Rocky Top MBA

CMM April 16th, 2008

I will preface this email by stating two incredibly valuable experiences I had as a result of my online presence.

First, the Knoxville area tweet-up last week was really awesome. It was very cool to put faces with so many names, and I felt enriched by finding so many smart folks in my immediate area. I’m a big fan of “innovate or go home” as a life strategy, and I feel like a central component of innovation is the environment (sometimes through hostility or pain, othertimes through creative friction).  After having a great and thought-provoking lunch with the Knoxville twitter audience (on the patio in beautiful weather with a river and mountains for a backdrop), I feel great about the future of this community. On a side, Jack Lail from the Knox News Sentinel was a missed addition… but we can’t have everything. Maybe one day soon I’ll get a chance to meet him face-to-face.

Second, I was invited to participate in a political debate through American Republic Online around a year ago with a local Democratic party official in East TN. The topic was gas prices and profits in the oil industry. I made the argument that we shouldn’t beat up on oil companies for their profit margins (after all, they average between 8-12% margins after covering the extraoridnary overhead and R&D costs).  As a staunch free market advocate, I argued that the short-term solution was soncumer side tax-breaks gor gasoline and policy support behind alternative energy. Since then, the Republican presenital nominee John McCain has come out strong in support of both initatives. I’m not so vain as to think that I influenced that decision, but it is nice to have proof that I had similar thoughts over a year ago.

Lastly, my online presence has turned into a swamp and I’m stuck in quicksand. About the only elements getting attention these dates are my email and twitter account. My Google Reader is getting cleaned out around once a week, and my blog has been postless for quite some time. Some of this is due to my life getting a little hectic with some life changes taking place, some of it is getting oriented into my new job (where 90% of the information I hear is proprietary, confidential or requires fact verification). Regardless, I’ve been drowning and want to make things simple (again). I don’t know how to do that… but maybe I’ll figure it out.

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