This week marks nine years of my exploring the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.

I started metacool because I was bored one Saturday afternoon. My wife was out of town for the weekend, I was bored, and as usual I was thinking about cars, meaning, business, aesthetics, technology, life and everything. As a name in action, metacool already existed as a Yahoo Group I used to blast out interesting (at least I thought) articles to a group of unsuspecting and uncomplaining friends. Since I had time on my hands, and because I thought it would be cool to write about my favorite beautiful-ugly car, I decided to ape my internet heroes Seth Godin and Joi Ito by cranking out my own blog.

Thank goodness. I really didn’t care then if anyone read my stuff, and I don’t care too much today, either — at least not in terms of having a big audience or lots of eyeballs or unique visitors or any of those stats that’ll drive you crazy if you let them. Writing down my evolving thoughts here has helped me learn new things and to refine what I know. And if one person reads them and enjoys them or fires off a dubious email to me, that’s gravy. It’s connected me to people who I otherwise would never have met in Real Life, and many of those folks have become good friends. For that — and the ability to pollute the interwebs with my various obsessions du jour — I am supremely thankful. Yet another example of how much you can learn by doing.

Not everything has been rosy here. To paraphrase a shopping cart expert friend of mine, “theTwitter is tyrrany,” at least when it comes to blogs like this one. It’s so tempting to read something interesting, think a few incoherent thoughts for a few milliseconds, and then tweet it out to the world. “Hey, check this out, you’ll love it!” But why? But how? And so what? Such tyrrany is why I only wrote a handful of things over the past few years (thank goodness for the Nissan DeltaWing!) and almost let this blog trickle away to nothing.

But in times such as these, when everyone else is busy tweeting out cryptic sub-140 musings and posting photos of cute little witty kittens, I believe it’s a good strategic move to position oneself on a different sort of mountain top. At least that’s what I learned from Porter! So, as you may have noticed, I’ve renewed my vows to metacool and blogging, and am trying to tweet less and write more.

To punctuate all of that, I’m about to ship a new version of metacool. Coming soon you’ll be able to log on to a new and improved site. Nothing revolutionary, but with refined aesthetics and navigation, amongst other things. Still the same, but better, leveraging a much more modern technology platform. Hopefully I’ll be able to innovate the way Porsche does with its 911: in automotive terms the new metacool will be modern like the 991, but still highly evocative of the 901.

Thanks for reading, and as always, please let me know what you think. Your questions, comments, and thoughts are always most welcome.

Thank you.