Category Archives: Blogging

So… I Started A Food Blog. Meet “Justin Loves Food.”

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So… if you’ve been asking yourself, why I haven’t been blogging here, it’s because I still struggle with what to write about.

This blog has predominantly been about the cross section of technology and people.   Over the last 3 months, I haven’t seen a whole lot that I could say that hasn’t been said by others.  Plus there isn’t a whole lot that new that’s getting my mental neurons working in the way which forces me to run to my computer and write.

I still want to write but just had to find something else to write about.  If you know me, you know that one of my passions is food.  My joke is that “eating is a lifestyle that I take breaks from.”

For me, food has always been something that’s brought parts of my various communities together.   When my family gets together around the dinner table, we will sit around and chat, even hours after all the food has been cleared away.  Some of my favorite times here in DC have been sitting around my dining room table with close friends and a few bottles of wine in the middle of the table.

Food has always been something that I’ve been fascinated by and enjoyed discovering.

I’ve decided that it’d be the subject of my new blog.  The blog is called Justin Loves Food.

This doesn’t mean that I’ll completely stop writing this blog.  I’m sure that I’ll come back to it from time to time.  My day job is still working at a Web startup.  As I run across new things and ideas, I’ll be here to chronicle it for you.

In the mean time, I’m going to chronicle my culinary adventures on Justin Loves Food.  Check it out, I’ve already gotten about 15 posts up.

In some of the posts, I’ll write about very geo-specific things, like a restaurant in a specific part of the country but what I’ll try and do is always impart something that I learned while eating there so that there will always be something for someone.

Send me your feedback – jthorp@gmail.com

Re-finding my muse…

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Wikipedia describes a muse to be the “goddesses or spirits who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths.”

Well as some of you have noticed, I have taken a small break from blogging.  I felt like I had lost my muse.   I didn’t know what to write about.  A lot of things that I was writing about and thinking about was boring myself so I decided to withdraw, reconnect with what’s happening in the world, and start up again.  This is me starting up again.

It’s funny because it all started right around when I listened to the audio of Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s talk from SXSW about how to be a better blogger.  They asked the question, “what are you obsessed with?

After thinking about it, I found this question increasingly hard to answer.   Do I want to be the guy who blogs about social media? Not really.  Do I want to be the guy who writes about a new CSS problem?  Not really.  Do I want to be the guy who reposts the random thing that I find on Digg or Google Reader?  Only if I can really add something to the convo.

I needed to figure out where I could focus my intellectual fire power, which led to me thinking more about where generally my passions lie.

I love what I do… commnity management. I love serving people.  I love helping people connect together. I love helping communities form, especially when it’s in a way that may not have happened otherwise. These are the things that I’m obsessed with.

I do love technology but for me it really is just a means to an end and not the end.   It absolutely doesn’t matter to me whether or not community is built using technology.  All too often I feel like we lean on technology too hard and end up missing out on the great memories that could be made with offline community.

This is the stuff that I want to write about.  This is the stuff that I think about all the time.  It’s what I’m obsessed with.

So… expect more cool things coming from this blog soon.


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The Explorer of the Past

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I just started reading the the book “In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace” by David G. Post. He starts out the prologue with a quote from Lytton Strachey, which is pretty rad. I’d thought i’d share…

If the explorer of the past is wise, he will… attack his subject in unexpected places;  he will fall upon the flank and the rear;  he will shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined.  He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with careful curiosity.


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Taking Time To Reflect

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I think one thing this blog has taught me is the importance of taking time each day to reflect and write about those reflections.  The act of sitting down and trying to write about how an experience moved me forces me to think harder about that experience and understand it deeper.  Plus I get the added benefit of sharing my reflections with all of you.   You get to tell me about your similar experiences.  We all get to grow together.

“Blogging Is A First Draft of History”

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I talk to a lot of folks about the idea of blogging and how using it as a tool for being open and transparent about their thoughts, experiences, and opinions could help them and their businesses or organizations.

Though… for quite a few people, the idea of writing freaks them out.  They start over thinking what they’re writing and more or less take themselves out of what they’re writing.  This makes the blog infinitely less compelling.

In an interview with Jon Stewart, Arianna Huffington shares some pearls of wisdom. She calls blogging a “first draft of history” and encourages people to not over think what they’re writing.  She considers blogging to be more like e-mailing with your friends.

Watch the video.

Micah Baldwin on Company Blogging

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My buddy Micah Baldwin just wrote an awesome post about company blogging. There was one section in particular that I wanted to share…

Most companies make the assumption that they know what they what their customers want to hear from them. It usually falls into a couple of categories:

  • Press Releases
  • Product Releases
  • Pricing Changes

What companies fail to realize is that their customers would rather engage with them than be educated by them. What companies fail to realize is that they are PEOPLE and PEOPLE use their products or services. And, PEOPLE, like to engage with PEOPLE.

Where Are The Local Bloggers That Will Replace Local Newspapers?

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I grew up in Lansing, MI.  There the newspaper is the Lansing State Journal. Well, today they made the announcement that they would be changing around the print edition of their paper.

Sports will begin on the back page of the Local/State section rather than as a stand-alone section.

Lansing is a “Friday Night Lights“-like town where high school (or “prep”) sports is a BIG thing.  In Lansing, Michigan State University sports is a BIG thing.  It feels like a bit of a tragedy that these are being relegated to a page or two in the back of the local section of the paper.

Seems like this signals an on coming coming void.  Local hometown newspapers are starting to fade away.  Who’s going to report local news?

Even in Washington, DC,  the Washington Post’s Metro section is pretty piss poor.  For local news there, I use blogs like Living In the District, We Love DC, and DCist.

There is a real opportunity for a set of local blogs to rise up outside of the major metropolitan areas, (NYC, LA, SF, DC).   Who is going to write the local blog for Cheboygan, MI or Erie, PA?  Who is going to write the blog about high school and college sports?

People still need their news.  Who’s going to create the news business that’ll innovate and thrive in our current economic downturn?

Blogging Because I Can’t Have Coffee with 150 People Per Day

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If you know me, you know that one of my favorite things is having coffee, lunch, beers, dinner… whatever, with friends. Love talking about what’s going in life and digging deep.  Thursday, I had the pleasure of meeting and having coffee/lunch with a lot of really great and amazing people.  It was such a blast.

As much as I’d like to think otherwise, meeting folks face to face is not a scalable method of staying in touch with my entire community of friends.  As the number of friends I have grows, the number of hours in the day doesn’t.  Also,  I’ve met a lot of folks from many different parts of the country or the world yet I can’t be in all different parts of the country or the world at the same time.

So… you leave yourself with the quandary, how do you keep in touch with all these people?

For me, this blog has played a major role, in my ability to stay in touch with all of you.  Hopefully, when you read my blog posts, you can “hear my voice” and see me coming through in what I write.  Hopefully reading my blog posts kind of feels like you’re sitting across the table from me at Starbucks.

It’s not that I want this blog to be a replacement for that person to person interaction but I want to have some mechanism for staying in touch with you all between when we’d typically see each other face to face.  I want to maintain that level of community.

Part of the promise of the blog is that it this won’t just be me talking.  As much as I love talking, it’s definitely not as fun as being in a conversation… being in community.

Please comment.  Tell me what you’re thinking  Tell me when you agree with what I say or when you think I’m fully of crap (which I’m confident is quite often.)  Let me know what your blog is and I’ll try and read that too.

Together, we can really create what my friend Shel likes to call a “global neighborhood.”

How a Local Washington DC Specialty Wine & Beer Store Could Use Social Media To Build Community

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I was up at Target in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC the other day looking for pants.  As I was leaving, I noticed a specialty wine & beer store across the street called D’Vines.  Being a pretend wine & beer connoisseur, I walked over there to check it out.

What I found was a plethora of craft beers.  Jack pot!!!  There was everthing from Brooklyn’s Black Chocolate Stout to Old Chub to Oaked Arrogant Bastard Ale.  Who knew that Stone Brewery made an Oaked Arrogant Bastard Ale ?!?!?!

I was talking with the guy behind the counter and it sounds like they have a guy who’s their beer scout.  He travels, tastes beers, and then orders them for the store. (What a sweet job)  I asked how often they got new stuff in.  He said it varies.  They don’t have anything on their Web site, accept an address.

I think this is the PERFECT opportunity where they could use social media as a way to build community around beer & wine and their store, which will ultimately increase sales.

People that love specialty beers and wines LOVE them.  So you need some way to keep connected with those customers.   You need to win their hearts and minds so that when they’re looking to drop $15-20 for a six pack of beer that they do it with you and not someone else.

Simply, the store could get something like a Twitter account or a blog just to tell people about when they have new kinds of beer that come in.  I’d love this.  I’d know when I needed to go back and check stuff out.

If they had wine or beer tastings and I knew about it, I’d definitely head up there and probably spend more money.

So… that better connects me with the store.  What about connecting me with the other store patrons?

They should go to the kids at Living Social.  They have their AWESOME beer review app, where you can log and review what beers you like or want to try.  It’d be awesome if there was some way for the store to say within the app what kinds they had in stock and let you see what other store patrons had said about those specific beers.

By doing this kind of stuff, I’d think you could take what would seem to be an occasional trickle of customers and turn it into a steady flow of regulars.  It’s building a community of passionate users.

TechCrunch Redesigned – Who Knew?

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Wednesday, TechCrunch wrote a blog post say essentially, “as most of you have already seen, TechCrunch launched a redesign.“  Well, I didn’t notice.  I read TechCrunch in my RSS reader.

The TechCrunch audience is pretty technically savvy.  I can imagine a majority of their readers use RSS.

I wonder how many noticed the redesign before they said something.