Welcome to my Internet, be sure to sign in at the front desk.

Finished?

Good, great, now stand back — I’ve got something to tell you. I don’t know where you came from, but I know what you are looking for — a new life, a new beginning as an entrepreneur, a writer, a publisher, a netlebrity an “internet guy or gal.”

You are looking for the rapture of the geeks — the freedom, fame and success that only semi-anonymous bits and bytes can offer, and I’m supposed to help you get there.

It’s the reason that bloggers blog and content producers produce content.

We love to hear ourselves speak (no really, we do) but we bleed for the opportunity to share something valuable with the world — something meaningful. Whether it’s our recipe for peach cobbler or the secrets to marketing your business online, we want to say that our words, pictures and videos did something, changed something, made the world just a touch better because they existed.

That’s why it galls me to realize that only about 10% of what I turn out accomplishes that. The worst day of any writing career is the day when you realize how much crap you’ve passed off as gold. Worse yet is realizing that people are so accustomed to reading the facile, hype-laden crap that the web offers up as prophesy that most of them probably didn’t even notice.

It makes you want to pack up your ball and go home, and trust me we’ve lost a lot of great voices for just that reason. Fortunately, most tunnels (even ones with speeding trains) have lights at their ends and sometimes the old magic RSS wheel turns up just the right posts to get you back on track, get you to realize that all the unreadable pap you’ve shoveled was a necessary part of a growth curve.

Helps you to see that anyone who tells you they are massively successful (think Techcrunch) and that they are proud of everything they’ve ever done to get there is either a liar or makes their money keeping up that particular fiction.

Helps you to accept that getting out of bed every morning and wanting to fix some small part of the world is sometimes as important as actually doing it.

It’s at this point of recognition that I sat a few weeks ago, when I decided to put this together.

Over the next few (dozen) pages I’m going to give you a condensed version of everything I’ve learned about the web over the last few years. I’ll weave this little tale with words, pictures, rants and links. If you make it through (which experience tells me about 1% of you will), you should have a slightly altered perception of the web and maybe, if we are all very lucky, you will have picked up some of the tools you’ll need to make your way in this world.

Let’s begin with guides

I like to think of guides as the base meme-form of the Internet. Over the years I’ve written a lot of guides. Guides to everything from starting a business to a great, big bear of a tome on “Web 3.0“. A handful of them have been great, some of them have been good, but most have been painfully mediocre.

Why?

The web is a moving target and trying to wrap up any concept in blog post format is like trying to summarize religion on the back of a postage stamp. For that reason and many, many more I feel comfortable blaspheming my blogging brothers by saying that long form content (the book, the magazine, the newspaper) is far from dead — despite rumors to the contrary.

Where am I going with this?

Give me a week or two and I’ll tell you all about it.

Back to my point about guides.

If you spend any time on this side of the shore, you’re going to start to notice piles and piles of guides that tell you some pretty heady stuff — mostly it’ll be about working hard, building community and the old journalistic acorn, “content is king.” All of the people preaching these doctrines are right, the only problem is that they’re leaving out all the juicy bits that matter — the “how” that leads up to these magical revelations and all the grinding, soul-less . . . creative, life-affirming, beautiful work in between.

I wanted to give something back to you and since this series is aimed at filtering down all the noise I’ve generated over the years into something palatable, for the pilot I’ve put together a meta guide — a guide of guides if you will. Whether you’re aiming to become a media kingpin or a successful entrepreneur, this “guide” should fill you in on the basics you’ll need to know and will be a good springboard for when you see it all over again written somewhere else.

At the very least it will give you something to do as I put together the rest of these posts.

For anyone who is confused, this is episode one of a seven episode “season” where I hope to cover just about every important thing I’ve learned about the web over the last two years. It will be spread out across this blog as well as most of my backchannels.

It was born of a desire to be better at what I do and inspired by re-reading some of the best pieces of content on the Internet today.

The fact is folks I need to add more value to your lives. As a HTSAA reader I want you all to be better at everything that you do — better entrepreneurs, better marketers, better bloggers, better than me.

If I am not making your lives better I am not doing my job.

If we (as content producers) aren’t trying to help you, what type of credibility can we really have?

So join me as I wander through the last few years and uncover that 10% that matter and maybe a little more.

Onto Episode Two: Back To The Practical

(Images) (Episode One)