Thursday, October 18, 2007

Alive!

In case you are wondering about this blog, it is still alive and I will keep posting, just that I haven't devised a plan for it: mission, audience, editorial line, content and resources.

I started this blog in January 2006 as an experiment. In November '05 I decided to invest my savings in the stock market because there was what I thought the opportunity of a lifetime, to invest in AMD bull-side before the whole world discovered and understood the technical superiority of its products, that was so great, that it will lead to an historical role inversion between AMD and Intel. By January I was inspired by Sharikou's blog, as an opportunity to express authentic opinions, not toned down by 'political correctedness' or other considerations, I got to see that regardless of how complex a subject may be, like comparing architectures of processors, it was in principle possible to gather together an audience/community to circulate ideas and to develop them.

Early enough I realized that the blog that inspired me for my own effort wasn't just a free expression of opinion, but that it gravely suffered from lack of intellectual honesty. Then it came the great dissapointment of losing money and credibility by the disastrous turn of events after the announcement of Intel's Core architecture; and once I realized that the same reasons that led me to invest in AMD-bull side, an exponential growth, could lead me to the opposite if the crucial parameters were slightly lower, indicating an exponential implosion. Thus, I 'flipped', and allienated beyond the point of reconciliation the core of the audience of this blog. Then, I got interested in the subject of volatility management through equity options, and that further allienated the audience. It gets even worse: the community I was participating in, that fed traffic to this blog, the Yahoo message board, underwent a fork after the change of format, and my faction, the more educated and seasoned participants, successively moved a second time to Investor Village; but that is not all, since the more educated and seasoned participants of the AMD Yahoo message board were naturally very entrenched die-hard supporters of AMD, they gave a very optimistic bias to the board, and after the successive rounds of AMD crashing and burning, the bias depopulated it.

For those reasons, this blog, that began as a project to complement a community to develop ideas around the topic of technology investment, turned into a personal project, even intimate, without a clear content orientation; and this evolution highlighted several issues: If I am going to have a low-traffic blog, there is no reason to put up with the very annoying inconsistencies of blogger/blogspot or any other free blog service, I could mount my own domain and use the tools that better suit my purposes. Another thing is the issue of privacy: A more personal project may require to lose privacy, but since I am a professional that has been called and may be called in the future by Intel, AMD and other companies, being publicly associated with very controversial or critical opinions hurt my possibilities to work, and hurt more where I am more knowledgeable/skilled and thus more opinionated... Finally there is the issue of content: What's the community of ideas that this project will concern itself with?

I have been meditating about these issues for a while and chose to slow things down to a 'hybernation rythm' while I am undergoing important personal and professional changes to see where are the strengths of this project and where they may go. Fortunately, I am at an advanced stage on these transitions and the panorama is becoming clearer. The visit statistics tells me that there is still a worldwide audience for this project, I am still participating in fora, and there are mountains of good content to publish, so, I can say that for the time being this project will continue to be alive and developing links.

1 comments:

howling2929 said...

welcome back. Let me know what will be the new editorial line.

I was to profit from a break from work to write a 3 part series on intel and AMD logistics.