From Scott Walker, Producer:
Kara and I drove down to New York yesterday for what turned out to be a meager and disappointing exhibition of online consumer stuff. It would have been a disappointing day except for the other meetings we'd set up, and for our conversation. The six hours of driving left plenty of time to roam around the issues and ideas, agonies and ecstasies of work and life.
Kara mentioned an acquaintance who asked her if she thought her "project" had a good chance of succeeding. She thinks of work more as a mission, and to this person it was a project, like building a bookshelf. It's hard sometimes to work in a field -- publishing on computers -- that is so little understood and so hard to explain to someone who isn't already an initiate.
We wondered for a few miles what it means to succeed, anyway. We both love working at Tripod because it gives us a chance to do something that matters to people, something that is useful and helpful, and that helps give us and the people who come to us a sense of shared experience. We also love doing something that is totally new: nobody knows how the economics of the web will work out, and part of our fun is figuring it out as we go. Inventing. We've got a nice little shelf-full of web awards -- this month's The Net (one of our favorite mags anyway) names us a site of the month. That's nice. We got a note from a group called WebNuts a couple of days ago who wanted to give us an award of some sort, too; we looked at their site and it seemed OK, but had only been accessed 360 times. There are so many awards given that they start to mean very little.
Our most significant reward comes from the sort of feedback we've all been getting lately -- letters and comments and questions and correspondence from other Tripod visitors and members. Thanks! Please take time to comment in each Tripod
section's survey area. Write to us with your ideas for working or living
with craft and cunning. Let us know what books to read and what music to
listen to and what you need us to do for you.
-- Scott Walker, Listener-in-Chief (2/28/96)
Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.