural influence of New York City. A secular cultural insitution predicated on goodwill, generosity, no small amount of old-fashioned capitalism, good cheer in the darkness of seasonally-affected winter, and savvy marketing? I'm all 'bout it. Stick with me on this one, though; I'm not completely crazy.

Christmas itself predates New York, of course. And messianic arrival celebrations predate Jesus, and solstice celebrations predate recorded history. So I'm not actually crediting the entire manger mythology to Madison Avenue, I'm just asserting that there are critical parts to the contemporary observation of the holiday that were nurtured in the city's bosom. I suggest this with some trepidation, knowing that there are those who would balk at the myrrh suggestion that some traditions are recent, rather than ancient, and that they are secular and man-made, rather than divine. But if it's any consolation, these discoveries helped make the holiday season fun for me again.

For those of you who live in the United States or are familiar with its culture, imagine a place that starts with a political and social system that's identical to today's United States, but has a few significant differences.

In this place, most people speak more than one language. Almost no one owns a car, even the millionaires. Many people don't even know someone who owns a car. There's no Wal-Mart, no Target, no Home Depot.

People regularly and willingly use mass transit to get around for the few things they can't approach on foot. Almost every neighborhood has the basic amenities in walking distance, like a hardware store or dry cleaner or drug store, and they're almost all mom-and-pop operations, not multinational chains.

The people in this place, in addition to being well-educated on average, are extremely friendly, showing a repeated willingness to talk to and greet strangers, and an eagerness to educate tourists or visitors on the customs and rituals of their home. Their cultures are an extremely varied mix of cultures, backgrounds and identities, pervaded with an astonishing level of tolerance and respect.

There's also a deep ethic of civic-mindedness. Average citizens are not just aware of, but actively engaged in efforts such as city planning and zoning laws and the design and preservation of public spaces. Architecture is valued and protected by well-organized, well-financed groups, often consisting of canny partnerships between public, private, and corporate concerns. New urbanism is an understood goal, not just a theoretical ideal.

And this society exists within an unparalleled environment of artistic and entrepreneurial innovation. Constant reinvention paired with startling new creations. Music, dance, theater, film, sculpture, writing, and any other manner of expression all functioning at levels unsurpasssed anywhere else in the world at almost any other point in history.

So this place? It's where I live, Manhattan. New York City. That's why I write about the city with such reverence, and why it exists as a living, breathing character in my life and in the lives of every New Yorker. It seemed like something I needed to remind people about, if they're interested in reading what I have to say.

The drums, of course, are beating. The Anniversary is coming up, and everyone is insisting not just that we remember, not just that we mourn, but that we do it The Right Way.

I'm a bit saddened to see that the unity I saw in my city just after the attacks has faded, that some of the assumption of kindness, of good intent, has given way to assertions of different people's agendas.

I see James Lileks mourn a girl lost, comparing her age to his own daughter's, and Jeff Jarvis, correctly, is moved by the empathy clear in his writing. He points out, correctly, that being moved to make a small change in one's life like starting a diet or living more healthily isn't particularly significant compared to the attacks, though he later admits that he feels he hasn't done enough himself.

I see that same Lileks essay read by Dean Allen, and he points out, correctly, that it's a bit macabre and manipulative to be Googling for a picture of a dead child to make a political point. Clearly the Hanson family is not looking for solace by searching the web, hoping that the guy who scans in the tacky interior design pics has posted their lost little girl's picture.

And I'm not offended by either of their views, as they're both right. I'm offended that Jeff, in his emotional and physical closeness to the attack, and Dean, with his well-reasoned and critical view of the responses, have both not paused to consider that it's not a binary choice.

I had hoped people could see that we were all right, and more importantly, that we're all wrong. I'm frustrated that two smart, literate men can't see that maybe theirs isn't the only proper way of grieving. Jeff blasts others' reactions as Californian wrongness, not understanding that analysis and introspection might be the way that they choose to grieve over a tragedy that's 3,000 miles distant for most of them. Just as I can see two girls kidnapped in England and be saddened but not grief-stricken, it would be false for people in California to not temper their sympathy with some more detached and analytical review.

When I was in high school, a friend who volunteered at a library told me about a woman who had come in and begun researching alcoholism and drunk driving at a near-obsessive pace after having lost an uncle to an accident caused by a drunk driver. It's not unusual for some groups of people to try to understand a situation as part of their response, as part of their grieving process. I doubt that woman thought her uncle deserved to be killed by a drunk, though she was striving to understand what caused his actions.

And for some people, including myself much of the time, processing grief requires identifying with the victims. It is absolutely self-serving at times, and might appear narcissistic. But I realized a few years ago that, for me, the worst thing that ever happens to someone is their worst thing, and we can't really judge it to not be awful enough, whether it's hangnail or heartbreak or heart attack.

So I can't fault someone looking at the most precious thing in their life and comparing it to what was lost last September. That it might be maudlin or treacly is obvious. That it might be okay... that's the harder point.

Dean criticizes Lileks' writing as if he had deliberately set out to co-opt a family's loss as a means to manipulate people into agreeing with the conclusions he draws about what actions we ought to take in the future.

Every response to grief is cliché and maudlin self-indulgence, though. It's become cliché precisely because grief is universal. No one ever doesn't know loss. No good parent doesn't ever fear seeing their own child in the shoes of any child ever victimized or wronged.

Dean, Jeff, please understand: I mean neither of you any disrespect. Nor James, for that matter. But I expect that all three men, and all good people affected by the attacks a year ago, want to do right by the people who died. I suspect that the best way we can honor them is to agree that we have different ways of honoring them, as individual as they were.

I've gotten it wrong, too, I know. I've seen firsthand this past weekend, and this past year, that you will never convert someone to your system of grief, despite any reasoning, cajoling, manipulation, or threats that you might direct at them.

That we might not have to attack each other for feeling our pain the way we each do... that's a goal. I have a name for that lack of contention, that lack of discord among those of like mind and like goals and like moral constitution. That absence of conflict is called peace.