Unlike past years the numbers presented above are not cumulative. Doing so makes it easier to understand what is transpiring. I also added a row showing the number of posts and used this info to calculate a Don Dodge version of a conversational index.
The number of posts written on FoG has fallen. Part of this, I am sure, is that I manage multiple blogs these days. Another big part was I took a spring break from writing last year to gain a little perspective. When I cranked things back up in the summer I had made the conscious decision that I was not going to write to build traffic, I was going to write to build community as well as devote more of my free time to other endeavors.
Traffic continues to grow, albeit at a decreasing rate. More important to me is the fact that the conversational index is a healthy and a good indicator of the community here.
The Technorati rank also has taken quite a jump, driven by the number of inbound links currently pointing to FoG. I also ran FoG through Blog Grader and it emerged with a grade of 95.8 and a rank of 10,442 which put FoG in the 94% percentile.
The other day while perusing Twitter I came across Typealyzer. Typealyzer is an application that looks at the content of a blog to determine its personality within the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) framework. Merely type in the URL of the blog and voila.
Who can resist, so I typed blog.weatherby.net into the input box.
The output, claimed FoG was an INTJ or “Scientist.”
Over the years I have taken a few MBTIs. The results have been mixed, ENTJ, ISTJ, ESTJ, and ENTJ. I believe I am a border line INTJ/ENTJ. Here are some characteristics of ENTJs, "The Executives."
Direct and assertive
Attuned to the big picture and how to get things done.
Likes making bold and sweeping changes in complex situations.
Outspoken and will not hesitate to speak of their plans for improvement
Seem like the behavior you have been seeing on FoG over the past week or so? It does to me.
It being Festivus it seems quite appropriate to air a grievance during an otherwise perfect holiday season.
My grievance is with American Express. I am deeply disappointed with them.
I had an AMEX charge card before I had a credit card. It was the first card I owned and used. Honestly was surprised that they give me one, but my first boss out of college told me to apply, and sure enough it was granted. I was a member. Have been a member since 84.
Over the years my AMEX use has grown. It is the primary card we use for household expenses. Used AMEX to buy laptops for new employees at MindSpring. Continued to use it during periods when I was traveling extensively on business, often racking up bills in excess of $10,000 per month. I think I was over $20,000 a few times. Even tried to buy my car with it though the dealer refused (I really like the Rewards Plus program and have taken many free trips to the Caribbean and mountains). I have 334,000 points in my Membership Rewards account. I easily have charged more than $1 million on my AMEX cards over the year, maybe more than $2 million. With the exception of current balances, which are not extraordinary, I have paid my bills.
I now have five AMEX accounts with nine cards outstanding. Many of these cards are used just to help with internal family accounting. Three of the accounts are used for businesses in which I am an officer. The Enfuse Group, Skribit, and another startup. Like my personal accounts these accounts are current.
So I have yet another startup, I need another AMEX account. I called up AMEX. Asked for another OPEN account. They would not even take the application. Said it would be rejected. I had too many accounts or something to that effect.
Excuse me. Here I am a long-term loyal customer with a FICO score above 800 and a life-time customer value that has to be off the charts and they are telling me they don't want any more of my business.
OPEN my derrière. AMEX you stink. I'll use that Citi card to finish up my Christmas shopping.
This is the second in a series pulling content off my first web presence. A personal list from 1999. Can not believe The Lord of the Rings did not make the cut. It bumps nine or ten off the list today. Will have to gave that some thought.
In the curious way that the Internet sometimes ensnares you. A series of events led me back to my first Web site. There is some oddly interesting stuff in there. This is a first in a series. My personal bio, circa 2000.
Welcome to the World!
I was in a hurry to get here. Born a bit early on a night when my parents were planning on going to a University of Louisville basketball game. The date was December 17, 1960. They made it to the hospital. I am still a UofL fan.
The Wonder Years
Oh the wonder years. That time in life where everything is all fun! Grew up in Louisville, home of the Kentucky Derby.
Spent a lot of time playing baseball and football. My parents were divorced was I was seven. It had a major impact on my life. My dad lived on the Ohio River and did until he passed away. Water skied quite a bit when I was in my teens. Miss my dad quite a bit these days.
High School
If you want to throw me in a category I was a jock. Played football, wrestled, dated cheerleaders, wrestled with cheerleaders. Led Zeppelin ruled.
College
I discovered that I have a brain. Dean's List and all that stuff. For the record I went to Eastern Kentucky University.
OK, maybe I really did not need a brain. Did not join a frat, got invited to more parties that way. Was a psych major for a while. Did not like playing with rats. Switched to marketing. Sold bibles door to door the summer between my junior and senior year.
Early Adulthood
Went into sales when the girl across the hall told me her father was the Vice President of Marketing at a Louisville firm. Bought a boat. Skied some more. Was a pretty decent beach volleyball player. Quit my job and left Louisville to pursue my MBA. I doubt if I will ever live in Louisville again. Not that it is a bad
place or anything.
My Wife and Real Adulthood
Abby, my wife, most recently worked at Coca-Cola, a place which isn't quite as cool a place to be as MindSpring. She had to wear suits, panty hose and stuff like that. On the days that she felt really daring she actually wore pants to work! She was afraid to do it the first time. However, their bennies made up for other
shortcomings. We have talked about her becoming a MindSpringer but she is a marketer too and we don't think that would work out. I interview a lot of her former co-workers. Before Coke she worked at Leo Burnett and Taco Bell. She left Coke when Kate, our daughter, got an ear infection and had to have tubes put in. I am more proud of her as a professional mom then I am of her being a professional professional.
Abby and I met at Indiana University while in graduate school. She had a few dates with my roommate. Five years later she invited me to go out and play in NYC and (she claims) innocently told me I could stay the night with her in the city (I lived across the Hudson in Hoboken) if we stayed out too late. Well .... one
thing led to another and the rest is history. We have been married since the spring of 1995. I am very happy.
Our First Baby
We had our first child together in the fall of 1998, Katherine Clarie. She came out 9 pounds 3 ounces. Abby had to go natural (not her choice!). Kate is a great tempered strong girl. We like to tell ourselves that it is due to superior parenting skills. We actually know better. We are simply blessed. I am happier.
Our Second Baby
Our second child was born on January 2, James Benjamin. He was five hours and 11 minutes too late to be a millennium baby. Or actually he was about 364 days early. Another big one weighing in at 9 pounds 4 ounces. A boy and a girl. I think we will stop.
I am removing the Twitter application from my Facebook account. I am doing this because I spent about four hours with some of the folks I came of age with at my high school class reunion. It was good time. And I learned a few things. Most of these folks are not in the world of tech so they have a different perspective about social networks. A perspective more like mainstream America.
It is nothing new to me, but people that are on Facebook and not on Twitter do not understand the machine language to operate Twitter. Too many @ replies and shortened URLs take a Facebook user out of context. It's confusing to them. Why bring confusion to communications?
Something that I did not realize before, but makes total sense now, is my twitter comment stream is heavily populated with information about my work. Too much information about my work for mostly non-professional contacts and friends. To them it is comment pollution. Who wants that?
Perhaps the most essential thing that I learned was that I have fallen completely out of touch with some people that were important to me. It saddens me. I am going to spend a little effort to change that. Maybe more than a little. You won't be reading much about that here, it's an offline personal endeavor.
And you also won't be reading my Twitter updates on Facebook any longer.
I have been having a bit of a hard time blogging this days. It's not that I have writer's block. I am just spending my late night and early morning hours on other things. On the next thing.
It actually started the day after I announced I was going on Spring Break. A coincidence perhaps. But a few of my co-workers cornered me in my office late that Friday over a few beers. Basically told me that I was an idea stream and that I needed to just go and implement one of them. We talked a bit about high level criteria. Then we went into action mode.
The first thing we did was go and create Ordiri, which is pretty much a Startup Weekend type idea share. Except it is not just focused on Startup Weekend. It is ongoing. While we were working through the best way to make Ordiri useful, (if someone with WordPress skills wants to get involved please reach out to me, it's an entrepreneur service project) while not exposing submitting entrepreneurs to idea theft, one of the test ideas started to take hold. For now the concept will remain stealth. But it is starting to take hold.
We undertook a market analysis. It laid out a potential opportunity. I got some good direction from a personal adviser to find out if people would pay for the app. The answer was yes. Market validation interviews created no red lights. Friendlies were encouraging. A small part-time team started to meet on a semi-regular basis. New third party research validated the market size with an attractive CAGR. We decided to go create a prototype. It worked. I incorporated. Market validation interviews are ongoing. Creating more friendlies to potentially play with the product. Actually showed the prototype. People that have normally told me to stop in the past were telling me to go. We are creating an alpha. Determining go to market strategy. Getting great advice from successful entrepreneurs.
And there are two other of these things going on at the same time. Earlier this week I passed on the opportunity to lead a restart that an active angel brought my way. Last week two other quite interesting concepts came my way. A lot going on.
So FoG is at a bit of a crossroads. I am not focused on blogging. I am focused on creating a company. Since that is what I am focused on that is the experience
that it makes the most sense that I write about. And hopefully by
writing about that I can help other people down their own road.
I am also at a bit of a crossroads. But only a bit. It's not like I am going to quit my day job tomorrow. I can work on these projects early mornings, late nights, and weekends for some time. But to keep some of them moving along we are getting close to writing checks. Writing checks is a serious endeavor.
I really did create Secret Sig. And it pretty much unfolded the way that I described in my How I Created Secret Sig post (less all the snarkiness). And after I made Secret Sig I pretty much put it on the shelf. But like the ring of power Secret Sig did indeed have a will of its own. And like the ring of power it was forgotten for a long time. Until it awoke and ensnared me. This is the story about how Sig Mosley found out that I created Secret Sig.
Once again, it all started innocently enough. It was June of 2008. I had a meeting with Melanie Leeth of Imlay Investments. I wanted to get her view on one of the companies that I advise. And as is often the case when seeking Melanie's advice we were having a great conversation. Right in the middle of it she changed the subject. Melanie asked me "Lance, what are your going to do?" Well since she asked me, I told her. I told her my master plan. She wanted to know if I had discussed this with Sig. I told her no and she encouraged me to do so. So shortly thereafter I sent Sig a note and we scheduled lunch at the now defunct The Globe in Technology Square.
Sig Mosley and I went to lunch. We had a good meeting. As we were winding things down and settling our tab Sig asked me one last short question.
"Have you ever heard of Twitter?"
"Yes" I replied as calmly as possible while a B9 voice started screaming in my head.
"Well somebody has gone and created a Twitter account called Secret Sig and attached a Web page to it. Would you have any idea about how someone could do such a thing?" Sig asked. I am not sure of the exact words. I was in a state of shock. And panic.
Yes, Secret Sig did indeed have a will of its own. And lots of power. The power of Web crawlers. The power of search engines. All you have to do is bing Sig Mosley to understand the extent of the power. Someone close to Sig had searched on the term Sig Mosely and told him about Secret Sig.
Here I was sitting across from the most powerful technology investor in Atlanta, if not the Southeast, and he was asking me a direct question about something that I had created to semi-impersonate him. I never dreamed that things would unfold this way. People talking about it at an event and online with me just listening, sure. Getting asked a direct question from Sig himself, no. My mind was racing. Really, really racing. I had not done anything with the Secret Sig persona for several months. Was this an innocent question? Was there some artifact out on the Web that connected me to Secret Sig from the botched first attempt? Does he know? What do I say? Is my master plan going to completely blow up before it gets out of the gate? My career flashed before my eyes. I tried to stay as visibly calm as possible.
You know they say under stress people revert to their true self. I believe in being honest. It's what my parents taught me. So I came clean. I told Sig the truth. It was really the only option. "Yes Sig, I know how someone could do such a thing. I created Secret Sig."
And waited for a response. Waited for what seemed an eternity. How was the unwitting father of Atlanta angel investing going to respond to this gem of a confession? I really did not know him very well. We had worked together on the GRA/TAG business launch competition but that was about it. I had no idea how he was going to react. I was dying.
And what did Sig do? Sig smiled. To me at the moment a smile that was more beautiful than the Mona Lisa. With that smile I knew things were going to be all right.
Sig asked me how I did it. I told him the story. He asked me about Twitter. I told him all about that as well. Sig asked me if he could have control of @secretsig. I said yes. I even game him a tutorial on how to use it. With the exception of an entry or two at the beginning it has been Sig himself tweeting since last June.
Eventually Sig asked me if he could have control of Secret Sig he wanted to change some of the content. Correct some errors in fact. I said yes. Came to find that there is really no way to transfer a blogger account. So I am now the webmaster of the only Web presence of Sig Mosley and Imlay Investments. Sig wants changes, I get cracking.
Like the Secret Sig blog itself this article is written in a manner that attempts to imitate the skewering parody voice Dan Lyons created for Fake Steve Jobs. I have the utmost respect for all the individuals and organizations mentioned below. It is my hope that they all view their inclusion as a sign of great respect in the same manner that Sig views Secret Sig. With the exception of the dudes from Despair. They really are weenies.
It all started innocently enough. In January or February of 2008. Maybe March. I was a little bored. Had a little time on my hands. And I was inspired.
Inspired by the then anonymous Fake Steve Jobs. Before he become Real Dan. Fake Steve was brilliant. Literally. Perhaps the best non-marketing marketing campaign in the history of man. Or at least for a book about a technology icon.
And Fake Steve was big. Maybe even bigger then real Steve. I wanted one of my own.
The target was easy to pick if you were sitting at the epicenter of the Atlanta technology community. Sig. Sig Mosley. Sig Mosley the unwitting godfather of Atlanta angel investing. Sig Mosley without the "e" of Noro-Moseley (lots of people make that mistake). Sig had no Web site. His company, Imlay Investments, had no Web site. So I decided to make one.
I started by privately registering a few domain names. Sigmosley.com was available. I grabbed it. Thought about it a bit. Started to feel a little creepy. Almost stalker like. Ditched that. Registered secretsig.com. Felt more like fun. Fun was the goal.
I don't really code. It's not that it's hard. It's just typing. I don't have time to code. I needed some help. And help I found with my trusty confidant Blake Perdue. Blake has some mad web design skills (among others), and he put up with my insistence on using all things Typepad when creating PeachSeedz. Like he had a choice. He works for me. He does what I say. Like he had a choice in my evil plan. So he did it.
Blake designed and coded up the first version of the SecretSig Web site. I wrote the content. It was a thing of beauty. Custom templates. It even had SigWear, inspired by Andrew Hyde's VCWear. Shirts that had cool writings like "I've Been Sigged", "What Would Sig Say?", and "If You Need The Internet To Find Me You Don't Deserve Funding." This was before those weenies at StartupLounge came up with their lame Sig Said No shirt and then ceased production because the even bigger weenies at Despair (no link love for them) sent a cease and desist for the use of the :-( emoticon that some idiot at the USPTO granted a trademark (Exhibit A the trademark and patent processes are broken).
So we had the site. SecretSig was up and running. I needed a launch strategy. And if there is one thing I know how to do in the world it is launch Internet stuff. Unless it really is crappy product from some entrepreneur that has no clue. No clue that you actually need to think of your marketing strategy before you start building. That marketing is not some tag on that makes people buy bad things that they don't want or need. They are losers. I know how to tell them to get lost. Or get them to pay me a bunch of money. But I digress. I created a launch strategy. It was brilliant. Really. More brilliant then Dan Lyons. Perhaps the most brilliant simple plan in history. Even better then the Grinch.
I decided to launch via Twitter.
Twitter before everybody was getting on and being all spammy. Twitter before that jerk Tony LaRussa, whom I used to respect, decided to sue Twitter because someone was using his name and they came out with the stupid idea of non-anonymous accounts only for important people (what are they going to do, use Wikipedia to decide who is important?). Twitter before anyone in the Atlanta technology investment community was on it. But they are all on there now. And it is because of me. I was the first person to semi impersonate a member of the Atlanta technology investment community on Twitter (and as far as I know the last, nobody else has the kahonas). I set up a twitter account using the handle secretsig. Set the more info URL to www.secretsig.com. And then I had secretsig follow Sanjay Parekh.
You may have heard of Sanjay. He founded Digital Envoy, created Startup Riot, and is a founder of Shotput Ventures. Has this big hangup like Tony Dorsett about how people should pronounce his name. Gets into arguments with important people about things that don't matter. And he has doesn't have enough to do so he sits around all day long, stares at Tweetdeck and spews meaningless drivel at the rate of about a zillion messages a day. I figured follow Sanjay and it would generate about 50 tweets and somebody that was actually important like the weenies at StartupLounge would find out and spread the word. Sanjay is going to get all pissy with me for saying all this but it is true.
But Blake screwed it up. Dolt. He failed to mask the domain of www.secretsig.com about page. It looked something like forceofgood.typepad.com/secretsig_about.html. Sanjay called me on it. Sent me a DM (that's direct message for all you twittertards). I denied it. Sanjay sent me the domain evidence. Mea culpa. But Sanjay was cool. He volunteered to keep SecretSig secret.
So I took down www.secretsig.com. Then recreated it on Blogger (the application that Google paid millions of dollars to Evan Williams for and then just let it languish like every other thing they buy with the possible exception of Urchin). I did it myself and just let it sit there. Waiting for the opportune moment to tell the world. Cooking up an alternative launch strategy. But like the ring of power, Secret Sig had a will of its own...
The story about how Sig found out that I created Secret Sig is a story for another day.
One of the mainstay features on FoG over the past two years has been the "quote of the week". It is a post that appears every Friday at noon (I tried 3:14 for a period, but noon works better). It started as a throwaway, something to get a quick and easy article up at the end of the week. Quotes are easy to find if you are looking for them.
It has evolved into a pretty popular series. One of the quote of the week posts generated more comments than any other article in the history of FoG. Heck I even used the quotes to create a presentation called "Startups in 12 Quotes" that generated over 2,700 views, 18 favs, and 9 embeds on slideshare.
But with the break from FoG I have also been thinking if I wanted to continue with the quote of the week feature. But instead of deciding by myself in some misguided self-absorbed vacuum, I thought I would ask the audience via a poll.
Please take a moment to take the poll. And comments beyond the poll are of course welcome.
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person on entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
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