The Silicon Valley Geek

The Big Sur Marathon is this Sunday.

So I’ve been “tapering” i.e. running less.

I’ve also been “carbo-loading” i.e. eating more.

The shocking part is that I’ve been gaining weight: 4 pounds over the past 4 days!!!! I am now 6 pounds heavier than normal.

Am I doing something wrong somewhere?

Or is it perfectly normal?

I am also planning to run with a hydration pack containing something like 2 liters of electrolyte water. So I am going to be running at a total of 10 lbs over my normal weight.

Adding to that, I ran a fast 5 miles with the Palo Alto Run Club yesterday wearing cheap Target socks and ended up with a big blister.

It looks like Big Sur is going to be miserable: overweight and running with a blister.

Robert Carroll (of Clickability) also pointed us to Philly.com, the online “extension” of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He used this as a great example of going hyperlocal: effectively handling local events and catering to each individual community (physical community, or interest/hobbyist groupings). This was a way for traditional printed news media to survive competition from Craigslist.

I think Robert was only partly right.

The problem is that Craigslist already has the community built-in. That is part of the Craigslist “brand”.

There is a local-to-Philadelphia Craigslist. You can generally specify your location (e.g. Fairless Hills) when you create an ad. There is no search-by-location on the Philadelphia version unlike the one we have here for the San Francisco Bay Area (you can search by south bay, north bay etc). But I think that is just a question of server resources.

If you were into discussion-based communities, Craigslist does it too, albeit in a very 1990s usenet-newsgroup kind of way.

The only missing item in the Craigslist portfolio is persistent user-generated content like blogs, articles etc. So if a new media organization is going hyperlocal and sees Craigslist as a competitor at the local level, then it will want to focus on these things that Craigslist does not have or does not do well at.

Okay, so I picked up enough courage to put together this video of me playing Green Day’s Basket Case.

Don’t laugh…