The launch of ribbonfarm-blog in September 2007 is the founding act of Rao's public intellectual career. The blog was started while Rao was still employed as a senior researcher at xerox-parc (Xerox Research Center, Webster, NY), making it initially a parallel project — the public intellectual work running alongside the corporate research role that funded it.
Significance
The launch is significant less for the immediate audience it attracted (which was small) than for the platform it established. Ribbonfarm would run continuously for seventeen years, generating the essays, series, and concepts that define Rao's public intellectual identity. Everything in the rao KB — every concept, every major essay, every collaborative relationship — passes through ribbonfarm-blog as its primary medium of development and distribution.
The choice to start a blog in 2007 placed Rao in the middle of the high-blogging era, when RSS-fed independent blogs were the primary venue for serious public intellectual work outside traditional media institutions. The blog-native intellectual — writing long-form, linking generously, developing ideas across many posts over time — was the dominant figure in the intellectual internet of that moment. Ribbonfarm was built on that model and executed it with unusual sustained commitment.
What Made Ribbonfarm Distinctive
The early Ribbonfarm was distinguished by its refusal to be a conventional tech blog. It was not a news aggregator, not a product review site, not a startup advice column. The tagline "Experiments in Refactored Perception" — connecting to the concept of refactored-perception — signaled that the project was about changing how readers see familiar things, not delivering information about new ones. The synthetic, essay-length format, the willingness to develop arguments across multiple posts and return to ideas years later, and the consistent engagement with social science, philosophy, and systems theory set it apart from the comment-cycle economics that drove most tech blogging.
From Launch to Peak
The xerox-corporate-period that contained this launch gave Ribbonfarm its initial conditions: corporate employment for financial stability, an engineering and systems background for analytical frameworks, and the accumulated frustration with institutional life for motivational fuel. The blog grew through the remainder of the corporate period, achieved its first major viral moment with the gervais-principle in 2009, and by the time Rao transitioned to full independence at the start of the peak-ribbonfarm era, had become a self-sustaining intellectual platform.