I read an interview with a hot shot venture capitalist back at the very climax of the dot com rollercoaster. The interviewer was skeptical of the amount of investment that the firm had placed in dot com companies. When the VC was asked directly about the Internet and its future he said the words “the Internet is still under-hyped”. While I’m sure his company lost a metric crap load of money in the dot com bubble burst – he was right.

A personal example: A few weeks ago I wrote a piece of advice for valedictorian speeches. This was my seventeenth post on this site. Google picked up the article and for reasons unbeknownst to me the post became the number two search result for valedictorian speeches. Since May 23, 2003 over four thousand valedictorians (or people pretending to be) have accessed the post.

Please indulge me as I do a little math. I assume that I went to an average size high school. My graduating class was approximately one hundred and fifty people. So if these are all valedictorians from average sized schools I have directly given advice to four thousand people who have in turn given advice to over half a million students.

4000 X 150 = 600,000

If you add in all of the non-students attending the graduation exercises it becomes almost ridiculous.

Sure not all of the visiting valedictorians necessarily took my advice, but most probably read it. This blows my mind. I initially had hoped to help the few people that were already going to this post from Google. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine thousands of class elected valedictorians reading my words for advice.

I can hardly grasp what this means in the grand scheme of things (politically, socially, etc). The shift in the power of information is overwhelming to me. All I know is that one hour of my writing ended up affecting in some way the words heard by hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps millions by the time June is over.

Tonight at UPEI the PEI blogging elite take to the stage to discuss all things blog. One of the brightest silverorange brains (honestly) will be there. You'll recognize him by his future shoes. Click here for all the details.

On a neighboring blog this week Jevon posted “Shifting Focus”, an examination of what web and IT companies in our political and geographical region need to do in order to become successful exporters. Extremely paraphrased, it pointed out the need for companies in our area to partner in order to bid on and obtain work from outside (a.k.a. bigger) markets. The article struck squarely on many nail heads. It also prompted good conversation and debate at silverorange headquarters.

While I agree with a great deal of what Jevon says, clustering, partnering, and all other synergastic words automatically raise my defenses. I’m not wary of these terms because I believe partnerships to be impossible or that we cannot work with other companies. It’s that these words, programs, and initiatives are trying to force something which needs to occur naturally. It’s quite like forcing two people to fall in love.

While most companies might not be actively partnering here in Atlantic Canada, encouraging them from the outside to do so could make things worse. As Smith observed about the invisible hand:

"By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

For the past month my subconscious mind has been processing something Peter linked to on Rob’s weblog. You can read it for yourself, but it basically states that we, western civilization, have decided we no longer like death and have bequeathed the problem of it to our health professionals. When our health professionals claim they have not yet conquered death caused by (insert disease here) we are disillusioned and raise money for scientists somewhere in the mid-west to work tirelessly in a secret underground bunker to develop a cure.

Like most wannabe writers I usually try and hide behind my words to distance you the reader, from me, the real author. Most things I write are intentionally ideas and thoughts that are impersonal, abstract or absurd. This is a rare delve into my personal life. Enjoy it because it won’t happen that often.

I was asked by Adam Kalsey to participate in a multi blog writing effort: Newly Digital: A distributed anthology of early computing experience. Enjoy.

I’m prompted to comment on valedictorian speeches as I’ve been getting a slew of Google refers for this post.

I can only assme that the people searching the web for terms like “valedictorians speeches" and "ideas for valedictorian speeches” are actually potential or would be valedictorians. So I’m taking this opportunity to offer you a little advice. Also, if anyone else out of high school would like to part some wisdom to our valedictorian audience please be my guest.

In the hideously designed, poorly written get-rich-slow book, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” hides many valuable insights into financial matters. One that has come to mind as of late is the measurement of wealth. The author, Robert T. Kiyosaki, points out that wealth should not be a measure of money but a measure of time. Your wealth is how long you can maintain your current lifestyle if you were to cease working your paying job. I couldn’t agree with the concept more.

In the interest of your entertainment I have calculated my wealth to be: 8.11 days.

It could also be an interesting concept if you were to apply it to commercial operations.

I recently had my copy of Douglas Coupland’s microserfs returned to me after a long stint on someone else’s bookshelf. Placed specially by my toilet I have been rereading the book a few pages per day. Today it dawned on me... This book, published in 1995, is actually written, formatted, read, and presented as a fictional personal blog. This I found quite interesting as blogs didn’t really catch on until a significant amount of time later.

Fun related side note:
In microserfs, as a quick way to get to know other characters, the protagonist creates “dream Jeopardy” categories for them. After a stint of most of us at silverorange reading the book we decided to make up dream Jeopardy categories for the people in our company. Mine was created (not by me) as follows:

1. Serial Entrepreneur Bios
2. 'Doc' from Back to the Future quotes
3. Dell Support voice mail
4. Meal Maker Express advertising
5. Jim Varney movies

I’m sure if you harass other blogging silverorange figures they’ll buckle and post their own dream categories.