This is a call for guest posts. Interested? Read on. The open-mic stage is officially open.

Over the three years that this blog has been in existence, I’ve rarely had people guest posting. Just 4 guest posts by my count. You can view the map of the  Guest Post trail here, and start browsing here.  It’s a rather eclectic bunch: George Gibson did a review of Predictably Irrational, Marigo Raftapoulos talked about video gaming in business, Dorian Taylor talked about his own take on the lean startup movement and Michael Michalko posted about how geniuses think.

I figured it’s time to get the guest posting thing a little more organized.

This is quite a demanding audience to write for.  But if you are up for the challenge of performing for a very tough-to-please and scarily knowledgeable crowd  (but one that is very generous with praise when it is pleased), and have something stimulating to offer, I am open to contributions.

You get noticed by a significant and high-quality audience (currently around 2300 regular RSS subscribers and about 17,000 – 20,000 visits a month), and if you can impress this lot, given the caliber of comments, you’ll get some high quality readers for your own blog and/or personal connections.  And I mean high quality. I am routinely surprised to find that some high-level exec or well-known entrepreneur, writer or professor has read something on this blog (personal high point: William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and cyberpunk pioneer, tweeting my Container Shipping post; can’t find the damn tweet now; should have bookmarked it. I doubt he’s a regular though). Scares me a bit, I admit, and I basically try not to let it worry me.

Rule #1: No purely commercial stuff or blatant self-promotion.

Rule #2: Your contribution has to be “Ribbonfarmesque.” If you don’t know what that means, spend some time reading stuff on the site.

Interested? Just cut-and-paste your contribution into this contact form. Or if you prefer, use the form to send me a proposal and if if I accept it, you can email me the thing as an attachment.

And please forward this to others who might be interested.

Venkat

p.s. In case regular readers are wondering why I am soliciting guest posts now, two reasons. First, I’ve got a VERY busy few months coming up and second, after years of wondering whether this blog has a distinct identity separate from my own writing voice, I’ve finally concluded it does. There is definitely a “Ribbonfarmesque” way of seeing the world and thinking/writing about it that many others share (the term was actually coined by a reader to describe somebody else’s work, so I am not trying to slap my brand on others’ styles!).

You may have noticed that in the last few weeks, I haven’t exactly been posting spectacular original content on this blog. A vacation and the simultaneous bootstrapping of two new writing outlets (the Trailmeme blog and the Be Slightly Evil email list), are part of the reason. The other part of the reason is that all my current ribbonfarmesque ideas are currently in the form of several rather demanding drafts (reading Gibbon’s 6-volume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” doesn’t exactly catalyze tweet-sized ideas). So rather than post hasty dreck, I figured I’d just point you to some of my posts on the Trailmeme blog that might interest you.

• In Rent vs. Buy and Digital Lifestyle Design I looked at what’s happening to an age-old decision due to the impact of future-of-work forces
• In The Marcus Aurelius School of Curation, I argue that information curation (an emerging new profession) is less like being a librarian, and more like being a stoic emperor. And yeah, this post is partly inspired by my current obsession with the history of Rome. Expect a lot of Rome references from me in upcoming writing. The fact that I was actually vacationing in Italy, and wandering around Pompeii, while reading the thing, probably helped burn the book into my head a lot more vividly.
• In The Eight Belts of Information Ninja-Hood I have one of my usual overworked metaphors.

These are just a sampling. There’s more stuff there. Between me and a colleague, that blog sees about 4 new posts a week. Subscribe to that blog if this vein of writing interests you. The Be Slightly Evil email list is turning into an interesting project as well, and after 4 experimental mailings, I am finally beginning to get a sense of how and what to write there. All you sociopath wannabes — subscribe if you haven’t already.

And oh yeah, the book is coming along nicely. I had some writer’s block going for a while, but things are back on track.

Lots of balls to juggle, but I am making my writing processes more aerodynamic all along, so you should see things back to normal here in a week or two. I have a couple of really interesting (to me at least) posts shaping up.

An Einstein quote that I disagree with is the following:

Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

It is the best known of various cautions against “intellectual greed.” I once interviewed at a university where there seemed to be a particularly strong fear of intellectual over-reach. Every faculty member I talked to had a word of caution about young researchers and “intellectual greed” — taking on too many, too big, or too wide-ranging a set of intellectual interests. If this is a sin — and it sort of sounds like one, which is why the biblical word “gluttony” seems more appropriate to me — I am certainly guilty. But if I am going to hell anyway, I might as well know why in a little more detail.

[Read more…]

I am headed out on a trip after a hectic week, so I didn’t have time to pipeline a new post for the week. Fortunately for me, I’ve reaped a bumper harvest of unusually good reading on the Web in the last week, so I thought I’d share a selection. If you follow @ribbonfarm, you may have already seen these. I put the selections on a convenient trail if you want to jump right in, otherwise read on for my quick commentary. Warning: I read the kind of stuff I write, so all these are long-to-epic size reads.

[Read more…]

It’s time for yet another Ribbonfarm update. The big news, since the last update, is that I’ve incorporated Ribbonfarm as a small, slightly evil corporation, and started figuring out how exactly to take you guys for everything you’ve got.  Anyway, here goes. Lots of items to cover:

1. The “Be Slightly Evil” Email List and Corporate Value
2. Ribbonfarm Inc., Q1 report, including spin-offs, layoffs and the like
3. Status of the Tempo book project
4. Roundup of Articles

[Read more…]

My latest post on the trailmeme blog, Four-Hour Workweek or Executricks? should be of interest to ribbonfarm readers.

There are two major views of the brave new world of work that is being created by social media tools. The first is the free agent dream of quitting the cubicle, striking out on your own, and settling into a comfortable, undemanding and lucrative niche by 40. Tim Ferriss’  4-Hour Work Week is the how-to bible of this gang. This is the gang that believes in overt lifestyle design, mini-retirements, a public “personal brand” and the like. The lesser-known dream is an under-the-radar version best described in Stanley Bing’s Executricks. This looks very similar, but actually sounds more deliciously subversive: using the exact same tools to “retire at work,” develop an under-the-radar personal brand, and achieve covert lifestyle design…Which view is smarter? Which view do you subscribe to? Let me frame the decision for you; it is subtler than you think.

Read the full post

I am planning to move my more tech-based/topical/practical “future of work” writing to the Trailmeme blog, leaving the more conceptual stuff here. Kind of a relief, since I like talking about the relationship between technology and work/life styles at a practical level, but have felt, of late, that that stuff doesn’t quite fit with the more philosophical ribbonfarm mode. So if you like that kind of stuff, you may want to subscribe to the trailmeme blog as well.

Some long overdue social media housekeeping matters. Ribbonfarm now has a facebook page, dedicated Twitter feed and (this last is a rerun news item) a pretty active “Ribbonfarm Hopper” blog on Posterous containing raw material that eventually percolates into my original pieces here. Hook into any or all of these channels. Some details for those who are interested and/or want to know why connecting might be worthwhile.

[Read more…]