It’s Hard to Lay Fallow

I’ll admit it, I’m one of those people who has a Google News alert set for my own name. Back in the day, it meant a lot more than it does now – the search results used to pick up blog mentions as well as “regular” news mentions, and before FacebookLand took over our world (and eschewed Google’s), a news alert was a pretty reliable way to find out what folks might be saying about you or your writing on any given day.

Like most folks who maintain a reasonably public conversation, I now watch Twitter’s @replies far more than I do Google news alerts. Of course, Twitter doesn’t catch everything, so I never unsubscribed from my Google News alert.

Yesterday, one came over the transom, and it kind of crushed me.  “The End of the Tech Conference?” it asked. The opening line was included in the snippet: “The heartbreak was palpable when John Battelle announced via blog post back in April that the Web 2.0 Summit would not be held for the first time since its debut in 2004.”

The funny thing is, while I think the writer intended to describe the Web 2 community’s “heartbreak” – certainly an arguable supposition given how overwhelmed our industry is with conferences – what she may not have realized is how close to home the line hit for me. When I read it, I felt my own loss – it’s difficult to stop doing something you’ve done well and for a long time. In my case, I’ve hosted a gathering of Internet industry leaders nearly every year since 1998 (before Web 2, there was The Industry Standard’s “Internet Summit”). That’s a decade and a half. Not doing it is far harder than I thought.

I took the decision to step away from the Web 2 Summit as inevitable for two main reasons. First, I needed to work on the book, and there didn’t seem to be room for such an ambitious project if I kept my two other day jobs (Web 2 and Federated Media Publishing). Web 2 takes an extraordinary amount of time to do – with nearly 70 speakers and three days of programming, my life very quickly becomes overwhelmed with research, production calls, and pre-interviews, not to mention all the sales, operations, and marketing work.

Second, I had been doing Web 2 for a long time, and I wanted to step away and look at it with fresh eyes – let it lay fallow, so to speak. Stop tilling and seeding the same soil, let it repair, in the most catholic interpretation of the word (“repair” derives from the Latin “to go home”). And it’s this part that’s been really hard. It’s a natural cycle of grief, in a way – I’m probably deep in the trough of sorrow right now – but I do kind of miss the work.

In other words, it’s hard to lay fallow.

But the beauty of a fallow field is what’s going on underneath. If you trust yourself enough, you’ll realize all kinds of seeds are competing to push through and gather the resources of your attention. I’m learning that it takes a lot of will power to let that process run its course. I find myself “watering” all sorts of potential new growth ideas. I’m not sure which will take root, which are weeds, and which might yield the wrong crop, so to speak. And that’s scary.

But it’s also good. If you’re not a little scared, you’re not really paying attention, are you?

Meanwhile, I can report that I *will* be involved in a new kind of gathering this Fall, one that I can’t yet announce, because it involves many other wonderful partners. It’s not a typical tech conference, and it’s certainly not on par with Web 2 in terms of commitment or time – either from me or the attendees. But it’s a seed, one I’m happy to be cultivating. Stay tuned for more on that soon.

Meanwhile, back to the fallows…

(image: Shutterstock)