Anne Truitt Zelenka

I’m leaving RedMonk, at least for now, meaning I won’t be blogging at tech decentral or taking briefings via RedMonk or attending analyst conferences as a RedMonk analyst. I’m focusing instead on Web Worker Daily, on the occasional GigaOM article on Web 2.0 happenings, and on turning this blog back to what excites me the most: the social aspects of Web 2.0. You can read all about my reasons for this change at my RedMonk blog.

I’ve been waiting for the right time to increment my version number. Perhaps I should have done it when I joined RedMonk and Web Worker Daily–but I didn’t. I suppose that was the dot-zero release that was full of bugs and crashed every time you left it running for longer than a few hours. My more full commitment to Web Worker Daily does seem to require a new version number: I’m no longer supporting Anne 2.0 Enterprise Edition. This is pretty huge, because it’s a space I’ve been following for much longer than I’ve been officially associated with RedMonk. It’s a major change in strategy for me.

A few things precipitated this including a piece I wrote on Web Worker Daily about dealing with web-induced attention deficit disorder. I quoted tips from Edward Hallowell’s CrazyBusy book [via Business Week’s Working Parents blog] which included “Give yourself permission to end relationships and projects that drain you.” I kept rereading that tip and thinking to myself, “should I do it? should I give up the RedMonk work?” It wasn’t the relationships that drained me so much as the work itself. It just didn’t suit me.

Another thing that led to this decision was meeting Josh Porter of Bokardo at Adobe Engage last week–now he might think I’m stalking him, because I keep mentioning him, but when I talked to him I felt like I was home in a way I never did in the context of RedMonk work. What I admire about Cote’, Steve, and James is that they get the new world and bring it to the old… me, I’m so solidly in the new world that I have a hard time dealing with the old one. It’s like I’ve fully embraced the new paradigm, and I can’t talk to the people who are working under the old one.

Seeing my old friend Allan Padgett at Adobe Engage also played a role… because I saw again how life spirals, it’s not just a one-way street, and when people are important to you, they will come back into your life again and again. Allan and I met right after high school graduation at the “Banquet of the Golden Plate” in Washington, D.C. He was “scholar-athlete of the year” from Dallas, I was Denver’s “teenager of the year.” I knew immediately he was someone important in my life–and then we met up again when we were assigned to the same freshman dorm in college. From Allan, I learned that just because I think a relationship should be a certain way doesn’t mean it should or it will… I learned that relationships need to grow in their own way, no matter if I think that’s the right way or not.

So here’s the Anne 2.1 release, with fewer features than Anne 2.0, but I hope with better performance and fewer system crashes.