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From Ethan Zuckerman, Vice President for Business and Research Development:

It must be pretty quiet in the business suite this week -- Bo, Kara and I have all been in transit, tracing complicated orbits between Williamstown, NYC, Boston, and Peoria, Illinois (poor Kara...). Personally, I've been feeling a deep bond with my parents, both of whom commute from rural upstate New York into NYC, a two hour train ride each way. They've become experts at using their "train time" to read mystery novels, digest every word of the New York Times and sharpen their crossword-solving skills.

I'm not sure I have the "train time" routine down yet -- I was trying to use my time the other day to crimp ethernet cables when I realized that several of my fellow passengers were staring at me with looks of horror on their faces. It took me a few moments to understand that my compatriots might misinterpret the actions of a long-haired, bleary-eyed man dressed all in black, frantically twisting and untwisting pairs of wires that emerged from a huge black bag. It took a good ten minutes to explain to the woman next to me that there's really no good way to hijack a train, and therefore she needed to take me at my word that I was hard at work on a networking project, not an explosives project. Next time, I'll just read a magazine.

One of the reasons for this week's excursion to the Big Apple was IndieNet, an "industry event" that Tripod was invited to "participate" in. IndieNet promised to be something different from the usual trade show -- the 30 "coolest" independent Web sites were invited to strut their stuff, and we were all asked not to build trade show booths, but to be our indie, alternative, GenX selves. Great! What they failed to mention was that we'd be sharing the floor with the Online Expo trade show.

I don't know if you've ever been to a trade show, but they are strange experiences indeed. Corporations build elaborate, slick fortresses out of plasterboard, plastic, aluminum and carpet, and staff them with salesbots -- generally actors who've been hired to smile, hand out software, and avoid answering technical questions. Salesbots are always uniformed, usually in matching polo shirts with embroidered company logos, but occasionally in more embarrassing garb (gorilla suits, railroad conductor uniforms.)

So, Thursday night Kara and I watched crews of Teamsters assemble portable citadels for NYNEX and Citibank and began to wonder whether our little display would cut the mustard. Of course, at that point in the evening, our booth consisted of two coffee machines, a rented PowerMac without software for connecting to the Internet, a small wooden table, four violently ugly green curtains, and 30 orange yo-yos with a "Trixie's" logo (don't ask -- it seemed like a good idea when I found them in the thrift store on 7th Avenue). And, as NYNEX's plasterboard towers reached higher and higher to the skies, we began to panic a little bit.

And here's where the story becomes really touching. As we worried that our display would be about as enticing as three-day-old roadkill, we noticed that there were a whole lot of nervous twenty-somethings, bleary-eyed and unshaven milling about the show floor. At first I thought that we had run into the cast of "Friends" on a bad hair day, or perhaps an attempt by the Teamsters to unionize office temps. But no -- these were senior people from Web content sites, looking like refugees from a Douglas Coupland novel...and looking a whole lot like Kara and myself, as well.

Those of us who work in Webland everyday forget that there's a very small community of folks building content Web sites, and that, for the most part, we all know each other. As T. Jay from Suck supervised the installation of the refrigerator that took up most of his booth, he thanked Kara for paying his salary for the first month of Suck's existence (not directly -- we like T. Jay and all that, but we were mostly paying for an ad on the site). A woman from Urban Desires told us that Tripod was responsible for finding her a job -- we asked her if she'd mind standing in front of our booth for the next three days and repeating this tidbit to all passersby. I officially met half a dozen folks whom I'd only "known" over the phone, and a few others I knew only as e-mail addresses. T. Jay offered free beer for anyone who was willing to help him re-label 20 ounce Coca-Cola bottles to make "Suck Cola," and as the people responsible for some of the coolest sites on the Web (The Squat, gURL, Web Review, the Electronic Frontier Foundation) gathered together to violate Coke's trademark, I felt the sort of community and camaraderie I rarely get to feel in this virtual industry. It was all I could do to keep from singing "Kumbaya".

Here's my theory: Everyone working in the Web content industry understands that they're approximately one lucky break away from being one of the teal-shirted salesbots at Citibank's booth. And everyone understands that they're about one stock market crash (or server crash) away from re-entering the exciting world of office temping. It's fear that bonds us together, along with giddy amazement that we can make a living while having this much fun.

Our furniture arrived the next morning, and the five evil green chairs we were allotted matched the evil green curtains perfectly. The T1 was turned on, the coffee was brewed, and by 9 A.M., we were ready to face the world. As we smiled, shook hands, handed out stickers and gave sales pitches, I couldn't shake the feeling that this was an interesting moment in history -- that we were part of a community in its infancy, where everyone still knew everyone else, and folks were willing to lend each other a hand to configure a router or install a hard drive. Here was the pioneer spirit, and a dose of small-town ethics, alive and well on the floor of the New York Coliseum.

Anyone want to buy some truly evil curtains? They're going cheap...

-E

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