Category: Uncategorized

Via Steve Rubel. Weblogs, Inc. is being sold to AOL.

All of August 6 to October 2 gone? Not good. What is going on? I had two private weblogs as well that were lost?

Update (10/5/05): OK. Colleen (at Six Apart) was very responsive and pointed out to me an outage where part of the data disk was lost. Was concerned as I visited a number of other TypePad blogs and saw no issues while mine was down. Looks like most of my stuff has been recovered, but I may still have to chase some residual errors down (even after republishing all files in a site rebuild).

Update (10/6/05): Steve begins with "S". Now I understand a little bit more about what went on from this post.

New look here. Playing around with some TypePad stuff that I haven’t played with before, just so that I can stay on top of one of the market leaders in the blogging space. The other guiding principle is that I am looking to simplify my life by migrating my blog back to something that I originally intended it to be – more of my version of an electronic newsletter and a way for people to get info about me and for me to share info in niche areas. This is in contrast to something where I am trying to both grow the reader base (which has stalled out somewhat) and follow cultural norms on blog format. Going to a stock template so there less technical stuff to mess with, and this may be at the expense of readability. If it hurts readability too much, I may move to 2-column format instead of 3-column. This may mean ditching some of the sidebar stuff that is traditional to blogs – my visible blogroll links have already disappeared.

With the new look, I am also trying to make some adjustments in my professional life (no plans to leave 21Publish). Not comfortable with disclosing specifics here, but all of my clients now know that I am transitioning out of certain projects in hopes of concentrating on new things which have not yet been determined. Could be non-profit, commercial, consulting, or venture-related. The future isn’t written yet, but I need to consolidate my efforts. Feel free to contact me if you have thoughts.

Given that I live in Dallas and try to work in entrepreneurial settings wherever I can, I do not like to read articles like this, which recounts one of Inc.com’s authors email correspondences with venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s buddy Jerry Colonna. The author of the article recounts an email from Jerry, who was then a Dallas-based CEO:

What’s the equivalent to the Ivory Tower for consultants,
columnists, and ex-VCs? I need to know because the e-mail from a
Dallas-based CEO made me realize that I’ve been locked away.

[Jerry] sent me this e-mail detailing his difficulties in finding capital for his company:

First, I live in the land of no VCs — Dallas, TX (excuse me…firms that call themselves VC but don’t actual provide capital) …

Now the article is not surprising to me as I am somewhat familiar with the overall distribution of capital and entrepreneurial activity in the US. But seeing something like this written out by a person like Jerry, whose reputation precedes him … well it is a bit sobering.

The Carnival of the Capitalists is *not* at the CIO Weblog. The co-authors are trying to figure out what is going on as neither of us signed up the CIO Weblog to host the Carnival this week. I noticed one post about the hosting of the Carnival on either Friday or Saturday. I should have taken a closer note in trying to root out what was going on, especially after someone just yesterday evening mailed me information about posting. My apologies to those expecting the hosting to be at the CIO Weblog.

If you are a reader of one of my blogs and are interested in ASP and Enterprise Software blogging, please feel free to contact me. I will be transitioning out of my role as an author at the CIO Weblog to fortify my efforts in other areas. Creative Weblogging will be looking at qualified candidates.

I plan to go through a process of changing my ante in the blogging world as well as rebalancing the consulting projects I am working on. 2005 has really been the personal year of the blog for me, having started more than five blogs with serious effort and joining a blogging company. For reasons too detailed to go into here, the fuel is waning on some of these efforts, and I am trying to figure out where I am going to make my next mark. I will continue to strenghen my efforts at 21Publish, but other things are up in the air, and I will ante down in some areas. The organizing principles for me are based on how I can contribute to 1) entrepreneurism or ventures or 2) social good. Any thoughts are welcome.