Turns out that also Richard MacManus and Phillip Pearson were also starting to blog 4 years ago, both inspired by Dave, both on the other side of the planet from where I'm writing. We are the Radio UserLand Generation.

Commenting my post Stowe Boyd offers some useful ideas to keep the enthusiasm alive:

1. Get out of the rut -- Write about something you have never written about before. Read new people. Wander around. Get out of your RSS reader.
2. Interview smart people -- Even if you think you have nothing new to write, there are others out there not suffering from that delusion.
3. Try new techniques -- Tired of facing the empty screen? Try audio or video. Write a poem.
4. Help others -- I recently read Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, and it turns out that one of the characteristics of survivors is that they are altruistic. Even in moments of great danger they hold on and work towards survival by consciously choosing to help others, or try to survive so that loved ones won't suffer.
5. Change your blog -- Change the template, add new widgets, create a sideblog with comments about your aspirations, travel, or geolocation. Fool with it with the goal of making it a better representation of your relationship to the world.

Very interesting, I'm going to try to follow some of these advices.

4 years don't sound like a lot of time from here: it's about 12% of my life. Then I start reading what I was writing 4 years ago.

Back then I was still a bubble 1.0 CEO with a couple of VC on my board still hoping to go public. So many things have changed since then and a big part of what has happened is related to blogging.

I started this weblog because of Dave Winer. I had been reading Dave for a long time, we were using Frontier in our company and Radio UserLand had just came out. But this was not about technology, it was the thrill of writing for a public, the excitement of being part of a big conversation. To be honest for the first few months I was writing mainly for Dave: I would try post something at the right time of the day, hoping to get noticed and get linked on scripting.com. Quite often Dave would link and he literally put me on the map.

Blogging allowed me to meet the most interesting people of my life, to get an infinite number of ideas, to develop new products, find new partner, new customers, to learn more then I had ever learned before. It changed my life.

I'm not blogging much anymore on the English part of my blog, I write a little bit more on the Italian side. I'm not involved in many conversations or I don't feel I have much to add to what is discussed. The atmosphere is changing, pretty soon you won't even be able to say that blogging is not "mainstream media".

The world will just keep evolving, it's hard to say where we will be in 4 more years. So far thank you to everybody for the last great 4 years.

Last Monday we moved to our new offices in Gorizia. We are very happy about the new place, getting the adsl line took a little bit longer then expected and we ended up spending almost a week off-line. We're back :-)

Tags: evectors, Gorizia

Drop everything you are doing and go read this great post by Euan.

Tags: Euan Semple, love

VeerChand Bothra just pinged to introduce his latest project: MyToday.

"MyToday consists of a Micro-content client and an aggregation system. The micro-content client is built keeping in mind the nature of micro-content like blog posts and news stories. They are small in size, large in volume and more often than not, time sensitive. MyToday's micro-content client makes it easier to consume lots of information quickly."

There's more discussion about the site in this post. The idea of creating pre-filled aggregators, with the ability for users to pick different reading lists (btw: there's an opml reading list for every page) is definetly an interesting way to bring RSS aggregators to the mass market.

The next step, before allowing full configuration from users (i.e. letting them subscribe to any feed), could be giving users the ability to subscribe to reading lists they find on the web.

Tags: MyToday

While I keep reloading TechCrunch home page, hoping to see the promised Google Calendar screenshots but getting only an error page, I'm realizing that putting a big logo of your CMS on en error page might not be a very good marketing idea. :-)

PS: Now TechCrunch is available again.

I have changed the preferences of my email client, it is now checking for new email every 30 minutes instead of every 5. Maybe this will help reducing the number of interruptions per hour. I still have all my IM clients open and try to answer in near-real time, at least to all the people I work with.

The next step is trying to stop reloading the aggregator page every 5 minutes. I might end up sitting in a room saying: "Hi, my name is Paolo, and I'm am RSS addict"

Ted Leonsis: Our goal is to team up with developers to create a completely live and interactive experience across the Web and beyond. No matter where you go on the web, you should be able to connect in real time to the people that matter to you - the people in your Buddy List. There really is no limit to the possibilities: take your Buddy List with you to check out videos on YouTube, use your cell phone to change the away message on your AIM desktop, set your profile to whatever song is currently playing in iTunes or winamp. Very cool.

Tags: AIM, Ted Leonsis

Since I opened my gmail account I have always treated it quite liberally, writing it on this and other web sites, hoping that the computing power of Google would save me from spam. Then I pretty much forgot about it and started using the account, deleting a few spam messages from time to time, no big deal. Yesterday I clicked on the "Spam" folder of my Gmail account (I never bothered to check it before) and found out that I'm receiving about 300 spam messages a day.

Thinking about it, I don't even know how many spam messages are sent to my other email accounts. I see some spam from time to time, but all my clients are configured to delete spam messages directly, I have no time to check if they are accurate (yeah, this might explain why I didn't answer that message of yours, try sending it again), I simply hope that most of the time they are and don't consider email reliable anymore.

Tags: Email, Spam

Dave: OPML 2.0 is a milestone, much like RSS 2.0 was in the summer of 2002. We now know how OPML is being used, and where the problems are, and I think are ready to produce a frozen and extensible format and spec.

Tags: OPML