The mini vacation continues been practicing Tae Kwon Do with some friends from New York who are in for the 15th annual Tae Kwon Do California Trip. Here’s a picture of me sparing with my friend Adam (I’m punching). I’ve been taking TKD since 1985, and have been teaching since 1990. Next fall will be my 20th anniversary seems like a long time, except the group of guys I practice with started in the 60s and 70s!

Took my friend Mike flying yesterday, here we are coming in for a landing in the Grumman Cheetah after an excellent flight that included some emergency evasive maneuversnever a dull day over LA.

I wonder if the film has made it to bit torrent yet? Any comments/links anyone!?!?

If you don’t see updates for a couple of days it’s because I’m taking a little break. Some people call it vacation, but to be honest I have so much fun at my “day job” here at WIN every day feels like a vacation. I guess you could call this “away from the computer” time.

Yesterday I was talking to my friend, and former mentor, Mike Savinoabout how some people were giving him a hard time because, as a business owner, he checked his email twice a day on vacation. He reminded them that as a business owner he had the ability to attend every event his kids had over the past ten years, had turned almost every business trip into a mini vacation and had never worried about how to use his vacation days. Sure, he had to spend an hour a day on his computer, but it was a simple decision to make.

When I ran Silicon Alley Reporter I was young and aggressive. I wouldn’t go on vacationever. I saw it as a sign of weakness. My partner Gordon on the other hand seemed to always be coming or going from some vacation. Made me crazy at the time, but he was wildly effective, despite his adventure-filled life. Gordon and I came from different backgrounds, I had the blue color he had the establishment connectionsit’s why we were such a lethal team. After every meeting the established guys would talk about the Hamptons with Gordon, and the blue collar guys would talk about the Knicks or Brooklyn with me. Gordon and I always envied each others upbringing and discussed it many times. Me wishing I had it easier, him wishing he had it harder. Ironic, isn’t it? Regardless, we developed true respect for each other, our skill sets and how they developed.

Anway, for years I dumped myself into the office, networked like a freak and all of a sudden five years of my life were gone. Sometimes as CEO I would be in my office and realize that everything was done. There was nothing to do but screw around on email, surf the web and watch CNBC. Every CEO knows this experience. You worked all weekend, you’ve given everyone their marching orders and you’ve put out every fire. Now you’re just executing on the plan and you’ve done such a good job that there is really little for you to do but wait for people to get back to you with their pieces of the puzzle. I should have taken advantage of those days and done some Yoga, Tae Kwon Do or just gotten on a jet.

Now, let me be clear, I don’t regret a day of my life at SAR. However, I wish I had spent more time traveling for myself, as opposed to going away and speaking on behalf of the company. Why did I do those silly two or three days trips to Europe, or those one-day trips in the US? I could have added two to four days for myself, no problem. I had a great management team with Xeni, Karol, Keith, Gordon, Ken, Joanne, CJ, etc. back at the fort.

Then my mind starts playing tricks on me and I think “maybe what made me so successful with SAR was that I was relentless and my competitors were not.” People confirm this all the time when they talk about how I was everywhere, knew everyone and was “indefatigable” as the press profiles always described me at the time.

Very confusing this balance your life and work thing. I guess as you get older you figure out how to balance things. The best way I’ve found is to find a job that you absolutely love so that the work feel like play. Play doesn’t feel like work, so you have no regrets. SAR felt like play to me for the first half of the businessI was a 26 year old kid who was going to Nobu and sitting courtside at the Knicks with all kinds of famous, powerful and rich people. It wasn’t hard, trust me.

However, the second half of the businessduring the down turnwas pure hell at times. Laying off seven people in a day, then doing it again two weeks later with five people, was not fun. Heck, I think I laid off like 20 people over three months and frankly I should have laid everyone off immediately. I remember people saying “f- you” to my face, while others cried. Try doing that 20 timesit’s pure hell.

The toughest was the young women who started crying the second she sat down in the officeshe knew what time it was. I tried to comfort her in that she was the most recent hire and that this had nothing to do with her performance. She said she knew that, so I asked “well why are you crying,” and her response hit me like ton of bricks: “I just love working here so much. This is the best job I ever had, all my friends are here.” Still hurts when I replay that back in my mind.

I learned more during the death spiral of the Internet then I did going up of course, so I don’t regret it. Also, I was able to pull up right as Industry Standard, Red Herring and Upside crashed. We rebranded SAR as Venture Reporter, and we moved from an advertising model to a database and subscription model. Now we covered medical devices, chips and venture capital, and the readers sent us thousands of dollars to read our words. It worked, and we saved the company and 15 people’s jobs. Eventually we sold the business, andDow Jones now owns it!Many of the team members are still working there and having great success. Makes me really proud that we never gave up, we never said die.

Anyway, I guess I was talking about having fun while making a living, and having “a life.”

Weblogs, Inc. is so much fun I feel guilty that this has become my “job.” This is what I would be doing if I didn’t have a job!

I work from home with 40 amazing bloggers from all over the country, most of whom I’ve never meet f2f. I have ten great calls on the phone a day, and when we come up with a new idea we try it out almost immediately. There are no meetings, projections and politicsjust humble and relentless execution. Plus, I can work in my underwear half the day.

There are no offices, rent or payroll. I just cut checks to bloggers as we make money. They are happy, I’m happy and things are growing like gangbusters. I wonder how long this business will stay “fun.” I’m trying to keep it from becoming an institutionlike all startups eventually becometoo soon. If we’re successful we’ll have an office and dozens of employees I’m sure. However, this time around I’m committed to keeping it “light,” making sure everyone is having fun along the way, and that I take some time off the computer.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m really loving my life and feel privileged to work with great people on fun things. On this day when many folks are going to see the new 9/11 film and tempers will flair, my focus is on how lucky we all are to be in this countryas flawed as it can be at timeswhere you can do what we do as entrepreneurs.

Have a great weekend!

The new version of Yahoo Messenger (version 6) came out today and it is is really slicklots of new features.

However, I just installed it like four times and it keeps crashing my machine. Anyone else having problems? Anyone know how to install version five?

This is a realy problem because I live on Yahoo IM!!!

test

My friend Andrew Rasiej has either totally lost his mind or is a total genius. I guess it will depend on if he is successful in recruiting the Boss to play Giant Stadium, which he has a “hold” on for September 1stthe day of the Republican convention in New York City (Iwonder what that costs to put a hold on Giant Stadium?).

Andrew is a non-stop promoterfor which I respect himbut this is borderline insane I HOPE HE DOES IT!!!

Go sign the petition!

PS – Andrew claims he has no political ambition however, if he pulls this off consider his MCing of this event his coming out party for his run for Mayor.

Looking for some background, references, etc.

There are a couple of great local blogs out there Gawker.com and Curbed.com in New York are amazing; Chicagobloggers.com and http://chicago.creativecanvas.com/list dozens of great Chicago blogs; Los Angeles has blogging.laand http://laobserved.com/. The list goes on and on.

Sean Bonner and Jason Defillippo, who I had dinner with on Friday night, are behind the a newsite called www.metroblogging.com which hopes to bring together 20 blogers in every cityin the world! Sean blogs on our Apple Blogand we’ve become friends since I moved to L.A.

Check out there first three cities:

http://chicago.metblogs.com/
http://nyc.metblogs.com/
http://sf.metblogs.com/
and the original city: http://www.blogging.la/(which will move to a Metblog format soon)

Ambitious sure, but if you shot for the stars and you get the moon that’s not a bad strategy.

Jeff Jarvis came out of the gate with the playa hate, kicking Metroblogging as YAJB (yet another Jason blog).Of course, he goofed and got Jason D. confused with me and got himself fact checked (check yourself kid!).

Also, Jeff neglected to mention in his first post that he had almost the exact same business model a year ago at his day job at Advance.net (see the local blogs here: http://www.nj.com/weblogs/). Hmmm.

Oh yeah, Jeff forgot to mention that he is on the Board of one of Nick Denton’s companies, as such his loyalty is to Denton’s local blogs (as a total aside you ever notice Jeff giving massive praise to Nick’s blogs and dissing everyone else’s?). He even goes on to link to Gawker as an example of great local blogs without mentioning his relationship to Nick.

Maybe I should get on IM and “talk” to Jeff oh wait, I’m not allowed on IM any more!

Somewhere along the road the web collapsed on itself, and I’m trying to figure out the who, why and when. For example, About.com, CNET and PC Magazine used to be greats sites to visit. They had amazing editorial and crisp site navigation. Today? Well, as Jeremy Johnson pointed out in his excellent post, PC Magazine’s site is 90% “crap.”

Since we started Weblogs, Inc., and blogs like Engadget.com, Peter, Brian and I have tried to make each site as cleanor “crap free”as possible. However, it is a constant struggle. We come up with ideas for new features to add to the home page, we get offers from people for CPC and CPA deals, and there is the never-ending lure of adding Google AdWords to our pages (we’re still considering itI mean it s cash in the bank right?).

We’ve made a decision early on to keep the blogs as slim as possible. We’re in the process of redesigning the blogs in WIN (the Weblogs, Inc. Network), to be even lighter in fact. As we work on the new design we’re trying to actually remove many of the features and noise from the top level. We’re also trying to have a minimal amount of advertisinglike two, maybe three advertisers per page.

Sure, we’ll loose some of the .25 or .50 per click advertising, sure we won’t have all the crazy navigation up top, but I think at the end of the day people want to look at somethingwellpretty. Go visit PC Magazine or About.com and try to figure out what they hell is going onit’s a mess. Users hate it.

This goes back to the issue of trust and transparency that we’ve all been talking about over the Jayson Blair and Enron years. When I visit CNET how do I know what is content, what is advertising and what are these nebulous “partnerships.”

Blogs are refreshingly transparent to users on a content basis because they are unfiltered, but they are also refreshing because they don’t have a lot of (advertising) clutter.

I’ve been watching some of the ads from one of the blog advertising networks, and I have to say they are looking more and more like content and less and less like ads. DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!

Now, I’m all for bloggers making money, but it’s getting confusing and users don’t like that. Users are smart very smart in fact.

You see, some sites put “advertisement” right up the top, which is great, but other put it a tiny font. Regardless of the size, as you page down they look more and more like blog posts rather then ads, and with the advertisement warning way up top most readers wouldn’t know. The ads are written like blogs posts on purposethis is very slick.

this is great for the advertiser because the reader is drawn in thinking it’s content. However, they are starting to confuse the market. If you’re running these style ads I would encourage a background color like Google, a dedicated column and putting the word advertisement on the top of each one.

Of course, people can do what they want with their blogs and I’m sure some people will say I’m sounding an alarm too soon. However, what draws me to blogs is transparency, and I fear that the second we loose that transparency we loose the reader.

Congrats to my pals over at BoingBoing.net for an excellent new design, some new features andmost of allsome sponsors.

BoingBoing.net brings a lot of joy to people everyday, and has for some time, and it’s great to see Team BB get some compensation for all their hard work.

Keep up the great job guys and I’m looking forward to even more of the delightfully obscure!