Quick break from vacation to point out this post at Signal vs. Noise:

Enterprise is the New Legacy (Signal vs. Noise)

The sharp kids at 37 Signals picked up on something the Startup Junkie noted awhile ago: enterprise is becoming a dirty word.

Startup Junkie: Mission Statement (Colaspot)

Happy New Year!

Introducing my latest distraction project:

The Journeyman Writer

It’s a Squidoo lens. If that’s gibberish to you, a lens is the love child of a blog and a portal. My lens is more or less this blog in distilled form. There’s a feed of the latest SRC posts, some writing links I like, gear I use, a blogroll, and other stuff that might be useful.

Squidoo is a co-op that hosts lenses, and the web application that you build them with. You can sign up and create as many as you want, on any topic you want to share knowledge about. Like the site says, everyone’s an expert on something.

The lens is a toolbox of knowledge and resources. It will by no means replace this blog. The way I see it, the lens should drive visitors to the blog, and the blog should drive information to the lens. It’s all very symbiotic.

Lenses are ranked by popularity. Watching my LensRank has become a daily addiction. Right now, I’m #168. Help me out by taking a look, and please leave any feedback here as comments.

Don’t post anything to your blog for a week.

Less than three weeks after scoring a link from Seth Godin’s blog, and watching my hit counter climb into the thousands, traffic is more or less back to pre-Godinian levels. I should have posted like a man possessed. Instead, I let holiday madness take precedence, and I let blogging take last priority. So it’s back down to you, my three loyal readers. Kind of like the end of the Christmas party when the guests leave, the lights come up, and your buddies stick around to help you clean up.

But we all know that’s when the real party starts.

This week, the Startup Junkie gripes about missing the holiday covered dish lunch. It ought to put you in the holiday mood.

Got any funny stories (or horror stories) about your office party? Post them here as comments or email them to colaspot@colaspot.com. If we use yours there, I’ll see to it that you get a comment invite.

I thought I’d spring for a new look up top. I’ve seen the old subway graphic on a lot of blogs — it’s part of Patricia Muller’s tasty Connections theme that comes with WordPress — and this place deserves uniqueness.

Major thanks to Bryan for coming up with the new graphic in about ten seconds.

So what do you guys think?

It’s high time I threw out some concrete goals for my writing career.

It’s a start. Some may be too ambitious, others may be too far off. I’m a procrastinator; trying to think about anything 20 years off is like trying to think in Hebrew. I picked 2008 to start writing full-time because I began my software career in the first week of 1998. Ten years as a programmer is long enough.

Maybe I’ll find out I’d rather write punditry than fiction. Maybe I’ll decide to be an editor-in-chief instead of a novelist. We’ll see.

I put these into GTDMail as projects, and will track my daily activities in terms of whether they move me toward these goals. Any task that brings a goal closer will get labeled with that goal.

It’s been said that your chance of achieving a goal goes up to 60% when you tell someone else about it. I just told a few people. I’ll try to keep you posted. If I can pick a particular time to report back, apparently I’ll hit 95%. So I’ll come up with some sort of regular schedule to post on my progress.

Now that you know something about The Business Experiment, I can tell you how exactly I’m involved in it. I’m spending time this evening editing the third issue of AnswerSpace — the TBE newsletter. I read the first one, thought the quality was lacking, and offered my services to the team leader. She read the previous post and accepted my offer. I had a blast editing issue 2. This week, I contributed an article in addition to my editing duties.

It’s not professional work in the monetary sense. They’re not paying me for it. But if I put enough material in front of the right eyeballs, it will eventually pay off in cash. I have to do my share of volunteer work before anyone will believe that I deserve to get paid for this.

This blog has laid the foundation for everything else to come. Without it, I wouldn’t be in a position to do this. So thanks, readers, for all your help.

I mentioned this piece in passing a couple of weeks ago, but I’m reprinting it here in its entirety. Next post, you’ll understand why.

This is an article I wrote for Colaspot. I know the cross-posting is getting a little out of hand, but this blog is and has always been about my development as a writer. Colaspot is a major stage of that journey. Anyway, here’s my rundown on The Business Experiment.

Are you tired of your dead-end job? Do you feel underappreciated and overworked? Would you like to get rich working from home? Friends, today I’d like to clue you in on an exciting new business opportunity.

Anyone still here?

Don’t worry — the Startup Junkie has not lost his mind and started selling Quixtar, or opened up an eBay store. I’m not going to drive off my friends and family by recruiting for a pyramid scheme. I am involved in a new way of doing business — something that’s never been tried before. For some of you webheads out there, it’ll be right up your alley. It’s called The Business Experiment, and it is just that — an experiment. Robert May had the crazy idea that a business could be run — from day one — like an open source software project. Free participation. Everything out in the open. Members contribute as much or as little effort as they like, with compensation (and perhaps company equity) distributed accordingly. If you’ve done time in a cubicle, that may seem like a pipe dream. Believe it or not, it’s all true.

In the early days, there wasn’t even a business plan; members submitted ideas to the message boards and everyone voted on them. (Each time a member votes in a poll, that vote is worth a certain number of points that will one day be used to determine equity in the company.) After several rounds of discussion and voting, the winner was an idea called The Wisdom of Us. It’s a simple idea, one that takes advantage of the collective nature of the project and requires very little in the way of capital. The other day, we all voted on a company name and logo. If this first company takes off — or even if it doesn’t — there’s no reason the cycle couldn’t start again with a completely new business plan.

There are several things about the concept that interest me. First is the large number of people involved (currently, 887 members are signed up) and the even distribution of influence. In a normal organizational structure, you’d better hope the folks in the top boxes know what they’re doing. The Business Experiment is a democracy. Sure, there’s an executive team –someone has to drive the bus — but the big decisions are made by anyone who bothers to vote. Everyone knows what everyone else is working on, so members are not going to get blindsided with bad business decisions. Second, the risk is spread thin. With such a large talent pool, no one person has to lay it all on the line. Many hands make light work. Since participation is voluntary, most likely the right people are doing the right jobs — and the most committed people get the most crucial ones.

I’ve been involved in the experiment from its early days. Why am I participating? I’m working full-time, and running the greatest site in my town. It’s not like I need something else to do. But it might just be the most interesting thing on my resume someday. There are all sorts of bright, skilled folks working on this thing: entrepreneurs, designers, writers, financial geniuses. The networking potential alone is reason to get involved. While you’re checking out the TBE site, take a look at the list of available jobs. They’re small, and they don’t pay — not in actual money, anyway — but chances are that you’ll find something on that list that you’re passionate about; that you’d do for free, at least in the short term. Maybe you’re thinking about a career change. Do you know what it is you’d love to do? Would you like to try it out for cheap, and get some real experience? Here’s your shot.

You could be involved in an idea that changes business as we know it.

I realized that Thursday’s post was right up the Startup Junkie’s ball of tea, so I shamelessly reused it. Skip over to Colaspot anyway; there’s plenty of stuff there worth reading.

My work day got off to a perfect start when I pulled into the parking garage. A quickly-printed sign was taped to the card reader. It read something like this:

Please do not drive the wrong way down the garage ramp. The ramp is for driving up and for parking. People have complained and there have been several near accidents.

This particular garage’s floors are laid out in the form of a bisected square. Looking at it from above, the left, top, and bottom sides of the square are flat. The right side is the down ramp, and the middle side (!) is the up ramp.

The traffic flow for going up is as follows:

• drive up the middle
• take a sharp left
• drive along the left side
• take another sharp left
• repeat until you reach your floor

(Most of my cow-orkers and I have been banished to the top floor, but that’s a subject for another post.)

At the end of the day, here’s what you do instead:

• drive along one side of the square
• drive along another side of the square
• drive along another side of the square
• finally drive down the “down” side of the square
• repeat until dizziness and impatience make you crash into something

If you followed all that, you may have an idea why someone felt it necessary to write the note. See, at the end of the day, leaving the top floor, tired and hungry, the last thing you want to do is drive around and around in circles, only going down one-fourth of the time. So you cheat.

You go down the down ramp, make a sharp left, go down the up ramp, make another sharp left, and go down the next down ramp. Et voila: you’ve just dropped three floors in less time than it would take to go down one floor the proper way. It’s late, the garage is over half empty, no one is coming up, and no one parks on the upper floors anyway, except us few poor sods. They keep the rates too high, so the garage is never more than two-thirds full.

The urban geniuses that laid out the garage ignored one crucial thing: people are in a hurry at the end of the day. They’re out of patience. They want to get home and see their families and eat. Yet the proper procedure forces you to take the long way down when you least want to.

It would have been so easy to lay out the flow the other way, so that going up was longer than going down. In a perfect world, they would have installed electronic direction arrows at the corners of each floor, so that up was shortest in the morning and down was shortest in the afternoon. The main thoroughfares to the Charlotte Coliseum (and probably a lot of arenas in larger cities) do just that. Each lane has a programmable traffic light above it, so that lanes can switch directions as conditions dictate. Yes, I know that would cost an arm and a leg. OK, so how about at least using signs that say “turn this way before noon and that way after noon”? Trust our intelligence a little, and most importantly, make it look like you care.

You might say that would invite chaos, and that people would just ignore the signs. Isn’t that what’s happening anyway? I talked to a cow-orker on his way out this evening. He ignored the memo and took the short way down. I can’t say I blame him. When businesses make policy that ignores their customers’ (or employees’, for that matter) needs and wants, rebellion ensues.