Yep, I’m leaving Engadget

It’s true, my last day as Engadget’s editor-in-chief will be late next month (my official announcement is here).

Without question, this has been the hardest decision I’ve ever made, but I know it’s the right one. And as much as I’m looking forward to new challenges (and grateful they’re not Motorola-related), I’m also really excited to see Engadget continue its evolution with Josh at the helm, and as part of the AOL Tech network (where I’ll continue to play an advisory role as editor-at-large). Pete and I are both pretty happy with how things worked out, and are definitely looking ahead. (You’re following us on Twitter, right?)

As much as wish I could, for the time being I really can’t talk very much about the details of the new company (which does not yet have a name). I’m pretty stoked though — promise, you’ll hear more soon.

Joystiq turns four!

Hard to believe Joystiq is four years old today! I remember the old days with Pete and Ben Zackheim (who’s actually still in the AOL Games family), working to get it off the ground, helping fill in stories for Joystiq between posts on Engadget. Four bits of Joystiq trivia:

• Joystiq’s first E3 (Engadget’s second) is where we all brainstormed with Cat Schwartz on the infamous DS vs. PSP video.
• The following E3, former co-editor Vlad Cole (now at Microsoft) was writing a book on all-Pizza diets. This, of course, meant Engadget and Joystiq editors all wound up eating basically only pizza. Not sure I’ve ever lost the weight.
• James Ransom-Wiley has been with Joystiq since early July 2004, making him the longest-tenured editor there. Go James!
• Contrary to popular belief, Kotaku actually started in October of 2004, seemingly as a response to Joystiq.

My favorite trade show of the year is usually E3 — partly because it means we get to regroup with Joystiq and do it up together. Looking forward to that next month, and happy birthday Joystiq!

Bonus trivia: Last E3 myself, Chris, and Pete were all ticketed for jaywalking — at a crosswalk. For some reason my ticket was withdrawn, but Pete and Chris still had to pay theirs. Pics or it didn’t happen, right? Here you go.

Page one!

Excuse me for a moment of self indulgence here, but I noticed my search referrers were going up for my first name — and as it turns out, I’ve gone from page two to page one (number ten, to be exact) for “ryan.” Okay, I know it’s nothing compared to Veronica, who claims the number one spot for her name, but watch your back, Ryan Adams, because number nine is only a matter of time now.

Joy of Tech brings me joy

I know Steve is a daily Engadget reader, but I never fully understood why until now.

Mentoring the next generation of gadget bloggers

Late last year Peter and I began a mentorship program with some students of the Torah Academy of Bergen County; Eli, Chaim, and later Charlie and Tzvi got together to begin writing an editing a gadget blog aimed at teenagers casually interested in technology, dubbed the TeenTechBlog. These kids have definitely made a lot of progress over the past six months. Starting a site and following it through isn’t as easy as it looks, and they’ve have been continually upping their game despite their demanding school schedule.

I think the question I’m most often asked by people not already in the industry is, “How do I break into writing about technology?” The answer is pretty simple: start writing, keep writing (even when the initial luster has worn off, even if you’re not collecting droves of readers and scads of review units), and with any luck you’ll hone your skill and catch your break — not unlike the path the crew at TeenTechBlog are already on.

“Annoying habits” ad irony

You know, if you’re going to do a feature called “The 10 Most Annoying Habits of Technology Companies”, you’d do best to vet your own site first — especially the page dedicated to annoying advertising.

Although to be fair, they do disclaim being guilty of the same, and I’m sure the site’s editorial staff doesn’t approve of that kind of advertising nor want it on the site. Trust me, I understand as well as any editor that the people making the content don’t always have much or any say in how their property advertises — but that’s both a double-edged sword and a conversation for another time.

Does Twittering mean you blog less? The answer might surprise you.

The other Twitter-related post I’ve been wanting to write lately regards the correlation between the decline of “regular” blogging (which I’m now referring to as macroblogging), and microblogging (specifically, Twittering). Ask anyone with a blog that also spends time Twittering, and they’ll likely tell you that as their microblogging has gone up, their macroblogging has gone down. That’s definitely been my take — I’ve been Twittering a lot more in the last six months, and I feel like it’s has a substantial impact on the volume of posting on my personal site.

So I decided to plot the numbers to prove the theory that Twittering was, in fact, causing my personal blogging to atrophy. I had a very clear image in my head of what the two lines would look like: the blog would be trending down ever so slowly, taking nosedives during busy months, while the Twitter line would be going up pretty fast. So you can imagine my utter surprise when I hit the render chart button and the following showed up. More…

Microblogging needs platform independence

Although I’m fairly ill-equipped to delve deep into burgeoning distributed social networking “standards”, there are some clear trends in play pointing toward the need for microblogging to become a platform independent activity. (The multiple Twitter outages over the last week are only the icing on this cake.)

Although blogging can trace its roots to zine / underground publishing culture, it wasn’t until the first blog CMSs landed in 1999 and 2000 (like Blogger and Movable Type) that mainstream audiences experimented with self-publishing. Those blogging at the time might remember what a highly platform-based experience it was. RSS and other forms of one:any (not just one:many) aggregation hadn’t yet come into widespread use, meaning some of those early platforms fed right back into their own siloed communities. This was especially apparent in the case of LiveJournal, which was really popular back then. Way late to RSS, LiveJournal instead relied on a light social networking system that aggregated posts to groups of friends using the service. Sounds familiar. Of course, blogging eventually grew up and out of its early stages into something far more horizontal and platform independent, ensuring the activity of blogging didn’t tie users to just one system and set of relationships.

Although Twitter should be clearly wary of users eventually fleeing for a distributed, decentralized, relationship-based cloud of microblogging, I think most in the know would agree that ultimately it’s what the medium needs to make the next step. Because of Twitter’s dependence on relationships, though, that transition probably won’t come easily; perhaps that’s where services like FriendFeed and other meta-aggregators step in as the glue for disparate, distributed life-content apps. Or perhaps that’s the tack Twitter needs to build into its own business, ensuring it makes the transition from early platform to future technology leader.

Veronica is blowing up!

So everybody found out today that V’s heading to Revision3 to do Tekzilla — but that’s only one of her two new regular post-Mahalo gigs. But besides the other thing (which is equally if not more awesome) did I mention she also had a song written about her recently? And did an interview with RCRD LBL? Looks like I’m gonna have to step up my game to keep pace!

Culture + charts / graphs = new sites

Despite being a cat owner I’ve never really been super into LOLcats — but this whole culture + charts and graphs mashup thing? Yeah, I can get behind that. Prepare to see the jamphat meme perpetuated indefinitely through the newly launched culturegraph (done by my pal Jeremy, among others), as well as graphjam (by the Cheezburger people), two sites with the same concept launching on the same day. I feel another chart coming on…

Excellent.