My Favorite Post of 2011 was a Team Effort

Looking back on this past year, it’s tricky to choose which posts are my favorite. Our team spans many countries across Asia, figuring out how to work together virtually has been a challenge. I’d have to say that my favorite posts were probably the ones that required a team effort, with people pitching in from all corners of Asia. And with that in mind, our coverage of the Techcrunch Disrupt conference stands out.

I wasn’t even in Beijing for this conference, but Willis, Steven, and Charles were there on the ground, and I tried to provide support where I could from here in Tokyo. They were struggling with poor Wi-Fi at the event, and often times logging into WordPress to post would take ages — so in some instances when the connection got really bad, they were updating me via IRC chat and I’d post from here. The guys had a good mix of stories and live blog posts [1], the latter using our own live-blogging tool that we’d experimented with at GMIC, but didn’t really get comfortable with until Disrupt. You can see an example of one of those live-blogs here, featuring paragraph level permalinks (ala Dave Winer’s Winerlinks [2]) so that readers can share any given quote with ease.

When the dust settled after the two-day conference, I put all the posts together into an unordered list that could serve as a one-stop summary of Techcrunch Disrupt. That post is here, and because it was such a coordinated effort among all the team members, I think it might be my favorite post of this year – though technically, it’s a collection of posts [3].

Willis (Singapore), Charlie (China), Rick (Japan), Steven (China): Our team has yet to all meet in one place. So this team photo will have to do.

Our core team members – Willis, myself, Steven, and Charlie – have yet to actually all meet in one place at one time. And while working together virtually has been a challenge, I’m looking forward to a beer with these guys in Singapore in February, so we can toast what I think was a pretty damn good year for this blog.

When Willis invited me to join PO way back in March, he invited ideas on collaboration tools and digital publishing workflows, and the opportunity to contribute in that area is one of the main reasons I joined. He’s gutsy, and encourages experimentation – and I dig that a lot.

So what’s in store for 2012? Personally, I’m looking forward to a lot of improvements for PO, including more original videos and photos, more screencasts, more interactive content, and more infographics. And more Markdown, because it’s way cool.

But of course, we’d love to hear what you want too. So don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you have a suggestion. Or if you think you’d like to get involved as a contributor, we’d love to hear from you.