Costa Rica was awesome…mostly. It was kind of an “outdoors Disneyland” so I felt a little cheap and touristy but it was great to detach, hike, ride a zipline, drink pretty good beer and stay away from electronics. But I still thought a lot about work. I thought about ways I can make myself a better evangelist and more valuable to Adobe. I thought about how I can make my blog less boring and I thought about how I can make RIAs the talk of techtown.

I actually took a bit of a hit when I joined Adobe in terms of “influence”. I was never an A-lister or anything close to it but I had a bit of geek cred in the wider Web 2.0 world and every once in a while I’d get links/attention/questions about rich Internet applications from the movers and shakers of the tech news world (not to be confused with the actual doers in technology). But when I joined Adobe I think I was viewed as selling out a bit and the attention didn’t come quite as often. I’d argue I still know more about RIAs and its community than almost anyone but I chose a side, so I’m impartial and I’m fine with the ramifications of that.

In the process my blog kind of got boring. It was watered down a bit with Adobe news and how “pumped” I was about what Adobe was doing. That stuff sucks for readers if that’s all there is and there’s no context to our announcements. Of course I’m excited about it but I work for the company, so it’s a no brainer. YOU guys are the ones doing the really cool stuff. You’re building applications, arguing about user interfaces, talking about designer developer workflow and building companies that *gasp* actually make money. Adobe does some cool stuff but it doesn’t become really interesting until you do something with it. Adobe is the clay and you are the artists. My goal this year is to help you get the attention of the digerati. I want to show off what you’re doing and help show how it’s going to impact users and change the way people communicate/work/play. That’s what excites me about RIAs and all of you are living and breathing it every day.

So please, drop me an email if something is cool. I want to get you on TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb, I want Scoble to do a really long video with you, I want Hugh McLeod to do a funny little drawing about you. I want Dave Winer to make a post about you with those little red hashmarks that I don’t entirely understand. Eventually I want the New York Times to write about you and the Wall Street Journal or The Register to talk about what you’re doing.

There’s no doubt that bloggers can be overrated and full of themselves. But when you get them excited about something it starts the ball rolling and can turn into something very valuable for you regardless of how you define value. There’s so much going on within the AXNA bubble that people don’t get to see. I hope I can help you draw it out and if you have any ideas on how I can do that, I’m all ears. Now get back to sculpting.

[tags]Adobe, personal, blogging, AXNA[/tags]