The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Monday, June 03, 2002

Joe Has New Themes for Radio Users! Even though I couldn't get his name right for 3 blog entries, I love Joe's work.  Take a look at: http://coolstop.com/radio/categories/jenettRadioConsole1/ for a new theme (maybe it's just new to me, not new overall). My friend Dewayne uses it and it's quite nice.  I'll migrate to it later this week I think.   9:03:03 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Failure is Good or Applying Parallelism to Yourself I know that my long time readers have seen various and sundry different things from me since I've been blogging.  Here's some of the things I've worked on: Spec'd a set of changes that I want in a news aggregator Wrote a fairly public spec for a distributed OPML rendering system Wrote an OPML viewer that converts OPML to HTML and works (well, ok, not always, I'll admit it and I'm in process on a full rewrite).  Go. Blog.name announced Friday The (very successful, if I do say so myself) 101 series of articles on marketing, consulting and business Miscellaneous PHP stuff including multiple articles in PHP Beginner Ranted about Microsoft a lot -- http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/categories/microsoft/ Repeated mentions of a new email product coming out soon.  Soon keeps moving farther and farther out of course (ain't software just grand) Incessant blog entries blathering about random stuff (like this) Written a series of free articles on Radio that led to my being the #1 scott johnson world wide on Google (ok, that's a bit vain but it's still cool) Written the Radio UserLand chapters for the upcoming O'Reilly book "Blogging Essentials".  Ok.  Still revising but I did write them. Had a hard drive die on my notebook and recovered it with 0% data loss (as far as I can tell right now, maybe I'm wrong but it looks great so far) I suspect your thoughts are on the order of: "Disfocused" or "Just plain whacked".  And, there is some truth to that but here's why I have put so many "oars in the water": I Expect to Fail Ouch!  That looks horrible when I actually write it down but it's so damn true I can't help myself.  Here's the reality, at least for me: Most new things you do fail.  No shame in it.  Remember the mantra "80% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years"?  Strike out "new businesses" and substitute "most things " and then strike out "5 years" and make it "10 days" (or substitute another time period, it varies). Better to try and fail than never try.  I learn from every single whack thing I do and my coding and writing skills get better every single day. Pretty much everything I do leads to some kind of visibility either here or thru Google or somewhere else (it's good to be public). I get really nice email from people all over the world about these efforts and that makes my whole day (example: A reader from Brazil sent thanks and a "hug" last week, I couldn't have been happier). Something will succeed -- I just don't know what -- and by going parallel rather than serial I am optimizing my chances (IMHO) The classical business approach is go deep and focus in one area.  I totally agree -- but how do you pick an area.  What I am really doing is applying lighweight parallelism and using that to test the waters.  When something gets a lot of interest then I go back and focus on it.  So, am I whacked?  Or does this make sense to anyone? 7:44:05 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This