Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

With me moving on as part of the restructuring, and the company in the midst of transition, we decided it's best to end Earthling's run. I say "we" in all honesty; assessing the situation and available resources, this is the path I recommended, and my leadership agreed.

Since I last wrote I've been working on how best to handle the "sunsetting," and what to do with all of the stuff Earthling has produced. In addition to the 459 blog entries I've published and the 1739 comments you've contributed, there are lots of other things that have come out of Earthling. When thinking about wrapping it up, it's important to think about what's behind all of those things and the larger world they connect to. And that can be complicated.

To help inform these decisions, I've been reading the advice of a few people, including Josh Hallett, Jake McKee, and Jeremiah Owyang. Jake McKee has written about the question for companies as the bus test -- i.e. could your corporate communications vehicle still persevere if the main participant were hit by a bus. Jeremiah has kept a single blog throughout his career transitions, and that's been tremendously valuable for him. In my case, I came on board to create and run a blog for EarthLink, so I knew going in that Earthling would be something of a joint interest between me and the company and would be deeply tied to both parties. Josh has recently been observing the EarthLink situation and asking some strategic and practical questions about how an individual corporate blogger and the company he/she represents should best deal with transitions. I'm working through that in realtime, and through these last couple of blog entries hopefully I can offer some insight into how I'm doing it.

Over the past two years, I poured a great deal of myself into this blog and tried to avoid too many arbitrary distinctions between Dave, the person and Dave, the guy who represents EarthLink on Earthling. I still think this approach is the right one, although it does make it difficult to make a clean break. I'm grateful the company has for the most part trusted me with hashing that out. In part to help me sort all of that out, here are the parts and how I'm accounting for them. This is an active process and I may be adding thoughts here:

• The blog entries, comments, trackbacks - I'm leaving Earthling up as an archive in case it can be useful to future readers. I'm also respectful of preserving the information here so that inbound links don't turn in to dead ends. I'll change all of the templates to make it clear that what remains is a static archive, and comments and trackbacks will no longer be accepted.
  
• The Flickr stream - For the past couple of years I've been keeping both my personal photos and EarthLink-related photos on the anearthling account, at www.flickr.com/photos/anearthing. I think that's given you a better sense of who I am and hopefully made me more accessible and easier to connect with. I've gone back and forth on how to handle this, and I think it's best for me to start a new Flickr account for myself and keep Anearthling around at least until the Flickr Pro status runs out. I'll probably mirror some of the same photos from there on my account, to make sure they don't go away. On Flickr, my new home will be www.flickr.com/photos/extraface. Add me as a contact there if you'd like to continue to see my often goofy photo stream.
  
• The RSS feed - I'm working on helping EarthLink create a new feed just for announcements, and one tough decision was whether to have that take the place of the old Earthling feed, or be a new feed that people opt-in to. I decided on the latter, and I see it this way -- it's a completely different vehicle, with different purposes, schedule, and utility. So it should have its own, new feed. As soon as that's done, I'll be passing that address along.
  
• The product blogs and employee blog directory - The product blogs will continue in the hands of their respective owners, and I'll make their placement prominent on the front of Earthling. I'll be taking down the employee directory, but welcome readers to connect with me online and vice-versa.
  
• The relationships - I've had the privilege of interacting with thousands of people through Earthling, via various forms of online communication and in person. I've helped answer questions, resolved issues, gotten and given advice, connected product teams and leadership with their users, connected people to each other, and just gotten to know a whole lot of people. Fortunately I don't see those relationships as changing much, and I get to take all of that with me, and hope that many of you will continue to keep in touch.

I'll be publishing a final blog entry next week, and will include my future contact information and more on where to find me online then.