In 2005, I came 9,405th in the London Marathon in just under four hours (3:55:36, to be precise). Last year I had a plan that I would do better, and would cover it as a freelance journalist too. The organisers obliged, and I realised I’d better start a blog. The Knackered Hack was born to track my exploration of endurance fitness, and some of the issues sports can reveal to us as amateurs: something like the professional lessons of Ed Smith’s book, which I reviewed only the other day.

But I lost eight weeks of training from the first 10 of 2007 to two viruses. Thus my hopes of running a marathon were in shreds. That was a lesson in itself. And it was about that time that Nassim Taleb contacted me so that his publishers could send me a copy of The Black Swan to review. The rest, as they say, is path dependence…

Last week, Guy Kawasaki listed The Knackered Hack as one of the web’s leading journalism blogs at his newly-launched aggregation site: Alltop.com.

Not all of you will be familiar with Guy. That’s OK, because the patron saint of us uncertain folks is Herbert Simon, who some will know coined the term “bounded rationality”, which incorporates the idea that you can’t know everything. Admitting as much did not stop Simon from winning a Nobel Memorial Prize.

But I digress. Guy was one of the early Mac team, he is a venture capitalist, and renowned speaker. And Alltop.com is aimed at us head-scratchers, who don’t quite know where to start sometimes. His company is also called Garage Technology Ventures. QED.

I’m bound to say that Alltop.com is a great site, and if you start using it you’ll be an early adopter because Guy and colleagues only really announced it a few weeks ago. Although I’m no expert in these things, some of you may find that the concept is broadly similar to popurls.com. What Guy is doing is taking a non-Google, non-quant view at the web, looking for influencers and connectors, especially through the prism of Twitter and the trust networks it is both generating and reflecting.

Here is what Guy said about it on his blog:-

A good metaphor is that Alltop is an “online magazine rack” that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page. Think of it as ‘aggregation without the aggravation.’”

If I’m allowed to say one thing I really like about it, it is the clean way that the first few lines of each news or blog entry open up as floating text (see above) and allow you a quick preview of the contents. There are other technologies that try to do something like that, but this reminds me of something I wanted way back in the 1990s as a way to allow the reporter to mask explanations of complex terms that would get in the way of readability or the patience of cognoscenti. Like many bloggers, I use Wikipedia for that these days in most instances, but it does involve opening up a new window/tab. So it will be great when that technology finds its way into more general use.

The week before last was Annie Hall week at home here, which contains Woody Allen’s paraphrased reference to the Groucho Marx joke: “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”. It was not my intention to start a journalism blog, and I’m not doing this for the brethren, but I’m grateful for the recognition. Of course, I do think journalism is important, and I do write about journalism frequently on this blog. And just so that there’s no doubt that this IS a journalism blog (amongst other things), I’ve decided to celebrate my Alltop accolade with the introduction of a new category on the right there: “journalism”. As I’m learning more and more, there are two certainties in this new world of ours: death and taxonomy.

And before we get carried away that we’ve reached the A-list, Guy shares some interesting ideas about influence from different sources on his blog here and here, that further explains perhaps our apparent non-linear rise out of the Long Tail‘s long tail.

Of course, for regular readers of KH, especially those who’ve subscribed to the email, or feed or follow the marginal entertainment of my Twitter service, you can feel especially vindicated for your loyalty and encouragement of this tired soul . Thank you.

For those following my experimental, ham-fisted attempt at streaming Twitters from Dan Ariely‘s lecture at the London School of Economics on Monday, a full podcast has been made available. He is funny, engaging, and I was sitting next to the guy whose wife was forced to confess she could not think of 10 reasons why she loved her significant other. Had I been younger, single, better looking, less shy, and that kind of man, I would definitely have seen an opportunity there.

It was all like good stand-up. So put it on your listening device for that next long run.

Also, I’m welcoming suggestions for what phone works best for Twits.

PS. To participate in counting the basketballs, pause the podcast and go here. Thanks to Seth Godin’s post here who also credits Bryan and Ken.

Here is a commercial version of the same:-

In 2001 I was faced with a choice.

Sit quietly on the sidelines of a corporate collapse while hell was freezing over, find a new job, or attempt a management buyout.

The latter involved some breaking ranks: never a comfortable path, as Gerd Gigerenzer has shown. But in the circumstances, and in Schumpeterian terms, it would seem to have been honest and right to try. In a Chapter 11 auction, you need bidders quickly. They need to come from somewhere. With my colleagues, I decided we were as worthy as any. After all, we had been pretty neat in creating social networks, so we knew how to operate at high levels of productivity without the need for as many staff as most news companies. Remember, we had to operate in Reuters’ backyard — probably the reason we were so resourceful, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

Bear Stearns played a small but disappointing role in this MBO attempt, as investment banker to the wider company sale, appointed by the company’s creditors. Surprisingly, as a thirty-something editor, this was the first management buy-out I’d attempted. So I needed help. I was pointed toward the bankers as I needed to prepare business plans and locate potential investors, but I was also still doing my bit trying to find a corporate buyer in London for the whole firm. As I recall, emails, calls and voicemails to Bear Stearns went unreturned. All I got for my efforts was a solicitation document pdf that I already had, and to which I’d made some contribution as a general manager, in any event.

Where Bear Stearns were too lazy to venture, I had to go find other help. It materialized in the form of London bankers Cazenove, who were systematic and supportive. Time worked against; all sorts of clocks are ticking in these sorts of end game, (although not as quick as must have happened over this past weekend).

It is just possible that, as an internal player, the rules put you at a disadvantage from the get-go. You feel an unwelcome visitor at the poker table — everyone else is expecting you to be clearing out the ashtrays. But I spent enough time at the table to lay down a couple of hands and get the chance to explain a little about the productivity benefits of social networks within the firm to a few of the great and good, who I guess might be grateful now for having had a little of that accumulated knowledge.

And one of the biggest ironies of it all: as we re-modelled our various news business lines to reflect an independent future, our strongest business plan identified that there was an untapped news market in a rapidly growing sector called credit derivatives. And we had the people who knew how to and wanted to cover it.

As we wake up each morning with the scale of the credit crunch appearing ever larger, I’ve wanted for a while, so long as you won’t think me a Jeremiah, to coin that old cliché from the Jaws movie for the sake of our central banker friends, uttered by Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) to Quint (Robert Shaw):-

• “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

And I wonder if, before too long, anyone is gonna get to say:-

• “Smile you son-of-a-bitch.”

Unfortunately, we may all now be in the same small boat.

For those unfamiliar with the movie, it goes something like this. As one YouTube commenter said: the shark still looks fake:-

A public service announcement: MIT‘s leading behavioural economist Dan Ariely, who was covered in this post, will be speaking at the LSE on Monday (probably today by the time you see this) March 17th at 18:30. Details here. I’ll be there I hope, so tap me on the shoulder if you pitch up too.

Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, has an interesting back-story, but here is a brief synopsis from his website:-

My immersive introduction to irrationality took place many years ago while I was overcoming injuries sustained in an explosion (here is a description of my experiences in the hospital). The range of treatments in the burn department, and particularly the daily “bath” made me face a variety of irrational behaviors that were immensely painful and persistent. Upon leaving the hospital, I wanted to understand how to better deliver painful and unavoidable treatments to patients so I began conducting research in this area (see picture below). After completing this initial research project, I became engrossed with the idea that we repeatedly and predictably make the wrong decisions in many aspects of our lives and that research could help change some of these patterns.”

Professor Ariely also blogs here.