31fps by Sam Purtill A blog about business, technology, and life

Welcome Back!

It's been nearly seven months since my last post. The site was brought down by a hacker and I lacked the motivation to bring it back up until this week. Looking forward to writing again.

Dear 31fps,

Please forgive me for neglecting you all of January. I've become hooked to Tumblr and have been updating my new mini-blog SamPurtill.com. I'll try to write a big post or two for February, but no guarantees.

Sincerely,

Sam

My problem with Marc Andreessen’s blog

I read very few blogs because I hate being overloaded with information. My favorite mainstream ones are Scobleizer (Robert Scoble), Blog Maverick (Mark Cuban), and TechCrunch (Michael Arrington). I subscribe to all my friends that write blogs too, which is about 8 in total (yeah, I don't live in Silicon Valley... yet).

So the other day I came across Marc Andreessen's [new] blog, blog.pmarca.com. I have a lot of respect for Marc, I've never met him, but he is definitely an internet pioneer who showed the world you don't need revenues to have an IPO and sell for billions (Netscape). This guy must be 1) extremely lucky or 2) very intelligent. I think he is the latter, because he is on his third startup, Ning, and it looks like it is going to sell in the hundreds of millions when all is said and done.

But with that said, I have a big problem with how this guy blogs. Here are my questions to Marc:

1) How on earth do you write such long posts every day AND run a startup that is gaining tons of traction? Your posts are WAAAAY too long for me to read all the way through, especially since they are almost daily that you post them. Mark Cuban posts his thoughts about once a week/once every two weeks, and writes long articles when he does.

2) A lot of your advice is definitely valid, since you have seen over 50 startups from start -> exit/failure. But you spend too much time talking about VC's IMO.
Dude, this is Web 2.0, there is no such thing as a "barrier to entry" ESPECIALLY with Amazon S3 and Amazon Compute.

I can't think of anything else I'd ask him. Well, I'd ask him for like $50,000,000 just so I don't have to worry about making money for the rest of my life. And my kids. And my grandkids (hopefully all of the money would be blown by then).

Anyways. Back to Summer Vacation, I'm going to go watch a movie.

A Year of Blogging

I began my blog on May 12th, 2006, so this post is two days late. Reason being I was up in Tahoe for Nate Pina's bachelor party (getting married in 6 more days!)

Let's reminisce on a full year of blogging for a second. Blogging has done a few things for me so far.

1) Help me become a better writer
I can articulate my thoughts much better because I write on a regular basis. The more you write, the easier it is to write, the faster you write, blah blah blah (I'm tired from the bachelor party last night, don't feel like being articulate tonight).

2) Proved to myself that I can do something for a whole year straight and not give up
I really wanted to see if I could actually stick to something for a year straight, and I was able to. Sure, there were weeks here and there where I didn't blog, but I never went for more than two weeks (when I was developing for ClassOwl) without a post. But I actually did it! Yay!

3) Helped me stay in touch with my readers
When I say readers, I mean my loyal readers -- Bubbie & Grandpa. Aunt Martha deserves a mention here too. But everyone else reads it really sporadically -- which I completely am OK with, my voice carries no weight... yet.

4) Helped me stay in touch with my family
Sometimes it is sooo hard for me to get up and walk outside of my bedroom to say hi to the earthlings I call my siblings. And also those... creatures... that happen to come around the house every now and then, my parents. Ok this one is totally a joke.

5) Helped me overcome writer's block for school papers
Sometimes when I'm doing homework, I really can't think of what to write. 99% of the time this is due to the fact that the essays that they make you write in high school are absolutely PATHETIC. I would never encounter writer's block if I was writing a paper on something interesting. Maybe comparing JavaScript with ActionScript, or even a research paper on why Python developers are exponentially smarter than Java developers. Something like that would cure me, but no, we have to write papers on our "civic responsibility". Heh heh heh, don't want to rant anymore.

6) I can BS everything so much better
Every paper I write for school now I can completely BS with paragraphs that go on and on about nothing, yet my teachers always write comments on my papers on how they "enjoy" my writing. Too bad I was minimizing the OpenOffice Writer window every 30 seconds and writing code for ClassOwl ;)

To sum it all up: yes, it's been worth it. Blogging is here to stay for me.

And so is the FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION!

I just added a book to my book list that I keep on my blog. I've actually been able to read a lot more than I thought I was able to in the last year, and it hasn't been too hard. Hmm, I guess I'm starting to get older or something :(

Here we go!

I have finished migrating all my old WordPress posts to this server, 31fps.com. Hosting by MediaTemple, and I work for OkapiStudio.

And I officially am in love with WordPress. The most seamless migration of all time.

My New Way of Blogging

From now on, I'm only going to be blogging about things that I care about. Like, really care about. Technology, education, skiing, college, baseball, life lessons, quotes. No more posts about things I don't care about and don't know about. So what this means is: my posts will be really long(like Mark Cuban's), passionate, and hopefully you'll be able to learn something new from every post. No more restating things that everyone knows about. This also means I can only be blogging once every few days... I've already figured out that I'm not Robert Scoble and never will be.

So might as well switch it up now and start my own style.