Venture Geek

Tonight I had a spooky experience — a 419 scam was attempted via AOL Instant Messenger. Someone using the screen name “taylornelly2″ claiming to have found me through MyBlogLog started out with small talk but quickly moved into the whole story about being from Africa and having lots of money that they need a foreigner to help them retrieve. I have seen hundreds (thousands?) of these emails in my life (thanks to Thunderbird and Gmail I finally have my spam under control), but to have it happening in real time with another person on the other end was a bit chilling.

I ended the conversation by simply pasting in this link:

http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/fraudschemes.htm#nigerian

A few minutes later they typed, “but i’m not nigerian i’m liberian and i don’t know what that means. i really need your help please find a place in your heart to help me please”

That was the point where I blocked the account from sending me messages and moved on with my life.

The >play conference at UC Berkeley is November 18th. >play is a conferenced dedicated to digital media. Last year’s inaugural conference was a huge success due to the heroic efforts of several members of the UC Berkeley Digital Media & Entertainment Club, and from what I am hearing this year’s conference will be even better.

Last year at >play I had the honor of conducting the keynote interview of Shantanu Narayen in front for a packed auditorium, and this year I’ll be moderating the “Where is Web 2.0 in the Enterprise?” panel

with Stephen Farrell, John Furrier, Jack Jia, and Ross Mayfield. Should be interesting talking about enterprise technologies in the middle of a conference that is mostly about much more entertaining subjects.

If anyone has suggestions for topics they would want to see covered in a panel about new web technologies in the enterprise, drop me a line, or leave a comment on this post.

I was talking with a friend of mine a few weeks ago about our differing opinions on self-disclosure on the web. I have a little personal web site that I made a few years ago when I was doing some consulting and needed a way for people to learn about me — since then I have kept it updated, and it serves as a way for folks who for whatever reason come to care who I am to learn something about me. I’ve gone back and forth on whether it’s hokey or a good respresentation of my professional self.

One of things I have on that site is a page with just about every virtual way to contact me — email, phone, and the various instant messaging handles. My friend said that eventually I’d starting getting IM spam (”spim” as it’s often called, though I hate the “sp_m” thing for every new kind of spam) and/or would just generally be unhappy to have disclosed so much about myself and how to get a hold of me. As someone who really came of age professionally during the rise of the Web, I have tended towards being “out there” as a good thing (in the mid-90s I was very active on various discussion groups and as a result my email address was spread far and wide, and I do get unbelievable amounts of spam to this day because of it — but, that’s a different topic).

Tonight I received a call to my Skype account from “Chris” (I originally was going to put his handle here, but I decided that was too snarky). I know several people named Chris, but none of them are currently on my Skype contact list. I sent an IM back explaining that it’s late here and I can’t talk — I tend to prefer text-based IM over voice chats for most short conversations anyway. Chris, though insisted that I talk to him, and after he kept calling again and again and again it became pretty clear that “he” is not actually one of my friends named Chris but rather some random person who for whatever reason really really wanted me to talk to him. The short of it is, for the first time ever I actively blocked someone from one of my IM services.

Obviously, this isn’t that big a deal, and it hasn’t soured me on IM or anything.  And I don’t think I’ll be taking down my contact page or blocking other people from finding me in the various directories.

Now that I’ve written this into a blog post, I’m not sure why you’d care, but hey, blogging is about first-hand experiences, right? Anyone else had unwelcomed IM interactions?

I moved to the Bay Area 9 years ago and never looked back. I knew this was the place I belong. And that despite the incredible cost of housing (having come from the Midwest, it was truly staggering — now I’m numb to it). Today I was reading a thread on the BACFUG email list (a group I ran from 1998-2002) prompted by someone from outside the area asking about relocating here. It prompted a flurry of folks sharing stories about how the increased cost of living is well worth it. My friend Nancy Tubbs summarized it so nicely I couldn’t help but post what she had to say:

While deep down people are people, at least on the outside people _are_
nicer here (even I’m nicer here). It helps not to be jammed into each other
on the subway/bus every day. Many are fulfilling a dream by being here so
are in a good mood overall. It’s easy to get a breather by getting into the
nearby open space preserves or the beach. People are healthier, fruits and
vegetables are fresher. Work can be stressful, with long hours and
unpredictable plans, but in general it’s more challenging and interesting as
we are building new products, vs maintaining mature ones. There are daily
opportunities to hear about new technologies and ideas, and the area is full
of creative, brilliant people who are curious and open to new things. Some
of the world’s best minds are here, and they have no interest in office
politics or posturing (although they might be a little nuts in other
interesting ways).

I have formed a strong dislike for vacation email messages over the years — mostly because of the kinds of email I do outside the “normal” inbox fare like listserv admin and the huge volume of email generated by Nicenet. And, given the number of people who read this blog with any regularity (and to be clear, I’m not even totally sure that class of people exists) I don’t know that anyone will care that I’m going to be gone for a week and thus not blogging much. Off to Wisconsin to see family. Can’t help but give props to my Dad for his quote in the local paper about love vs. money as motivators.

I always say the best blogging is about first-hand experience, but I’m not sure a week in Wisconsin will yield much of interest for this forum….

Brad Feld posted a request for resources to help teenagers learn to program on his blog, and after writing my comment I got to thinking about my own history doing software development. Brad’s question has been one on my mind lately because my cousin’s 15-year-old kid (my first cousin once removed for those keeping score at home) has been wanting to learn to program applications on his iBook for quite some time. His Dad knows some other people who have given him pointers, but more than a few times in the last couple years we have had lengthy IM sessions about his frustrations in trying to get the machine to do something meaningful. I have pointed him at several resources, and I think he’s starting to get into it, but the bottom line is that programming computers involves a lot of mundane and often maddening minutiae. Trying to start with building Cocoa-based applications on the Mac as your first programming task is probably the wrong way to go, but my attempts to get him to start with javascript in a web browser (where he’d get much more instant gratification while learning some basic concepts of variables, looping, conditionals, functions, expressions, etc.) have failed.

Mind you, I am not what I would consider a “real” programmer. Sure, I have several years of hands-on experience building database-driven applications on the web. I can get my hands dirty with most web-related technologies and just about any RDBMS, and I have decent experience in application architecture, software lifecycle, and various other trappings of the software developer. But, it would be downright disrespectful to the talented software engineers I have had the pleasure to work with over the years to think of myself as a true peer. My schtick has generally been more to know enough about the nuts and bolts to have a meaningful conversation (and to be an effective manager) but then be able to cross over and go deep on market positioning and brand strategy discussions (something that most of the software engineers I know would avoid like the plague).

I remember when we were selling the first company I started (an asset sale, to be specific). At the time my partner and I were still writing most of the code for our clients, and the Managing Director of the firm acquiring us (our new boss) had a talk with us about the choice we would face about stepping out of hands-on development work. Basically he was saying that once you head down the path of management you have to accept that your technical skills will become progressively obsolete and eventually be all but useless. I’m not sure I totally agree, and I do try to get my hands dirty in code once in a while just to try out new stuff, but his basic point is certainly valid. As I have moved on to various non-technical roles I have found that my hands-on experience is still invaluable in helping me to understand the implications of various management decisions around software projects. Such an understanding is far too often lacking in those making such decisions around software projects — ask any developer you know if you doubt me. I even once started writing a book that was a primer on the software process and culture for non-technical business managers (hmm, perhaps fodder for future blog posts…). Hopefully my natural geeky tendencies will give me enough lasting street cred to avoid PHB syndrome….

(By the way, for those of my readers not steeped in geek culture, the title of this post refers to, well, you should see it for yourself [and don’t miss the remix])

Keeping up with a blog is tough. If you don’t write almost every day, people start to lose interest. That’s particularly true for a blog that hasn’t even really started yet.

So, you can imagine how upsetting it was when my second post on this blog was lost in the ether by Flock, that fancy browser based on Firefox. One of the nice features of Flock, in theory, is the integated blogging interface, allowing one to create a blog post any time by clicking a button on the toolbar. Sounds great.

Somehow, Flock managed to post only the title of my post, losing the body entirely. It just didn’t make it. And, of course, Flock closes the window after you post, making it impossible to retrieve. But, wait, Flock is apparently able to save posts locally. Well, somehow the folder Flock created to do just that is empty.

The short of it is, instead of reading what was surely brilliant insights into the nature of the universe, you are reading this. And how is a rant about beta software a valuable use of your time? Well, it’s a warning to stay away from the Flock beta if you are in it for the blogging tools….

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.