turoczy

Totally agree. Very much a throwback to StumbleUpon in the best way. And more directed given that we get to choose the focus of the content.

So glad to hear that there are other folks out there who continue to blog over long periods of time. It has the potential to create such an incredible resource, for the general public, for history, and for — of course — the writers themselves.

I've written on various blogs, including my own, since the late 90s, but I have been blogging consistently on a single instance for a little over 17 years. I've seen my writing shift from long form to rapid fire and back again.

I've also noticed that it's become mostly formulaic, as a way of dispersing information to folks. But it's those rare occasions where I'm actually struck with the inspiration to write a longer form thought piece that really brings me back to the whole reason I started my current blog.

Again, super happy to read this piece and the comments here. I'll remain hopeful that it inspires others to start — or to return to — blogging. It's really an incredible means of communicating with one another.

I've been blogging in some form or another since the late 90s, but consistently on the same blog for going on 15 years.

Like many here, I turned off commenting years ago. My motivation had less to do with spam. (I'm on WordPress and it does a pretty good job with that.) It had more to do with the conversations moving from my site to the social web. Folks wanted to talk about stuff where they already were, rather than centralizing that conversation on individual blogs.

(As an aside, I rarely participated in those comment threads on my blog. I always saw them as a place for others to talk about a post. I'd already had my chance to say my piece. So the comments had less value to me, personally, but seemed to have value to the folks reading my blog. All to say that I wasn't really driving engagement with the comments. I was just letting them do what they were doing.)

I tried a few of those "commenting" solutions that attempted to pull the social channels into the blog itself, but they never seemed to recreate that 2005-2010 dynamic of active and engaging conversations occurring on a single post.

It's also worth noting that, in my experience, a big motivator for many platforms had to do with driving pageviews. And once commenting stopped doing that, folks seemed to lose interest in continuing to offer that functionality.

Author of the referenced repository, here. This content is pretty dated, but it's still been a helpful document for a number of folks. And I still reference it regularly.

If folks have questions, comments, or edits, please feel free to post here, submit an issue on Github, or submit a pull request.

https://siliconflorist.com/

I hesitated to respond because it's not exactly awesome. But for anyone interested in what's happening in the Portland, Oregon, startup community, it's +12 years of content in that regard. Written mostly by me. Who happens to be a human on a regular basis. A human with bad grammar.

Also, people so rarely ask about blogs anymore that I was compelled to respond. So thank you.

I don't have any immediate answers, but I did want to quickly thank you for having the courage to reach out, rather than just suffering silently. This is something with which many of us struggle on a regular basis.

Thanks for writing this up. It's interesting to see how rapidly the traffic trails off these days.

As a single page: http://crosscut.com/2013/11/18/business/117499/brewing-city-...

Thanks for chiming in here. I was going to mention it to you but you beat me to the punch.

While I truly appreciate the context and the thought behind this, I'd also advocate for stepping back and not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A strategic communications effort can aid and assist your product getting noticed, but I totally agree that it shouldn't be the be all and end all of your product getting noticed.

I mean, if you can get TechCrunch coverage, why not? Will it be valuable? Maybe.

My question about this is: Have we reached a point where "institutional memory" is more of a liability than a benefit? I often wonder about this. "That's the way we've always done it," "We tried that before," or "That's not how we do things here," are all institutional memories that hamstring innovation.

Totally agree. And I'll try to write some stuff about facilitating that communication in future posts.

I didn't mean to come off like a cranky passive aggressive ass. I mean, I am. I just didn't mean to come off that way ;)

This was just a hack at providing some definitive timelines to an often nebulous arrangement.

Totally agree that it's a very rough concept. And that it's full of flaws. But I hope that it's a bad idea that gets people thinking about better ones.

And it wasn't really coming from a place of a negative view of an employer. I'm sorry if it came off that way. I was more of the mind that it gave a target for employees as to determine "how much good can I do here before my time is up?"

Paul has built something awesome. And something that's been entirely missing for many of us---both as mentors and accelerator managers. We've tried to throw any number of the existing tools at this issue to no avail. I'm really looking forward to putting Dashboard through its paces with the next class of PIE.

"Rather than cram these things into Dark Sky, we decided to do something grander: create our own full-featured weather service from scratch, complete with 7-day forecasts that cover the whole world, beautiful weather visualizations, and a time machine for exploring the weather in the past and far future. You can access it from all of your devices, whether it be your laptop, iPhone, Android phone, or tablet."

My favorite quote: "I am a Founder, and to be a Founder you must be, first and foremost, an entrepreneur. The one overriding characteristic of an entrepreneur is a passion to accomplish a goal. We are driven. We create, build, and dream. When you lose those abilities and hire others who are more focused in their position to share percentages of your total workload as you scale a business, you lose what you are, and who you are, in the process. Founders have a shelf life. I am past my due-date."

With the growing focus on STEM education, I found this an interesting adaptation of the model: adding Arts to the mix. Given how much company differentiation and product usability are being driven by design and creativity, it makes sense.

In addition to "Remember where you came from," I'd also add: track regular, incremental progress. Entrepreneurs have a tendency to move from big win to big win, while forgetting all of the little steps that got them to that point.

Keeping track of daily or weekly progress (even as simple as iDoneThis), can help minimize the amplitude of the downswing. It will still be there. It's inevitable. But this can help take some of the sting out of the low points.

Thanks for these definitions. In a post on Hackalone, I had incorrectly lumped together "antisocial" and "introverted" as synonyms. Your definitions (and a comment from a reader) clearly highlighted my error.

Irony: I'd classify myself as introverted and antisocial. But not anymore. Now I'm just introverted ;)

We host a ton of hackathons. And at every event, there are inevitably developers who prefer to work on their own, rather than joining teams. Their creations are often on par with the team driven projects. But they're still (pun intended) odd person out.

Love the idea of getting a bunch of these solo hackers together in the same room to see what they can accomplish.

Running a accelerator, one thing we've discovered with feeding our startups is that bringing in food has another beneficial side effect: stress reduction.

We try to cater at least three meals a week for our folks. Because we've seen the benefits: 1) Makes sure that people are actually stopping to eat. 2) Lowers the burn rate for the companies. 3) Lowers stressing about "Where are we going to eat?" 4) And perhaps the most beneficial: It ensures that we're forcing some actual nutrients into their diets.

Of course the other fringe benefit is the peer mentoring and socializing, where people actually stop banging on keyboards and take a moment to talk to one another.

I don't know if you'd categorize it as "useful," but Laika used 3D printing to do some exceptional work on ParaNorman. But again, it required a lot of retouching and detail work. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/visual-ef...

From the article: "VCs right now are kind of weird. They have this herd mentality that's starting to look like a bubble," [Geoloqi CEO Amber Case] says. "When people celebrate taking in $5 million, it's like celebrating taking a bank loan to buy a banana."

We were lucky to partner with Google last year, as well -- before this program was formalized. They were very open to exploring options with our (then) relatively new program. I'd recommend contacting them directly.

If you've ever been curious about what's happening in the Portland startup scene, this is the post to read. Luc does an amazing job of capturing both the tech and the culture of the town. And if anyone has any additional questions about "Why Portland?" I'm always happy to answer those, too.

I am a cofounder of PIE, a startup accelerator that is part of the Google for Entrepreneurs program. If you have any questions about the program, please let me know. (And thanks to zacharycohn of Startup Weekend for the nudge.)

Link to the documentation: http://chirpify.com/api/v1.0/docs

Link to the spreadsheet to run the numbers yourself: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvugcL9yC5-DdHR...

Having Alex move to Portland was something that really bolstered our startup community. It was a validation of sorts. And I can't thank him enough for what he did -- for Simple and so many other things -- while he was here.

I've been lucky enough to follow Darius' career for a number of years. And I can't say that I've seen a more masterful use of AngelList to round out a who's who of investors. This post shares some great insights on how he managed to make that happen.