However, I am dismayed by Nick Douglas;’ tactics in his investigation of Mike’s alleged conflicts of interest, as detailed in a letter Mike was forwarded by someone who Douglas has contacted. The document speaks for itself, I’m afraid, and does a tremendous disservice to Nick Douglas himself. The language of the letter is reminiscent of a McCarthyite witchhunt–there’s unfortunately no other way to read it.

I admire Nick’s writing, and think he’s one of the funniest and talented people in the community. But I also know Mike to be one of the smartest, and rigorously circumspect people in the Valley, and in fact would not count him as either a friend or even a one time guest on the Gillmor Gang, let alone a core member, if he was so stupid, venal, or self-destructive to do the kinds of things Nick is looking to "uncover" with these letters.

Frankly, I am much more concerned for the impact this will have on Nick’s career, who is in my dealings with him to date, strikes me as an honest, fair person. But this crosses a line I hope he’ll reconsider, and I said that to him directly in a phone conversation with him this afternoon. If that brings me the kind of examination he’s foisting on Mike, so be it. I’ve got nothing to hide, and my bet is neither does Mike. Welcome back to the Gang, Mr. Arrington.

As you know, this has been a tough week for me and my family, with our beloved dog Murphy gone to the big Squirrel Chase in the sky. I thank you so much for your condolences and expressions of shared understanding of this passage. Lying on the sofa today, our cats slowly came over and curled around me, as the melancholy begins to lift.

Writing this blog has been in many ways the end of a journey for me. My brother was one of the first mainstream journalists to start writing a blog all those years ago, and although I only started a blog for real after I was fired from the back page column of InfoWorld, I always felt a kinship that perhaps sprang from the style of editor’s notes I started writing as editor in chief and editorial director for XML and JavaPro magazines. Indeed, one of the things that led directly to my firing at InfoWorld was my refusal to hew to a new more traditional style mandated by the newly appointed CEO and editorial director. It wasn’t that it was unreasonable; it was that I didn’t want to do it. A blogger’s choice in a mainstream world.

Following Mike Vizard to CRN, I began the same process I’d begun at InfoWorld by hiring Jon Udell, of seeding a blogging infrastructure inside CMP (the parent publishing company) by starting the first blog, named Steve Gillmor’s Emerging Opps by Vizard in an attempt to somehow bridge the chasm between a channel book and a disruptive flamethrower. You notice I’ve linked to the blog here, in apparent conflict with The Death of Links. Well, you can scroll down a bit to where I started that crap in the first place, on September 30, 2003. Ironically or not, the permalink is broken.

Around that time, my friend John Taschek resigned as eWEEK Lab director (the job I held at InfoWorld) and I negotiated a deal between eWEEK print EIC Eric Lundquist and online czar Jim Louderback to write an OpEd column in the print book and run a section of the online site on collaboration and messaging. Of course, once again I offered myself as the guinea pig for eWEEK.com’s first blog. Each successive RSS opp, which is how I saw the process of tunneling under IT to establish blogging, and then RSS, as a strategic (and destabilizing) virus inside the mainstream trade press, moved a little faster than the last. Udell’s success at commandeering the dominant page view metrics (and most of the InfoWorld brand integrity to boot) was by now becoming obvious to even the most entrenched ostriches (names withheld, as with links, because you already know who you are.)

Ironically or not, that first post of Steve Gillmor’s Blogosphere is the only one that survives. The Wayback Machine provides the rest, like this post about the first Gillmor Gang, right up to the day I was fired in July, 2004. Only now, with Mike Vizard running Ziff Davis Online Enterprise, have blogs by such fine writers as Peter Coffee finally surfaced. Ironically or not.

It was at eWEEK.com that I developed my profound loathing for the page view model, which I viewed (correctly of course) as the next big handbag to hell for the trade press who had escaped in the helicopters from the collapse of the print model. As with InfoWorld, I was fired for cause, in this case cause I just didn’t give a damn what some online pinhead in the San Francisco office had to say about what journalism was all about. And when I sat next to Dan Farber some weeks before the eWEEK gig fell apart, I took a chance and spilt my guts while we waited for some press conference to start. When the ax fell, Dan conjured a contributing editor slot out of paper mache and chewing gum, and I started posting what first appeared as online columns and finally (hello IT) morphed into this blog in late October, 2004.

Amazingly, I haven’t been fired this time, mostly because Farber has evolved into a close friend from a start as one of my best editors ever, and also because all this gibberish I’ve been spouting over the years about attention and now gestures turns out to be right on the money. As attention gained a capital A, so too did my star rise to the point where some folks are amazed that my brother Dan is related to me. Of course, I’ve seen Dan take the first step out of the pod bay and live to tell about it, making transitions such as Om Malik’s and even Robert Scoble’s a lot easier to fathom. I call him my younger smarter brother because a) it’s true, and b) I’m afraid of him.

A little more about Farber, because although I promised I wouldn’t post this before he saw it, I’m doing it anyway. He’s turned blogging into a journalist art, reinvented himself as editor, stringer, photographer, budget magician (just look at the talent writing blogs for/with him on a fraction of the budget his CNET counterpart plays with), and whatever else it takes to keep so many balls floating in the air. If anything, I’m leaving because he’s convinced me that anything is doable. It’s one thing to champion user control of your own data, and quite another to conjur just the few breadcrumbs that it takes to let me nurse this spark into the full blown inferno it’s become. Airfare to Gnomedex 5, hotel to OnHollywood, lunch when I couldn’t afford the gas to get home and eat. And that’s just the money. At every turn, even some that challenged his beliefs about his own business, he’s there to stick together and offer the best an editor and friend can, a nod of approval and more importantly, the right tone to tell me when I’m off the rails.

I’ve had a lot of occasion to cry these last weeks; the Valley has become a feeding frenzy as the reboot suddenly becomes obvious to everybody. As I leave InfoRouter behind, I am no longer amazed at the vitriol that pours from those who would ascribe the most venal, pathetic, short-sighted, and twisted motives to the pure joy of writing what I see and hear and feel. Imagine for a moment, those who I am calling out–if you were the victim of those same attacks. Think about what would hurt you most, whether it is being fat, old, stupid, corrupt, pathetic, a loser in the hurtful sense of the word. Then brush that off and tell me what hurt worse–any or all of that lot, or the threat of taking away your freedom to communicate, complain, cry, bore, surprise, apologize, delight, and fail. No matter how insufferable I find the mean-spirited people who populate my little corner of this village, I still defend with every fibre of my being your right to spew that crap. Just remember that it’s people like Dan Farber and Mike Vizard and Dave Winer and you, yes you, who are fighting to keep this network out of from under the Thumb.

So I’ve got my reasons for closing down InfoRouter, and tomorrow (if tomorrow is Tuesday) I’ll be on a plane to New York to work with Seth Goldstein on some of the infrastructure for this new world we’re sailing toward. If all goes well — and I know it will — those of you who want to join me in the next phase will just have to sit back and wait for the switch to occur. There will be similar upheaval with Gillmor Gang, but what will emerge will be worth the struggle. In the end, it’s easy to tell who your friends are: they’re the ones who pay attention. Thanks for listening — and stay tuned.

All this comes at a convenient time, as InfoRouter wraps up over the next several days before going off the air July 31. Accordingly, I’ll release the three parts of this Resignation Gang, (mixing Part I at AO Summit this morning) and reboot GG as well. Thanks in advance for listening. 

Last night our dog Murphy died. I can hear him in the silence.

As we drove away from the emergency clinic, Tina wondered if we ever could catch a break. Today I’m thinking we caught a thirteen year one with our puppy. 

The last wiki I logged into was the FOO Camp one several years ago when I was still welcome, and I’ve not had that problem since. I would note however that I requested credentials for Web 2.0 quite some time ago and have heard nothing since. Two years ago John Battelle graciously put me on his personal comp list when O’Reilly said the ZDNet quotient was filled up. Last year I was a speaker along with Seth Goldstein at the rollout of the AttentionTrust’s Attention Recorder. This year, silence.

Update: Heard from Battelle, invites haven’t gone out and I’m on the list, that "there are no monsters under the bed…." Well, alright.

With InfoRouter shuttered as of the end of the month, the rationale for identifying me as a legitimate member of the mainstream media might diminish, though I will continue as a ZDNet contributing editor. But that’s not what this is about. This is about connections, as Bob Dylan writes in Chronicles Volume One:

It went to the very root of things, gave unfair advantage to some and left others squeezed out. How could somebody ever reach the world this way? It seemed like it was the law of life, but even if it was, I wasn’t going to sulk about it or, like my grandma said, take it personal.

Speaking of conferences I’m appreciated at, Tony Perkins’ AlwaysOn Summit begins Tuesday night. The feeling is mutual: Tony’s Republican act cleverly submerges his razor-sharp instincts for the real story in the Valley. I couldn’t help cracking up over an AlwaysOn ad on the home page hyping thought leaders and such with Tony, my younger smarter brother and I bracketing Marten Mykos of laMp fame. Our father (who was liberally defined at the extreme left end of the Democrat Party as Tony might put it, would be or is rolling over in his grave. But our grandfather, Rear Admiral in the Navy and friend of Ike and other righties, would be suitably proud of us.

Regardless of which party you belong or are invited to, there really is serious business going on here beyond popularity contests and political maneuverings. During the Gillmor Gang recorded live at Gnomedex this year, Dave Winer brought up the possibility of Senator Edwards supporting BitTorrent with the candidate’s aide Ryan Montoya. As Ryan allowed how it was possible the campiagn would support the peer-to-peer technology, I got a laugh by asking how the fundraising was going with the Cartel. Several days ago, the Edwards Campaign announced BitTorrent support. Laugh line to campaign promise in less than 30 days.

For Dylan, "I knew I was doing things right, was on the right road, was getting all the knowledge immediately and firsthand." But now came a startling thought, "that maybe I’d have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn’t know." That was Mike Seeger, of whom Dylan wrote: "It’s not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them."

I pondered it. I wasn’t ready to act on any of it but knew somehow, though, that if I wanted to stay playing music, that I would have to claim a larger share of myself. I would have to overlook a lot of things–a lot of things that might even need attention–but that was all right. They were things that I probably felt totally powerless over, anyway. I had the map, could even draw it freehand if I had to. Now I knew I’d have to throw it away. Not today, not tonight, sometime soon, though.

As we nurse our puppy (we call him that all the time) I’ve been going through some great records. Hendrix continues to amaze, particularly the Starbucks record he just put out. It’s a bluesy selection and fills the bill. And Love and Theft, Dylan’s death suite. And Little Feat, a terrific box set I bought several years ago and never even listened to until now. And then we noticed Murphy was actually getting up and moving from room to room as the music moved with us. Surely it means nothing, but it’s everything to us right now.

I kicked Paxil about a week ago. I’ve been taking it for years since I had a series of atrial fibrillations in 2001 around the time I was negotiating to join InfoWorld. The first one landed me in the hospital in Charleston (I drove myself in) and I thought I was getting away with attending an XML Mag all-hands-on-deck from the hospital bed. I wan’t fooling anyone. Except myself, of course — I’d ignored out-of-control high blood pressure for years. The afibs continued for awhile as the doctors monkeyed with the medication; the last one occurred after a night of beer drinking in an Irish bar on Geary. But while they were happening, they were terrifiying, not the least because they would happen in the dead of night. Hense the Paxil, which curbed my anxiety and allowed me to learn how to realize that the base level of anxiety in my life was as much chemical as based on reality, or at least my dark interpretation of it.

I tried kicking it about six months ago, by cutting the dose in half. After about 2 weeks of it, my wife begged me to reconsider. Of course I should have known — I’ve never been able to stop doing anything to myself by tailing off. So this time I just stopped, and carved out enough time to sleep through any rough spots. My theory was that I’d replace the opiates or whatever that stuff does with sleep. In fact, I’d been doing this sleep dance for a while, shutting down the systems and floating on the edge of dreams — with great results: ideas, conversations with old friends and enemies long since dead or never been born, ’til then.

And this time almost from the beginning I could feel the subtle fog lift. Don’t misunderstand me: the medication saved my life, I really believe. But now i need whatever talent and courage I can muster. We’re in the midst of a transformative moment or wave or whatever we want to call it, and I am unwilling to coast or miss a precious moment of it. Things were going well on the professional front, our kids were in South Carolina for the summer with their grandparents, and Tina and I were finally making some headway in finally unpacking and fixing up the house we moved into 2 years or so ago.

In case you’re wondering, this is more personal than I intended or expected. We got Murphy 13 years ago after Tina and I suffered a miscarriage. We went down to the Charleston ASPCA in our heartbreak and peered into the cages at all these bouncy, jumpy puppies. But Tina’s mother put an end to that notion as she came out of the cages with the most pathetic excuse for an animal in her arms. So mangy that even after a fullbore shave down to the skin they still called him "Scruffy" on his cage door. She put the dog down on the ground near Tina sitting cross-legged, and the creature crawled on its belly trembling with fear right up into her lap. What’s the old line — you don’t choose your family. He sure did. And 10 months later our daughter Naomi was born.

Time to wrap this up, as Day at the Dog Races begins its wending way to a parallel galaxy where dogs outlive their masters. We go into it knowing the rules, the arc, the beginning, the glorious middle, the end. Yes, he’s Murphy as in law. No matter what, things will always screw up. Maybe he’ll screw up and not die on us. Who the hell knows.

9:30 PM Eastern 6:30 PM Pacific

starting July 31

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