A few years ago, I noticed an information void in our local tech ecosystem.  At the time, I was still running around the Triangle area meeting with entrepreneurs  investors, small company employees, big company executives, students, professors and everything in between.  I am connected.  But, I was not getting all the news when I wanted.

Triangle Tech Talk was born.  TTTalk for short.

With the help of a few very dedicated volunteers (Anthony Deloso and Katie Page at Knurture and Megan Carriker) we launched in September of 2011 with a very unique business model.  The idea – take the crowd-sourced aspects of Hacker News, combine that with the stylings of TechCrunch, but apply very firm RTP walls.  And we would only cover software tech.

At some level, we have built a pretty fair content machine with the help from a series of very dedicated and passionate writers (Hersh, Diemmi, Robin, Clay, Michael and Logan).  We created a little news engine.  With time, we started to get a few guest columnists as well as a healthy dose of company news through Press Releases.  In 15 months we accumulated over 1,100 pieces of news.  Combine that with another 100 event notifications and I think we had something going.  Traffic continues to grow very nicely and the engagements #’s are very respectable for a local niche news site.

But like any startup, we were not satisfied with what we were producing and the impact we were having on the ecosystem.  Specifically, the volume, quality and timeliness of the news was not where we wanted it to be.  So, we stepped back and looked at what it would take to bump this up to the next level.  The answer – the same thing I tell every entrepreneur – dedicated time and effort.  With more time and effort, we could see better quality articles, written at the right time.  We would also see more coverage across more companies.  The problem?  This is a volunteer effort and we all have day jobs.

So, today, I share with you what you might have already noticed.  I am pulling back on the crowd-sourced content and the dedicated writers fishing for stories.  For the time being, TTTalk will represent my personal blog concentrating on my observations of what is happening in our ecosystem.  From time to time, I will add a guest post from the people who I think are driving big ideas or making keen local observations.  You will also see a few subtle changes as I add items that make sense and remove items that dont fit the current model.

For those of you who have contributed over the past 15-18 months – thanks.  And stay close, who knows where this goes.

For those readers who enjoy what comes from TTTalk – thanks as well.  I hope you continue to enjoy the words.