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The Personal Bee is a brand-new, new-media company with one foot planted firmly in Silicon Valley and the other on the other side of San Francisco Bay in the Berkeley Arts and Commerce District (yes, there really is such a place). In a nutshell, we're dedicated to helping information producers and consumers capture the essential buzz from the roar of information washing over us all everyday. We believe that smart analysis of the information torrent coursing through blogs and mainstream news sites, coupled with the abilities of smart, aggressive and ambitious human editors, will help accelerate the evolution of our news media. The first expression of our thinking is The Personal Bee as you see it today: a collection of news editions personalized to your way of thinking, drawing from a panoply or sources, both novel and traditional, on a wide range of topics. It's our start—and we're glad you wandered by to see it.
We hope you're not overly disappointed to find that you can't call us or send us snailmail...yet. Please email us (we really do write back):
Ted has a long history
as an entrepreneur—Prior to founding The Personal Bee he spent time as COO of Orb Networks, Inc;
as CEO and co-founder of The Dr. Spock Company; CEO of Israeli-based Neta4 Technologies; and was the first outside executive recruited
to WhoWhere? Inc., the eighth-largest Web property in audience reach at the time it was acquired by Lycos in 1998. From 2000 through
2003 Ted served as the chief strategy officer for Borland Software Corporation, helping to reposition Borland as a strategic vendor
of life-cycle development infrastructure from its prior history as a tactical vendor of development tools. In prior lives, Ted also
led a development team for CMP Media, a high-tech media company, Swiss Bank Corporation (now part of UBS), and was a founder of IT
Solutions, Inc., a software development company focused on the NeXT computer.
Chick was the original
programmer and became the chief software architect of the library
automation company, Innovative Interfaces, Inc. Innovative Interfaces is the worlds largest supplier of computerized systems to
libraries, with systems installed in over 39 countries. Prior to working for Innovative Interfaces, Chick worked on software for
speech synthesis at National Semiconductor. Aside from his work at The Personal Bee, Chick pursuing disparate interests in the
longevity problem, cellular biology, indigenous technology and sand volleyball.
Dan comes to The
Personal Bee with a media career spanning more than three decades. Through 1996,
he worked in a variety of newsroom capacities, most notably for The Hearst Corporation's flagship San Francisco Examiner, where he
served as an editor on the paper's foreign, national and metro desks and as an feature and editorial writer. Leaving The Examiner to
pursue online media, Dan has held senior editorial posts in a series of new or startup projects, including Wired News, Wired Magazine,
and TechTV. His freelance reporting has appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Business 2.0, Travel
and Leisure Golf and Salon.com. Dan's an accomplished long-distance cyclist and enthusiastic hiker, blogger, amateur photographer and
family guy.
The image that might jump into your head when you hear the phrase "personal bee" is the old community bee—say a quilting bee—where a bunch of people work on a project together. And indeed, The Personal Bee does prompt the sense of a growing community working on a common project: assembling our own well-informed news editions every day (using "news" in as many ways as it can be defined). That picture also calls to mind bees, the insects, themselves: a group buzzing along in a big social enterprise. They make honey and keep their queen happy. We create new ways of getting at and understanding the news.
We're far from the first to use the word Bee in connection with the notions of language, publishing and news. Here's a brief historical survey:
The first place we find the word "bee" used in connection with a noteworthy public entity is in classical Greece. The philosopher Plato was referred to as the "Athenian Bee" for the pleasing sweetness of his speech and ideas. Similarly nicknamed was Xenophon, who was called the "Attic Bee."
Fast-forwarding 20 centuries or so, we find a much more direct connection between "bee" and the idea of news and publishing. First, consider Eustace Budgell, a British poet, essayist, politico, and spectacularly unsuccessful land speculator who was also something of a news pioneer. In 1733, he brought out a weekly called The Bee. The first issue was subtitled, "Universal Weekly Pamphlet, Containing Something to Hit Every Man's Taste or Principles. It promised to "contain an abridgment of every thing Material, and all the Essays worth reading in the Weekly Papers" as well as Budgell's own writing. "The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland" (1753) notes The Bee published more than 100 issues but that Budgell was forced to fold the publication in 1735 because he was given to "quarrelling with his booksellers, and filling his pamphlet with things entirely relating to himself."
More Bees followed. Irish novelist/poet/playwright Oliver Goldsmith started a literary magazine in London in 1759 called The Bee. A little further on and across the Atlantic, we find L'Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans (the Bee of New Orleans), a French-language paper launched in September 1827 and soon joined by a counterpart in English, the New Orleans Daily Bee. A few years later, Francois-Xavier Garneau, whom the "Dictionary of Canadian Biography" describes as a "notary, poet, and historian, started up L'Abeille canadienne. Garneau did not make a big splash in the world of journalism. The DCB summarizes L'Abeille's history thus: "The paper proposed to encourage 'the spread of knowledge and a liking for reading.' It was an unpretentious weekly, and ceased publication two months [after it began], on 8 Feb. 1834. ..."
But whether in French or English, what was it about "bee" that suggested itself as a periodical name?
The best-known U.S. paper to use the title, The Sacramento Bee, came forth with an answer in its very first number. When the news sheet, then called The Daily Bee, hit the streets on February 3, 1857, founding editor John Rollin Ridge's note to readers explained:
"The name of The Bee has been adopted, as being different from that of every other paper of the state, and as also being emblematic of the industry which is to prevail in its every department." (From Pictures of Our Nobler Selves: A history of Native American contributions to news media.)
That's a pretty clear statement, but eventually it was forgotten. In 1991, a Southern California paper poked fun at the Sacramento paper's name. The Bee responded with a column (republished, sans byline, on the paper's site) that recounted Ridge's 1857 pronouncement and went on to do a quick review of other papers that now carry the Bee name (including one in De Queen, Arkansas). The history notes the Bee legacy has its fun and historic side: Scoopy, the cartoon mascot of The Sacramento Bee and its sister papers in California's Central Valley, was drawn by Walt Disney (the caricature is a dead ringer for Disney's better-known rodent creations).
So what's the take-away?
First, we're not satisfied we've really gotten to the bottom of the "bee" mystery. Sure, Eustace Budgell published his Bee in 1733. But where did he get the name? And what about L'Abeille and the whole French connection? Second, and finally, the particulars of all that background aside, The Personal Bee has rich antecedents in the natural, social, and publishing worlds.
We hope you enjoy our efforts in making this your Personal Bee—a new kind of community, filled with industrious activity, bringing you the buzz and celebrating the American tradition of unfettered news reporting that some may think of as honey and others as a sting.