About John P.
I’m John Pozadzides. Most people just call me John P. I’ve been putting words and pictures on the World Wide Web since roughly 1995, back when the whole thing had a few thousand sites on it and I was helping write some of the rules for how they’d be built. I’ve run this blog, One Man’s Blog, continuously since 2006. That makes me one of the longest continuously-publishing writers on the internet, and I’ve got the receipts.
Before There Was a Blog, There Were the Standards
Before “blogging” was a word, I was building the web by hand. In 1996 I founded The Web Design Group, better known by its address, HTMLHelp.com: one of the first few thousand websites in existence, and one of the earliest places online where you could actually learn to build a site the right way. I spent those years as a loud advocate for web standards, contributing to the early HTML specifications and later the CSS specifications that still hold the web together. The group’s CSS work earned a spot in the W3C’s CSS Hall of Fame. HTMLHelp.com is still online thirty years later. Go look.
One Man’s Blog: Twenty Years and Counting
I launched One Man’s Blog in 2006 to replace the hand-coded site I’d been running for years before it. The tagline has always been “Specialization Is for Insects,” and I meant it. Nearly two thousand posts later (1,954 at last count), I’ve written about personal finance, consumer rights, technology, philosophy, metalwork, and whatever else fascinated or annoyed me that week.
Some of it traveled further than I expected. My article “How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords” got picked up by CBS News by name, syndicated to Lifehacker, and copied across the web for years; it’s still the piece strangers bring up. When I decided to build a catamaran out of two kayaks, the how-to I wrote became the reference for everyone else crazy enough to try it. That’s the pattern: I do the thing, then I show my work.
The Day Job Paid for the Hobby
For most of two decades my professional life ran on internet infrastructure: connectivity, security, and hosting, back when that was the hard part. I was Vice President at SAVVIS Communications, a Director at Cable & Wireless, and Chief Marketing Officer at Layered Technologies. I served on the President’s Cloud Computing advisory board under the Obama administration and contributed to the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy.
I’ve also run companies. I was co-founder and CEO of iFusion Labs, the company behind the real-time analytics platform Woopra, which I helped start and personally funded through the 2008 financial crisis. I was also CEO of the media company Livid Lobster.
On Camera
For several years I hosted GeekBeat TV, a technology news series that ran up to four times a week and reached millions. That put me in front of a lot of cameras. I was a regular tech-news guest on CNN, the BBC, NBC, and Fox, and a frequent guest on my friends’ shows, like Leo Laporte, Chris Pirillo, Fro Knows Photo, and many others. I represented brands including Qualcomm, Panasonic, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Ford, and Toyota, and gave keynotes in Japan, the UK, and the US on everything from leadership to the future of technology. I also got to interview some genuinely interesting people. One favorite: sitting down with Slash from Guns N’ Roses.
What I’m Doing Now: Making Things Out of Steel
These days I make things you can hold. I’m a formally trained bladesmith, blacksmith, welder, and direct-metal sculptor, and a member of the American Bladesmith Society, where I studied under four different Master Bladesmiths. My work has appeared in juried exhibits and sits in private collections around the country. Today I’m the founder of Texas Metal Works. When I’d rather write about the road than the forge, I do it at AlwaysDetour.com.
Put my name into a search engine and you’ll turn up thousands of results going back two decades: interviews, articles, talks, and a fair amount of nonsense. I’ve been at this a long time, and I’m not done.
You can find me on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Shoutouts, insults, and praise are all welcome.