pghwireless

Singer

Writer

Not only is it a Blogfest Friday and the last one for the year, but it's also Light Up Night in Pittsburgh! So come to the Blogfest and then go dahntahn and check out the lights!

WHAT: Pittsburgh Blogfest 16
WHEN: Friday, November 21st, 2008, 5:30 PM to 9:30 PM and beyond!
WHERE: Finnegan's Wake (near PNC Park, 20 General Robinson St., North Shore, 412-325-2601), in the Pub Room
WHO: All local bloggers/podcasters (and their friends... feel free to bring some even if they don't blog!)
AND: Ephemera Ephemerae , Inner Bitch, My Brilliant Mistakes, and Have a Good Sandwich.

As always, if you plan to attend, please send an e-mail to blogfest AT closkey.com.

Writer

Writer

Writer

A very exciting invite comes from Jeffrey from the Mattress Factory about an event happening on Friday, November 14th from 8:00 - 10:00!

Bloggers (and other social media types) will have media access to the exhibition, and complementary food and drink will be provided. The whole facility has WiFi, so bloggers are invited to write about the event as it's happening.

To RSVP, please go to the form and register!

For more information, check out the Mattress Factory website!

Thanks Jeffrey!

A very exciting invite comes from Jeffrey from the Mattress Factory about an event happening on Friday, November 14th from 8:00 - 10:00!

Bloggers (and other social media types) will have media access to the exhibition, and complementary food and drink will be provided. The whole facility has WiFi, so bloggers are invited to write about the event as it's happening.

To RSVP, please go to the form and register!

For more information, check out the Mattress Factory website!

Thanks Jeffrey!

Writer

Writer

Actress/singer

Teacher/director

Singer

Actress

PodCamp Pittsburgh 3 is coming back for a third straight year!

WHAT: PodCamp Pittsburgh 3 (or PCPGH3)
WHEN: October 18th-19th, 2008 @ 9 AM - 4 PM
WHERE: The Art Institute of Pittsburgh (420 Boulevard of the Allies, Pittsburgh PA 15219)
COST: FREE!

Meet social media creators -- and fellow viewers / listeners / readers!

Exchange tips, build contacts and launch new ideas!

Learn how to integrate (or improve) podcasting, blogging and social networking into YOUR
business!

Questions? Sponsorships? Registration?

For more information, please visit our website:

http://podcamppittsburgh.com

You can also add us at Twitter: http://twitter.com/pcpgh

Come join us for the kickoff Meet-n-Greet at AlphaLab on October 17th from 6:00-9:00PM at 2325 E. Carson St.!

Singer

No more posts. This is it. I'm not Mr. Rogers, or Carol Burnett, or Douglas Adams; no clever farewells here. Since I announced that Pittsblog would be shutting down, I've received several invitations to guest blog from time to time at other blogs around Pittsburgh, and I may accept some of those. (Is that a threat or a promise? You decide.) It's not the topic or the audience that I need to leave behind; it's the time that I invest in blogging that I need to recapture. I may appear here and there in the future, but not all on my own. One person even suggested that "Pittsblog" is a brand that means something. I'm not so sure about that, but I appreciate the thought. This blog will stay up, of course, as long as Google permits.

In general, I appreciate everyone who's read the blog over the years, whether from time to time or regularly, and I especially appreciate those who took the time to comment. I know well that lots of people didn't agree with me (even earlier today!). Thanks to everyone, including the last group, for taking the time to pay attention -- even briefly. Writing and corresponding here has been a lot of fun for me, and I've learned a lot (whether or not you can tell!). You can still find me in the blogosphere at Blog Lebo (our little microcosm of Pittsburgh -- really -- down in Mt. Lebanon), and at my law-and-technology-and-other-interesting-things blog, co-authored with a bunch of fellow law professors, at madisonian.net. Around Pittsburgh, my proto-entrepreneurial interests will get expressed through a new program in entrepreneurship that we're working on at the law school at Pitt. Look for more early next year.

With that, I'll sign off. Here's a Joe Grushecky video that I like. It has nothing particularly to do with me, but it's a lot of fun. And it seems to capture a spirit that a lot of people think of when they think about the best of Pittsburgh. I really do like this place.

Can Pittsburgh dig out of the narrative hole that it's dug for itself? My last post was melancholy, to say the least. But I want to close out the blog on an upbeat note. There are good things happening in Pittsburgh. There is reason to believe that more good things are yet to come. (Still, read this piece on equilibrium-based economics from yesterday's New York Times. Everyone should.) I want to call out some of them, focusing on economic development and the tech sector in particular.

I've written before that I've convinced myself that Pittsburghers themselves aren't capable of turning the region around. Finding better, smarter, harder-working, and more innovative souls among the million-plus who call themselves "Pittsburghers" simply won't do it. Whatever the solutions might be, they are structural, not personal or individual, and they require insight and input from people and firms who know how the world works outside of Southwestern PA, who in most cases have lived in that world, and who are willing to suffer the burdens of bringing knowledge from the outside to what ails the Burgh. And there are burdens: Local resistance to outsiders and outside knowledge is deeply-rooted. The inverse of the Pittsburgh Diaspora that I'd like to promote today is the Scots-Irish-Welsh diaspora that settled much of Appalachia, including Pittsburgh, and the populist descendants of those groups still influence cultural things in the region today.

Here, then, is a non-exclusive list of local institutions, groups, firms, structures, and innovations that have impressed me over the last four years and that I think stand a good chance of impressing in the future, though in different ways. This is a non-exclusive list! By naming names, I'm breaking a Pittsburgh rule of sorts: Don't needlessly run the risk of omitting someone who be offended simply by being excluded. (The best example of this rule has always been Henry Hillman's decision to invest his millions in a venture capital firm -- in the Silicon Valley, not in Pittsburgh. Kleiner Perkins. You might have heard of it. Fabulously successful, fabulously rich.) I haven't done a comprehensive study of this, but having met most of the people involved in these initiatives, it's my distinct impression that many if not most of them were raised outside of Pittsburgh, spent a significant part of their professional careers outside of Pittsburgh, or both.

Innovation Works. Head and shoulders above every other economic development shop in Pittsburgh.

Alpha Lab. An IW spin-off of sorts. (Entrepreneurs getting entrepreneurial -- that's a good thing.) Among other things, AL now offers something that Pittsburgh has long needed: a place for entrepreneurs to get together informally and hang out with one another.

Project Olympus. Both Pitt and CMU have technology transfer offices (TTOs, in the jargon of the trade), and both offices have gradually gotten stronger and more competent over the decade that I've lived in Pittsburgh. But research faculty who want to play in the entrepreneurial space are still frequently stymied by university bureaucracies (of course, research faculty aren't alone in that!). Lenore Blum at CMU is putting her students in the same room as investors. The next "show and tell" is Oct. 22.

Pittsburgh Technology Council and the TECHburger blog. After years of running around in unhelpful circles, the PTC is a player again in the Pittsburgh tech community around Pittsburgh. The energy coming out of its Hazelwood HQ is palpable. Regis McKenna, Pittsburgh native and once a Kleiner Perkins partner (hmmm!), is speaking at the Tech50 bash on Oct. 16.

Donald Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at CMU's Tepper School of Business. A great collection of entrepreneurs teaching the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Enterprise Forum Pittsburgh (formerly the MIT Enterprise Forum). I was delighted when these folks dropped "MIT" from the name; the mission is clearer and broader. On Oct. 24, they welcome MIT president Susan Hockfield, who is a spectacular catch for MIT and for the Forum. Go!

Entertainment Technology Center at CMU. For all the talk about life sciences research in Pittsburgh, the ETC is quietly making a big impact on the computing world.

Vivisimo. Entrepreneurship done right. It's a mystery to me why this firm isn't celebrated from one end of Allegheny County to the other.

Ed Engler and Pittsburgh Equity Partners. Pittsburgh isn't a big enough market to support a huge range of venture-level investments, and I'm regularly told that the angel investors here get cold feet if they lose money in a single deal. As I understand it, PEP is trying to make a market in between those tiers. If it can raise money, and the current market may make that difficult, then it could do a lot of interesting things here.

The CityLIVE! series produced by No Wall. Keep prodding and provoking the power elite. Pittsburgh needs to recognize and respect thought leaders.

Finally, blogs that seriously address economic issues around the region are few and far between, but there are some good ones. What I read and recommend:

Pittsburgh Ventures blog by Alan Veeck and Matt Harbaugh.

Harold Miller at Pittsburgh's Future.

Chris Briem at NullSpace.

and

Jim Russsell at Burgh Diaspora.

This is the final wrap up post, but I'll have one more so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish / I'm-so-glad-we-had-this-time-together / It's-such-a-good-feeling post in the future.

It's Pittsburgh valedictory time, in the blogosphere and elsewhere. In this still-not-quite-the-final-end-yet Pittsblog post, I want to tie together some narrative themes.

I start with the premise that Pittsburgh is an insanely nostalgic place. Most fading Rust Belt cities wallow in their fair share of nostalgia; perhaps all do. I've long wondered whether Pittsburgh's nostalgia industry is more powerful than its Cleveland and Milwaukee cousins, that it might be so insidious, so pervasive, and in the end so corrosive that it's a nearly absolute bar to meaningful economic, political, or social progress. The names sometimes change, but the underlying stories never do. Pittsburgh may well be way, way too caught up in validating its own history -- and I'll include individuals and institutions alike in this claim -- to see its way to writing its future.

A month or so ago, in an email conversation with a new acquaintance here, I talked about the stories that the new Pittsburgh might tell. Here's an abbreviated version of my end of the exchange:

I've come to believe that letting go of the past isn't the right narrative [for Pittsburgh]. The narrative should be to let the past influence the future, but in different ways.

One possibility is to change the narrative of the past ("Back to Pittsburgh's Future"). We've seen a little of this with stories that re-invent Andrew Carnegie and George Westinghouse as proto-modern entrepreneurs, but I think that those stories aren't credible. "Pittsburgh was first in innovation before and it can be first in innovation again" ... is another "Back to the Future" narrative; again, I think that it doesn't quite work, largely because being first to invent something doesn't count for as much as people think. First to build a market around something that someone else invents (often, elsewhere) is much more important.

A second possibility, not entirely inconsistent with the first, is to essentialize the narrative of the past so that it evolves seamlessly into the future ("Citizen Carnegie," a la Citizen Kane, whose life turned out to be a search for the lost innocence of youth, or ... Star Wars/ Wizard of Oz: you have to discover the power of change in yourselves ..., and that's the power of "home"). ... Pittsburgh's modern life sciences sector builds directly on Jonas Salk's program to develop a polio vaccine. ... [There is a powerful] narrative of scientific enterprise that Salk's research created at Pitt, and that largely remained behind even after he left. ... Pitt may have been stupid to left Salk leave, but it was brilliant to let Salk's research out into the world, where it could do the most good. The current "patent everything" climate is crushing a lot of potentially useful academic research, at Pitt and elsewhere.

There are other narrative possibilities, of course, but the culture of Pittsburgh, when it looks inward, is generally defensive and backward-looking, rather than open to the new -- new ideas, new people, new anything. "Critical engagement" is hardly a Pittsburgh watchword (or a pithy Pittsburgh phrase, which would be better, syntactically speaking). Instead of "Back to Pittsburgh's Future," we have "Building a Better Past." I borrowed that last phrase from a Pittsburgh expat that I met recently, who left years to ago to find a career in San Francisco and who now lives in Connecticut. To him, Pittsburgh is warm and fuzzy memories, but it's basically cooked.

I'm hardly the first person to point this out, but it's been a consistent theme of this blog since I started posting early 2004. Trying to turn lemons into lemonade, colleagues and I concocted the idea of the Pittsburgh Diaspora as a social movement and posted the ambitious but little noticed Manifesto for a New Pittsburgh. Has the needle moved, even just a little? Bill Toland has picked up the theme, and a few in Pittsburgh's tech communities (more on those in a future Wrap Up post) but elsewhere, I have my doubts. Consider today's valedictories in the Post-Gazette:

Valedictory #1: Chad Hermann, late of Teacher.Wordsmith.Madman, posts a blistering explanation of his abrupt departure from the blogosphere:
I expected people to disagree with me and, when those disagreements came in the form of impassioned, respectful e-mail exchanges, always appreciated that they did. But as those responses gradually gave way to bunkered assaults, as my posts began to fuel not thought or reflection but the very sick, sad opposite of them, it became clear that the reach of my efforts had exceeded the grasp of readers willing and able to engage them. As my reputation grew, the caliber of my audience precipitously declined. And much of what I'd hoped to achieve with TWM no longer seemed possible.
I had my share of vituperative rose-goggled critics (search the blog's archives for the keyword "yinz"), but nothing ever rose to the level that Chad experienced. For more on this theme as it relates to the blogosphere in particular, see Saturday's post by the Hon. Peckham, J., at the Pittsburgh Men's Blogging Society. And don't miss the Comments there.

Valedictory #2: Barry Balmat, who founded and ran the RAND Corporation's outpost in Oakland, is returning to California. Comments that I noticed:
When you experience Pittsburgh versus a place like Silicon Valley, [Pittsburgh] people hold their cards close to the vest. They're not quick to say, "Let's partner and do this together." ...

People in the region should appreciate the change that has taken place and the progress the region and the city have made. It needs to continue to be open to change.

There are a number of key people in town who are bringing change and I think the population needs to be supportive of that. One is [Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent] Mark Roosevelt. It's not just outsiders like him. There are other people who have been here for a long time and have been working to change the area like one of our trustees, [PNC Financial Services Group Chairman ] Jim Rohr. I don't want to get into naming names because I don't know everybody in town. There's a mix of people who have been here for quite a while as well as some fresh blood.
Right on the merits, disappointing on the tactics. Note that Barry Balmat (who I've never met) is leaving Pittsburgh, never to return -- and he's still not willing to name names. Who's in the way, Barry? I hear things, I hear names -- but I'm just a guy with a keyboard. (Cf. Hermann, Chad, supra.)

Valedictory #3: The most poignant and tragic valedictory of them all, Michelle Massie's "Loving/hating Pittsburgh: It's not easy being black in my hometown," by a native who is in many ways more comfortable living a healthy distance away:
While Pittsburgh is being rebuilt as a technology hub and health-care mega-center brimming with jobs and opportunities, I can't help but wonder if that insightful gentleman from the bar might be a hiring manager charged with deciding a jobseeker's fate.Pittsburgh's social disgraces have existed since its founding 250 years ago. It's so ingrained in the psyche that most people don't realize it when they say or do something offensive.

Like a neglected child, I want to love Pittsburgh and I want it to love me. In fact, I think I love the city more than some self-proclaimed die-hard Pittsburghers because I am willing to recognize its flaws and challenge others, as well as myself, to do something to fix them.

I'm not going to pretend everything is fabulous when black neighborhoods remain blighted until developers feel they are ripe for gentrification or when the social and economic conditions of blacks remain unchanged or have worsened over the past 30 years. The only time we genuinely come together as a city is to rally around the Steelers; then we return to our segregated neighborhoods.
This echoes a Pittsblog post from 18 months ago on the different Pittsburghs out there, what I called First World Pittsburgh (the Allegheny Conference, the SEEN section, the corporate and emerging high tech communities); Second World Pittsburgh (our working class forbears, Steel Valley communities); and Third World Pittsburgh (communities, largely but not exclusively black, cursed by structural poverty and crime).

What do I make of all this? When I moved to Pittsburgh in 1998, I had lunch with a colleague (since departed for other pastures himself) and talked about what might be labeled the "Rocco Mediate Rule": Pittsburgh's obsession with its place in the world, and especially with its former place in the world, and its hypersensivity to reasoned criticism (again, cf. Hermann, Chad, supra). He and I agreed that the Rule could be compared to what I had once observed about San Jose, California, which passes as the largest urban center in the Silicon Valley (which is not to say that it is the heart or the HQ of the Silicon Valley), which in the 1970s and 1980s was home to the San Jose Mercury, and the San Jose News (two newspapers then, one newspaper now). Back in those days, the San Jose newspapers of record behaved like Pittsburghers today often do: They lashed out at the real and imagined enemies of what had once been great and good about San Jose and what they believed was still great and good. To those who know San Jose's history, you might justifiably wonder just what that was, exactly. The answers were the small town bankers and businesses that built San Jose into the center of a vast agricultural economy, into which some techno-upstarts -- HP, IBM, Xerox, Ford, Westinghouse (Pittsburgh is everywhere!), Lockheed, and this thing called Fairchild -- had in recent years injected themselves.

Today, Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley. San Jose is a part of it but by no means the hub. Agriculture has been mostly but not entirely extinguished in the Valley. (Think steel in Pittsburgh.) And the San Jose Mercury News is a real newspaper, at least most of the time, not an apologist for the ancien regime. What happened? Newcomers. The Valley is overrun by them, and it has been for several decades now. The new is welcome. Ideas, and money, and people. The past is respected but not venerated. On the whole, and with some interesting and important exceptions, ancient tribal affinities (that is, neighborhoods and towns, not just ethnic, national, and religious identities) are not. In many ways, Southwestern PA should not want to emulate that part of the United States, but in some crucial respects -- this willingness to accept novelty and to put the past in perspective -- I wish that it would. Back to Pittsburgh's Future. Coming anytime soon?

Philanthropist/actor