Hands down, the most frequent question I get about this blog is about its name and what 16th Letter means. I’m glad that everyone who asks thinks that it must mean something, but so far, no one has figured it out without me telling them. So here’s the scoop.

I started a company this year called Pure Incubation. The naming process was difficult, but when Pure Incubation came up as an initial idea, part of the appeal of the name was that the initials are “PI” - like pi (or pie). The super-geeky part of me really liked some of the symbolically interesting things about naming a company after pi (the 3.14 version), if you read up on the listing in Wikipedia you’ll see what I mean, but here are the highlights:

• Pi is related to math. I am not a big math-lover, so I like the irony.
• Pi is “transcendental” - in math definition is too hard to explain, but its other definition is “surpassing all others” or “beyond common thought or experience.”
• People often say that pi is infinite, but it isn’t - it’s “irrational.” This is another math term that means that a number can’t be written as the ratio of two integers - you cannot reach the end of trying to calculate the exact value of the number.
• There were many people who worked extensively on calculating pi across many nations and cultures and centuries. The first was Archimedes around 250 B.C. Over the years, mathematicians from Greece, China, Babylonia, Egypt, India, Scotland, Germany and France dedicated their entire lives to working on the calculation. It was considered to be a great breakthrough in 1424 when a Persian calculated the number to 16 decimals. There was something so appealing about this number that people dedicated their lives to discovering more about it.
• With the advent of computers, work on pi was revolutionized. In 1949, John von Neumann used ENIAC to compute 2,037 digits of pi - a calculation that took 70 hours. The current record (set in 2002) is pi calculated to 1,241,100,000,000 decimals.

That was likely more information than you ever wanted to know about pi.

After I figured out the company name, I needed to come up with a name for my blog. I wanted it to be related to Pure Incubation, but not tied so closely to it that it couldn’t stand alone. Finally, it dawned on me that pi is the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet.

Photo by jaqian

When I started my career, the Internet didn’t yet dominate publishing to the extent that it does today. There was a lot more paper being pushed around, and my first two “real” jobs - at Let’s Go travel guides and Network World magazine - were both print-based.

The thing that I liked the best about both of these jobs was the feeling of accomplishment that I got when something was finished. At Network World, we put the magazine to bed every Friday afternoon, and were free for the weekend. Monday morning, the issue would appear in the office, all our hard work evident in the print publication. Let’s Go was much the same way, although on an extended scale. We would work through the spring semester and summer, and at the end of the year, the updated and improved travel guide book would be released. An entire book, with your name on it, to prove that you worked hard and produced something great. (I just checked and now that book is 10 years out of date and available to buy for $0.35!)

With my current work, I relate this publishing experience to launching a new Web site. Or a new feature on a Web site. Or a redesign. Or a blog post. There are so many more milestones with the Internet because things are fluid - if something isn’t working, it can be changed easily, so I am quicker to approve and launch something. But there is still a thrill that I get when I create something new and see it live.

Today I get to tell you about some new stuff - and I am excited. I hope that you check everything out and let me know what you think.

First, my blog has been redesigned. If you are reading this post on RSS reader, come to the site and check it out. The redesign was done by Allyson Nickowitz - she’s great and incredibly talented. Not to mention that she managed to get me to sit through a photo shoot!

The Web site for my new company is now live, as well. I hope that this helps explain a bit more about what I’m doing with my business for anyone who is curious.

I have been lucky enough to be involved in the Cara Austin music project from the beginning, and Cara’s first song is now available for free download at her Web site. The CD should come out sometime in December.

There are other projects that I have in process, but they are not yet ready for prime-time. More announcements on future launches will be coming soon.