The following letter, composed at my kitchen table, will be an expository essay. Why expository? Because it's an archaic but proven method of sharing an idea. Expound = share. This might sound a bit like an academic lecture, but hang in there — we've got Turkish men, T. S. Eliot's feces, and more to cover. Here's my idea: We live in a blurred world where the boundaries between work and home, buyer and seller, and Web site dot-one and Web site dot-two are disappearing.

It seems that each day we read about companies merging, acquiring, spinning off business units, and forming strategic alliances. Banks, portals — even Martha Stewart's done it. I've participated in some of these activities both actively and passively. I would guess that many of you have, too.

Think about how you work. Where you work. When you work. Now add in the "life" part, mix in e-mail with a dash of cell phones, pagers, and voice-mail. What's the result? Blur.

The traditional barriers between work and home are dissolving. As I type this essay, I'm sitting at home with my laptop facing the window. I can't see the nearby peak, Pine Cobble, but I can hear the wind rushing through its barren trees. It may appear that I'm a hopeless workaholic, but really I'm only trying to adapt to these changes and enjoy the results. If work is home and home is work, then you have two choices in our increasingly connected economy: Adapt or deny. I've chosen to adapt.

Consider a place where bagels are served on Mondays, pizza late on Wednesdays, and dogs are free to roam the space. Sound familiar? Is this home or is it work? Here, quite literally in this Tripod/Lycos/Williamstown office, we have chosen to adapt a casual work atmosphere where Margaret's son and Natalie's dog are equally welcome. We recognize that people who feel relaxed and comfortable in their environment will do their bnest work. People who feel at home at work. Blur.

Just recently Tripod redesigned and restructured the architecture of the entire site. We literally trashed hundreds of HTML pages, blew away thousands of lines of old code, and deleted functioning Perl applications in one masterful sweep. This marks the fourth or fifth redesign in the protean history of the company. It also designates the fourth or fifth shift in our business model. Why do we continue to shift gears and change directions?

In a blurred world, we realize that organizational structures that are designed for adaptability (open systems, open standards) are ultimately more enduring and more successful. We learn this lesson from biology, where organisms sense the environment around them, adapt to it, and sometimes change it. Think of those evolutionary creatures that bred and multiplied, but could not adapt to their environment and thus died. Other creatures, which combined old and new genes through the process of natural selection, changed and survived. T.S. Eliot knew a little something about organic Web sites when he wrote:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fire to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces

From "East Coker," Four Quartets

Eliot was speaking of the cyclical nature of things in his Four Quartets. He repeats the phrase: "In my beginning is my end, in my end is my beginning" throughout these poems. He could have substituted the word "blur" instead of this phrase. So it is on the Web. Sites are launched, change over time, and are destroyed. In their places new sites appear. In biological terms, each was a chance to prune some unhealthy information from the genome.

Did you forget about the Turkish man? Kiss Mahir; he is indeed living in a blurred world.

— Geoff Strawbridge

Want to read more about Blur?

Geoff recommends Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer's book entitled Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy. Letter from Tripod or sales pitch?