In addition to launching a new homepage, we have decided to put an official end to the VaynerMedia blog. As you may have noticed, we haven’t produced quality content in some time. We are proud of the articles we have published in the past but have found that we are far stronger in executing on social strategies for our clients than we are producing content on a daily basis. Thank you to everyone who has read and/or commented on our blog posts in the past. The blog will still remain as an archive, but as mentioned, updates will no longer be published here.

Our own Gary Vaynerchuk will be joined on stage by a host of entrepreneurs eager to share their experiences and vision for the technology sphere today and in years to come. The smash lineup of speakers will feature Digg founder Kevin Rose, former Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin, Quirky founder Ben Kaufman, serial entrepreneur and angel investor Travis Kalanick (Formspring, Blippy), Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca, and Founding Partner of the incubator 500 Startups, Dave McClure. Most importantly, after each speaker has briefly addressed the crowd, everyone will return to the stage for a roundtable discussion and Q&A. Rather than speak to the audience, our panelists will be having an in-depth discussion with the audience.

Best of all? The admission price of just $399 includes a one-night stay at the beautiful Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Resort and Casino on Thursday, September 30th. After hours of engaging conversation by day, we’ll relax and hit the gaming tables by night!

Click here for more details and to purchase your ticket today. Space is limited so act fast, this event WILL sell out!

Planning, to come? We want to know! RSVP via Facebook or PlanCast!

The Website

Carrot Creative put together a great site for the game, socialmediabasketball.com. They included both teams’ starting rosters, complete with names, nicknames, and the ability to follow all of us on Twitter. Even cooler? Visitors have the ability to “Like” which team they are rooting for / think will win (VaynerMedia currently leads 100-63). Finally, a live feed features anyone who tweets about the game with the hashtag #CCvsVM. So, props to Carrot Creative for a job well done.

The Game

Tip-off is tomorrow, August 12th, 2010, just after 3PM EST. If you are would like to attend to watch or to cover the event, please email info@vaynermedia.com.

The good news is that we’re live-streaming the game for all to watch, and having our good friend Owen JJ Stone (aka OhDoctah) announce/commentate/emcee. You can watch live at bit.ly/ccvsvmlive. Also, you’ll be able to follow along with anyone live tweeting from the game by keeping track of hashtag #ccvsvm.

So, what do you think? What’s your prediction? Who will you be rooting for?

Ten months ago, we launched the VaynerMedia Blog with the main intent of providing a creative outlet for the VaynerMedia team while also serving as a source of insight for our friends and colleagues who follow us. After a few months of figuring things out, we settled into a system where VaynerMedia would produce one blog post per weekday (Mon-Fri). That system worked fine at first, but as time passed, a blog post went from being a creative exercise to just another task on the to-do list. While I strongly believe in consistency, I don’t believe quality should be sacrificed just to maintain consistency.

How we addressed the situation

We have had a few internal meetings discussing the best way to move forward with the VaynerMedia blog. The main takeaway from these meetings was the fact that there are many different ways to approach writing a blog post, and that the best action moving forward is to provide individuals with the opportunity of executing blog posts the way he/she believes will allow him/her to produce the best content. This change means that we will no longer be following the strict daily content calendar. This change also means that blog posts can be 20 words, or they can be 2000 words – doesn’t matter. Finally, this change should mean an increase in the quality of blog posts you see from the VaynerMedia team.

Last thoughts

Even though the blog can be (and will be) improved in the future, I think our team has produced some great stuff over the past 10 months. Here is a small sample of some of my favorite VaynerMedia Blog posts:

(in no particular order)

Redesigning Your Facebook Tabs from 760px to 520px

Build an Application Even if it Already Exists

Extending the Story

Casual Business Relationships

Groupon: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Deal

Early Proof that Geolocation Marketing Will Succeed

What Are You Working For?

We were on the offensive from the minute we got there, spurred on by Gary’s constant urgings of “let’s do something competitive!” and a surplus of alcohol generously supplied by Wine Library.

Over the course of the two day weekend, the following competitive activities took place:

• Volleyball
• Football
• Mountain Biking
• Relay race
• One-on-one beer shotgunning competition
• “Over the Top” style arm wrestling competition
• Spontaneous “how many consecutive sweet tarts can @akopec throw from the balcony into varying distance mouths below” competition
• 4 hour argument about whether Paul Pierce is overrated
• A game invented on-the-fly involving deception, stealth, and wild-eyed chases in the dark that saw @garyvee, @shaunchapman, and @keithholjencin crawling on their stomachs through the dewy weeds and mud at the cabin’s perimeter in the pitch darkness as if they were in enemy territory in ‘Nam.

There were a few people there not used to the intensity, and seeing their raised eyebrows at all this got me thinking about the purpose of all of it.

It’s not immediately apparent what the purpose is for members of an internet startup to bat around a ball at each other when they’ll never surpass weekend warrior status.

To find meaning in these casual competitions, you have to look at the place sports have in our culture, and why it’s important for professional athletes at the peak of their game to compete against one another.

“After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down”
-Fight Club

To the casual observer, any sport is a meaningless game around an arbitrary goal. Athletes’ salaries are more worthy of debate than their accomplishments on the field.

To the participants though, the games take on a meaning that is more powerful than the meanings found in everyday life.

Why? because sports tap into our competitive, animal nature. Every animal is wired for competition because of the scarcity of resources needed for survival.

The need to acquire food, air, water, mates, and sunlight at the expense of others is the primary driver of growth: stronger, better, faster, smarter, significantly more able to fly…whatever can give you an advantage.

Competition as inspired by scarcity also forms the foundation of one of the two most basic instincts: killing. The driving force that compels people to compete against one another in sports is a modified version of the instinct to survive by growing stronger and killing competition.

Sports are one of the most fascinating human inventions. They showcase our ability to re-route natural urges and re-assign reward systems. To transcend survival instincts and use them to organize a group of selfish individuals for a common goal.

“UNITY!!!”
-Dave Chapelle as Rick James

Look at how humans competed with other organisms way back in the day. We were smaller, weaker, and slower than most predators around us.

Yes, yes, we were smarter. But not as individuals. Try to outwit a grizzly bear and you’ll see what I mean. All we had going for us was collaboration.

Still to this day, nothing unites people so much as a common goal, and nothing inspires a common goal better than a common enemy.

Think about the world cup. Michigan fans and Ohio State fans, Auburn and Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma, were all rooting alongside each other as local sports allegiances gave way to a larger sentiment of our country as a whole against the other countries of the world.

World peace is an impossibility today, but imagine if tomorrow hostile aliens came down like in Independence Day. Any inter-human conflicts would immediately give way to collaboration in a larger struggle.

At our retreat this weekend, teams were formed and re-formed at random. Now think about it in the context practicing allegiances and collaboration.

Does this internal competition not make us that much stronger when play conflicts in the world of sport amongst ourselves give way to real conflicts between our entire company and another in the world of business?

It seems absurd to many that playing volleyball against each other gives us more of an ability to succeed at the game of business. I disagree. It’s all about the spirit of the game.

“You play to win the game. You don’t play to just play it. That’s the great thing about sports”
- Herm Edwards

We live in a world of scarcity, there is no question about it. Given that you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you are lucky enough to not be experiencing scarcity of food, water, or shelter.

You’re faced with a different type of scarcity, a decidedly human scarcity: scarcity of attention. People have a limited amount of attention to give.

Let’s go back to the salaries of athletes for a second. The reason they get paid that much is simple: demand. The reason they compete is not, in the cases of the most successful, for money or any other tangible reward. They want to be considered to be the best by whomever is important to them, whether it’s the general public or a high school coach who slighted them.

The financial success of your brand depends on capturing peoples attention, and if you think you don’t measure individual success in terms of attention (and admiration), whether it’s from hundreds of thousands of like-minded strangers or just one of your parents, I call bullshit.

Whatever scarcity or competition you are facing, there are three approaches you can take to improve your position.

1. Embrace constructive competition (the Michael Jordan strategy)
You focus on winning through strength. You courageously admit that you are not complete; you learn from each contest. You seek stronger competition at all times, committing yourself 100% in every arena because you believe you have a chance to win.

2. Embrace destructive competition (the Tonya Harding strategy)
You focus on winning through injuring or otherwise discrediting others. Given a choice, you’ll gladly take a perceived victory over strengthening loss every time. For those who compete destructively, insecurity transforms hunger into greed and admiration into envy.

3. Refusal to compete (the Goth Kids strategy)
This happens far, far more often to all of us than any of us would care to admit. Right now, you’re implicitly denying competitions because it’s easy to convince yourself you’re doing alright when you decline to compare yourself to others.

I’m happy to report that if this weekend was any indication, it seems that everybody here wants to be Like Mike.

What’s the significance of that tweet? It was from my first day here. July 14th was a year ago. Put ‘em together, I’ve been working here for a year today. Seems like an appropriate time to take a look back.

2009

I’ll never forget the day I got this job.

The moment Gary reached across the table to shake my hand, I knew my life had changed. The rush I felt that summer evening was unparalleled, but I’ll tell you about that when you’re older.

Intuitively, I was right. A year later, working at VaynerMedia has changed my life to the extent I thought it would. But I was wrong about how.

Sure, we almost doubled in size and are making exponentially more revenue. But from an external standpoint, we haven’t come very far.

To anybody who’s not one of us, one of our clients, or a fan of Gary’s, we’re still just another nameless Internet startup in Tribeca that a bunch of kids bike to from their Brooklyn apartments.

We’re still a forgotten byline on the 12th page of an online magazine. We haven’t hit primetime, we haven’t entered the mainstream conversation.

Frankly, if you told me a year ago after that we would be where we are now, I would have been surprised and disappointed. “Surely we’d be a household name, at least in New York!”. “Surely we’d all be making six figures, on a clear path to getting Gary his billion to buy the jets”.

I was wrong. I wasn’t handed extravagant success, and neither was VaynerMedia. It’s OK though. The two things I’ve been instilled with the most over the last year have been patience and faith.

I see now that I was given something far better than automatic, trickle-down success: an opportunity to learn the blueprint for creating success out of nothing. Enrollment in my own personal business school with one of the most fascinating families in business.

2010

Teams win championships.

Gary and AJ have excellent DNA for creating a team, and they’re putting on a clinic on how to inject global perspective and purpose into a group of individuals, how to unite disparate personalities into a cohesive whole, and how to create an environment of mutual support and trust that allows everyone to work beyond their individual capability.

Everyone here is trying to drink their own ocean. Every single person here is underqualified on paper for the responsibilities and tasks they assign themselves every day. If there wasn’t an atmosphere of trust, support, and friendly competition, people would quit.

At the last place I worked, the whole was less than any one of its individual parts. Sounds extreme but it’s true. This is already an organization where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it has been that way from the beginning.

Seems simple. Should be simple. It’s not. The default approach of humans to one another is a distrustful “guilty until proven innocent” mentality. It takes honest dedication to establish a culture of trust, familiarity, respect and love in a group of unrelated individuals.

How few companies can say that they’re truly operating as a team?
How many organizations have degenerated into a cesspool of unchallenged and unutilized minds and hearts, festering and decaying in their cubicles right now?
How many startups are powered by aggrandized ego and selfish greed?? It’s tragic.

Creating a culture is done through direct and transparent communication. That’s certainly been a theme here.

The manifestation of that culture, though, is in what’s not said. Actually that makes it sound like censorship…it’s about what’s not even *thought*.

When you can trust that everyone you’re working with has their self-interest tied to yours and is here to help you rather than harm you, that frees up a lot…a LOT…of mental power.

2011

So where are we headed? Honestly, I have no idea. We’re still young as hell. Bonds are still being forged. People are still gaining competency and skill in their individual disciplines. For example, a year ago I was working with wordpress…now I’m working with redis, node.js, and edge rails.

There’s more to it than individual development though. We’re a wolfpack in training. There’s a collective, palpable, group-wide focusing. Every individual is leaning a little further forward every day.

There have been peaks and valleys, I don’t want to paint a picture that everything is unicorns and flowers here. There have certainly been points over the past year that I’ve had doubts.

But at the end of the day, I always come to the same conclusion. I’ve escaped the lonely, selfish corporate world. Each trough is higher than the previous one. Most importantly, I’m finally part of a team that I genuinely believe in and care about.

All in all I can say that globally, I’ve wrapped my head around the fact that the team I’m a part of is headed in the right direction, and it’s going to be fun to see what the future will bring.

I used to train new customer service reps in the order department at Wine Library. In that case, the job primarily consisted of procedures. Various people served the same role, and essentially needed to be interchangeable. If John Q. Customer called and spoke to Customer Service Rep A on Monday, then called again and got Customer Service Rep B on Tuesday, B needs to be able to pick right up where A left off and understand the status of an order, what the customer wanted, and so forth. The job required little in the way of specific product knowledge (trained wine consultants handle that part of the business), and had everything to do with understanding how the various back-end systems interfaced with each other, what company policy was in each situation, and standard procedures that everyone had to follow in the same way.

Training Phil for the assistant role is a very different kind of training. I have procedures that I use, but they are my own. There are certain things we’ve worked out over the years that will remain the same (for instance, how Gary expects things to appear in his calendar), but other than that, it’s the results that matter: making sure Gary is in the right place at the right time, making sure he takes the meetings and calls he wants at appropriate times, and etc. Some of that takes specialized knowledge, which I am teaching as best I can as things come up. Unlike for the Wine Library job training though, most of the procedural stuff is personal, just the way I keep myself organized. I am sure other people use different systems, and my system might not necessarily be the right one for Phil.

I basically showed him how I do it, but I don’t want him to treat that as gospel. He has to make it his own. At this point he’s spent a few weeks being cc’ed and bcc’ed on correspondence, with me explaining why I made this or that choice or who so-and-so is, but at a certain point he just has to get in the trenches and lean on me when he has questions. And that point has come! I’m creating a glossary document of various people in Gary’s world for his reference, and he’s off to the races. Now he’ll cc me and I can lurk and make suggestions and improvements, and Gary will provide feedback as well.

Wish him luck!

The episode featuring VaynerMedia debuts tomorrow, Friday, May 28, at 6:30 PM EST. This was an extremely positive experience for us, and we hope you’ll tune in to find out what we look for in a prospective employee.

Check out the trailer below, and follow MTV Hired on Twitter and Facebook!

A few weeks beforehand, they got us involved to help them craft a release that innovatively leveraged social media.

This was probably the most fun project I’ve done so far, and I wanted to share a little about what made the process so enjoyable, exciting, and unique.

1. Discovery

Travis Porter’s manager, CEO Charlie, had an existing dialogue with our own hardworking hip-hop blogger @mikeboydjr who writes Hip Hop at Lunch. Boyd introduced him to Gary and AJ and subsequently to me.

When we spoke on the phone, the opportunity was obvious. Their last independently released mixtape had propelled them to a national and overseas tour, a couple videos on MTV, and a song on the billboard rap charts. They were releasing a follow-up, 17 song mixtape and a short film (1/2 hour) on May 18th.

Their last social media campaign had been in February, a “tweet to watch” campaign for their music video for “Get Naked” and they wanted to innovate on that. From 6-8pm, they were going to take over the livemixtapes.com site, redirecting all visitors to a custom social landing page.

Travis Porter had an avid and rapidly growing fan base, which gave us a captive audience. They were unsigned, which gave us creative license. They were innovators in a space (Hip Hop music) that was seeing huge social effectiveness with rudimentary implementations, which gave us an exciting and potentially rewarding challenge.

Charlie and I hung up after about two hours and my mind was buzzing with the opportunities that this unlikely collaboration could yield.

2. Concept

CEO Charlie called me on a Friday, and the next day Boyd and I came in to the office to brainstorm. The tight timeframe of the release helped simplify and focus our vision, and we came up with the concept over a Saluggi’s pizza and a couple leftover Newcastle Brown Ales in under an hour.

The concept was:
1. Allow people to unlock through twitter (tweet link + follow travis porter) or facebook (post link + give email address)
2. Have a video section that will play either the movie or Travis Porter live ustreaming
3. Allow the audience to interact with Travis Porter directly through twitter and facebook on the page. Each interaction propagates through their network and extends the viral loop.

Simple, right? I put up a living prototype that day (you can still see it here: http://graphpaper.vaynermedia.com/travisporter) and it was game time.

3. Execution

From concept to execution was only about 20 hours between two people. I handled all the back-end work and social media integration, and our newest team member @shaunchapman (of 0 to 255 pseudo-fame) handled the front-end UI.

More impressively, we could do it in half the time if we did it again and a quarter of the time if we had control of the servers for testing production code.

Take a look at the final result:

Travis Porter: “Proud to be a Problem” social landing page

The best part is that 3/4 of the elements on the page are plug-and-play components offered by ustream, twitter, and facebook. From a user experience standpoint, 75% of the page was done in under an hour.

The development time was all spent on writing a custom OAuth implementation for Twitter, integrating Facebook’s new open graph api, collaborating with livemixtapes.com to ensure the correct user flow from authentication to unlocking the mixtape, and skinning the page according to the specifications of Travis Porter’s graphic designer, Colourful Money.

Of course that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg; if you’re interested in technical details feel free to ask how we did anything in the comments and I’ll respond with an explanation and code sample.

4. Results

- 42,000+ unique visitors in 2 hours. 239 combined days spent on the landing page by all visitors.
- #3 trending topic on all of Twitter.
- #11 most searched term on Google.
- 7,000+ tweets and follows.
- 15,000+ clicks on the official bit.ly link from the generated tweet (stats: http://bit.ly/proudtobeaproblem+)
- 4,500+ likes on the Open Graph enabled album (and de facto Fan Page) for the album Proud to be a Problem.

5. Conclusions

The launch was a success. It was fresh and exciting for everybody involved — us, Travis Porter, Live Mixtapes, and the fans.

This Travis Porter/VaynerMedia collaboration is my absolute favorite type of working relationship, and the effectiveness of a good working relationship can be seen in the results.

They are on top of their game, and we are on top of ours. They don’t need more than what we can provide because they already have the talent. They’re not going to restrict us to less than what we can provide, because they don’t have a legal department.

Travis Porter just told us their story and goals, and we listened. Then they stepped aside and gave us the freedom to select the right tools from our vast social media toolbox to accomplish those goals.

But enough about us. The most important takeaway is that it is downright scary what Travis Porter and other up-and-coming artists can do with minimal effort by leveraging social media.

The power is truly shifting from labels and other corporately tainted entities to the artists themselves, and touching that yesterday was exhilarating.

Toodledo

This is my big gun. I started using Toodledo about a month ago and it’s blown me away with how useful its been. The basic functionality of Toodledo is creating tasks and checking them off when they’re completed. I prefer this style of organization because I flat-out enjoy checking things off, whether on paper or virtually. The advantage of Toodledo lies in all the ways you can customize your lists, from due dates to repeating tasks, and allows for a surprisingly sophisticated task management system.

Additionally, Toodledo has Firefox and Gmail plug-ins, allowing for even easier access to the service. Instead of going to the site to add a task, I can click on the green check mark next to the navigation bar. Without even going to the site, I can bring up the Toodledo side bar with a hot key and quickly see what tasks I need to be working on or to check off something I’ve completed. Toodledo makes it easy to access your lists, which is essential for getting me to use it. To give an example of how I use it, here’s a screen shot.

I browse through my folders every day to make sure that I’m on top of every initiative I’m responsible for, but throughout the day I sort by due date more often so I can get what needs to be done, done.

Email

Email is my second wave of organization. For anything important that needs to be completed by a certain date, I use Toodledo, but in order to keep tabs on open conversations and make sure I don’t forget about something, I use a Gmail labeling system.

This system has two tiers, the first being “high”, “mid”, and “low” labels that segregate the emails by urgency. I make sure I always know exactly what is in “high” and the second I can act on something, I do so. I check “mid” throughout the day to complete anything I can move on there, and I leave “low” for whenever I have free time. I also use three different color stars to determine whether I need to respond, whether I’m waiting for a response but should follow up if I don’t get one soon, or if I should just wait for a response.

Google Calendar

Google calendar is my final, and least important, organizational tool. While I could probably replicate a lot of Google Calendar’s functionality with Toodledo and consolidate what I need to look at, I like the ability to visualize my schedule and compare it to that of my co-workers. I don’t do anything special with Google calendar so I’ll toss in this little tip which AJ showed me a couple weeks ago. When adding an event on the calendar, instead of letting it default to one hour and going in to change the length of the event, if you include the length in the name of the activity the event will adjust automatically. For example, “Write blog post for ten mins” makes a ten minute event.

In the end, a good organization structure can only limit mistakes, it can’t prevent them. Despite the fact that I’m way more confident in my ability to stay on top of what I need to get done now, I still make mistakes and let things slip by me. Controlling the human element and giving the system all the information it needs to assist you is the true key to becoming more efficient. A good system, however, will give you a major head-start.

As some of you may know, VaynerMedia operates out of Sunshine Suites, a co-working space in New York City.  Co-working is an incredible opportunity for small businesses, not only for the direct business benefits of a professional working space but also for the networking opportunities inherent whenever you have so many diverse companies in one space.

Full disclosure; VaynerMedia not only works at Sunshine Suites but they’re also a client.  One of the first things we noticed when we began working with them was that there wasn’t an efficient way for businesses under the Sunshine umbrella to connect.  In order to remedy this situation, VaynerMedia advised Sunshine Suites to implement a Yammer network.

For those unfamiliar with Yammer, it’s best described as Twitter for a closed community.  Businesses began signing up for accounts and were getting some really great results, but it still lacked the wide-scale adoption that would truly unleash its potential for the entire Sunshine community.  In order to build its visibility and create community-wide buy-in, VaynerMedia and Sunshine Suites began working on a day dedicated to creating excitement for the Yammer community.

The result: “Yammer Day,” which occurred last Thursday, February 4^th.  It was an incredible success in all regards – not only did it create buzz throughout the day, it established a level of engagement that would ensure the long-term utilization of Yammer.  VaynerMedia utilized three main strategies to optimize the event’s success:

Yammer Q&A Sessions

One of the most beneficial aspects of a Yammer network is the ability to tap into the expertise of a community.  To showcase this, three experts in the Sunshine community volunteered to spend an hour on Yammer answering questions relative to their respective fields.  David Tunstall answered accounting and tax questions, Sabir Semerkant gave advice on branding and social media, and Shezi Sardar advised on legal matters.

These sessions were a great success, attracting questions from a wide variety of businesses.  Most importantly, however, they delivered a real, concrete example of how the Sunshine Suites community can leverage Yammer to improve their business.

Social Media Panel

In order to give businesses a relevant and actionable game plan for utilizing Yammer, as well as other social media tools, Sunshine Suites held a panel discussion featuring Sunshine businesses who were already utilizing these tools.  Featured in this panel were Yipit, Britemap, and VaynerMedia.  Attendees were encouraged to ask questions while panel members explained how specific businesses could benefit from embracing social media. The panel was followed by a networking event, further building the relationship foundations created throughout the day.

Free Wine

It’s not exactly a secret that people love free stuff.  In order to encourage interaction during the day, VaynerMedia offered up a case of wine to be randomly given away to anyone who posted on Yammer before 3:00pm.  By creating an incentive to get involved, and get involved early, the wine giveaway helped jumpstart the conversation on Yammer.

Overall, Yammer day was a great success for Sunshine Suites.  For the short-term, the number of interactions doubled the previous high, representing a huge increase of Yammer usage on the day.  More importantly though, Sunshine saw a huge increase in businesses requesting a Yammer account, placing the service closer to achieving a closer representation of the Sunshine community.

Going forward VaynerMedia will continue to work with Sunshine Suites to ensure that momentum from Yammer Day is not lost.  The day, however, serves as a good example of how to relay the value of beneficial services in a relevant, engaging way… and the power of free alcohol.

So the Web 2.0 expo is in town here at the Javits Center in NYC. That means a year ago today is the first time I met (read: observed from a distance) the guy who is now my boss, Gary Vaynerchuk.

Cut to 11 A.M. the day of, my boy Ricky and I realized we had uh, neglected to purchase passes to the event. So naturally, Ricky engaged some guy with tech-speak who then started knee-jerk pitching him some nonsense about a portalized hub for something-or-other. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the guy, I was surreptitiously snapping iPhone photos of the access badge dangling from the guy’s neck.

40 minutes later we were back huddled around the conference room table of FanDome’s midtown offices, meticulously gluing together and furiously spray painting the raw materials we had bought from Home Depot to duplicate the badge from our high resolution photograph. It took forever to get them right, but we finally did, victoriously hailed a cab back to the Javits Center and got past security without so much as the suspicious upcurl of a lip. Great Success!

We got in, met up with @stephbags (also now a VM employee!) and headed over to the area where the keynote speeches were starting. We got in just in time, and filed in to three empty seats at the very last row of the massive lecture hall.

Now to this point, all the experience I’d had with technical seminars had been of the mind-numbing variety. Picture yourself shifting uncomfortably in a wooden chair while witnessing a live reading for the books on tape of a technical manual. Not to mention, this books-on-tape was courteously narrated by some foreign-ish guy who, how can I put this delicately, could have used a couple semesters at the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too

So you can imagine my surprise when this happened:

If you haven’t seen Gary’s keynote at web 2.0, just stop reading this post, stop all the other crap you’re doing and watch the whole thing from start to finish. There is NO better use for 14 minutes of your day today. Errr, 14 minutes in front of your computer at work that is

You done? I’ll wait. You sure? OK, now, if you were there you know that the entire performance from start to finish just blew you off your feet. It was the purest form of that feeling I just WISH, so bad, that I could bottle up and share with all of you. The feeling where you feel like you can reach out and touch the future. And let me tell you, that future is just unbelievably soft and velvety and luxuriant, like bags of sand.

I know a lot of people, especially those in the non-tech space, saw that keynote, were mildly impressed and just went about their day. I, on the other hand, was immediately and irrevocably obsessed. Combine Gary’s fundamental uplifting message with his impeccable stage presence (which is something I can appreciate the challenges of) and I was hooked.

A few days later, I was using ‘the twitter’ regularly (again, premature infatuation), and it wasn’t long before Gary sent out a tweet looking for people with sports sites, which prompted this tweet.

Nothing came of the initial e-mail contact I had with Gary and AJ then, but if it wasn’t for that early adopter action, Gary would have no idea who I was when we met in person at the NYC Digg Swigg in April. If Gary had no idea who I was then, then the conversation that we accidentally struck up with @drzhang who was serendipitously seated next to us at the NYC Blogs with Balls conference never would have led to us arranging a meeting with Gary and AJ at the then nascent Vaynermedia offices in Hell’s Kitchen, and I would never be working at my dream job today.

Now, this story is one championing the open-mindedness it takes to be an early adopter, but the reality is that early adoption can be a double edged sword, and there exists a real dichotomy here in the web world.

How it was for me a year ago at the web 2.0 expo is how it is at its best: the community is a vibrant, exhilarating, and addictive blend of early adopters, all united with the vision of bringing the future to the masses. But at its worst the web-building community is like a support group for sufferers of acute premature infatuation — a group that enables its own destructive tendencies by building elaborately designed skyscrapers that nobody asked for on top of cities that are only accessible by an underground tunnel that only people who know what an RSS feed and are using a bleeding edge version of Firefox can enter.

This premise of early adoption versus premature infatuation, and the dangers of disconnecting yourself from the grounding influence of the brick and mortar world around you is going to be the basis of my blog post next Wednesday, tentatively titled “I’m so ronery (why is everybody so fah*ing stupid)”.

Catch you guys next Wednesday!