Category: Ruminations

By Jeremiah Owyang @jowyang, living in Silicon Valley since 1997. My long-time, close friend, Chris Saad, wrote a helpful essay on 39 tips for startups. He shares many suggestions, based on his personal experience, in the startup world, from his home country of Australia, and in Palo Alto, and in the heart SF’s tech district SoMa. While I agree with 38 of his tips and suggestions, I’d like to discuss the merits of tip number one. Dear readers please know, I first chatted with Chris in advance, he was aware I was writing this, as I certainly don’t like to surprise a friend. Chris gives startups the following suggestion as his opening tip: #1: “Be in Silicon valley. Yes you … Continue readingYour Tech Startup Doesn’t Need to be in Silicon Valley.

Research, workout, or write down your thoughts each morning. Don’t check email, as that’s paying someone else. Email, while a dominant form of business communication isn’t effective: The more you respond, the more emails you’ll receive. The tool is over burdened for its initial use case. You’re teaching your network you’ll forever be reactive. I pay myself first. I focus my priorities on the tools that will maximize my time. For example, rather than responding to multiple emails or conversations on one topic, I leverage broadcasting tools, like this very weblog. This isn’t a new concept, as many financial advisers will suggest that you invest in your future (funds, roth, 401) before fully paying down your debt. In the long … Continue readingPay Yourself First

This will be the fourth, (or wait, fifth? I can’t keep track over the years…) design iteration of the Web Strategy blog, and I’m pleased to share an upcoming sneak peek comp. Overall, we leaned on a focus on accessing information quickly –rather than a complete new look, you’ll notice many of the same familiar UI elements, but with greater access to reports, graphs, and popular posts that may be ideal to reference. We’re thankful for your feedback (we listened, responded, and factored it in) so I really want you to know how important your feedback is. If you’ve any other final comments, kindly leave a comment below. Thanks to the Engage Sciences web design team for their assistance, and … Continue readingSneak Preview: Upcoming Blog Redesign

What? Are you serious? Who needs a guide on how to take a vacation? As we become more connected through mobile devices, our always-on jobs, and our expanding online social networks, it’s harder to break away from the physical aspects of work, and even more importantly, the developing mental separation from work and daily life woes to really relax and recharge. This was my first time unplugged in a few years, and now that Altimeter Group is continuing to safely grow (and hiring) it was a good time to take two weeks completely away from work, and week completely unplugged in the remote Fiji islands. Well, I should point the finger at myself first, as I live and work, a … Continue readingFive Steps To Take a Vacation in a Highly Connected World

Each one of these could be meaty blog posts, but I don’t have the time, and I’d rather share them, I guess to some degree, Steve Rubel is right, there’s a need for something in between a tweet and a blog post. It was a busy week, I travelled to Indiana to visit a client, had several briefings and client meetings during the week.  Chiago’s O’Hare is consistently poor performing, bigger isn’t better.   Still conducting interviews for upcoming report on skills needed for social marketers. I don’t need to say it, but there’s a tremendous amount of interest from brands and media around social.  In the back of my mind, I try to keep a bigger perspective, as in … Continue readingJuly 31, 2009

I’m all smiles today, as I reflect on three years of blogging at web-strategist.com. Although I’ve been blogging about web strategy previously on Blogspot, Yahoo 360 for a few years prior, things really started to get serious when I launched this domain. Over the three years, the technorati rank of this blog has settled around the 500 range (the lower the better) and it’s unlikely it will drop lower as I’m not a news breaking site, or have a team of writers like many of the top 100. What’s worked for me? Pay yourself first. I put in a lot of passion, and read and blog nearly every morning (It’s 3:51am right now) before I check any email (which is … Continue readingThree Years

After being with Dreamhost since I launched this blog, I realized it was time to move on after my site would be down at least once a week, nor could it handle a large influx of Twitter users at a single time. To Dreamhosts credit they were very responsive to my support tickets, but I really never saw things improve as far as uptime goes, and that’s what matters. Mitch Canter, my web designer is handling the migration as I move over to Media Temple, but there’s a few recent blog posts that are missing, but we’ll get it ironed out in short order. It’s interesting that Robert Scoble called me as soon as he noticed my site was down … Continue readingSwitching to Media Temple as my host