Dave Winer wrote:

It's lame to charge for weblog software based on how many weblogs you make and how many authors there are. A weblog isn't that big a deal.

To me, it's not whether a weblog is a big deal or not.  Importance of a feature is subjective and, in the end, nothing is a big deal.  Besides, making a big deal out of nothing is what marketing is all about.  Remember Seinfeld?

This comment over at Joi Ito's blog regarding the impact of Six Apart's new license hit me hard:

6A essentially fired its old Sales and Marketing staff…

The key lesson here is that you shouldn't be messing with the viral aspect of your product.

Seth Godin is musing about five years from now.  Frankly, I would be happy just with baldness becoming a matter of choice.

Baldness is in my gene and I can now feel the hair follicles hanging on desperately to my head like Indiana Jones.  This climatic scene has been going on too long and I can feel the tragic ending ahead, an avalance of screaming hair follicles.  Aaahhhh~  Maybe I'll go to sleep one stressful day and wake up next morning looking like the Half Dome.

But then baldness could be the perfect excuse to buy a Cobra like my buddy Dave Rogers.

Hmm.  It sort of look like my goldfish.

Sorry.  I was just wondering why there aren't more posts like this which would be more useful to geeks than waka waka about blogging or poo poo about Bush.  To avoid disappointing you altogether, here is a golden rule I learned when I was single:

Don't ask questions that could be answered with a No.

Until she got to know you well enough to make an informed decision about you, stick with the rule and ask other types of questions.  If she gets that twinkle in her eyes, check your wallet to see if you need to make a run to the drug store.  If she gets that pestered look, walk away happy knowing that she wasn't your type after all.  Delusions can be useful when you are single.  😉

If you are a complete loser, stick with the rule until she calls the cop or makes a run for the door.  If you are a persistent bastard, keep at it until she gets a restraining order against you.  If you are a clueless idiot, follow her to Texas and congratulate her for getting a gun license.

If a butterfly in Beijing can destroy Kansas, this post has a good chance of triggering a population explosion.

Update:

The advice worked for Gwai Lo.  Cool cat you are, Gwai Lo.  The letters on the locks say T.L.C., meaning lots of attention, not pressure to make a snap decision on some stranger the girl just laid her eyes on.  Besides, she is a doorway to her social network of girlfriends.  Think long, even longer than your longing.

I met some folks yesterday whom I haven't seen for a long time: Peter Yared, whom I worked with at NetDynamics, and Mike Boich, whom I worked for at Radius.  Peter Yared was CTO of Sun's Liberty division and Mike, founded and headed Radius, Rendition, and Eazel.  He is now a VC at Alta Partners where Robert Simon, a long time friend, also works.

I forgot to take Peter's picture but here is Mike and Robert.

Kimchee~

I have a late afternoon meeting in the City today so I am thinking about stopping by at Technorati Developer's Salon afterward for pizza, beer, conversation, and adventure (I never been to that part of the town — Do I need to bring my urban jungle knife, David?).  Maybe I'll see you there.

Update:

I did make it to the meeting and here some pictures to prove it.

Marc is getting really good at this

It's was a rather large garage…for a caboose, I think

Ah, there is David.  Many people showed up,
some VCs, even Mitch Kapor.

Loic brought his french gang to which JY here belongs to.
Hi, JY!  You look like someone just grabbed your butt.
Not me and I have the Victory sign to prove it.

What?  Technorati is working on an IE toolbar?;-p

For every startup, there comes a time when you stop looking around and start pushing, the long haul.  Your goals are clear so you pour all your resources into filling and expanding the rank and start beating the marching drum.  At the executive level, focus shifts from faces and dreams to numbers and dollars.  It's a time of metamorphosis that turns a group of people into an engine of profit.

If all the pushing goes well, swell.  If not, there is no point in keep pushing in the same direction.  But all to often, startups I worked with over the years continued to pump away until the money ran out.  The smart thing to do would have been to 'turn' your product line toward a direction that will give more easily just as a wrestler might.  Some VCs see 'turning' as compromising of the original business plan, a great poopoo.  Hogwash.

If the landscape changes, the map must change as well.

I think I may be losing it.  I wrote two posts today but trashed them both because I didn't want to bother with the backlash.  Fear is something I have a good handle on, but not the lazyness.  In one of the two posts, I pissed liberally on good people like Dave, Joi, Tim O'Reilly and companies like Microsoft, Google, Six Apart, and O'Reilly.  The other post was about why I may be a racist.  Saucy topics indeed, but my lazyness got the better of me.  I hope I get better soon.

Six Apart's new gravy-train license for MT lasted only a day.  With new changes, it's looking a lot more bearable to MT users.  While I respect their fast response to criticisms, I think the worst of the damages, loss of trust and sense of betrayal, are not reversable unfortunately.

I also question the wisdom of emphasizing misunderstandings and miscommunications when the former places the blame squarely on the MT users and the later undermines Six Apart's competence.  Whether true or not, I don't think excuses are very effective in situations like the one they are in.

If I was running Six Apart, I would have just pleaded temporary idiocy and begged for forgiveness instead of serving a string of weak excuses which just end up as fodder for suspicion.