Venture Geek

This is the first post on this blog, though for me it feels simply like a continuation of my past blogging effort. That blog has been dead since I started business school, and it suffered from not staying “on topic” — mostly because it was never clear what exactly the topic was in the first place. My plan is to keep this one a bit more focused, but we’ll see. Given that very few people will even know this blog exists for the foreseeable future, a word on why I bother…

I remember when I first found the Internet. It was 1994. Sure, I had been sending email and doing research through telnet for over a year by then, but it was in (and here I will date myself) late 1994 that I decided, along with my classmate, Ben Archibald, to do an independent project about the Internet during the “January term” of 1995. At the time we came to the Internet from a social science perspective. We were interested in the cultural phenomenon of a new medium. The Internet was a new paradigm in media that we wanted to write about, as good social scientists do. But, we quickly learned that writing about the Internet would be missing the point.

Put yourself back in January 1995. The very notion that you could sell things on the web was quite a new idea — in fact, it was still controversial with a non-trivial percentage of people that constituted the “Internet community” — a term that barely has meaning today. The mainstream media was certainly abuzz about the Internet, but plenty of the stories were about whether or not it was here to stay.

Back then, Internet culture meant things like John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace — lofty stuff, to be sure, but I was fully bought in. Really, I still am. So, for me, blogging is not really a new phenomenon at all — merely a formalized set of conventions for what the Internet was supposed to be all about all along. For that matter, most of the Web 2.0 hype fits that same mold — bottom-up, distributed, open, peer-production — these are all concepts that made the Internet great even before HTTP.

So, whether anyone but a handful of my friends reads this blog isn’t terribly important as long as someone is getting something out of it. That’s the beauty of living way out here on the long tail.

As an aside, I was struck after I wrote this how similar it is to how I started my last blog nearly two years ago.