the love of change
One of my favorite people that I follow on Twitter is Genevieve Spencer. Her tweets are extremely brief, and she writes pretty much exclusively about her day to day life. Sometimes she just comments on the weather (“Snowed a little bit today”), other times she talks about school (“Played “I Spy” at school to-day. Teacher was late. I was the first one there.). She never comments on current events or responds to other people’s tweets.
That’s because she’s dead.
Hey folks. It’s been exactly three month since I last wrote a post for Tropophilia. Trust me, it hurts me as much as it hurts you. I’ve been busy with moving from Mountain View to San Francisco, as well as throwing a bachelor party and being the best man for our very own Mr. and Mrs. Ansley. (Congrats to the happy couple, currently on their honeymoon!)
The biggest trouble I’ve had is finding topics that I’m both passionate enough to write about, but also am “allowed” to address. Google has few rules about employee blogging (it’s actually a highly encouraged practice), but obviously there are limits to what I should and should not touch. Writing about competitors, or businesses that are suffering because of the rise of the web, or even about Google’s own moves, would probably not be in my or Google’s interest. Since this is pretty much everything I used to write about, you can understand I’m having a little blogger’s block recently.
The most frustrating part is not that I can’t chronicle the news items themselves, but that, as a result, I can’t vent my enthusiasm for the subject matter. One big reason I wanted to start Tropophilia was to release some intellectual energy about this new digital era. While my job gives me the daily opportunity to think about and work on these issues, there’s just something different about sitting down at the keyboard and crafting my own subjective analysis. I really miss that feeling.
All of this is to say that I’m going to resolve myself to finding those stories I can write about, and reengaging myself with this blog in short order. There will probably be more “pointing to / this is interesting” posts than “analysis” ones. I’m also hoping to start teasing out some of the legal questions surrounding new technologies and companies, in addition to talking about their cultural impact. I hope that you’ll continue to find it interesting, and even if you don’t, that you’ll at least be able to see the enthusiasm behind it.
Good talk, see you out there.
Hey-o! After a little research and e-mailing, I’ve successfully had Tropophilia added to the “Blogs By Googlers” section of the Official Google Blog. Mmmm… link juice.
Though our first posts were published in December 2007, Tropophilia was officially launched one year ago on January 5th, 2008. In that introductory post, we announced our mission:
While we hope that you come to understand some of the changes that are happening around our world, we also hope that we cause some small amount of change in YOU. Whether we expose you to a new idea, or change your mind about an old one, we hope your perspective on life is changed – however so minutely – after having visited Tropophilia. If you’re not a tropophiliac before you arrive, we hope you’ll be one when you leave.
This blog has certainly changed us for the better, and we hope in some small way it’s done the same for you. Tropophilia has inspired us to read, write, think, re-think, debate, learn, and grow. We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far as much as we have.
We thought that we’d take advantage of this special edition of Monday Links for a little introspection and retrospection, as we reflect on some of the happenings on Tropophilia over the past year.
Content
According to the Internet Archive, we had published 32 posts to eleven different categories by January 19, 2008. Today, we have just under 300 posts published in 59 categories (check out our new full-page archive to explore all our posts by date and category). In addition to Taylor and Jarred’s content, we’ve had 17 guest posts from friends such as Dan, Joel, Eric, Bruce, Marriott, Jarry, and James. We also have over 850 comments on our posts, signifying the robust conversations that have emerged among our growing community of readers.
Here are some of our favorite entries from this year:
Statistics (as of 12/30/08)
Design
In a way, Tropophilia has almost come full circle in terms of visual design. Check out how we appear in the Internet Archive’s index from January 19, 2008. We launched with a double-column variant of the excellent K2 theme — much as we have right now, though the width was narrower. Not long into the life of the blog, we added a second sidebar to the left side of the main content. We kept this format for most of the year. After an ill-fated tinkering with a completely new theme in early December, we’ve come back to our roots with the dual-column look. We love it for its simplicity and the priority it gives to the main content. We’ve also introduced a new logo up top, which we also hope you like as much as we do.
At launch, we had a “What We’re Reading” widget in place that tracked our online bookmarks of cool articles. This eventually was replaced with our “By The Way” section, where we would post small updates and links. Several months ago, we removed “By The Way” and replaced it with feeds from our Twitter accounts. Finally, in the past few weeks, we have reintroduced the “What We’re Reading” widget with a fresh commitment to keeping it populated with interesting links and notes.
We continue to tweak things here and there to see if they stick. As always, we welcome your feedback on any design changes and suggestions.
Other Awesomeness
This has been an exciting year for Tropophilia: not only for the interesting conversations that have come out of our posts, but also for some special opportunities it has given us.
In June, we were invited by Brazen Careerist to join their new start-up community of blogging 20-somethings. Since then, Taylor and Jarred have been featured a number of times on their front page and it’s been a major source of traffic. Just a few weeks ago, one of Brazen Careerist’s founders (and noted columnist and career coach) Penelope Trunk cited posts by each of us as reasons she’s inspired to keep pursuing her startup business.
Taylor and Jarred have also been doing a little guest blogging. In May, Taylor attended the Council on Foundations conference in Washington, D.C. and was invited by Sean Stannard-Stockton (who runs the Tactical Philanthropy blog) to write up some of his thoughts from the panels he attended. Later that month, Jarred wrote a post for Sarah Perez’s blog speculating about how the battle over the social web would be fought, and who would probably win (hint: Google).
Speaking of which, as we’ve noted in several places, this blog played a big part in making Jarred feel confident enough to pursue and eventually get a job offer from Google. So even though he knows you often found the posts boring or too detailed, he wants to thank you for humoring him as he cultivated and explored his (super geeky) passions and turned them into a dream job. Here’s hoping that 2009 will help Taylor to do the same.
New Year Resolutions
While 2008 was a great start for the blog, we want to make a conscious and concerted effort to ensure that 2009 is even better. So, here are our resolutions for Tropophilia in the new year.
Thank You!
Thanks for reading Tropophilia. We’ve enjoyed writing for and sharing with you over the past year, and look forward to 2009 being even better.
We’d love to hear what your favorite posts and conversations from 2008 were, what you’d like to see from us in the new year, and any other comments or questions! And remember, if you ever want to write a guest post, we’d be thrilled!
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user The Facey Family.
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