• by Kendall Allen , August 2, 2010

Ghosts are something I think about a lot. Especially when I travel to San Francisco -- a place where I lived and worked for about 11 years, starting in 1993. I have been here all week, working, visiting friends, sharing meals, sashaying through old haunts. All of this is done, as you may imagine with the ghost reference, with intensely mixed feelings. For after all, this is the Bay Area, the Peninsula, Silicon Valley -- and I was here during very formative, dramatic years personally and professionally. Much converges here; and the traces will always be evident in any conversation with people who've stayed and are continuing to fuel the region.

And by the way, I love ghosts. They're not bad. They just are. Personally, the ghosts are old loves, early stories, decisions made or not made, pivotal drives along the coast late at night, friends who've passed away -- things and conversations that went down in the foggy passages of this place. Professionally, there are early struggles and small victories; decisions made and not made (just like the personal ones); exhilarating and precarious management chapters; breaking new ground with pals during my early time in digital publishing; my first agency gigs; riding with clients through their own market travails of building companies and watching them fall; participating in lots of company building, then restructuring, rebuilding; macabre recollections of the crash; great entrepreneurial memories of the rebuild and the path forward. The list feels infinite in scope.

I always think about the broader industry tableau when I am here. How could you not, in a region where so much intersects: technology, publishing, venture capital, the agency world, media, public and private enterprise, and 17 versions of entrepreneurship. And where all was uniquely ignited for that certain period I was first here. Yes, we all know the often-quoted economic reference to those periods of irrational exuberance and then of lethargy that followed. But, I reconnected with a lot of the small industry-related things when I was here that, together, have sure additive relevance.

On the business side, in addition to the big things that linger and helped shape media evolution and history, there are smaller patches of industry history, truisms or shared points of view that provide really essential context to understanding where we are. These are not region-specific, but I found myself thinking about them, as I attended various meetings or saw old business pals from those days. Their lingering in memory helps ground industry context.

• I thought about Flycast in the early network landscape and what the industry has had to gradually tackle, address, and overcome. After all, I know my agency wasn't the only team who had to talk a client off the wall when their ads for pearl necklaces ran on a mullet site. So much had to be broken apart and reconstituted by the network space as a whole, to begin -- now -- what may be its heyday.

• My mind wanders to the original cottage SEO industry -- and the boutique folks we large agencies relied on as outside vendors to service our clients. Within the launching of the industry within an industry that became search, this period was on some level foundational, as bad SEO practices fell out and best practices became part of the greater industry good.

• Speaking of search, I remember the early chance that AOL had at AOL.com. Its dual platform visibility, captive audience and available keyword and consumer data was remarkable. While I will never understand the resisting of what looked like a first-mover opportunity in paid search, there's even greater reason to be intrigued by all the M&A activity and executive rallying over at AOL over the past few years.

• When I think about privacy while driving down U.S. 101, I cannot help but think of early forays into behavioral targeting, "imputed data profiles" and the like. For a brief period, a time of which I don't talk much, I did some work at excite@home. Some of their acquired companies were pioneering -- something. But let's just say, the true advance of the science in this area, thanks to today's market leaders on this part of the landscape, has been not just exciting to see -- but somewhat of a professional relief. Those who got early glimpses are thankful to today's commitment to get this stuff right.

When I get on a plane back to New York in a few hours, I confess I'll probably be thinking more about old love, past magical nights sleeping under the stars on the West Coast, and my timeless, borderless business relationships from those days that still rock on. But it's these other little congregating ghosts that make me smile as I wrap up the week and look onward to the horizon.