It’s been nearly 6 months since I last posted.  Shame on me.  But it’s not easy feeding the content beast and I felt the need for a hiatus to re-think why I blog and what I want to blog about.  I’m sure inertia had something to do with it too.  But I’ve missed blogging.  What I’ve most missed is being forced to organize and structure my thoughts into something that is hopefully cogent, especially since there are few opportunities to do this during the weekly grind. I also miss the people that I’d meet through my blog.  And so I’ve resolved to do the following:

• Average 1 post per week
• Focus on professional topics around digital media, e-commerce.  I’ll post about more personal topics from time to time, or I may find another outlet for that.  Ideally I’ll find a way to combine the two.
• Continue to tweet at www.twitter.com/ragsgupta.
• Favor analysis or ‘learnings’ over regurgitation of topical news.  Memes will no doubt drive what I post about but I’ll try not to take the easy way of adding a little commentary to a trending topic.

That’s it for now.  I look forward to getting past my blogger’s block.

Twitter has been blowing up of late.  Recently, I've had more and more non-techie friends asking me about twitter, what it's about, why one should try it, etc.  I've tried explaining twitter a few ways but still don't think I can do so in a concise way.  To some people it's "facebook status updates, but public".  To others, it's encapsulated in a picture depicting friends hanging out.  It's hard because it is a communication platform used in a number of different ways: as a way to interact with friends, as a source of real-time information from events as they unfold (as with the mumbai attacks), as a way to communicate with one's 'tribe', as a marketing tool, and on and on.  Kind of like how blogs is a catch-all term referring to a communications platform used in many different ways.  So it's not surprising that Evan Williams, one of the pioneers behind blogging, was a founder of twitter.  Go Ev.

I just changed the name of this blog to "The World According To Rags" instead of "Rags’s Soapbox".  Why?  Well, I didn’t spend much time picking the original name and, as it turned out, I don’t use this blog to do much ranting and raving, making the Soapbox monniker somewhat inaccurate.  Instead, I’ve used this forum to make observations – about digital music and media, and about places I’ve seen and things I’ve done — and this new name is a better reflection of that.  I was inspired by the John Irving classic, The World According To Garp, which I recently read and greatly enjoyed, and I just hope that the title doesn’t make me seem too self-centered!

I joined Facebook this past spring.  I didn’t use it much at first but, as more of my friends have joined, I find myself visiting it more and more of late.  It has even joined my daily rotation of sites and services to visit such as my personal email inboxes and MyYahoo.  I’ve been conflicted on some things such as whether to accept friend requests from what are really acquaintances or people I’ve met once or twice through work.  At first, I didn’t accept them on the theory that I’d use LinkedIn for professional relationships and FB for personal ones.  But after reading reports that Facebook plans on allowing finer-grained privacy settings and Michael Parekh’s post on the topic, I decided to start adding ‘casual acquaintances’ and have started to, for the most part, only let them view my Limited Profile.  [If this happens to be you, it's not personal and is what I'm comfortable with now as I'm sure you'd understand].  I’ve also edited and removed some things about myself and have recently found myself
deleting them from my feed so that not all of my "friends" see this, or removing other fields about myself.  I’m clearly still comprehending the nuances of Facebook but can see myself using it more and more over time — especially when they give more control over privacy settings.

Congrats to Om and the rest of the GigaOm team on their launch of Earth2Tech, a publication focused on the cleantech/greentech industry.  I don’t know much about it but it seems that it will be a welcome addition to the burgeoning space.

My friend Tom Ryan just took up blogging.   Tom was a founder of Cductive, a pioneer in digital music that he sold to eMusic, which was a public company at the time.  He then went corporate working gigs at Virgin Mobile and, most recently, at EMI, where he worked on their mobile and digital strategies.  He’s thankfully out and looking to scratch is entrepreneurial itch.  Nice story on his blog that demonstrates the potential of the mobile platform. 

Welcome, Tom.

Cool site I found via TechCrunch lets you take a quick quiz to determine what superhero most fits your personality.

I’m Superman.

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 70% The Flash 60% Green Lantern 60% Iron Man 60% Spider-Man 60% Catwoman 50% Hulk 50% Wonder Woman 45% Supergirl 45% Batman 40% Robin 37%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Welcome to Kara Nortman of Battery Ventures.  She has been blogging for a little while but only recently ‘went public’ with her blog, Venture Inside.  Great name for a blog.  I’ve known Kara since college (when she was only ever called "Nortman") and we recently reconnected after discovering shared professional interests in digital media.  I’ve been enjoying the posts on conferences that I’ve been unable to attend and about the interesting companies that she gets to meet with.  So welcome Kara!

My former colleague, David Porter, has recently waded into the blogging waters as has Mike Hirshland, a partner at Polaris VC who recently funded Heavy.com per Om. 

Welcome to you both.  I look forward to your posts.

I caught up with a friend of mine today and we talked about one of the things I’m working on and whether there’d be a fit for it at his company in terms of doing a commercial deal.  He told me the ways that his company typically works with others and, after some back and forth, we both determined that there really wasn’t a good fit.  No more need for me to keep calling him about this topic and for him to put me off, as often occurs when people don’t want to say no.  Of course, there are times when it’s justified to put someone off — maybe a strategy isn’t yet clear or more time is truly needed — but when doing a deal is unrealistic, it’s best for both parties to be upfront and save time.