Technosailor.com

A lively little discussion developed over the past few days on the DC-PHP developers mailing list. We have a very active developers group here in the DC area – much larger than most cities, in fact. Part of what makes our group great is the diversity of background and experience that is in the group. More after the jump.

I had an opportunity to appear on the Mediasphere show with Jim Turner. I shared my thoughts on the future of online advertising and advertising networks, a topic that came up again this past weekend with the announcement that Pajamas Media, a conservative political blog and advertising, was closing their ad network.

Take a listen.

Sir Isaac Newton was a noted genius among geniuses. Most of his lifework is seen culminating in the Law of Gravity and the development of Calculus. This, however, was not his life quest. History tells us that Newton was more concerned with proving that lead could be turned into gold (it can’t) and that the Christian understanding of the Trinity was a falsehood. Stories of Newton describe a neurotic man that would often not get out of bed for hours and sometimes forget to eat as he tossed his thoughts around in his head. The story says that calculus was developed as a result of his frustration with mathematics and a will to “force” the universe to bend to his own thinking.

One wonders if his genius wasn’t a little by accident.

Last night I spent the evening rubbing shoulders with some of the best and brightest traditional (and some online) marketers in the Capital Wasteland Region at a holiday party (There are many of them this time of year, are there not?).

As I stood there talking with a frequent reader of this blog, who also happened to work at Potomac Tech Wire, we got to discussing lessons learned from various times in our careers. I remember distinctly one of these moments from my days at b5media, which challenged me to remember that even though you think you know your job, career, industry or environment… you really don’t.

It was a Thursday night, like any other Thursday night. My son was in bed and my wife and I were dlipping around channels. One of our favorite shows, The Unit had just gone off at 10pm when all of the sudden, my Blackberry started buzzing. Annoyed, I glanced at it and saw alerts pouring in that the b5media servers were going down.

Having come from the blog space, I have a mostly unique understanding of the difficulties encountered when running a content business. There is always a war between traffic and community, profitability and loss, long term projections and short term realities. It’s not an easy business.

When I left b5media, I had established a base of over 1300 feed subscribers on this blog. I was proud of that because, let’s face it, if you aren’t a news site breaking news all the time, people are not as inclined to subscribe to a feed.

The feed at that time was hosted via FeedBurner with whom the network had an enterprise account with. As a member blog of b5media, and one of the folks that tested and pushed FeedBurner on the network, my blog was one of the first hosted under their CNAME policy. The CNAME policy allowed us to brand feeds with b5media (http://feeds.b5media.com as opposed to http://feeds.feedburner.com).