What I Am Up To

I have been in a swirl for weeks, it seems, and while I have had time to reflect on various topics — the subject of the various talks I have given at Shift (Lisbon) and Web 2.0 Expo (Berlin) in the past weeks, and the upcoming presentations at Defrag (Denver) and BlueKiwi Partners Conference (Paris) — I haven’t really taken much time to muse publicly on what it is that I am up to, personally and professionally, these days. So I am taking a few moments to talk about that here.

/Message, /Ground, /Mind, /Nomad, /Aviso, and The /Edgewards Blog Swarm

/Message has continued to grow in various ways. Last week, I noticed that there are more than 105,000 people subscribed to the /Message RSS feed, which is misleading since 100,000 are Blogrov users so they only see posts that refer to something they are currently looking at. Still, there is a serious community of readers here, interested in social tools and web culture.

I have tried expanding the roster of contributors here, and many good posts have come from it. But I am going to switch to a different model, one that might be more interesting for others and less demanding on the contributors, and returns /Message to being Stowe’s pulpit again.

Instead of a list of other contributors who write whenever the fancy strikes them, every month I will have a Guest Contributor, who will work with me on some specific issue, topic, or question for the month. This allows for more focus in a time-boxed fashion, and removes the onus of having to contribute regularly, day after day, which wears on contributors, I know.

Next month’s Guest Contributor will be Adrian Chan, who joined /Message under the previous system, and who has helped refine the model we are using. I will write a post on 1 November, kicking off the month’s topic that he and I will be jointly attacking. In upcoming months, Matt Balara and David Cushman will reappear, as will other, new contributors.

I have stopped the /Aviso video series, at least for the time being. Sponsorships are very hard to come by, and my heart just isn’t in video. Maybe if I could just be a talking head on a show run by others, but fooling with all the operational stuff just sucks up too much time. I think I will just do occasional interviews from my nokia n82, and post them as the whim strikes.

/Ground has been going for several months now, and has taken on a life of its own. The blog is focused on localism — local as in food, economics, politics, media, transportation, whatever — and that focus is turning out to be core to so much of what is happening in the world today. The contributors — Rachel Weidlinger, Marnie Webb, and Hillary Hartley — have started to carve out their interest areas and build on their other work in the world. If you are at all interested in these topics, I suggest you put the feed in your RSS reader.

Likewise, /Mind — a new blog about human cognition — is moving forward pretty nicely, with frequent contributions from Brynn Evans and a new contributor, Sanjay Kairam, joining us this week.

I am slipping the planned launch of /Nomad — “a handbook for serious travelers” — into 2009, perhaps in Q2, because I have too many other things going right now.

All of these blogs will be undergoing a facelift in the next few weeks, as I roll out a new template for the blogs (designed by Matt Balara, and implemented by the folks at Fusebox), with more consistent appearance and a new ad solution. That facelift is 99% ready, but as I am headed out traveling again starting Sunday, it’s deferred until Thanksgiving, at the earliest.

All of these (and more, in the future) are part of the /Edgewards blog swarm (yes, I managed to get the www.edgewards.com domain somehow). Once the new templates are in place, and I have completed designing and implementing a few widgets to connect the blogs that form the swarm, I will be drawing in other blogs, already established online, as part of the /Edgewards swarm. My goal is to develop a short list of the smartest folks writing on the most important topics today, and collate, filter, and annotate that at /Edgewards. A few good friends have already signed up, and I will be actively recruiting once the /Edgewards infrastructure is in place.

Stowe Boyd and The /Messengers

My consulting work continues to stimulate me, and I am getting to work with very interesting firms, like Six Groups, My 6 Sense, School Of Everything, //www.globallogic.com”>Globallogic, Glubble, b5 media, and a number of others that have to remain under wraps for the moment.

In essence, I am working with a slightly larger group of clients, and increasingly like an analyst: where I share thoughts about their product direction and market trends, nudging them to make product changes or course corrections. In the past few years, I had worked with a smaller number of companies, often taking equity, and almost always getting involved in all aspects of the business. I found that financially rewarding, but difficult psychologically and in terms of time demands. Since the shift I made in the summer, I have been working an equal amount of time but with more clients, and enjoying it more. I have stepped out of various partnerships, with the exception of a few, where I have an ongoing interest, like Workstreamer and Front Channel.

My plans are to continue to enlarge this aspect of my work. The big chill that has blasted the tech sector (caused by the financial meltdown on Wall Street) has definitely had an immediate impact in the startup sector, but there are still a lot of companies interested in getting my help, and since my new model is based on the premise that they get 80% of the benefit from the core 20% of my involvement, I am still signing new clients every month.

Research

I will be announcing a new research study next week in my talk at Defrag, and that will be consuming a bunch of my time in the first half of 2009. More to follow.

Memes and Schemes

I recently was invited to speak at a futurism conference, so I seem to be morphing into a prognosticator. I guess howling for ten years about social tools, their impact on the world, and the rise of web culture, has made me look more and more like a visionary.

It is still unusual to be well known for promulgating ideas via blog, and not as an entrepreneur, investor, or author of bestsellers. I am scheming about how to convert the stream of ideas that animate /Message into a book. No one has approached me to do so, so maybe I have been waiting for that email that just never seems to come.

So, I am going to start a sideblog to /Message, once all the templates and /Edgewards wiring is in place, and update the outline I drafted last year, and start blogging the bits. Obviously, I will hear what others think, nip and tuck here and there. My goal is to have it pulled together by 2010.