Anil Dash

My friend Mat Honan amused and beguiled you a few months ago with Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle. As is the course of such things, he got a book deal for his efforts, despite having been responsible for the onslaught of unfunny ripoffs of the site which followed his success.

But, I take some very small satisfaction in this whole thing because Mat very graciously credits me (both in the book and in conversation) with having helped spread the word about his site. It's just another in the long string of goofy web memes for which I have become an unofficial ambassador. It's a good thing there's no Hell, or surely I'd rot in it for all that I've done.

At any rate, Mat's quite an entertaining and engaging interviewee, as evidenced by his recent stint on Internet Superstar, and as there's a totally gratuitous and flattering mention of me at about the four-minute mark, I felt obliged to link to it here.

You can buy Mat's book at Amazon and other reputable booksellers near you.

Last month marked the ninth anniversary of me starting this blog, more or less continuously updating since then. As I begin my tenth year here on dashes.com, I've made a few changes around the site.

First and foremost, there's a new look to the blog. My incredibly talented coworker Jim Ramsey created the basic theme, which I made a little bit uglier and naturally added some purple to. (Movable Type users can grab the Mid-Century template set upon which it's based.) I also owe a debt to Joi Ito for taking the original photo from which my little icon is based. There are more changes to come, but even at this half-complete stage, feedback is welcome.

Second, I finished something I've been meaning to do for ages, two new listings:

• Most Popular
• Best Of

Both of these archives are exactly what you'd expect, with the Best Of featuring a number of my posts that I've been most proud of over the years, including some that were less popular but that I thought were worth featuring. There's also a more extensive list of all archives, organized into a calendar or by tag.

I've brought back the Action Streams that I had on the site earlier, and will be doing more to incorporate my various online presences into my site here. I don't plan to just dump my Twitter updates and my bookmarks and crap into the stream of posts here unless you folks think I should. (I'm guessing not.) There's also different ads on the site. I've experimented with a number of different advertising ideas over the years without much objection, so I'll likely continue to do so. Unsurprisingly, the ads are provided by SIx Apart Media.

I'll be doing more with giving folks the chance to vote on things on the site, as well. Coming up with my own list of my best blog posts seems a little ridiculous, even for someone who's as shameless as I am about self-promotion. I'd love to hear more from readers about what posts were interesting, or what I should write more about.

But that brings me to the most important point: Thank you! Over the years, I've seen my technical skills decline, my writing skills improve, my frequency of posting drop, and yet somehow the number of readers has consistently increased. Writing for this site is one of the most satisfying hobbies, most rewarding intellectual pursuits, and most unlikely passions that I've had in my life, and the biggest reason why is thanks to the relationships I've formed with people who've read what I write here.

So, I hope you'll take a minute or two to look over the best or at least most popular things I've written, to see if any of it strikes a chord. And I hope we're all still here having this conversation nine years from now.

I forgot to mention one point when I was blathering about lists earlier this week: The easiest way to get on them is by asserting, truthfully or not, that you don't want to be on them.

Behold, my incredible mancrushworthiness, from an entire list of the mancrush-worthy. Or something.

It's nice to be called nice, but it's even better that people wrongly believe that I am nice. Thanks, Eliot!

I've been a fan of The KLF since I was a teenager, and just last week was reminded of one of their most amazing stunts. This is just the first of a five-part video showing the entire "Burn a Million Quid" documentary, and I think you don't get to see the actual torching until part two, but it's well worth the look.

What's interesting to me is how many people respond to this performance by saying it made them feel sick to their stomachs. I am not quite sure what that signifies. See also: Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.

Hey, NowPublic made a list of the 50 most influential web people in New York, and I'm on it at number six. So, thanks to the folks who made the list, and I appreciate the recognition.

However, every time a similar list comes out, I have a number of responses that immediately come to mind, and most of my friends who have to suffer through my ranting reply with some variation of "You're just complaining because you're not on the list!"

But this time, I am on the list. Which means it's a chance to talk about the reasons, good and bad, why these sorts of lists exist, and what purpose they can serve.

Update: Apparently, I'm on the TechCult Top 100 Web Celebrities list, too. Which appears to be even more blatantly link-baiting, though again, the company I'm keeping there is nice.

• First and foremost, organizations (whether they're websites, media organizations, publishers, individuals, institutions, whatever) create these lists to solidify their power and influence, and to promote their own authority. This generally works, with the most exceptional examples like Time's Person of the Year actually acting to amplify the publication's own profile. With that kind of success, it's easy to understand how Time decided to also create a Time 100 list as well.
• For less-known organizations, like NowPublic, having a list like this acts as a phenomenal engine of promotion. People who have a high profile are generally well-known, at least in part, because they put an effort into being well-known. Therefore, putting their name on a list is an extremely effective way to get their attention. On the web, we call this link-baiting, but offline, it's simply called flattery.
• These types of lists can be useful. One of the earliest and most fundamental milestones in the formation of a community is the desire for certain members to recognize those that (appear to) exemplify the values that the community aspires to, or would like to be identified by. Similarly, promoting unsung or less-known members of a community can be a useful method of indicating a desire for a community's values to evolve.
  
• Lists are different from awards. Everybody on them is a winner, of sorts, so there's very little sense of bitterness between people on the list. Similarly, having a large number of people be recognized increases the aspirational value for those who aren't on the list -- it's easy to pick someone on a lengthy list who seems undeserving.
• Creating this kind of content is perfect for the lazy days of summer. Fondly referred to in the publishing industry as "listicles", assembling faux-scientific methods of cataloging potential list members is a perfect task for interns. Here in New York, all of our local media editors traipse off to the Hamptons to sit out the sweltering days of July or August, and by amazing coincidence, much of local media publishes their "Best Of" articles around the same time. It's a credit to NowPublic that they've decided, interestingly, to publish the methodology for calculating influence.
• Pointing out these structural circumstances which occasion the creation of such lists doesn't mean that they're not still flattering and appreciated. It's nice to see your name on something. One of NowPublic's stated criteria for evaluation is accessibility, and as someone who's had his mobile phone number sitting on the side of his website for years, I am happy to see that's a factor in evaluating influence.
• There are, of course, some lists which are really important. Such as the Top 10 Boy Bloggers We'd Let Rub Our Touchpads. Congratulations to Nick Denton and Jason Kottke for being the only guys who are on both the NowPublic list and on this more esteemed accounting.

Thanks again to NowPublic for the recognition, and congratulations to the many friends and acquaintances of mine on the list. With only one exception, it's fantastic company to be part of and I can't wait to see who they pick in other cities and in New York next year.

Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible.

I mentioned a year and a half ago that I like Twitter. That was a little bit less common a position to take back then, but in the months since, tons of people have taken to the little messaging service, so clearly this was no great insight on my part -- it's just a useful, fun service.

But of course, that popularity has not been without its problems. Twitter's gotten a reputation for being unreliable, as a result of its rapid growth. In fact, in many ways, the Fail Whale and its related frustrations has come to define Twitter's brand more than almost anything else.

I'm no expert at these things, but there are a lot of reasons startups fail, and the reasons almost never include the fact that thousands of users clamoring for a service. Indeed, it seems to me that most companies (whether they're tech startups or anything else) fail because of being poorly managed. Put another way, execution is everything.

With that in mind, it's worth pointing out how particularly well-executed Twitter's recent acquisition of Summize has been. I don't know any of the deals of the financial or business arrangements, except that I'm a little disappointed that Twitter isn't maintaining a presence in New York City, instead moving all of the employees to San Francisco. That nitpick aside, the public face of this transition was extremely well executed.

Ev Williams, co-founder and the most public face of Twitter, speaks about the deal at some length in this excellent, candid interview with Techcrunch. (Which site, by the way, may rank as my "most improved" blog of 2008.)

Rumors of the Summize acquisition leaked a few weeks ago, but both companies kept discipline around communications and didn't acknowledge or respond to the conversation. And then, when it came time to announce the deal, the sites had been fully integrated, a lengthy and personable blog post complete with a sketch of some future ideas for integration was posted, consistent branding was in place on the acquired site, and the roadmap for what was going on with employees affected by the acquisition was clearly communicated.

In all, that's a formidable amount of coordination to happen across the country, while business deals are being worked out, and while maintaining secrecy about the fact that it's taking place. And, all of that was done with an eye towards providing a good user experience to their shared customer base.

There are a lot of things to criticize in such deals most of the time, though it seems likely that this will be a successful acquisition, from an outsider's point of view. But what's striking to me is that, as quick as so many are to criticize Twitter (fairly) for technological problems, people haven't been as eager to acknowledge a remarkable discipline and execution on the business side of the company. Frankly, all of those who'd suggested that Twitter should be sold to a larger company seem to have forgotten that almost none of the big companies suggested as acquirers have a history of consistently pulling off this kind of execution. And that's even more true for the smaller innovative companies that they've acquired.

Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done.

The unofficial goal of Microsoft in its early years was to see a computer on every desk and in every home, presumably running Microsoft software. That sort of vision, put forth in a time when the conventional wisdom dictated that personal computers might disappear entirely, was astounding enough. But by the year 2000, just 25 years after its founding, Microsoft had achieved that improbable goal, at least in the developed world.

The story of the Gates Foundation is well-covered, but it's important to consider the context in which the Foundation was created. What would you do if you defined the most ambitious goal you could imagine, and then achieved it just 25 years later? And what if you had done so while still relatively young, not even fifty years old? That's the position Gates found himself in just a decade ago.

Most people, when faced with the realization of their greatest dreams, will respond at first with elation, and then later settle into melancholy or even depression. It can be overwhelming to think that there's nothing left to do. Instead, Gates upped the ante.

How high did he set his new goals? How about curing AIDS? Or ending the spread of malaria? What about improving life expectancy and quality of life for the poorest people in the world? After achieving a goal that seemed outlandish, it's clear that the only logical next step is to try to achieve a goal that seems nearly impossible. I have to point out that sense of thinking "Okay, we won -- what next?" is extremely unusual.

Plainly, I admire Bill Gates for this. I think there are few people who, instead of resting on their laurels, decide to stake their reputation and fortune on goals that are not only altruistic, but that conventional wisdom dictates may not be achievable in a single lifetime. There are many other ways to measure a man, and I'm not diminishing at all the fact that Microsoft as a corporation has made regrettable, unfortunate, and even illegal decisions during Bill Gates' tenure. But imagine if someone had defined an explicit goal of a "cure AIDS tax" for corporations, and then tried to get that enacted. The fact that, effectively, this has happened is remarkable.

And there are many who still want to think, despite the commitment of incredible resources and formidable talents to support the Gates Foundation's mission, that all of this philanthropic work is an attempt to simply generate good PR. But that simply doesn't follow the facts.

A Family Tradition

The truth is, Bill Gates doesn't just come from a family tradition of philanthropy: It's actually a significant part of the reason he got the single biggest opportunity of his professional career. You can see the family tradition today, with the founding chairman of the Gates Foundation being William Gates Sr., Bill's father. But you have to go back twenty years earlier, to Gates' mother Mary Maxwell Gates, to understand how philanthropic work opened doors for a fledgling Bill Gates and Microsoft.

Mary Maxwell Gates was deeply involved in the work of the United Way for many years before her passing in 1994, most notably as its first female chair. And one of the connections she made through that work back in 1980 was to John Opel, the chairman of IBM who was also a member of the United Way's executive committee.

It's become fairly clear in the years since that at least part of the reason IBM was willing to hire Microsoft to create an operating system for the initial release of the IBM PC was because of the introductions made through that connection. Taking a risk on an unproven small software company was a big leap to take, and it's one that ended up being the greatest turning point in the history of the biggest software company that's ever been created.

It's fitting, then, that that opportunity is honored by having the founder of the company return all of his efforts and the vast majority of his wealth to an even more ambitious new vision for philanthropic work. So, congratulations to Bill Gates on his new job, and I hope this hack is even more successful than all the ones that he's done in the past.

Essential Links

A few recommendations for those who want to understand more about Bill Gates and his legacy:

• Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews published Gates: How Mirosoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry, back in 1992. I have been a big fan of this book since it came out. It was released before his period of greatest fame after Windows 95 launched, and perhaps as a result is more insightful than later efforts that tried to case Gates' entire life and career merely in the context of post-monopoly Microsoft. (I've shown the original, gloriously awful, cover photo above, but I think the paperback edition has less floppy-disk lunacy.)
• Fortune has a slideshow covering 30 years of Bill Gates' career, narrated by the man himself.
• Gates' 2003 rant about the shoddiness of the Windows user experience. Though this has prompted lots of "haw, haw, Windows sucks!" responses from geeks, I though it was interesting to look past the memo as merely a document of a typically dysfunctional large company. What struck me was a founder, nearly 30 years after starting the company, and decades after becoming wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, still obviously had both great passion and an enormous amount of technical knowledge.
• Those same themes of passion and technical competence are echoed in Joel Spolsky's essay about his first BillG review. Joel revisited this in a less-geeky version of the essay published in Inc. magazine.

Today Newtalk, a site dedicated to substantive political discussions, hosted a conversation asking "Is it possible to fix government?". In his response to host Philip Howard, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg reveals that it's his first time responding to a conversation online:

Thanks for the opportunity to participate in this discussion, Philip. This is my first time participating in an online discussion, but I can assure you I am not at home wearing my pajamas. This is a great group, the kind of crowd I'd enjoy having over for dinner. So I'm just going to pretend that we're all sitting around a big table. I always learn something when I break bread with diverse groups of talented people, and I expect this conversation will be no different.

It's a little bit depressing that, more than ten years after blogging's taken off, even some of the most prominent politicians in the country still think bloggers are folks at home in their pajamas. But I will take it as a sign of at least a little progress that Newtalk is a Movable Type Community Solution site, so maybe indirectly my day job helped Mayor Mike make his first steps online.

When the Space Shuttle Discovery glided home a few days ago, one of the electronic components which made it possible was the humble Intel 8086 processor.

Some of the chips powering support systems for the shuttle were purchased from a motley variety of suppliers including sellers on eBay. The New York Times told the story six years ago:

Civilian electronic markets now move so fast, and the shuttles are so old, that NASA and its contractors must scramble to find substitutes.

In the past, NASA procurement experts would go through old catalogs and call suppliers to try to find parts. Today, the hunt has become easier with Internet search engines and sites like eBay, which auctions nearly everything.

The 8086 processor just celebrated the 30th anniversary of its release. The space shuttle program just celebrated the 27th anniversary of the maiden shuttle launch.

Image of the 8088 processor, sibling to the 8086, courtesy of Intel's Microprocessor Hall of Fame.

One of the most satisfying and fun things I've ever seen in my job was the sight of my friend and coworker Michael Sippey onstage with Steve Jobs and the Apple crew, showing off TypePad for iPhone. In our line of business, Apple keynotes are just about the biggest shows in town, and Sippey killed it on the toughest stage around.

As Michael graciously mentions in his own post, the demo wouldn't have been possible without our great developer (and demo god in his own right) Ray Marshall, along with Stephane Delbecque on our team who helped pull the entire effort together. You can watch the whole keynote on Apple's site, or just see a short clip of the TypePad demo for yourself:

But while I'm happy for Michael and the team on such a great demo, it also made me happy to see Michael onstage showing that his knowledge of blogging is second to none. Michael was, along with Peter, one of the people who really inspired me to start blogging, and he's probably under-recognized as a pioneer.

The list of ways he's influenced blogging and our industry are countless: Even the biggest gadget blogs today still make a huge deal out of featuring big-name tech CEOs when they get an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, but Michael interviewed Jeff Bezos for his seminal blog Stating the Obvious twelve years ago. I interviewed Michael for our series on the 10th anniversary of blogging last year, in which Michael talks about creating what was arguably the first link blog, Filtered for Purity, ten years ago. And of course, Mena mentioned Michael's joining Six Apart back in 2004 as our VP of Products. It's a role he's held ever since.

Add in his influence in efforts like advising the original Pyra team, which created Blogger, and it calls to mind the old chestnut about the Velvet Underground: Not everybody has read Michael Sippey's blog, but everyone who did, started a blog. (And at some point in recent history, it's possible that everyone who did started a blogging company.) Congrats to my friend Michael on putting that experience on display on the biggest stage around.

(And oh yeah, if you're the best in the world at what you do, you can work at Six Apart, too.)