dennis yang dot com

Mike was interviewed today by NPR’s Robert Siegel on All Things Considered (if you’re here on the West Coast, you can still catch it at 5:30pm)… go Mike!

So.. it’s a good week for Techdirt press, apparently. This article, The end of e-mail: discover new ways to stay in touch, writes:

Dennis Yang is one such person. He works at Techdirt (www.techdirt.com), a corporate news and analysis company. Yang rarely sees his co-workers, but stays in touch with them in real time via IM. He typically has around seven conversations going at any time. It lets him work anywhere, even his grandmother’s living room.

“IM affords the ability to have a real conversation, as opposed to the staccato-style conversations that e-mail threads seem to become,” he says. “Studies show that people on IM at work don’t waste too much time chatting with friends, and their productivity gain would outweigh any socialising.”

Mike writes me asking if I had done an interview with this guy, and.. I don’t recall any interview with this guy in recent history. Then again, I can barely remember what I did last week, so it’s quite possible that I did, and forgot…

The reference to working from my living room means that he read the Boston Globe piece.

That said, the quote does seem vaguely familiar.

And then Carlo figured out why.

The reporter “quoted” me.. from a blog post that I did on Techdirt… from 5 years ago…. Wow.

Thanks for the quote and all, but I would have been happy to give another, more recent quote. Just contact me..

Update: Apparently, this lil’ thing has gotten Carlo riled enough to write his own post..

Well.. not the print edition, but the WSJ did a piece this weekend about the 10th anniversary of the Blog. Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster listed Techdirt as one of his favorite blogs, so we got the mention.

Thanks Jim!

So, the WSJ contacted us to add some more color to the piece, wanting us to send them a video about various topics. Since Mike is on his honeymoon, I got tapped to do the video.. Woohoo. Here I am.. A little dorky, but damn, staring point-blank into a camera and talking is kind of new… Maybe I’ll do more.

This video didn’t make it into the print version of the story.. oh well. Getting a hedcut in the WSJ is one of my lifegoals, so maybe this is kinda like a baby step…

Woohoo.

Techdirt got nominated for a Webby Award this year in the “Blog – Business” category. This is the second nomination that I’ve had something to do with — the first one was back in 2001 for mySimon (we didn’t win)… The awards gala is on June 5th, in NYC, which is timed perfectly since I’ll be in NYC that week already.. Time to dust off the tux.

Yay, awards.

Oh yah… I almost forgot, there’s a “people’s voice” award too — so go there (and vote for Techdirt cuz we’re the best).

Wooohoo.

So, we just announced the Techdirt Insight Community. I’ve been working round the clock to get this whole thing ready, so I’m super excited. I’d write more, but my brain is a little fried.

Woohoo! Techdirt is on a Roll. Mmm.. rolls.

As I mentioned before, I’m here in New York for the Blogon conference, which is just now wrapping up.. It’s been a great conference. We announced our new service here at the conference, Techdirt InfoAdvisor. InfoAdvisor is a managed information service for corporations; take a look at the site and if it looks appropriate for you, drop me a line. The service is being well received and we’ve made a lot of great connections here in New York for interested clients..

It’s been great building this service over the past few months — a small, focused team (er.. “team” means me and Costanza, basically) free of bureaucratic hurdles means the project moves forward much more quickly… most of my time is spent actually doing work, wow.. Some of the biggest challenges actually came from the fact that we don’t have anyone dedicated to supporting the development effort on the IS-side.. like, we had to set up our own server, SVN, Mantis, wikis for documentation, etc… And while we did get it all done eventually, it definitely took away from the initial development momentum.. And yes, while there are managed services that provide all of these services, we opted to just do a lot of it ourselves (since we could). Ok, enough geeking for now, back to work….

Oh yah.. check out the new Techdirt logo that Jamie whipped up for us… cool, eh?

Much like the memory maps that I annotated to illustrate what I remember from my childhood, the flickr desknote meme is composed of a bunch of people taking pictures of their desks and annotating the hell out of the resulting picture on flickr (so click over to look at what all these things are on my desk)…

I actually didn’t take this picture with the intent of adding to the desknotes group — I was chatting with Jason, a wedding photographer, and he mentioned that he’s started taking everything in RAW format as opposed to JPG… So, I tried it out.. RAW is impressively flexible and all, but for most pics I think I’ll still use JPG since it takes a lot more work to get the pictures viewable — and it takes a ton more space (about 2.5mb per picture as compared to 500kb).. and it’s slower.. but, you sure can make some neat pictures with it…

Last night was the Techdirt 25k party at the cigar bar.. in celebration of Techdirt’s 25,000th post.. Me and the many Mikes of Techdirt headed down and enjoyed a drink and a cigar down in downtown SF. Despite the nasty San Francisco drizzle/rain, and despite the premiere of episode III, we had a good turnout, and a good time seemed to be had by all..

Back in the heyday, there was some sort of happy hour or party like every night… since 2005 is the new 1999 and all, who’s gonna bring back the happy hours?

I’ve posted photos at flickr, tagged “techdirt25k“…

Man… first the Alameda Journal, and now.. the San Francisco Chronicle… It’s been like a parade of press lately for me..

Yes.. that’s the back of my head (it even says so in the caption).. Man, I never really realized how much of a mullet I had last week. I got a haircut since then, but I mean, honestly how many times do you really get a good look at the back of your own head like that.

You know how after a haircut is done, they give you the mirror so that you can look at the back of your head? I always feel so silly looking at the back of my own head. I mean, you can’t really get that good of a look back there anyway, yah? I mean, as long as the mullet isn’t starting to curl back up, I suppose its fine. Hmm.. maybe rat tails are on their way back in.. wouldn’t that be lovely..

Anyway, I digress.. I’m in the paper! Oh right.. I suppose I should actually link to the article about Techdirt and all.. Things at Techdirt are going really well so far.. It’s been greating working with all of the Mikes, and I’m trying to minimize the impact that working at home has on my personal hygiene.