You.

About a year ago I was putting the final touches on an article for a major media outlet. I honed, I proof-read, I tweaked. My self-absorbed goal was to have to the most popular item on this big media site for at least a few hours, and based on the topic and content, I really thought I had a shot. And then, minutes after my piece was published, the site’s editors put up a story about baby panthers.

And just like that, it was over.

There are a few rules that hold true even in this ever changing media landscape and one of them is that no one beats a good kitty story. While story placement and promotion matter, readers have a big part in determining which stories will rise to the top of the most popular lists on news sites. As a rule of thumb, editors choose the top stories while the reading public decides which stories will be the most popular by way of their shares, Tweets, Likes, and the like. Editors decide what to cover. The public decides what to read and share.

But I have a feeling the public is getting a promotion. In two major cases, conversations historically reserved for editorial meeting rooms have been extended to the social web.

First, there was the challenge to the Stop Online Privacy Act as it moved through Congress. Several major Internet organizations joined in a coordinated effort to bring the negative aspects of SOPA to the attention of the general public. Big sites either went totally black or at least supported the cause with prominent links to information on the subject. The media dramatically boosted coverage of the story. And in a very short time, public and organizational pressure forced the political backers of SOPA to fold. When was the last time a large swath of the American public even knew the contents of a bill before Congress?

This week we’ve seen an even more powerful shift. There was no coordinated organizational effort. But thousands of voices on the Internet still managed to organize in a way that drove the news. I write a daily newsletter in which I cover the top ten news stories of the day. As part of my daily routine, I visit about fifty top news sites multiple times a day. At the outset, the story about the Susan G. Komen Fund cutting its financial support of Planned Parenthood was covered, but it was not a major story on any of these sites. It was, however, a major story in my Twitter and Facebook streams. People were energized by the news and from the Komen Facebook wall to Twitter and blogs, they had an outlet to express that energy. Within a few hours, major media picked up on the surge of activity around the topic and it quickly moved to the top of front pages.

The story started small. The people decided it was major. Big media responded and gave the story more coverage. And within a day, we had a full-fledged media firestorm that was being driven from the bottom up.

At the height of the coverage, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviewed Komen founder Nancy Brinker. During the exchange, Mitchell explained that she was voicing the anger of many people and channeling the energy and ideas surfaced by thousands on Twitter.

That sounds like a pretty good way to decide what’s news.

SOPA and Komen represent a change in how we pick top stories. Even in an era of constant changes in the way we consume and share content, this is a remarkable moment in the history of news and public discourse.

There are of course risks to majority rule when it comes to what makes headlines. Sometimes the pace of the realtime Internet leads to the rapid and rabid spread of mininformation. Brands and individuals can witness the destruction of their reputations before anyone has a chance to see the facts through the fog of retweets.

But with the mainstream press and the Internet-enabled general public providing checks and balances, we might see a much improved process by which we all decide what should be the headline of the moment.

I’m guessing we’ll still be pretty interested in cat stories. Some things will never change.

Related Confessions:

1. Curation Nation: We Can’t Stop Sharing News
2. I Broke Up With Jenny McCarthy. Please RT
3. I Can’t Turn Off The News

I tell you this story because I figure you’ll probably hear about it anyway. So it might as well come from me.

That seems to be the lesson offered by Andy Boyle. Boyle was at a Burger King when a young married couple at a nearby table had an argument. The fight was loud enough for Boyle and other patrons to overhear. The fighting couple was certainly aware of that. They chose to argue in public. They, in effect, gave up their right to privacy among those at the restaurant. But should they have assumed their fight would be broadcast on Twitter and eventually featured on ABC News?

Thanks to one guy who decided to take a break from his Whopper and start tweeting, that’s exactly what happened. Andy Boyle opened with this missive: “I am listening to a marriage disintegrate at a table next to me in this restaurant. Aaron Sorkin couldn’t write this any better.”

From there, he went on to live-tweet the fight, describing details of the argument, even going so far as to broadcast photos and videos of the couple.

Getting a large dose of overly personal details from someone’s life on Twitter or Facebook is nothing new. Plenty of people broadcast the content of arguments, share intimate details about their marriages, and even mourn the death of a loved one online. But usually those experiences are shared voluntarily. Most people get to decide for themselves which parts of their lives they want to share on social media.

But maybe the ubiquity of smart phones and new technologies, coupled with a decreasing respect for boundaries, has changed the equation. You no longer get to decide when to share. You don’t even get to decide whether you want to use Twitter or Facebook. If you leave the house, you’re on social media.

Recently, a nude picture was stolen from celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and sold to gossip site TMZ. When Bourdain got wind of the sale, he decided to go pre-emptive and post the photo to his own Twitter account.

The whole incident doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the state of our often obsessive culture. But I’m sure it didn’t surprise Bourdain. He’s a celebrity. He chooses to be in the public eye. He expects to occasionally have to deal with a violation like this because he knows the rules of being a celebrity.

But if Andy Boyle’s actions are an indication of a broader trend, we are entering the age of the unintended celebrity, where the new rules state that we all run the risks associated with fame without necessarily enjoying any of its benefits. There’s a new reality show and you’re the star, whether you like it or not. Someone should follow you around all day yelling, “action!”

The one glimmer of hope I’ve found in this whole unfortunate mess is the immediate negative reactions others have had, not to the couple’s decision to fight in a restaurant, but to Andy Boyle’s decision to share the details. Almost everyone I’ve talked to is repulsed by what took place at Boyle’s Burger King table. Some didn’t even want to read the outtakes of the fight. The curiosity about someone else’s life was outweighed by a disgust with the messenger.

In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple’s marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint. We can’t stand by and let an alliance between technology and poor judgement disintegrate all decency, and turn every human exchange into another tawdry and destructive episode on a never-ending social media highlight reel.

If our disgust with this kind of secondhand sharing is widespread enough, maybe there’s still a chance such invasions of privacy will be the exception and not the rule. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

The only thing I know for sure is that the next time my wife and I have a fight, I’m rolling up the windows.

…

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That statement is pretty common these days. But there was a time I would have never imagined creating something on a computer. Sure, I had some friends type up one of my essays or a college application on their parents’ Compaq computer, the glowing green letters clicking across a deep black square. They typed. My words came out of the printer. But it wasn’t creation. It was typing. The actual creation couldn’t be done on such an uninspiring, lifeless machine.

When it came to creating, I stuck with my ball point pen and a pad of lined paper. That’s how it was until the 80s when I got my first Mac and I saw how a computer could be a tool so powerful and yet so unobtrusive that it almost felt like extension of myself. It was easier to use. It looked better on my desk. It was better. It was made by someone who cared that it was better.

I got rid of my pens. Everything I created from then on, I created on my Mac.

It seems so obvious now. Yeah, of course. You create stuff on your Mac. But back then, the people to whom that seemed obvious were part a tiny club. We only made up a couple percent of computer users. We’d see each other at small, dank Mac stores and wonder why the rest of the world didn’t see what we could see.

The Mac looked better. It felt better. And everything looked and felt better on a Mac. The Mac was inspirational. The Mac was a place to create. Documents looked better. When the web showed up, it looked better too.

For years, long before the “switch” campaign, I spread the gospel. I tried to convince my friends, family, classmates and coworkers to see the light and use a Mac. A few designer-types trickled over to the Mac world, but the rest always had some excuse to keep using Windows. But none of these excuses ever made sense to me. I never, ever considered using anything but a Mac from the first day I touched one.

When my then girlfriend agreed to be my wife, I told her it was time to have the discussion about her converting. She said, “Don’t worry, I’ve already talked to the Rabbi and started the process of becoming Jewish. I know our kids will be growing up in a house without a Christmas Tree and I’m okay with that.”

But that wasn’t the conversion I was talking about. I explained to her that our kids would be growing up in a house without Windows-based PCs. And then I gave her my old Mac Plus and said, “Lady, this is your life now.”

She joined my small club.

Then Steve Jobs came back to Apple. And slowly, as the new iProducts came, Steve and I converted more and more of my friends and family. One by one they all came over. Those old faces from the corner Mac stores were now joined by millions in lines outside of grand Apple stores.

What was all the excitement about? The same thing it was about the first time I used a Mac. Inspiration and creation. It’s about a guy making something awesome and by extension telling you to go make something awesome yourself.

Since Steve Jobs died, I’ve already seen hundreds of writers and designers thank him for helping them live creative lives. A few folks have called Steve Jobs the modern day Leonardo da Vinci. Maybe that’s true. But more importantly, he made the products that unleashed the da Vinci in all of us.

And he left an army of us. Our numbers can be seen in the flowers left by the inspired and lined up outside of Apple stores and in the messages that blanket the Internet and in the companies that will make tomorrow’s technology.

Like a few flowers, these words are hardly a fitting tribute. But right now, it’s the best one I can make.

And tomorrow I’ll open up my Mac and try to make something else.

Arrington is a controversial guy. This was true during the earliest days of TechCrunch and it’s truer now. And that’s no mean feat. It’s hard to be loved or hated by a lot of a people for that long in the age of short attention spans. I think he would agree that one of his secrets to success has been his willingess to push the envelope, have public smackdowns, and occasionally come off as an asshole. That takes a certain intestinal fortitude (that, frankly, I wish I had more of). On the Internet, being that kind of a brand is pure gold.

The current Arrington-related controversy has to do with journalistic standards. The concern among many is that Arrington’s new fund (CrunchFund) will be investing in the exact same pool of companies that his news site covers. While such a conflict of interest is not unique, it’s certainly worth some serious thought and Kara Swisher (a longtime Arrington foe) covered the key issues in her recent blog post: CrunchFund? Unethical Ventures? Pig Pile Partners? No Matter What You Call It, It’s Business as Usual in Silicon Valley. The folks at TechCrunch have their own concerns about the way the whole deal is being positioned by the higher-ups at AOL.

Even though Arrington has been informally investing for years, the ethics around a journalist investing in the very kinds of companies he covers (and, equally important, those he decides not to cover at all) is certainly worth a long, hard look.

But if you’re part of the Internet start-up world, that’s not the big story here. The big story is about power and popularity in the age of personal branding.

Several of the biggest Venture Capital players in the Valley invested in CrunchFund, including folks from Sequoia, Redpoint, Kleiner Perkins, Accel Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz. Those are some big names who, combined with some well-known angel investors, rounded up the $20 million for CrunchFund.

For these funds, putting in a small piece of $20 million into another fund is unusual. First, it’s a small amount of money. When someone at Accel or Kleiner sneezes, $20 million comes out. Second, they aren’t even investing this money directly into a start-up – which is their core mission. For big valley players, putting a few bucks into another fund (run by a guy with very little formal experience in the investment arena) hardly seems worth the effort it takes to read and sign the paperwork.

So why are major VCs wasting their time putting a few bucks into a little fund with no track record?

Because the very Internet ecosystem that they funded and helped to create has changed all the rules.

There are a couple of key trends you need to understand to really get what’s happened in the start-up world. First, it takes a lot less money to build a compelling product than it did during the original Internet boom. A couple of kids in their undershorts can build a site or app that can easily scale to serve millions of users. Second, since the Internet industry has matured, there are a lot more former entrepenuers who are looking to rotate some of their sizeable earnings back into other start-ups.

Start-ups need less dough and there are more people looking to write a check. Big venture capital firms can’t sit back and wait for entrepreneurs to nervously show up with their Powerpoint presentations, because it may not always happen in the new start-up marketplace. So these funds have moved downstream and are making more and more small investments in very early stage companies in an effort to essentially buy an option to invest in later rounds should things go well.

So that explains why big VCs make smaller and earlier investments. But why are they so anxious to co-invest a few bucks into Michael Arrington?

Because this is the age of the personal brand. Tools like blogs, Twitter and Google+ have enabled individuals to build their personal brands and their following like never before. Pretty much everyone in the start-up world reads TechCrunch. And Michael Arrington is a bigger brand than TechCrunch.

People who are starting up their new Internet companies are just like the rest of us. They respond to brands. And like the rest of us, they are swayed by public relations and the size of a brand’s following. Arrington has a big brand on the playing field where Internet start-ups are born, so he’ll see deals. And the bigger players are desperate to see those deals too.

But Arrington doesn’t have a track record as an investor. But he only has a small fund. But the skills it takes to cover an industry don’t necessarily translate to those required to be good at investing.

Yes, but he’s got a lot of Twitter followers.

This personal branding barely mattered in the past. The big venture firms had strong track records and so much public notoriety that they knew they’d see the best deals.

Today, plenty of VCs at big firms blog and tweet about the topic of investing and the Internet industry on a regular basis. They probably like the attention. But in this age where personal brand power can trump insitutional brand power, they also sort of need the attention.

And maybe they feel they need to be connected to people like Michael Arrington. There’s not much money at stake, there’s some additional dealflow that could come their way, and they don’t have to worry about suffering any of the journalistic consequences that might arise for those who don’t participate in the fund.

When I first started blogging back in the 1990s, I got inbound links from several newspaper sites on a single day. I also got an inbound link from an already accomplished blogger named Jason Kottke. Kottke sent me fifty times the traffic than all the newspapers combined. That was the beginning of the age of the personal brand. And now it’s bigger than ever. If I was about to launch a Mac product, I’d much rather have an inbound link from John Gruber than any other publication on the web. When I want to market something on the Internet, I think of the indivudual people I want to tell. Those individuals are the brands that matter.

So Michael Arrington has a big personal brand and is dipping his toes into an increasingly crowded market of start-up investors. And the biggest venture capitalists want to see the same deals Arrington sees. Can he transition his personal brand from being a controversial journalist to creating a solid early stage fund?

Who knows? If it works, his brand will be bigger than ever and the power in the venture world will shift even more dramatically towards the individual player. If it flops, the VCs will only have lost some loose change and Mike can always go back to being the biggest (and now more controversial than ever) name in tech journalism

Either way, we’ll be following.

(Full disclosure: I am an angel investor, writer and aspiring asshole.)

Related Confessions:

1. I Never Tell Zuckerberg Anything

Are you more or less connected since you started spending so much time on the Internet?

I’m more connected to people I don’t know.

I’m equally connected to the people I do know.

I’m less connected to myself.

The other day, I was watching Arcade Fire play at the Outside Lands music festival when I thought to myself: I wonder if Michael Sippey is here right now? Michael is one of many friends I’ve made on the Internet. We all share common interests (the main one seems to be the Internet itself) and frequent a lot of the same virtual conversations. From following Michael Sippey on Twitter, Facebook and our common music streaming service, I know that he is a fellow Arcade Fire fan. It’s just one of the personal details and threads of commonality I share with a growing community of fellow web professionals and others whose path I regularly cross. This community wouldn’t exist for me without the assistance of the Internet and the suite of social software that now rides its rails.

I’m a member of several of these virtual groups, large and small. I count on these folks for much of my news. On blogs and Twitter, we share inside jokes and opinions, and riff off each other in the same way I do with my friends in real life.

It turns out Michael Sippey was at the same show and even in the same section, but true to form, the only interaction we had was via a couple follow-up emails. Keepin’ it virtual is the new keepin’ it real.

The Internet has had a dual effect on the level of connectedness I feel with the people I know in my offline life. On one hand, the basic communication tools now available make distance almost a non-issue. My conversation with Mordy that led to this post took place over instant messenger where we communicate nearly every day – far more often than we ever did before the Internet, even though back then, we were only separated by a few blocks, not a few thousand miles.

On the other hand, when I am actually with my friends and family, I find myself (and increasingly, my companions) distracted by a smartphone that’s either the object of my gaze or being fingered in my front pocket.

In a recent Pew Internet survey, 13% of cell owners said that they’ve pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid interacting with the people around them. I’m assuming the other 87% of cell owners were not pretending at all, and were using their phones because they just couldn’t help themselves. I recently walked through a hotel restaurant where every single person was interacting with a device of some sort. They were together spatially, but that was about it.

The actual number of social interactions I have with friends hasn’t been impacted by the Internet. But I do worry that the quality of those interactions has taken a hit because everyone in the room is not only connected to each other, but also to everything else in the world.

So when it comes to my connectedness with people I know, I’d say it’s about a draw. The overall frequency of our interactions has increased, but my ability to focus on them and only them has become more challenging in this age of distraction.

The distractions play an even more aggressive role when it comes to my connection with myself. Most of the moments once reserved for a little alone time have been infiltrated by the realtime Internet. I never just wait for a bus, or just stand in line at a bank, or even just sit and think as I sit stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. At these moments, I pull my phone out of my pocket faster than a gunfighter pulls his weapon out of its holster.

The only time I really experience any self-reflection these days is when my computer sleeps and my screen goes dark.

And I’m not alone. According to Pew, 42% of cell owners used their phone for entertainment when they were bored. If those 42% of people are anything like me, that so-called boredom now arrives sooner than the random thoughts that can lead to self-reflection, creativity or just a few seconds of nothingness. I can draw my phone faster than my mind can wander.

Of course, the draw of our devices is about more than relieving boredom (a goal the devices only occasionally achieve). It’s about getting a fix; reacting to a feeling of urgency that you’ve got to keep up with whatever it is that’s coming into your stream right now. Part of the power of the realtime web is that it can quickly make you feel like you can’t live without a flow of data that you easily lived without before you discovered it.

That’s the Internet’s reverse placebo effect: you feel as though you were missing something important before you signed up for the latest service. It’s a drug for an ailment you never had.

At that same Arcade Fire concert, a guy in front of me held his camera phone towards the big screen that flanked the stage and hit the video record button. He stood like that for a long time, separated from a live concert by two screens. Maybe he gained some social benefit by sharing the video with a friend or a broader Internet audience. But the concert provided him an opportunity to lose himself in the music and the moment. He let a screen block that experience.

I’m thankful that I can use the Internet to connect with my old friends and my newer, virtual communities. But I’m worried about the price of that always-on connection. Without the Internet, my friend Mordy never would have asked me the question that led to this post. With the Internet, it’s a lot less likely I’ll ask similar questions of myself.

That seems like a reasonable way to start a post on how difficult it is to grab and hold a little attention in this era of twitchy fingers and shifty eyeballs, when two tweets on the same topic can pass for longform writing.

Almost no one does just one thing anymore. The screens won’t let us. And in an incredible burst of human evolution, our minds have grown accustomed to monitoring multiple inputs at once. Yeah, you’re reading this post. But we’re nearly three paragraphs in. So if you’re anything like me, it’s about that time to check Twitter, count the additions to your Google Plus circles, read a handful of new incoming email messages, and chime in on a couple of ongoing instant message conversations. But wait.

During my junior high Presidential Physical Fitness challenge, I topped out at half a pull-up. I’m the wrong guy to be dangling from the side of a twelve-story building. When I woke up this morning, I was just a writer and tech investor, tucked behind the warm glow of my 27-inch Apple monitor. How did I end up here? Well, it’s long story. Long stories don’t work so well on the web, and besides, one of my hands just slipped and now only a four-fingered grip is keeping me from becoming a chalk outline on the street below.

On a recent morning, my wife was busy with several work related tasks on her Macbook Air when our two year-old daughter sprinted across the room and dove onto the couch, knocking the computer lid shut. Without looking up, my wife re-opened her laptop and said, “Don’t dive onto to the couch when Mommy is working, Jen.”

Only, our daughter isn’t named Jen.

It’s getting harder to concentrate on anything, even the stuff that’s clearly the most important. My daughter is too young to email us a note that she’s about to jump, tweet a message from midair, and then provide a link to a YouTube clip of her flight as she heads towards her couch landing. But that’s what it takes to get undivided attention. Little what’s-her-name didn’t stand a chance.

The other day, I asked my son if he wanted Daddy or Mommy to take him on the bus for his first day of Kindergarten. He answered: “I want the iPad to take me.” Who can blame him? His parents are barely the equivalent of a single app.

As my whitened knuckles are about to give, I feel the grip of a large, strong hand around my wrist. Someone is trying to pull me up. So I do what any neurotic Jewish man would do in that situation. I pass out.

AT&T regularly runs commercials for its version of the iPhone touting what the company sees as one of its key advantages: You can make calls and browse the web at the same time.

Makes sense. I mean, can you imagine just talking on the phone or just browsing the web? Sure, maybe that’s fine while you’re also driving in your car or jaywalking across a heavily trafficked street or teaching your child to ride a bike, but otherwise, it just seems silly to waste that kind of time unitasking.

A naked light bulb glows dimly in an otherwise dark and dank room. I see a perfect face just above me; puffs of glitter float down from her golden, brown hair making me feel like I’m suspended in a disco-themed snow globe. It takes a second for me to hear what she’s saying as her fingers cradle my head, one of her thumbs caressing my cheek. “Say my name.” She whispers, “Say my name.”

“Beyonce?”

I have three friends who are accomplished novelists. Two of them have cut off all Internet access to their homes. The other leaves his devices behind and sits in an unconnected cafe with a pen and a stack of paper for several hours a day. They know that even their impressive abilities to concentrate can’t compete with a connected computer.

These strategies are working for now, but the realtime Internet is starting to sneak in. They all have kids and other parents want to be able to make last-minute playdate schedule changes, so they all bought smart phones. Their publishers demand that they use social media to promote their writing, so they’ve all started to Tweet and build-up a Facebook following. Their eyes water when I mention that now Google has introduced a new social network.

They can sense the inevitable. The Luddites’ days are numbered. The Gluddites are coming. It’s only a matter of time. They can run but they can’t hide.

I squeeze and re-open my eyes a few times. I hear a voice say, “Wow, this guy is really out of it.” I then feel an iPad (the heavier first generation model) slam down on my head. The next thing I see is the inside of ZipCar’s trunk.

I recently heard a pitch from the founder of company that – like many start-ups these days – has the goal of garnering a large percentage of your mindshare on the second screen. The second screen is how media types refer to your computer while you’re watching TV. To them, the idea that you’d ever just be watching television seems about as likely as you reading hieroglyphics by torchlight.

The founder described a scenario. Say you’re watching the latest episode of Mad Men. We can connect you with thousands of other people who are watching at the same time. You can discuss the show, post opinions, and make and share polls. Meanwhile, we’ll scour web and serve up the latest gossip and news about John Hamm so you can read that while you’re watching the episode.

I looked at him and said: “Tell me the truth. You don’t really like TV, do you?”

The idea of reading gossip about John Hamm while watching a new episode of a great show like Mad Men might seem crazy, but the truth is that both my wife and I have our laptops open during almost every other show. And we’ve already aged out of the target market. Several friends have told me that their teenagers absolutely never just watch television, even when they’ve rented an action movie. Some other screen is always on.

If you’re a content creator, you have a few options. You can create content that is simple enough to be easily absorbed during a series of quick glances from viewers whose attention is divided. You can attempt to make your content so unbelievably riveting that even the most jaded member of Generation Realtime can’t take their eyes off it (I’m thinking here of a show like Game of Thrones which adds to its hour of excellent content a healthy dose of frontal nudity interspersed with graphic beheadings). Or, you can provide second-screen content to further engage viewers while they half-watch your shows.

Where does that leave me when all I’ve got is this pile of words and I’m four paragraphs away from my last action scene?

I’m splashed in the face with ice-water and wake to find my ample torso chained to a chair in front of a new Ikea desk, empty other than a yellow pad and a finely sharpened number 2 pencil. Beyond the edge of the desk, I see a semi-circle of nerdy-looking guys each holding a pistol in one hand and an iPhone in the other.

Recently a guy who goes by the name of Lezevo and often shares videos of himself playing Call of Duty 2 decided to share the personal details of his just finalized divorce. Someone as familiar as Lezevo is with immersive shoot’em up video games knows how unlikely it is that people will listen to thirteen minutes of someone talking about his crumbling union. So he layered his voice over a video of himself shooting up buildings, taking down helicopters, and creating a trail of carnage. The viewer is entertained by explosions and action-packed battles as the speaker calmly shares the ups and downs that led to the cratering of his marriage. Kaboom.

In addition to coming up with a pretty satisfying metaphor for the way many divorcees feel about the experience, Lezevo may have also created a blueprint for the way we need to think about sharing the details of our lives. The content can be deeply personal. The audience can still be wildly public. And once you’ve gone past 140 characters, you’re not going to hold anyone’s attention without machine guns.

The nerd directly opposite me cocks his gun and points it towards the yellow pad on the desk. “Dave,” he says, “We need the next blog post.” I now recognize these editors and readers and manifestations of the voices in my head, and I instinctively complain that I’ve been busy lately and that I’ve had a major case of writer’s block.

“You’ve sent 12,000 emails, pushed 1,800 tweets and dropped at least 30,000 words into your instant messaging client since the last time we saw a new piece from you. That sound like writer’s block?”

They all laugh as their eyes shift back and forth between me and their iPhone screens.

“Sorry. Pal. You’re gonna sit at that desk and write until you have something to post. No tweeting, no browsing, no screens, no Angry Birds, nothing, until you’re done.”

I pick up the pencil from the desk. Before I start to write, I have to know one thing: So, I guess Beyonce was never actually part of this, eh?

“Nope. But you should include her in your post anyway. It’ll keep things moving…”

The other day I accidentally loaded the wrong version of a podcast I had been working on. About a minute in, I heard myself stumble over a few words, and then ramble, “What are you doing wasting your time with this? You’re a grown man with two kids. Is this the crap you want them to see you doing? Even your two year-old complains that this web garbage has no revenue model. Did your parents really survive the Holocaust and make an idyllic life for you in America so you could be reading this goddamn crap into a microphone attached to your laptop you stupid loser.”

My avatar never acts like that. He never lets life’s frustrating moments get him down. Every wrong can be made into a right. When an investment goes bad, he tweets something funny yet insightful about the offending company. When someone cuts him off in traffic, they get anonymously humiliated on the Internet. When his kids complain that he’s on his laptop too often, he knows he can turn their complaints into a pithy quote that will lead to a couple hundred retweets. If he screws up a podcast recording a few times, he just laughs knowlingly and thinks to himself, “Looks like I’ve got the topic for my next blog post.”

When my avatar drinks too much coffee, his wit accelerates. When I drink too much coffee, I get jittery, frustrated and my irritable bowel syndrome kicks in. When my avatar gets drunk, he becomes more entertaining, makes more pointed jabs at those who deserve them, and leaves his mark as the life of the online party. When I have a couple too many bottles of beer, I usually sing as much of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album as I can before passing out with my cheek propped up against the cool porcelain of the Toto in my master bathroom.

My avatar easily maintains every popular diet. He doesn’t get those creases around his eyes when he laughs. He completed his journey to the 4-hour body in less than 45 minutes. Both of my kids asked me if I’d make them a t-shirt with my avatar on it. They look up to him.

I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. You know my avatar a lot better than you know me. I’m sure some of you who have never met the real me probably think that me and him are one in the same. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Sure, my designer Brian went to great lengths to match my current facial hair (the curved tough-guy mustache and the unironic soul-patch). But in reality, my facial grooming comes nowhere close to the avatar. I ended up with this look after I shaved off all the gray parts of my beard. The last time my neice saw my facial hair she asked me if I was going to a costume party.

She never talks trash like that to my avatar. No one does.

My avatar is steady. He’s attractive. He’s even-keeled. He looks great on coffee mugs and mousepads. He didn’t see a shrink three times a week as a kid. He never wet the sleeping bag at camp. He didn’t cry during his first week of football practice. He never owned a Manilow poster. He never drove a Moped through the bushes and into his outside bedroom wall. No one bought him a vaporizer for his 44th birthday. When he watches porn, he feels even more secure about his own anatomy. He’s cool. He’s enigmatic. Sometimes when my wife closes her eyes during love-making, I know she’s thinking of my avatar. And I don’t blame her. More often than not, I’m doing the same thing.

I still think it’s pretty sad I that spend so much of my life in front of this computer screen. But my avatar has no such doubts. The Internet is the only place where he exists. No apologies. No second thoughts. No carpal-tunnel syndrome.

And in the end, he doesn’t really care if you like this post. If it sucks, he knows you’ll just blame me.

“Dave,” they explained. “You need to start swearing in your commentaries.”

They both argued that I was more funny, irreverent and interesting in person than I was on my blog. Swearing could help the real me to break through the text. So I took their advice and I included a few choice obscenities in my next post. And it felt good.

Five minutes later I got a call from my mom. She said while she enjoyed my latest article, she really didn’t think the swear words were necessary or appropriate.

I stopped swearing in my posts.

That series of exchanges took place nearly a decade ago. Back then, it didn’t seem that unusual to experience a significant crossover between my two lives — the real one and the one on the Internet.

Today, while a larger share of my life is online, I actually feel that the connection between my online and offline selves is significantly less seamless.

Without any prodding from my friends or relatives, I decided to swear in a recent tweet. Given my past experiences with digital profanity, it wasn’t a decision I took lightly. But after a series of deletes and rewrites, I finally pulled the trigger. And it felt good.

Five minutes later, I walked out into the lobby of my office building and someone I know looked up from her phone and said, “Hey, I see you’ve decided to start including some pretty aggressive language in your tweets.”

This time around, the in-person, real life feedback about something I had shared online was a lot less welcome. My negative reaction to this terrestrial input about the virtual me had nothing to do with the content of the feedback. Unlike my mom a decade earlier, the person in the lobby said she enjoyed the profanity and urged me to keep it coming.

What felt uncomfortable was having a face-to-face conversation about something I posted on Twitter. The only place I want to discuss something I write on Twitter is on Twitter. You can reply to me, you can retweet me, you can even tweet hurtful and hateful responses about me.

But don’t talk to me about my tweets in real life. The first rule of Tweet Club is that you don’t talk about Tweet Club. Whether your reaction is positive, negative or neutral, you can’t possibly expect the real me to answer for the Twitter me.

These days, when I tell someone to have the guts to say it to my face, I mean my avatar’s face.

Part of me even understands Anthony Weiner’s initial reaction to the very public inquiries about the crotch shot heard around the world. He explained that he couldn’t be sure whose crotch it was and that he certainly didn’t send it out via Twitter. To this day, I believe him.

Anthony Weiner didn’t post that photo. @repweiner did.

One of the holy grails of Internet marketing is the merging of our online and offline worlds. Everyone from Groupon to Google wants to own local and better connect our mobile devices to our real life experiences through deals, maps, augmented reality, and location-based check-ins.

And maybe that merging of our offline and online selves is inevitable. But for some reason it just doesn’t feel natural to me.

I was at a party last weekend and over a couple glasses of wine a fellow Internet professional mentioned that he didn’t understand one of my recent tweets.

The issues described above flooded my mind. I took a deep breath, finished off my glass of wine, looked off towards the horizon and gave him the only response that seemed possible at that moment.

“Is this some great fucking weather or what?”

(Sorry Mom.)

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My son apologized. My daughter — magnanimous and probably more than a little relieved to be entirely intact — quickly forgave him. Unprompted, they hugged. It was an extended, cheek to cheek, smiling, giggling, It’s Gonna Be Us Against The World Long After We’ve Forgotten Your Droning Parental Speeches And Your Silly Overbearing Neurotic Rules About A Little Forkplay Hug. Soon, my wife and I were giggling too. Regardless of the preceding events, the moment was beautiful. The love, joy and gratitude I felt at that moment can’t be measured.

And that’s one of the things I liked most about it. I experienced something. I felt it. That was it. There was nothing to measure or count or rank.

The Internet measures everything. And I am a slave to those measurements. After so many years of pushing much of my life through this screen, I’ve started measuring my experiences and my sense of self-worth using the same metrics as the Internet uses to measure success. I check my stats relentlessly. The sad truth is that I spend more time measuring than I spend doing.

I used to feel an immediate sense of accomplishment when I wrote an article or came up with a joke that I thought was good. Now that feeling is always delayed until I see how the material does. How many views did my article get? Did it get mentioned the requisite number of times on Twitter and Facebook. I need to see the numbers.

And I define myself by those numbers.

I judge the quality of my writing by looking at the traffic to my articles. I assess the humor of my jokes by counting retweets. My status updates, shared links, and photos of my kids need a certain number of Likes to be a success. How am I doing? That depends on how many friends I have, how many followers, how much traffic.

My shrink recently asked me how my current projects are coming along. I said, “Let me put it this way. Lady Gaga has 10,329,595 more Twitter followers than I do.”

Sure, as the fork incident made clear, there are many ways to judge success, accomplishment and pleasure other than numerical rankings. I keep telling myself that. But the Internet keeps telling me the opposite.

A couple months ago, notable web designer Jeffrey Zeldman addressed this conundrum with a tweet: “Popularity on Twitter won’t cook you breakfast in the morning.”

My first reaction was to exclaim, “Yes, of course, Zeldman got it right!” My second reaction was to check how many retweets he got.

For the past several weeks, my friends Alex and Brian worked with me to design and build Delivereads, a service that enables me to send out a handful of great articles to the Kindle of anyone who subscribes. It’s a passion project. Everyone worked for free. Brian’s design is one of his best. Alex’s coding and workflow is fantastic. And the three of us had a great time working on the project. I couldn’t have been happier with the process and product.

Then it launched. And for two days, almost nothing happened. The numbers were not there. No traffic. No subscribers. The pride and fellowship I felt went out the window. I viewed the entire experience as a failure. I guaranteed my wife and friends that this was it. I was done with the web for good. The last decade and a half in this business had been one massive waste of time.

That all changed when, after getting some nice reviews from a couple of popular bloggers, the subscriptions started to pour in. With each refresh of my subscription numbers page, my self-esteem and pride inflated. I was back. I loved the web. I was a success.

But then I thought: what if I just stop refreshing that page? What if I try to stop judging the experience using Internet stats as my only yardstick? Of course, anyone who works on a site hopes that if you build, they will come. But the thing about this project that makes me most happy is the passion, joy and satisfaction I felt while working on it with two guys who I like building stuff with. And over the long haul, those feelings far outweigh any collection of numbers amassed on a stats page.

The project was great before anyone signed up. Period. I can’t put a number on it.

It’s a struggle, but I try to remind myself that there’s more to life than the rank order of things. I love this article. It is a pure reflection and honest confession of how coming of age on the Internet affected the way I perceive myself. You might like it. You might tweet about it or forward it or share it on Facebook. But no matter what the reaction, I’ll try to remember my opinion of these words right now, when it’s just me and them alone.

Last night my wife and I worked up our courage, loaded up the car, and took the kids out to another restaurant. On the way, my two year-old daughter called out from the backseat, “Mama and Dadda. I have to tell you something.”

Yes?

“I didn’t choke Veronica in school today.”

And I was reminded again that the proudest achievements in life just can’t be measured.

After Hudson rightfully said no, the engineer responded by hijacking the site, right down to the domain name. And he did a pretty good job of it. No one could help. Other engineers didn’t have the required credentials. His hosting provider had no means to solve the problem. And even his registrar couldn’t figure out a good way around the hack that the engineer had devised to hold the site and its contents hostage.

At the height of the dispute, the engineer taunted Hudson with this question:

“What are you gonna do, call the Internet Police?”

The situation was ultimately resolved. But during the thick of it, Hudson called me since I’ve spent the last decade and a half working with Internet companies, launching sites, and investing in tech startups. But I had nothing useful to offer. I had no idea how to get his site back.

Even for people like me who live and work on the web, there is a constant, underlying feeling that something core to our lives is one or more steps removed from our control.

And almost no one is completely immune to that sensation. Recently, several of the top sites on the Internet went down for several hours because of problems at a single data center run by Amazon.

During a major New Year’s Eve fire in San Francisco, key personnel at the city’s Division of Emergency Services were reduced to taking notes with a paper and pencil. The organization’s main computer system had crashed. Why didn’t someone just get the backup system running? Because no one knew the password.

In these cases, from the rogue engineer to the missing password, everyone at least knew what went wrong, who to blame and the people who could fix the problem. That is rare. I usually know something has gone wrong, but I really don’t have any idea what it is.

It’s always been frustrating when a technology you depend on doesn’t function properly. But it’s becoming even more alarming as many of us move our work and personal lives onto the cloud.

The other day, the Internet access in my office went down. I began where I always begin — I restarted my modem. I’ve been told by so many technical support staffers to restart so many modems that it’s become my first reaction to almost everything. If a site doesn’t load, or my email doesn’t arrive, or I twist an ankle, I restart my modem. And it never works.

I called my access provider for a service status update. No problems to report. I rebooted my laptop. I unplugged and re-plugged every cable and power cord within a thousand yards of my desk. Someone in my office lobby suggested that I reset my modem with a paperclip. “I’m an internet professional,” I shouted, “Where am I gonna find a paperclip?”

I was cut off. I wanted to check my bank account balance. I wanted to Tweet and blog. I needed to connect with friends on Facebook. I wanted to see my kids’ beautiful faces on Flickr. Maybe I could just escape from it all and get a nice relaxing massage. But no, I couldn’t access Groupon to get my half-price massage deal. Even my offline life is online. I was left alone, alienated from almost everything key to my daily existence. Refresh. Web page not available. Refresh. Server not found. Refresh. Nothing. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

“I give!” I screamed. “Whoever or whatever turned off my internet, you’re the boss. You own me. Please make it come back.”

And about 45 minutes later, it did.

But I don’t know why it did. And there’s the rub.

So much of my daily life is hosted in the cloud — websites, finances, news, entertainment, social interactions, family connections, schedules, notes, memories, business transactions — and yet I have no real control over any of it.

At least my friend Hudson can complain that someone else hijacked his site. I’ve handed myself over to the cloud of my own free will. Sure, right now that seems fine. But at any moment, I know I can be cut off — from one site or from the whole network of computers that hold among them the contents of my life. And there’s not a thing the Internet Police or anyone else can do about it.

This is all starting to depress me. Maybe I’ll restart my modem and see if that helps.