Note: while the main stream of liveblogging will be over at the Tempobook blog, I will be cross-posting a weekly summary/itinerary on ribbonfarm. This is the first one. If you want to join in for this week’s action, post your comments on the original post. If you want the blow-by-blow liveblogging, subscribe to the Tempobook blog.

Here’s the itinerary for week 1, with approximate days/times and a partial itinerary of planned events. Post a comment if you want to do something at any of these locations or any obvious waypoints.

Tuesday, May 3

Morning: micro-meetup at Caffe Amouri in Vienna (a DC suburb) at 11 AM with readers Benjamin Eason and Julio Rodriguez. Join in if you’re around.

Afternoon: drive to Baltimore to check out the Beehive Baltimore, a coworking spot I’ve always been meaning to check out. Julio will be riding along and I’ll get to test my in-car iPhone based video interview rig. Fingers crossed.

Evening: drop Julio off and drive on to Wilmingon, Delaware.  Why? Stay tuned.  Plan for the night is to couchsurf.

Wednesday, May 4

Drive leisurely north to Albany, NY, stopping randomly along the way. Holler if you are along the obvious route. Will probably make a stop in New Jersey somewhere. Plan is to camp out at an old friend’s home for the night.

Thursday, May 5 and Friday, May 6

Drive to Montreal. Seb Paquet has kindly offered to host me for a couple of days and I’ll also be meeting up with Daniel Lemire.  Trying to pull together a talk about the book for the group Seb runs, Technologies et savoirs. I thought it means “Technology is our Savior” but apparently it means “Technology and Knowledge.” Good. I don’t do Messianism well.

Saturday, May 7 and Sunday May 8

Get myself to Ann Arbor, MI by Sunday night, weaving vaguely through Ottawa, the Lake Ontario shoreline and Toronto. Haven’t made any concrete plans yet, so I am very open to ideas. I’ll stop somewhere if I can find free/cheap  accommodations (hint, hint), otherwise it is a straight dash to Ann Arbor where I have accommodations.

Here’s the itinerary for week 1, with approximate days/times and a partial itinerary of planned events. Post a comment if you want to do something at any of these locations or any obvious waypoints.

Tuesday, May 3

Morning: micro-meetup at Caffe Amouri in Vienna (a DC suburb) at 11 AM with readers Benjamin Eason and Julio Rodriguez. Join in if you’re around.

Afternoon: drive to Baltimore to check out the Beehive Baltimore, a coworking spot I’ve always been meaning to check out. Julio will be riding along and I’ll get to test my in-car iPhone based video interview rig. Fingers crossed.

Evening: drop Julio off and drive on to Wilmingon, Delaware.  Why? Stay tuned.  Plan for the night is to couchsurf.

Wednesday, May 4

Drive leisurely north to Albany, NY, stopping randomly along the way. Holler if you are along the obvious route. Will probably make a stop in New Jersey somewhere. Plan is to camp out at an old friend’s home for the night.

Thursday, May 5 and Friday, May 6

Drive to Montreal. Seb Paquet has kindly offered to host me for a couple of days and I’ll also be meeting up with Daniel Lemire.  Trying to pull together a talk about the book for the group Seb runs, Technologies et savoirs. I thought it means “Technology is our Savior” but apparently it means “Technology and Knowledge.” Good. I don’t do Messianism well.

Saturday, May 7 and Sunday May 8

Get myself to Ann Arbor, MI by Sunday night, weaving vaguely through Ottawa, the Lake Ontario shoreline and Toronto. Haven’t made any concrete plans yet, so I am very open to ideas. I’ll stop somewhere if I can find free/cheap  accommodations (hint, hint), otherwise it is a straight dash to Ann Arbor where I have accommodations.

It’s been quite an insane few weeks, but finally I can cut loose and have some fun with my free agency. Tempo is now on Amazon.com. The early “Stealth Edition” on Lulu has been retired (sorry no more discounts until Amazon decides to offer some; I am doing my best to get the Kindle edition out as soon as possible though). The book site is up and running. I’ve also put most of my stuff into storage in preparation for a nomadic summer, based out of the Barbarian city of Las Vegas. The main act is a major road trip, spread across two legs, across most of the lower 48 states of the US. Here’s the rough map of the route. The first leg of the trip will be DC to Vegas, between next Monday (May 2) and approximately May 24.

The detailed logistics are in the inaugural post on the Tempo blog. If you’d like to meet me and participate in the road trip, click through and post a comment on that post. I am closing comments on this post to avoid confusion.

The immediate purpose of the road trip is to jump-start the Tempo blog and get the conversation around the book going in an interesting way. I will be live-blogging the entire trip in a Tempo-themed way, mostly in short-post, photo-blog and video-blog formats.  After ribbonfarm and the Be Slightly Evil list, the Tempo site is going to be my third major online property, and I am really hoping I can get good at the photo/video/short format/high frequency model I have planned for that site.

More broadly, the idea is to simply explore different places, meet different people and restock the hopper for all my writing with fresh experiences, conversations and other stimulating raw material. One of the dangers of blogging is that it is easy to get stale and start repeating yourself, drawing on fading memories of the same raw material over and over, especially if you don’t have a regular job feeding you live experiences to reflect upon. I hope the road trip recharges my writing.

It’s been insane getting ready for this trip (you’ll see glimpses of that once I start the liveblogging on Monday night), but I am hoping it will be worth it, and I am really looking forward to meeting some of the really curious characters I’ve met through ribbonfarm.

Before you click on over to the main post about the road trip, a couple more requests:

1. If you’ve already read all or part of the book, I’d really appreciate a quick comment on the Reader Responses page.
2. Now that the regular edition is out on Amazon, if you were planning on writing a review on your own blog, Amazon, or somewhere else, go right ahead. I’d appreciate a link to tempobook.com in addition to the link to the Amazon listing.
3. If you were planning on playing the Tempo Tracer game at the back of the Stealth Edition, It would be a lot of fun if you finish the book, pass it on, and send in your picture sometime in the next few weeks

So head on over to the main post about the road trip.

p.s. Thanks to everybody who bought the Stealth Edition and helped fund this trip: I sold over 200 copies in less than a month.

p.p.s As expected there were some oopses with the Stealth Edition. Many US-based readers got copies with a misprinted page 12. Get the corrected page here. Readers in the UK and Europe appear to have received copies with all the apostrophes missing. Ouch. Sorry, but I can’t really fix that.

p.p.p.s Yes, regular programming on ribbonfarm and Be Slightly Evil will continue as usual.

Update – 4/28/11: the Stealth Edition has now been discontinued. Please check out the book site and buy the regular edition, available from Amazon.com. Thanks to the over 200 people who bought the Stealth Edition and get the buzz going.

Two and a half years after I began scribbling my first notes, my first book Tempo is finally sneaking out into the marketplace. Today, I am releasing an early stealth edition. It is exactly the same as the regular edition to come in about 6 weeks, except that this edition has a) a nice early release discount and b) an extra page at the end with details of a little experiment designed to get some word-of-mouth going. If you choose to participate in the experiment, you can get the ebook free later (the experiment involves giving your copy away).

You can get the Stealth edition via Lulu at 30% off. A reader informs me that the coupon APRILREAD gets you an additional discount, through the end of April.

The regular edition (without the word-of-mouth experiment) should be out on Amazon.com by May 15 or so.  This Stealth Edition will be discontinued at that time.

I already released this last Friday on the Be Slightly Evil mailing list, and sold just over a hundred copies on the opening weekend. Let me address the two most common questions immediately:

1. eBook edition: The eBook edition won’t be out for several months. I’ll try to get the Kindle edition at least out by July/August or so. Other formats will follow.
2. International availability: If you are NOT in the US or Canada, Lulu DOES deliver internationally, but the shipping costs seem to be highly variable, ranging from reasonable in the UK and Australia, to somewhat expensive in Norway to ridiculously expensive in some parts of Eastern Europe. Check before you hit “submit.” If it is too expensive, you may want to wait for the regular or ebook editions. I am trying to get the cheapest possible distribution lined up.

A quick request: if you plan on reviewing the book, please hold off till May 15. The regular edition should be available by then, and I’ll probably do some sort of official launch event around then. I don’t plan on overtly promoting the book beyond this blog until you guys have had a chance to read the book, and I can get a good email conversation going with at least some of you about it. I am taking this one slow and easy.

Note: if you were one of the early buyers, and your version has a misprinted page 12, download the corrected page here. My sincere apologies if you received the flawed copy.

So much for the basics. Let me share a few tidbits about the story so far:

[Read more…]

When I went free agent a few weeks ago, I solicited micro-sponsorships to help keep ribbonfarm free.  Thanks to my first spike of generous sponsorships,  I raised approximately $1100, which I used to buy a new laptop to replace the one I had to return to my former employer. Say hello to the new crowd-funded ribbonfarm laptop,  a Lenovo Thinkpad T510 that I named Barbarian, to commemorate the circumstances of its purchase.

A big thank-you to everybody who signed up as a sponsor. I can think of nothing more appropriate than my primary creative tool being a gift from readers. If I were religious, I’d call this  an auspicious start.

On a more practical note, you have no idea how much of a relief it is to get back to a machine that I am comfortable with. I’ve been getting things done using my aging Windows desktop and my wife’s Macbook for the last 3 weeks and I learned two things about myself: I can no longer work at a regular desk for more than a couple of hours without a coffee-shop break, and I will never be able to make the mental gear-shift necessary to become a Mac guy. I nearly went crazy for three weeks. Things are back to normal now, whew. Evil empire or not, I guess I am a Windows guy until Microsoft goes under.

Sponsorships are continuing to trickle in slowly after the initial spike. Check out the sponsors page if you’d like to support the next crowd-funded ribbonfarm capital investment.

In other news, Information Week just soft-launched a new site The Brain Yard. I will be posting there biweekly on Enterprise 2.0 topics. Check out my debut column, Hard and Soft Power in Enterprise 2.0.

Lots more brewing in the background, so stay tuned.

This is a call for guest posts. Interested? Read on. The open-mic stage is officially open.

Over the three years that this blog has been in existence, I’ve rarely had people guest posting. Just 4 guest posts by my count. You can view the map of the  Guest Post trail here, and start browsing here.  It’s a rather eclectic bunch: George Gibson did a review of Predictably Irrational, Marigo Raftapoulos talked about video gaming in business, Dorian Taylor talked about his own take on the lean startup movement and Michael Michalko posted about how geniuses think.

I figured it’s time to get the guest posting thing a little more organized.

This is quite a demanding audience to write for.  But if you are up for the challenge of performing for a very tough-to-please and scarily knowledgeable crowd  (but one that is very generous with praise when it is pleased), and have something stimulating to offer, I am open to contributions.

You get noticed by a significant and high-quality audience (currently around 2300 regular RSS subscribers and about 17,000 – 20,000 visits a month), and if you can impress this lot, given the caliber of comments, you’ll get some high quality readers for your own blog and/or personal connections.  And I mean high quality. I am routinely surprised to find that some high-level exec or well-known entrepreneur, writer or professor has read something on this blog (personal high point: William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and cyberpunk pioneer, tweeting my Container Shipping post; can’t find the damn tweet now; should have bookmarked it. I doubt he’s a regular though). Scares me a bit, I admit, and I basically try not to let it worry me.

Rule #1: No purely commercial stuff or blatant self-promotion.

Rule #2: Your contribution has to be “Ribbonfarmesque.” If you don’t know what that means, spend some time reading stuff on the site.

Interested? Just cut-and-paste your contribution into this contact form. Or if you prefer, use the form to send me a proposal and if if I accept it, you can email me the thing as an attachment.

And please forward this to others who might be interested.

Venkat

p.s. In case regular readers are wondering why I am soliciting guest posts now, two reasons. First, I’ve got a VERY busy few months coming up and second, after years of wondering whether this blog has a distinct identity separate from my own writing voice, I’ve finally concluded it does. There is definitely a “Ribbonfarmesque” way of seeing the world and thinking/writing about it that many others share (the term was actually coined by a reader to describe somebody else’s work, so I am not trying to slap my brand on others’ styles!).