Today

I (We) have spent a lot of time on the internet. Most of that time I (we) have been reading, learning, playing, and participating, but contributing very little. Yet today is January 16th and today we plan to change. Today, we begin our blog.

Tag-Team Bloggers

(Russ) My name is Russ McLoughlin and as of today (January 16, 2008) I am a third year undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara majoring in Computer Science. I have worked as a contractor for the past 5 years doing coding, web design, system administration. Recently I've worked at Truston (They do identity theft protection/recovery), New Sun Nutrition (Think the FRS Energy Drink), Commerce Planet (God knows what), and a handful of others.

(Bill) Perhaps in a different than you may be used to reading, Russ and myself(soon to be introduced) will be blogging in a tag-team-like fashion. That is, we will coauthor the same blog and sometimes even the same posts. So, as it is best to adopt a standard early on, we will be using (Russ) and (Bill) to signal the voice in the post.

Coming out of the Dark

(Bill) In a Russ-like fashion, I will introduce myself. My name is Bill(y) Lennon. The 'y' is optional. Odds are, if I have met you within the past year or so, I have introduced myself as Bill, but Billy is perfectly acceptable as many of my friends and family call me that. I am also frequently addressed by: Billbo, William, Mr. Lennon, Billiam, Mr. Baggins, Stupid, and some unmentionable inappropriate ones. For the record I will list some of Russ' nicknames as well: Rustle, Russell, Russellmania, Mania, Rustlemania, the guy wearing brown, etc.

I am a third-year undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley at the Haas School of Business. Russ and I first met our first year of college when we were both studying at the UCSB. For a while I thought I wanted to study Mathematics, but as it turns out, I didn't. Instead I defected and transferred to study business and be closer to Silicon Valley. I now spend some of my time working with an amazing startup destined for great things(as all startups are, right?) by the name of Attributor.

While I grew up on a computer, played video games, and engaged in other geeky activities, I always considered myself something of a slightly-cool, business-minded individual as well. (After the school district declared a ban on junk foods being sold at lunches and break in middle school, I created a black market for these items--selling candy and soda out of my locker through 7th and 8th grade. Unfortunately I ate and drank most of my profits.)

While I studied Mathematics at UCSB and intended to stay with the slightly-cool geek thing, I diverted my interests into the US financial markets and economy for a few short years. I became quite good at picking winners (or so I claim) and became something of a "technician"--deriving infinite meaning out of the seemingly ordinary candlestick charts.

But that's not all!

(Bill) At the same time as I was discovering the wonders of the financial markets, Russ, myself, and my dorm roommate Drew Bates (a brilliant trader and technician, now) were scheming to create something SO unique, SO powerful, that there was no way we could fail to take over the world. Or so we thought...

Our brilliant plan was to create an online community for the local college area inhabitants (businesses, students, the indigent, whoever) to collaborate, talk, trade, find lost tomes of information and many exotic pleasures, etc. Essentially it was a mini-Craig's list for the college community. And so began WALBRM Inc. and our reckless voyage through the Internet, see [A brief history of WALBRM Inc.]

But wait, there's more!

(Russ) Yes, the fun never stops when Billy and I are around (gross fabrication). Regardless, we do try to keep busy. More recently we have aimed to sustain ourselves on the affiliate milk (money) that flows from mother Amazon and mother Google's teat. It turns out that it's not as easy as it looks... mostly because at this point there are a million other people trying to do the same thing. Free market equilibrium is a bitch, but Bill's the biz major and that's his department. We are also working on a little project we call Group Press. GP is really only a working name (domain taken). Don't worry we will come up with something much more creative. GP accounts for >50 of everything Bill talks/thinks/dreams about so there will be much more to come on this front.

So why should you care?

(Russ) Well at the moment of writing you probably should not. Hopefully however, our actions from here on will somehow attract your interest. Perhaps you are looking back through our archives, looking to learn more about our origins. Armed with luck on your side you have managed to find this post. Congratulations!

(Bill) Here's why you should care: Russ and I live a large part of our lives eating, breathing, and dreaming about the Internet, "Web 2.0", the "blogosphere", and other tech subjects. We have explored and experimented with many aspects of the Internet such as affiliate marketing, traffic arbitrage, building fansites, community-driven sites, SEO, SEM, and more. Our main focus now is developing a (hopefully) useful tool for many people over the Internet. I hope to excite you more about this in later posts.

Each of us has our specialties, which you will learn more about, mine being "business"-minded, Russ' being "techie"-minded. Although these are very broad and incredibly unfair generalizations (but life's not fair).

Why we are blogging...

(Bill) I told Russ that we need to inject ourselves into the "tech world" and have something that we can refer people we meet to. This blog is to chronicle our journey through the Internet (and beyond?) and hopefully show that we know what we are talking about (at least half of the time).

But seriously, bro : this blog is a way for us to talk about all of the things that interest us the most out there in the Web. We also want to share some of our experiences with you, so that you can get to know who we are, learn from our many mistakes, failures, and successes, as well as allow us to share our commentary on the "happenings" of the Internet today.