Five or six years ago, the venture fund I was running invested in a company that made content management software. In an early pitch, the execs laid out a number of business-specific uses for their software. And, they said, there was even a consumer application: people could use it to keep what was called a ‘weblog’.

I was unimpressed. A weblog? Apparently, they were sites where people wrote inane posts about their daily lives, about the weird things that interested them, then threw it all online in a chronological pile, hoping that people would read along.

It was the stupidest idea I’d heard in a while, I said. And I meant it.

But, at a subsequent board meeting, I agreed to give the whole ‘blogging’ thing a quick try, just to get a better feel for the software’s interface. I’d do it for a month or two, I figured, then get back to the more important stuff in my life.

At the end of the two months, however, when I stopped posting, I started getting angry emails. People I’d never even met had apparently been reading my site at work, and had quickly developed procrastinatory addictions. “Keep writing!” one reader urged me. “Otherwise, I’ll have to actually start doing work.”

So, despite my initial skepticism, I kept blogging. Even once the company that dragged me into it evolved away from consumer-facing software, I downloaded an early version of Movable Type, and kept writing away.

Since then, though, I’ve tended to have annual crises of confidence. I’ve looked at this habit that I somehow fell into backwards, and questioned why I do it. And, usually, I’ve claimed I would stop blogging, to transition the site towards something more feature-article driven, something that would encourage me to actually edit before posting, something that would allow me to focus in on topics that I’d like to write about, but that don’t seem to flow naturally when I’m simply banging out, day by day, whatever happens to be on my mind.

Sadly, it never lasts. Mainly because, whatever else it does for me, this site is the free equivalent of the therapist’s couch. Oddly enough, there’s something remarkably psychologically soothing about hashing through the things I’m thinking, knowing that people are listening, even if most of them are people I’m never likely to actually meet.

So, this year, rather than threaten wholesale redesign, major change or ground-up rethinking, after spending a few hours last night staring at the ceiling, I’m sailing through this year’s ‘what the hell am I doing this for, and how can I do it better?’ breakdown with only a minor change: I’m going to start categorizing posts.

Yes, I know, that doesn’t seem like much. But, in doing so, I’m hoping it will convince me to pay more attention to those categories I tend to neglect, will cause the volumes of writing to balance out over the different facets of my life.

I’m also hoping that, by lumping the better posts in each category together, it will encourage me to write longer series over time, knowing that people will still be able to easily find earlier, related posts. To that end, for example, I’m thinking of slowly posting up my half-written book on entrepreneurship, a chunk at a time. Certainly, it would do much more good if people read it than if it continues languishing on my hard disk.

So, in short, here’s my current list of what I think I’ve written about in the past, and what I’d like to keep writing about going forward:

Cooking
Culture Consumption (music, book and movie reviews)
Dating
Entrepreneurship
Filmmaking
Fitness
Interviews
Judaism
New York Life
Photography
Productivity
Quotes
Restaurant Reviews
Science & Technology
Style
Toys & Gadgets
Travel
Trumpet
Writing

The list may evolve slightly as I move forward, but I think it’s a fairly broad base. Expect to see category tags on posts and categorical index pages cropping up over the course of the month.

And, as ever, if you have thoughts, feel free to mail ’em in.

As I’m temporarily down for the count with a belated case of the winter cold, updates and excitement – both digital and analog – will be briefly delayed.

Looks like it’s time to whip up a second pot of that aforementioned chicken soup.

“He has no enemy, you say; my friend your boast is poor. He who hath mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure must have made foes. If he has none, small is the work that he has done.”
– Alexander Anton von Auersperg

When we were first launching Cyan, one of the things we discussed constantly was how we should judge our work. By financial success? By popular response? By critical reviews?

And, in those discussions, we all unanimously agreed that, at least on the reviews front, we’d be wildly happier with films that polarize critics – films that get some really great reviews and some really bad reviews – than with ones that garner a widespread ‘meh’ for their inoffensive mediocrity.

With I Love Your Work, we pretty much got what we wished for. The reviews coming out of Toronto, and in the international release of the film, have been wildly split, with reviewers either loving or hating the film, and with very little in between.

At first, glad as we were to have made something that garnered a strong response, bolstered by the enthusiasm of the positive pieces, at some level, those bad reviews really hurt.

But, with a bit of time, we started to feel okay about them. And then, with more time, better than okay. We started to relish the bad as much as the good. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that “a creative act is not considered: it’s instinctual. It is to be responded to, reacted against.” Those strong reactions, the good and the bad, were the best positive feedback we could get. In making a film, we’re putting a collaborative creative effort out into the world. People responding to it, reacting against it, means that we’re doing at least something right.

But if it only took me a few months to become zen to criticism at work, I must admit it’s taken me much longer to apply that thinking in the rest of my life. I don’t mean at the small, day-to-day level, where I’ve long appreciated people pointing out how I could do things better. Rather, I mean it at the level of me as a whole.

A few times a month, someone emails in, or posts about me on their (or in the comments of someone else’s) site, to say that I’m a 100%, total douche-bag. And, irrational as it may be, their missives initially really piss me off.

In the past, I’ve let them piss me off for a surprisingly long time. A really cutting one could ruin my day. But, increasingly, like with bad film reviews, after the initial shock wears off, I’ve started to revel in them. It’s not just with Cyan’s films, but with my life as a whole, that I’m shooting for far past inoffensive mediocrity. And since the varied group of friends I regularly see, by definition, are mainly a source of ‘good reviews’, it’s the occasional ‘bad review’ that confirms I’m pushing the envelope just enough.

Tellingly, I almost never receive hate mail from people I’ve actually wronged. Instead, I get it from people who seem deeply offended by the fact that I’m trying, day by day, to piece together the life I really want to be living.

Hatred, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated. Bring it on.

I’m getting back on the daily posting bandwagon, even if it kills me.

The thing with blogging is, it’s a habit. And, like any habit, once you get out, it’s hard to get back in.

I say that in light of my light posting this month – four entries in twenty-three days being more than a bit off the daily schedule towards which I shoot. Sure, I could make excuses, blaming moving, furnishing, hosting my visiting brother, starting Long Tail, or any number of other time sinks. But, in truth, the ever-increasing span of non-blogging is simply the effects of return-post dread: with each passing day, I’m increasingly convinced that, whatever I write as my first entry after the long stretch of nothing had better be damn good, had better somehow make up for all the slacking off.

Hence this post, which, obviously, isn’t a damn good one, but rather an attempt to wipe the fear-of-return-post-quality slate clean. After all, whatever I write next, it pretty much has to be an improvement.

As comment spam has been raging out of control, and as, of the slightly less than three thousand unique visitors over the past week, exactly seven have actually commented, I’m heading back (at least temporarily) to the years of commentlessness that characterized this site.

If you don’t like it, leave a comment.

As with most web users, when I set out to research something, Google is my inevitable first stop. As a result, that site holds great power in designating expertise. Show up as a top result for a search string, and it’s assumed that you know something about the topic that led the searcher to your site.

As I’ve previously written, that’s not always the best assumption. While I continue to pick up a dozen hits a day on ‘urinal etiquette’, a topic I have written about in depth, I also draw equal numbers from searches like ‘fat naked guys’ and ‘lesbian self-photography’, topics that, while obviously enthralling, fall a bit further outside my area of expertise.

Apparently, even people who should know much better are using Google in this way. A Newsweek editor, for example, emailed a couple of months back while researching an article on specialty teas. And while the extent of my contribution to that area of knowledge is essentially limited to occasionally talking shit about Starbucks’ decision to sell sub-par Tazo, I still managed to get my father quoted in her article as a result.

I’ve been particularly amused, however, by the recent spate of visitors arriving at this site by searching for the string ‘asdjf’. I mean, that’s not even a word – it’s what you get when you smash your hand down nonsensically on the center row of a keyboard. Still, each day I get thoughtful, dorky questions like:

“I would like to know what words that appear to be just a random sequence of letters, usually containing elements of the set {a, s, d, f, h, j, i} mean. Sometimes the “words” are separated by semi-colons. Examples are “asdjf,” “asf,” “asdfkl” and “sldfjasjkdf.” Teenagers and young adults use them on the internet and chat rooms, many times in conjunction with “grrrr” (which I presume to be an expression of anger.)”

To which I can only say: aas;lkdfj alj;fsdk kljalfsd a;sldkfjads;fkl.

After countless stretches of thinking time on planes, trains and automobiles over the past month, I’ve finally articulated to myself what I want this site to be about, the various kinds of content I’m hoping to wedge onto this small space of screen real estate. As a result, the structure of the site will be (yet again) evolving slightly over the next few months; in advance, however, I wanted to give whoever the hell you people reading along are a quick heads up on where things are heading.

First, despite the recent spate of increasingly lengthy posts, I’ll be refocusing on short writing covering the various and sundry stupid things I muse about during the gaps in my day: The connection between Skinner Boxes and dating. Violating subway etiquette. Chapstick.

Next, I’ll also be fleshing out further some of my longer ideas into essays of varying lengths – from weightier pieces I’ve been mentally outlining (“God at the Edge of Science: Do Limit Questions Imply a Higher Power?” and “The Napsterization of Film: Shifting Movie Businesses into the Digital Age”) to fun but too extended to be webloggy content (further installments of The Great Pickup Line Experiment, more friends and family interviews [e.g.]).

I’ll also be expanding out the Salmagundi section – still pointing people towards the things I find interesting in my constant stumbling through the web, but with a bit of space for me to toss in a sentence or two about each.

And, of course, keeping true to the site’s name, the vanity content (my bio, trumpet performance schedule, etc.) will be sticking around.

I’m still puzzling through the best way to make all of that fit on one page, as well as how to balance what little writing time I have between them. But, at least in my current fantasy, that’s where the site’s going. Argue now, before I become increasingly wed to the ideas, or forever hold your peace.