Since the redesign I have seen a big influx of traffic, so if you’re new, this is for you. Or a bit of review for everyone else.

Greatest Hits

The Business of Running

-Why you have set your own pace and stick to it. If you don’t, you let others define you and ultimately doom your chances of success.

On the Spartans and the Perfect Paper

I was hesitant to write this but then after I posted it, it went viral on three separate occasions and continues to be my most popular post ever. (It is doing really well on StumbleUpon–and for all of you that voted for it before, the URL has changed and it’d be great if you could vote again)

Of all Virtues…Energy

I wrote this sitting in the office one day after remembering the Von Clausewitz quote–sort of stream of consciousness–but I’m really glad I did.

Why We Could Eliminate the A-List Bloggers and Be Smarter for It

Everyday the head of the Long Tail gets less and less relevant. This post was big for me too, I ended up discovering a lot of latent agreement from big people that didn’t want to admit it publicly.

Well son, what do you want to do with your life

I’m still not exactly sure, but I’m a lot closer to figuring it out. The comment section on this did really well.

Important Pages:

The Reading List (read them, they won’t let you down)

Book Quotes and Passages (almost 15,000 words at this point)

About Me (work in progress)

Ryan on Rudius

Ryan on TMMB

Ryan on Myspace

Ryan on Facebook

Ryan on Digg

Ryan on Del.icio.us

One last thing:

And even though the design is awesome, the site really is easier to read via RSS. If you subscribe you’ll get all the updates within minutes of them being posted–and you won’t have to deal with ads, or load times or partial feeds, or any of that other stuff. I suggest Google Reader. If you want to subscribe to my feed, click here. I’d appreciate it if you would.

Tim Ferriss is promoting a new charity idea that he is working on called LitLiberation.

It’s not really my thing but I think it would be really cool if a charity announced a partnership with WheresGeorge.com, the money tracking site. All charitable donations would converted to cash before they were deposited and then their serial numbers would be entered into the database. For the rest of that bill’s circulation, as it was tracked by its exchangers, the donation giver’s name would show up as the originator and labeled as “charitable.” But more importantly, they could trace its path all over the world, seeing the “good” that it is doing–maintaining ownership in a way that keeping it would have never really touched. And here’s the thing, it looks like the ultimate transparency, a truly open charity. But it’s really since it all goes to the bank, they aren’t significantly more accountable then they are now. Wouldn’t every other charity have to do the same thing? I know where I would put my money.

When people screw up in front of me, the first thing I like to think about is how close I’ve come to doing the same thing. Or, how many times I’ve probably done it and never even known.

Last week, I spoke to advertising company about working for just one of the Rudius sites. Later in the conversation, I dropped another major client in their lap, for the good of everyone involved. And by major, I mean a site who’s pageviews are measured in the millions, monthly. The person on the phone, thinking that the Rudius property was of little value, turned around and gave the private information to a competitor. Thinking that I was little, and thus didn’t matter, he felt that it was safe to act without integrity. But the problem with that is that you never know who someone has lines of communications with and who else is packaged along with them. In the midst of what the rep thought was a big coup for he and his sales friends, he fucked himself out of nearly 30 million monthly pageviews and that’s just the immediate present. More than that, he placed me in a troublesome situation, for which I will never forgive his company.

It is almost never safe to act without integrity. And even more dangerous to think that you can get away with it. You won’t be confronted about it, people will just move on. Rudius will go with another advertiser (because you can’t be trusted) and I don’t plan on recommending this to any of the other properties that I’m working to monetize.

For me, I’m quickly learning that people often have influence where you wouldn’t expect them to have–especially when knowledge is scarce. But more importantly, since I know that I purposely reveal very little about myself, most other people do it too. It’s better to be safe and treat people right, then the folly of underestimation.