Here’s an excerpt:

London Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. This blog was viewed about 460,000 times in 2011. If it were competing at London Olympic Stadium, it would take about 6 sold-out events for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Today, John Lilly put up a really nice note on the Greylock Partners blog officially welcoming me to the firm.  Needless to say, I’m both honored and excited to be joining such a great team.

We’re fortunate to be witnessing the explosive growth of not one but two incredible new platforms for consumer products and services: social and mobile.  Both are literally changing the fundamental ways that consumers interact with devices, and are rapidly changing the dynamics for building successful new products and services.  After spending the past four years helping to build out social and mobile platforms, I can’t wait to partner with entrepreneurs to help them build out the next generation of products and companies over them.

Over the past few years, I’ve shared a number of insights here on this blog about building great products and companies.  Here are a few that are worth reading if you are curious about how I think:

• Why LinkedIn Hackdays Work
• Why T-Shirts Matter
• How Designers Can Get the Most out of Their Product Managers
• Rethinking IT as an HR Benefit
• Product Prioritization: Three Feature Buckets
• Want Engagement? Find the Heat
• Embrace the Minimum Necessary Change
• LinkedIn as a Platform
• Startups, Technology & Giambattista Vico

And of course, the most appropriate for this announcement:

• The Paradox of Being a Smart Venture Capitalist

For now, I just want to say thank you to Reid, David, John and the entire Greylock team.  I can’t wait to get started.

One the best t-shirts: LinkedIn Breast Cancer Awareness T-Shirt 2010

Since then, this blog post has been viewed over 36,000 times.  It has been referenced from Hacker News, TechCrunch, Zazzle, and many other blog posts.

Ironically, that blog post has a cliff hanger at the end of it:

It turns out that this is a lot harder than it appears.  Mario always tells me my blog posts are too long, so I’m going to save this topic for the next post…

So Where Is It?

One of the most common questions I get now is “when are you going to write the post on how to make great tech t-shirts?”  Let’s be frank – it has been over eight months since the original post.  Procrastination is one thing, but at this point you’ve got to wonder whether or not this is a Duke Nukem situation.

One Post or Eight?

One of the reasons I haven’t been able to put this post together is that there really is a lot to cover.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this problem, and as a result, I’ve accumulated quite a bit of content on it.

So I’ve made a decision.  Rather than tackle this beast all at once, I’m going to turn this into a theme for this week.  Every day, I’ll post another aspect of how to make a great tech t-shirt.  At the end, I’ll add a summary post for those of you who prefer cliff notes.

How To Make a Great Tech T-Shirt

1. Introduction
2. Goals: Why Are You Making the T-Shirt
3. Metrics: How Do You Measure Success
4. Quality: Picking the Right T-Shirt
5. Design: Styles That Work
6. Execution: Avoid the Camel
7. Operations: Collecting Sizes, Ordering & Distribution
8. Summary: How to Make a Great Tech T-Shirt

Tomorrow, I’ll begin the series, adding links here as an index.  Can’t wait to get started.

LinkedIn Blog: 10 Ways to Make Hackdays Work

As part of the post, they published this wonderful video montage about LinkedIn Hackdays. Thought it was worth sharing here too.

I love it because it really captures the warmth and the passion that make LinkedIn Hackdays so successful.

It also is a reminder that last month I had chosen to grow a beard…

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 440,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 19 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 23 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 698 posts. There were 10 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 4th with 2,735 views. The most popular post that day was Café World Economics: Profit & Cafe Points.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were google.com, facebook.com, twitter.com, stumbleupon.com, and zynga.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ntfs mac, mkv to mp4 mac, hardest material, convert mkv to mp4 mac, and ntfs for mac.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Café World Economics: Profit & Cafe Points October 2009
36 comments

How to Convert MKV to MP4 on Mac OS X March 2008
53 comments

How to Mount NTFS Drives on Mac OS X with Read/Write Access May 2007
13 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

How to Convert FLAC to Apple Lossless (MP4) on Mac OS X March 2008
18 comments

How to Delete Individual Backups from Apple Time Machine March 2008
45 comments

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of Twitter.  I’ve learned a lot from them from both a user-perspective and a product-perspective.

The problem, however, is that tweets are ephemeral.  They offer an interesting combination of news sharing, brief commentary, and even a smattering of public dialog.  Unfortunately, they dissipate like snow flakes on a warm windshield.

I’ve been posting on the blog for several years now.  Almost 700 posts total.  But there is no question that my blogging activity has dropped considerably as I’ve tweeted more.  This is my first blog post in over a month.

And where are those tweets now?

In 2006 I wrote a thoughtful, but brief blog post about the Orion program, and the reinvigorated plans to establish a permanent presence on the moon.  A few weeks ago, President Obama put forth a proposal to kill the program.  I tweeted several times about it… but no blog post.  It’s sitting on a “to do” list of blog topics that I haven’t completed.

Does it matter?

I suppose it depends on the reasons that people have for blogging.  For me, blogging serves multiple functions:

1. Blogging allows me to collect and share opinions about topics of interest (e.g. The Real eBay Magic: Irrational Commerce)
2. Blogging allows me to demonstrate my interest / skills around a topic (e.g. The Personal Economics of Farmville)
3. Blogging allows me to share knowledge publicly (Roth IRA Loophole: Everyone Can Qualify in 2010)
4. Blogging allows me to keep a diary of topics of interest (The Self Organizing Quantum Universe)
5. Blogging allows me to personally experiment with social media (Category: Blogging)

Unfortunately, I’m worried that the trade off between tweeting and blogging is having a significant long term impact on many of these goals.

My working theory is that Twitter is influencing me to blog less in two ways:

1. It’s real time. As a result, I’m more likely to comment on something during the day, rather than waiting until the evening to blog about it after work.  But, once I’ve commented, the pressure to blog about it lessens.
2. It’s where I get my news. As I’ve started depending on Twitter more for news than Google Reader, my old workflow of going through blog posts and articles, finding topics of interest, and then blogging has been broken.

Now, Twitter has its own value.  In terms of traffic generation, I find it phenomentally effective.  It has also become my primary conduit to gain environmental awareness of topics both personal and professional.  Twitter has also enhanced my professional reputation in a number of circles – circles that rarely if ever discovered by blog.

As a result, while I’m still going to tweet frequently in the coming month, I’m also going to make a renewed effort to blog more frequently over the next 30 days.  At minimum, I’m going to shoot for 1-2 posts per week, to get some rhythm back into the exercise.

I’m also going to experiment with some different tools and features to see if I can’t help turn topics that I find interesting enough to tweet about into topics I’m interested enough to blog about.

The key to obfuscation was simple: there was no one Fake Leonard Speiser.  A group of people who have worked with Leonard before all had access to account.  Consider it a form of “Twitter Improv”.

Yes, this is the kind of fun we have in Silicon Valley.  It’s because we’re geeks.

See below for the kickoff email.  We had fun with this all weekend.  I hope Leonard (and fans) did too.  I’d like to think that even though Fake Leonard was just around for a few days, he was starting to develop a real personality.

Goodbye, Fake Leonard.

From: Adam Nash
To: Elliot Shmukler, Chris Yeh, Bart Munro, Ben Foster, Shri Mahesh, Michael Dearing, Kenny Pate
Subject: Welcome to the Fake Leonard Conspiracy
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:10:37 -0700

Merely by reading this email, you have been inducted into the Fake Leonard Speiser conspiracy.

Yesteday, Leonard made the mistake of issuing this tweet:
http://twitter.com/leonardspeiser/status/4350181575

Clearly, this was a desperate cry for a prank.  We will oblige him.

Behold, Fake Leonard Speiser:
http://www.twitter.com/fakeleonard

Instead of just one of us making up fake lines from Leonard, we are *all* going to contribute.  Kind of like a live, Twitter improv.

Here is the commitment:
For the next few days, every one of us will make *at least* one tweet from the Fake Leonard account.  Don’t worry about being consistent with the tone of everyone else too much – just shoot out lines that you can imagine Leonard saying.

Follow @fakeleonard, and tweet/respond/retweet his posts, to help get his followers up.  If someone wants to run around and follow a broad swath of his social network, all the better.

This is all in good fun, so nothing too personal or offensive. 

The account password is:
********

Please try to make your first tweets today… I got mine in.

Email me with questions.
Adam

Update: I’ve been reminded that this is the second online gag I’ve played on Leonard Speiser… in the first, the co-conspirator was GoldenPalace.com.

I was all set to write a post tonight on the economics of trees in Farmville… but then I caught Pablo’s post on “Treeconomics”.

Brilliant.  Leveraging some of the work I had done, he does a evaluation of a 16-square of trees in terms of “yield” vs. crops.  Very interesting, confirming that a 16-square of Date trees can compare very favorably to almost everything.

I’m going to have to think about this a bit more – I want to build a model where I incorporate a few additional factors:

• The “down payment” for trees.
• The freedom to never have to “plow” or “plant” again. (value of time)
• The freedom from working capital for seeds on an ongoing basis.
• The removal of “withering risk”.  Crops wither after 20% of their growing time, yielding a complete loss of the capital to plow & plant.  Trees never wither.
• The lack of experience points from trees
• Incorporate the data from all the trees, not just the ones you can buy.

I’ll still write a follow up here, but tonight there is no need.  Check out this table from Pablo as  sample:

And this one:

Too cool.

Now go read it.

Updates: I’ve now posted additional articles on Farmville Economics:

• Farmville Economics: What Price Experience?
• Farmville Economics: Risk Adjusted Crop Profitability
• Farmville Economics: Sweet Seeds are *Almost* Genius
• Farmville Economics: Flowers & Updated Tables
• Farmville Economics: Cranberries, Pattypan Squash, Acorn Squash

Why I love Timber as an Asset Class (November 10, 2006)

Since then, from time to time, the article has been referenced in investment blogs and journals.  For example, I am still getting hits to my blog based on the following article on Seeking Alpha:

• Considering Timber as an Asset Class (Seeking Alpha, December 2008)

Last year, I was flattered to see a quote of mine show up in Nuwire Investor:

• Timber: A Renewable Resource (Nuwire)

What I didn’t realize at the time I wrote this blog post in January 2008 was that my entire interview was actually posted online.  That’s right. You can read the whole thing in all of its glory:

• Timber Interview: Adam Nash (Nuwire, May 2007)

How embarrassing.  I remember doing this interview over the phone in March 2007 from a conference room from the Toys building at eBay.

Still, it’s a matter of public record now.  So enjoy, if you are curious.  I still do love timber as an asset class.

You might be wondering why this is big deal, since these have existed on every other site for years.

Well, the reason is because this is Facebook, and ironically because they waiting this long to launch handles, it’s now moved from part of the new-user experience to a huge virtual geek battle for your name.  (if you want yours, go to http://www.facebook.com/username)

I, of course, claimed “adamnash”.

Not very creative, I know.  When I chose my first username, freshman year at Stanford, I picked a nickname I had in high school.  (To this day, the wonders of the web have preserved old Usenet posting from under than handle… embarrassing.)  Thankfully, when you declare Computer Science as your major at Stanford, you get a virtual second chance – your Xenon address.

With a full name that fits in an old-style unix handle of 8 characters, it seemed too obvious.

I am adamnash.

These days, of course, you can find me at:

• http://www.adamnash.com (my domain)
• http://blog.adamnash.com (WordPress)
• http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnash (LinkedIn)
• http://www.twitter.com/adamnash (Twitter)
• http://www.google.com/profiles/adamnash (Google)
• http://myworld.ebay.com/adamnash (eBay)

Brilliant from an SEO perspective, I guess.  Not that hot if I was looking for anonymity.

Now, I can safely say, Facebook is safe for “adamnash” as well:

• http://www.facebook.com/adamnash (Facebook)

I feel a little guilty for hogging all the virtual cyberspace for myself.  There are other Adam Nashes out there.  I think there are over 30 on LinkedIn alone.

But not that guilty.  I’ve been “adamnash” since 1992.  I’m not going to stop now.

While we’re still adapting to life with three kids in the house, I thought I’d note the tech milestone as well.  When my first son was born, we had a birth blog to commemorate the event.  That was less than five years ago.  Clearly in just that short time we’ve moved on to newer modes of obsessive documentation.

I guess that answers the question on whether Twitter competes and/or substitutes for blogging.

In any case, welcome to the world Jordan.  Our first Twitter baby.  (In fact, one of my colleagues at LinkedIn was kind enough to reserve @jordannash for him…)

Posted in Blogging, Family, Twitter ]]> http://blog.adamnash.com/2009/05/12/jordan-my-first-twitter-baby/feed/ 5 adamnash Jordan Jordan Jordan Jordan Tweet http://blog.adamnash.com/2009/02/24/scot-wingo-seeking-alpha-traffic-drivers/ http://blog.adamnash.com/2009/02/24/scot-wingo-seeking-alpha-traffic-drivers/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:01:55 +0000 Adam Nash http://blog.adamnash.com/?p=1098 ]]> It’s still fascinating to me how many insights I gain from the traffic to my own personal blog.

Today, I checked my stats briefly and noticed something really strange: my post about eBay Express, A Eulogy for eBay Express, had jumped with a vengence to the number one post on the blog.  My overall traffic spiked a bit too.  A little strange for a post that is over 6 months old.

Perusing my top referring sites, I saw one obvious culprit: eBay Strategies.  Scot Wingo has a new post up entitled Episode IV – How to fix eBay (you are here) – A NEW HOPE – Introducing eBay 2.0. It’s a long post, but there are a couple of paragraphs in it that point directly to my last eBay Express post:

You may recall an experiment eBay had called eBay Express where they tried to extend the brand with a different fixed-price site, but failed.  Ex-eBayer, Adam Nash had a great eulogy and behind-the-scenes view of what happened that I recommend everyone read to see his perspective.

I always likened eBay Express to diet donuts.  It just isn’t an extension and you are admitting that, well, if you have an eBay express, that makes eBay – what- eBay slow and poky?  There were other problems too that Adam details, like they didn’t send it any traffic and small things like that.  Also the way the inventory worked was all jacked-up, it was a sub-set of fixed-price items on eBay (what?!).  I’ve read all of Adams thoughts on eBay Express and chatted with him before on what eBay’s doing wrong/right and many of his ideas have found their way into eBay 2.0. (BTW, eBay needs to get this guy back.)

OK, it’s hard not to find that last line flattering.

Scot’s post is fairly long and detailed, and while I don’t agree with everything in the article, I did find all the talk of “New Coke” amusing in one sense.  You see, Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink had just been released when we kicked off the eBay Express concept efforts.  As a result, one of the specific guiding statements for the project was: “Don’t build New Coke.”  As I mentioned in my original post, one of our key goals for eBay Express was to NOT change the original eBay, but instead focus our efforts on a new site in order to protect what buyers & sellers loved about eBay.com.  Our analogy was, in fact, Diet Coke, which is not totally surprising given that I have an entire category for Diet Coke-related posts on this blog…

Still, the branding point around the name “eBay Express” is fair, and as I mentioned previously, branding was one of the obvious mistakes made in retrospect.

In any case, a little more snooping and I discovered that while eBay Strategies was the source of some of the new traffic, even more traffic was being sourced from the Seeking Alpha distribution of the article.  I’ve been an active reader of Seeking Alpha as an investment site for years, and I’ve noticed their recent push for sourcing content from any major blogger.  However, this is some real evidence that bloggers who leverage Seeking Alpha are likely seeing significant boosts in distribution.

I wonder if I have any posts that are Seeking Alpha worthy… I’ll have to think about experimenting with them at some point.  I’ve actually been cited in Seeking Alpha posts before, but typically with pointers to my articles on investing in Timber as an asset class…

So far, despite the debut on Friday, it looks like my traffic may have peaked yesterday, on Saturday.  5380 hits to the blog that day, with my most popular BSG posts taking the top 5 slots for article popularity.

Why?  Check out the top 10 referring searches from Google, Yahoo, etc:

Notice a pattern?  I’ve discovered that my blog post is the number one result in Google for the search “fifth cylon”.  At least, it is today.

Over 200 hits to the post “The Fifth & Last Cylon” yesterday alone.

I’m even getting referral links from O’Reilly!  Love it.

No matter how I try to diversify this blog, ever since my first Battlestar Galactica post in 2006 (which still gets comments regularly), I continue to get massive traffic at key points in each season.

The only thing I think will be greater than the excitement for the series finale is the empty realization afterward that there is, in fact, no more.

Now for the ultimate spoiler…

… I am the fifth cylon.

January 16th, 2009

(Turns out, the reason she asked me to look at it was to translate the “Double U – Tee – H”.  I told her it was WTH or “What the Hell”.  There were several minutes of back and forth before she was convinced I was right.)

In any case, the article covers a basic cyber-mom question of what social networks she belongs to, and what each is for.  I thought the four snippets were great:

• MySpace is a socializing website for teens, young adults, stars and music
• Facebook is sort of the same only for young adults and tracking down your old school classmates and college friends without having to join Classmates.com for $29 plus a year.
• Linkedin is for professional adults and for networking with people in business and sometimes it’s helped people land really awesome jobs.
• Twitter – everyone is doing Twitter. Twitter is like text messaging meets the internet. It’s a way to text all your friends at once and have them text you back.

Of course, the primary theme of the article is one of social network fatigue. Apparently, this mom draws the line at these four.

Daily/Weekly use, in order of repeat visits (December 2008):

• Google Reader
• My Yahoo
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• WordPress.com (this blog)
• Facebook
• E*Trade
• Mint.com

Twitter is the biggest surprise for me.  I’ve been playing with it for months, but I’ve noticed my activity has been increasing measurably.  This past month, I’ve been checking it multiple times per day (thanks to TwitterFon for the iPhone).  Mint.com also has spiked up now that it has iPhone integration.

Not sure I’ll do this often, but how cool!

Love the fact that they open sourced the code. Really cool.

LifeHacker: How to Create Your Life Plan

The article points to a blog post by Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers.  The post from Michael is extremely detailed about the system he’s used for the past five years to guide his life (not just career, but life) on a quarterly basis with the help of his executive coach.

Here is the intro:

I have met very few people who have a plan for their lives. Most are passive spectators, watching their lives unfold a day at a time. They may plan their careers, the building of a new home, or even a vacation. But it never occurs to them to plan their life. As a result, many end up discouraged and disillusioned, wondering where they went wrong.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can live your life on purpose. It begins by creating a “Life Plan.” This won’t insulate you from life’s many adversities and unexpected twists and turns, but it will help you become an active participant in your life, intentionally shaping your own future.

I remember some of these exercises from the management and leadership curriculum in the IEEM (now MS&E) track at Stanford, but never with this much richness or detail.   It’s a fairly personal and exposed post in many ways – impressive in some regards to see this kind of transparency from an executive.

On the surface, it feels a little strange to see this type of micro-management of your entire life.  Of course, I’m not sure it makes sense to expect your goals to be fulfilled without both a clear definition of your goals, and a strategy & execution to get there.  After all, it’s what I hold Product Managers accountable for, right?

Can you manage your life the way you manage a product?

Definitely worth a read and at least 15 minutes of consideration…

My friend & resident blogger at LinkedIn, Mario Sundar, found this follow-up post to a comment I left on one of the “live-blog” write-ups on my Graphing Social Patterns East keynote yesterday.  In the write-up, Craig (the author) had left a slightly snarky response to an answer I had given during Q&A.  I posted a quick comment to help clarify the issue, and to express my honest thanks for the live-blog synopsis.  As you can tell from the title, Craig liked the response:

Worth noting here is how Adam–in a way befitting the professionally oriented nature of his enterprise–responded so perfectly to my intemperate post. He started with a compliment and shifted into a clarification that reframed [and corrected] what I’d written. He ended with another compliment.

This is a near-perfect display of best practices when responding to a negative post: Remain calm and respectful, do nothing to escalate a the exchange, clarify the point, keep it short. He comes off looking good, representing himself and his company very well.

I’m really glad Craig wrote this post, because it’s a topic I’m fairly passionate about.  (Plus, he gave me the title for this blog post.)  I honestly believe that the way employees behave and communicate with the outside world is part of the brand and part of the connection that a company has with it’s customers, followers, and even detractors.  More importantly, when you help participate and encourage friendly discussion, it helps you remember that we’re all just people – people with opinions, sure, but real human beings.

It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget sometimes when you get caught up in theoretical and emotional arguments in email, groups, and blogs.

The truth of the matter is, I was really grateful to all the people who captured content from the conference.  I’ll be posting a more official summary of the material tomorrow on the LinkedIn official blog.  For tonight, here are some snippets that might entertain my family & friends who read this one.

First, here are the three live-blogs of the keynote I gave, called “LinkedIn: The Business Social Network“:

• The official GSP East 2008 live blog
• Technosailor
• Web 2.0h… really?

The last one is where I left the original comment that Craig was responding to.

Here are some Flickr images, courtesy of James Duncan Davidson:

This is from the keynote in the morning.

These three were from a really fun panel called “The NEED for FEEDS” that we did in the afternoon.

Anyway, while it’s good to be home, I had a lot of fun participating in GSP East 2008, and I learned a lot from the conversations I had with different people there.  We’re in such early stages of people figuring out the social internet, it’s wonderful to be a part of it all.

And Craig, just in case you read this, you should know that our Director of Communications at LinkedIn thinks I should add your article (and title) to my LinkedIn profile permanently.    Hopefully, we’ll get to chat live in the future sometime.

Tonight I got a brand new (OK, well, refurbished) 2.8Ghz 8-core Mac Pro from the Apple Store.  I managed to use Time Machine to resurrect the boot drive from my G5 onto it, which seems to have worked well so far.  I’m a little nervous though about how many PPC items might have been moved/executing as system extensions, etc, on the new Intel-based Mac Pro.

I also decided to go wireless with this machine on the Keyboard & Mouse.  The keyboard is fine, but the bluetooth mighty mouse is a little… off.  Not sure what it is, but I’m debating going back to my USB Logitech.

In any case, I likely won’t get a lot of blog posts in this week, but a few may crop up here and there.  I’m excited to put the new machine through its paces, but that’ll have to wait until I get my photo library back online, install Photoshop CS3, and start ripping movies again.  I hear that this machine can rip a 2-hour movie to MP4 in about 40 minutes, which would be approximately 10x faster than my old G5.

BTW Despite promises from the Apple Store on Saturday that they would run diagnostics and tell me the problem with my G5 by Monday, I had to call them today (Wednesday) just to find out that they still can’t get it to boot.  They think it is the power supply, which is good news because that means $300 could net me a machine that will sell for $1200.  If it’s the logic board, then I’m hosed, and I’ll likely sell the box, sans hard drives, on eBay for parts.

In any case, I’ll post at the end of this ordeal about the Mac Pro and the transition, and what is better/worse about the new setup.  I have to say, I haven’t been this excited since… I got the PowerMac G5 4 years ago.

It’s times like these that blogs need hold muzak…

Yesterday, I posted a piece on the LinkedIn blog called, “The Long Tail of Professional Expertise“.

Read it and let me know what you think.

Blog Stats

• Total Views: 272,308
• Best Day Ever: 4,536 — Monday, March 26, 2007
• Posts: 450
• Comments: 1,312
• Categories: 35

Here is a nice graph that shows page views, month by month, since I launched this new blog in August 2006:

The big spike in March 2007 was due to a flurry of interest in my Battlestar Galactica posts, which remain to this day the most popular posts on this blog.

Obviously, it’s just a quick Photoshop job over the Leopard background from Mac OS X 10.5.  But people seem to be completely against it.  Elliot has gone so far as to say he refuses to read my blog from the site anymore – just the My Yahoo reader – just to avoid the new header.

Thoughts?  I can replace it with a plain vanilla color header.

There is only one problem that is annoying me to now end:  this template does not display the sub-title of this blog.

It should be:

Psychohistory
The personal blog of Adam Nash

Does anyone know either:

1. How to modify the template to display the sub-title?
2. Another 3-column template on WordPress.com that has this layout that does display the sub-title?

If you do, please let me know.

Thanks.

I bring it up because this article appeared today in the Nuwire Investor, “Top 5 Recession Investments: How investors can protect themselves in the event of a recession.”  In it, you’ll find the following paragraph about timber as an investment:

Timber is a solid commodity with steady demand that does well during stock market declines because it is not correlated to the market. Its returns reliably outperform the market, and its value increases over time, even without investor input.

Adam Nash, a timber investor, said owning and harvesting timberland is essentially a classic fixed-income investment. The land acts like principal, he said, and the timber acts like a perpetual dividend.

Yup, that’s me.  Adam Nash, timber investor.

So, the backstory here is interesting, and directly related to this blog.

Back in early 2007, I was contacted by one of the journalists working on Nuwire Investor, for it’s launch.  They had read my blog post on timber, and wanted to interview me.  Initially, I begged off, explaining that I wasn’t an investment professional, and I wasn’t sure I was qualified to be an “expert” on the topic.  Still, we ended up doing a 1 hour phone interview in March.

In May, this article on timber investing came out in Nuwire… but no mention or quote from me!  So, I forgot about the whole thing… until the article today showed up in my “adam nash” Google Alert.

Very exciting, and a little fun for the day.  I’m glad Nuwire contacted me.

So for today, you can call me Adam Nash, Timber Investor.

It goes without saying that I’m excited by the challenge of my new job. I’ve thought an awful lot about the role of MoCo (our shorthand for the Corporation) in supporting the Mozilla mission and manifesto, as the coordination point for our work on the platform and on Firefox. We’ve got a lot to do in the coming years, starting with getting Firefox 3 out the door, and then swiftly followed up by our work in mobile and services. Mozilla2 will be a major step forward on the platform after that, not to mention our new experiments in Labs and the work that we’re doing to move the whole Web forward with Javascript 2, HTML 5 and other standards work.

John’s post is here.

Mitchell’s post is here.

I haven’t decided to 86 adamnash.com yet, but as of today, this blog is going to start being served off:

blog.adamnash.com

The Psychohistory title and URLs will remain, as well.

Some of the basic stats to date:

Blog Stats

• Total Views: 227,463
• Best Day Ever: 4,536

Totals

• Posts: 400
• Comments: 1,139
• Categories: 35
• Tags: 17

I think the weirdest thing about my 400 posts is the strange collection of search terms that now lead people to my posts. Check these 20 out from the last 2 days:

Today

Search Views
south park 10
high dividend mutual funds 3
boston accent 3
craigslist depreciating asset 3
pretty colors 2
marissa mayer 2
south park wii episode 2
electoral college chart 2
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Yesterday

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Overall, I seem to hover now between 500-700 hits per day, with about 100+ people subscribed through RSS, 20+ through email. Not bad for a personal blog with a mixture of topics ranging from game theory to Battlestar Galactica to coin collecting…

I won’t spoil it here, but you can read about it directly on the FSJ blog.   The announcement from Forbes.com is here.  The New York Times coverage that outed him is here.

I find the FSJ blog extremely humorous on most days.  It’s a little sad to have the illusion popped.

I feel like he deserves one of those “Real American Hero” spoof commercials for Bud Light…

So here’s to you, Mr. Fake Steve Jobs… 

Either version is true – today’s post on the LinkedIn corporate blog is from my mother, Dr. Sharon Nash, Ph.D. After my initial post on the corporate blog, I was surprised at how many people sent in comments about the fact that my mother was on LinkedIn. Since she is a relatively new user to the site, and a professional expert on relationships and people, we thought it would be an interesting user story to tell.

Considering that it is her first blog post ever, I think she did quite well. In fact, I think the bigger dilemma for her was picking the right picture to use.

The fact that my mother has enjoyed LinkedIn so much that she has recommended it to over 85 (and counting) colleagues and friends is incredibly validating. I spent four years at eBay trying to break her of the typical e-commerce habit, and never succeeded. Not even eBay Express, I’m afraid.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that the opportunity for LinkedIn goes far beyond the site as it stands today. There is a very real human interest in connecting with your trusted colleagues and friends in a professional environment. We have only scratched the surface of the interesting and useful applications for professionals built over this platform. Right now, most software and web applications are still based around a model that assumes that data & information are the basis for getting things done. However, in the real world, most problems are solved by referral and advice from the people that you trust & respect. LinkedIn enables exactly that type of model, and that makes me incredibly optimistic about the future for the site and the platform.

Or if you don’t believe me, ask my Mom.