I’m happy to say that metacool turns four today.  Huzzah!

Four years ago my wife vacationed attended a yoga camp or something in Hawaii and I stayed behind in California because of work commitments.  Me, at home by my lonesome and wondering how I might learn a bit about how ideas diffuse across the web, decided to indulge my 3rd-grade ambition to be a writer, and cranked up this blog by writing a one-liner about the merits of ugly cars.  Thus was born metacool.*

Some 838 posts later, I’m still at it, and I thank you for your patronage and for the great conversations.  The great thing about taking risks in life and just doing something is that unexpected things emerge, stuff you never anticipated would happen.  I can honestly say that this little blog landed me two great new jobs, a new hobby that routinely transports me to a state of flow, and an incredible group of new friends.  Via metacool I’ve been able to befriend people everywhere from the Middle East to Japan, and just about everywhere in-between.  I’ve quite literally met some of my heroes, too.  I am very grateful for all of these human experiences.

My wife has been my biggest supporter.  I can be a bit obsessive about my passion for the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.  For example, she came with me the day I visited the Ducati factory, the Pagani atelier, Fiorano raceway, and the Ferrari museum, all without even a pitstop for a coffee, let alone lunch.  That’s  love.  Please join me in thanking my wife for her patience and support over the past four years as I’ve dribbled out these posts.  I’d likely be a little fitter, our household a bit more together, and more rested than I am now if it weren’t for the time I spend writing stuff here.  But it is so fun, and I’ve learned so much.  My wife is just great, and words fail me.

Thanks for quattro, let’s go for otto.  And flow.

* actually, I already had a mailing list going on Yahoo Groups called metacool.  Blogging on TypePad, as it turned out, is much cooler than spamming your friends.

Never leave well enough alone.

Spring is in the air, and the team here at metacool world headquarters just returned from a week-long management retreat where, among other things, we decided to revamp the way we go to market.  It’s time for some market segmentation.  Instead of delivering metacool goodness through just one tube called metacool, we’ll now be delivering metacool goodness through two of these tube structures which we’re told make up this internet thing.  More than double the fun, and a new way for me, I mean us, to investigate some passion areas without boring the majority of you all to tears.

If you dig my coverage of the more visceral aspects of our designed environment, please tune your radios to my new blog called Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.  Where metacool is all about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is focused on the visceral side of things.  If I were to imagine a Venn diagram of sorts, then this new one would overlap 90% of its area with the older one.  One can’t understand the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life without understand the visceral sides of things, but many folks interested in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life bore easily when fed gearhead gnarlyness more than once a month.  Hence the segmentation. 

If it helps, allow me to sketch out a prototypical target audience member for each blog:

• metacool:  early forties, with 2.3 years of graduate school; enjoys a fine red wine and dines on gourmet Vietnamese cuisine at least 2x per week; can name the drummer on every Coltrane album; also reads the NYT, Winding Road, the Economist, and Monocle (but is unsure where the last publication is going); recently augmented the 1964 Aston Martin with a Breezer Uptown 8 bike.
• Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness:  mental age of 14 regardless of true physical age; likes music a whole lot but suffers from hearing loss from standing too near to too many aluminum-block Can-Am V8’s;  likes any number of fine cuisines but is equally comfortable with cheese doodles and a fine light beer from Golden, Colorado;  used to read Road & Track, Automobile, Car & Driver, Autoweek, Autosport, Racer, Motor Trend, Car, Air & Space, and Bicycling, but dumped all of those subscriptions for Winding Road alone; recently modified the 1964 Aston Martin with a supercharged Chevy small-block conversion, and added a Boeing Stearman to the internal combustion corral because of the sound it makes.  Secretly prays each night to receive a Ford rocket Galaxie from the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.  Or both.

Does that help?  In other words, I am both of these blogs, and they are both me.  I want to have a way to explore visceral stuff more deeply without turning off the rest of you.  I am mildly dismayed when metacool is called a "car blog" (it isn’t — I merely use cars as a lingua franca to talk about innovation), but I would love it if Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness were labled as such.  One of my favorite public intellectuals is Russell Davies, and all I’m really doing here is aping him or Kevin Kelly, each of whom maintain a nice collection of inter-related blogs.  Looking at what Russell does, hopefully Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is to metacool as eggsbaconchipsandbeans is to we’re as disappointed as you are.

This new blog is a working prototype.  The graphic design is rough, and some of you loyal readers will recognize some older content.  Thank you for patience and feedback as it moves forward.

Let me know what you think by dropping me a line or leaving me a comment.

AFAQS*:

• Why are you wasting your life blogging about cars?  Well, I don’t really blog about cars that much.  But I believe it is vitally important to understand the visceral side of things if we’re going to make much progress on planet Earth.  Why doesn’t everyone drive a fuel-efficient car?  Why doesn’t everyone ride a bike instead of driving a fuel-efficient car?  Why don’t we ride public transportation?  All of these have to do with what I call the challenge of making green red, and unless you dive deep in to our reptilian psyches as I plan to do here, I think you lose the big picture.
• Will there be less Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness on metacool?  No.  But there will be more at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.
• Will the character of metacool change?  I think so, but only gradually.  When I started writing metacool, I was but a lad in my early thirties without a care in the world and a hot 240-horsepower car in the garage.  Now I’m an old man with two kids, a mortgage, and a real job, and my hot car now gets out-dragged by a Camry from Hertz.  As I move through the world, I’m actually less interested overall in aesthetics and product-related stuff, and more interested by macro economics, psychology, and organizational dynamics.  I hope metacool continues to be interesting across those domains.

Oh my goodness, this has to be the most boring post I’ve ever written.  Let’s get back to business!

Ship it!  JFCI!

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

* Anticipated to be Frequently Asked Questions

Yeah, I dig the MacBook Air, too, but Apple’s big announcement of January 15th pales in comparison with big news coming out of metacool today: I’m very proud to announce that today we shipped yet another fantastic offering to market.  It’s much cooler than that other thing.

Coming from the same corporate gene pool, as it were, very little distinguishes this version from that of our last announcement in 2005 — they share not only total cuteness but an amazing list of features and functionality.  And yet each one is uniquely individual.  Look at this feature list and eat your heart out, Apple Design Team:

• a complex, powerful, yet low-power consumption bio-computer running a self-teaching, open-source operating system
• a huge amount of information storage capacity — won’t run out for decades, hopefully even a century
• completely cradle-to-cradle in terms of production materials
• low mass — all of this in a package only a few pounds heavier than the MacBook Air: a total of 8 pounds, 9 ounces, to be exact
• timeless aesthetics; built for the ages

Branding is still TBD.  Am going to sleep on that (I really need to sleep, come to think of it). 

HonestIy, I can’t say that this one is in any way better than the previous one — I love ’em both.  But, I would say that metacool’s software development process has certainly benefited from the real-world experience gained over the past 31 months of intense development activity.  To quote Indiana Jones, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage.

Sorry for the recent radio silence here at metacool. Everything is a-okay.  Been busy at conferences, endurance car races, taking care of the family, and work.  The good news is, I’m now swamped with interesting ideas.  It’ll all brew up in to some good blog fodder, I reckon.

Now, it’s time to crack open a tasty new book about Porsche 550 Spyders… a wonderful form of structured procrastination if there ever was one.

In the spirit of always being in beta, never leaving well enough alone,
and continuing to use this blog as an intellectual sandbox, the staff
of metacool have made a few small changes to this blog.

First, a shift from nouns to verbs.  Sharp-eyed web surfers will notice
that the topical categories on metacool are no longer nouns.  Instead
of “design”, there’s “designing”.  Innovation is now innovating,
leading has replaced leadership, and marketing is, well… marketing.
Doing seems more important to me than ever, and so the verbs have it.

Second, we’ve rounded up a group of books and placed them under the
heading of — hold on to your seat, folks — COOL BOOKS.  I find myself
going back to these again and again for clarity, insight, and
inspiration.  This list is partly for me, so that I can remember what I’ve read that worked for me.  Hopefully you’ll find it useful, too.