The View from Silicon Valley: Bloggers come in from the cold

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. "It" was the seemingly everlasting tech bust of the year 2002. Try as we might to turn the tide, there seemed little we could do. So we all went over to Jing Jing, a Palo Alto eatery that is much favoured by geeks, to talk it over.

"We" are nerds, geeks, dweebs, technorati and, in this case, bloggers, a group of about 50, mostly male, mostly middle-aged and largely under-employed or unemployed inhabitants of Silicon Valley. Most of us had spent the past five, if not 10, years basking in the high wages, high costs-of-living and even higher franticness of one of peacetime's greatest economic expansions.

We once sat in Aeron chairs, played table football on company-provided tables, and sailed midnights on San Francisco Bay on company-rented yachts. We wrote code, we marketed, we worked late, very late. A couple of us became wealthy, very wealthy. A lot didn't. So now we, the "didn'ts", are "consulting" or working for lower wages at struggling companies, or living off savings or collecting unemployment or working odd jobs. Many of us are Webloggers ­ "bloggers" for short. It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between the meteoric rise of blogging, the practice of keeping a frequently-updated online journal, and the rise of unemployment in Silicon Valley and other tech corridors. When you're not working, you don't have to worry about the boss objecting to you working on a blog.

At the half-empty Jing Jing, solicitous management rearranged table after table as bloggers rolled in, so we could talk "off the blog" (meaning: not for publication) about still-secret Open Source projects and famous but failed technologies and the skewed personalities behind them. We talked about social software, smart mobs and technology for political action. We talked about Bluetooth and wide-area WiFi and GPRS. We tried to update a Weblog from a cell phone (didn't work).

We talked about Weblog metrics, and how you can catch cheaters who "stuff" the Weblog hit counters (their hits vs referrers ­ who's linking to you ­ curves are wrong). We talked about inbound links (good) and outbound links (inconsequential, unless you can trade them for inbound referrers). We talked about length and frequency of posts (longer and more often being good). Read more if you like at www.gulker.com. We talked about how this would be a great time to start a company: lots of talent sitting around, and office space is cheap. We talked about "chicken" venture capitalists who are afraid to invest in start-ups now. And we talked about what a great ride it had been, like so many disaffected Industrial Revolution workers complaining that the buggy-whip factories were closing.

Instead of Marx and Engels, we have (Dave) Winer and ("Doc") Searls. Instead of barricades and demonstrations, we have Weblogs and P2P. Instead of Manchester (home to Engels and the new industries) we have the ad-hoc architecture of the net. We had PDAs and digital cameras: we estimated maybe a teraflop and a gigapixel of processing and picture storage. We had lots of good and very spicy Szechuan-style food and just a few bottles of cold Tsing Tao beer.

The day after, blog accounts of the Great Event abounded, were crosslinked, and edited and reposted as we each looked at each other's offerings. Pack blogging, if it hadn't existed already, was born.

Did we huddle from the chill of the frozen economic terrain hereabouts? Yup... and maybe it was a good thing; we're the same people who did the actual work that resulted in the greatest legal creation of wealth in history. And we have our eye on next year...

cg@gulker.com