Well, the cat is out of the bag. Dave Winer and I are working together.

Not that we were keeping it a secret. And now that Dave has come out and said it, I feel like we've set our facbook status to 'in a relationship with...'

Except we haven't of course, we both don't do the facebook, in fact, a lot of what we're working on deprecates the corporate status silos.

Dave is the second of three such partnerships I've had in my career and life. The first was Jeroen van Inkel, the most recent is my No Agenda podcast partnership with John C. Dvorak.

Jeroen and I were very young and super successful on dutch radio in the early 80's. Many say we in fact changed the radio landscape in the Netherlands, remnants of which can still be found in today's programming there. Not many people know that we weren't friends. We never hung out together and perhaps even never really liked each other at all. I believe it was exactly this balance that made us so great back then. There was a natural tension that had us living on the edge together. We were young and full of adolescent energy, so the constant tension was easy to handle. I'm pretty sure we could not do that again now that we are both are approaching 50.

John C Dvorak and I had it figured out from day one. We have a golden rule. We don't talk to each other unless it's on the show. We rarely even email. We do no preparation together. In fact, it is the obvious one-upsmanship on the show that makes it work. We are both trying to outdo each other with some godaweful news we've uncovered and dissected that is completely ignored by the mainstream news media. We have enormous respect for each other and have a perfect sexless marriage and we love it that way. So does the audience apparently, as we are now in our 4th year of the show and we are both even more enthousiastic each time we kick of a new episode.

Dave and I have a mix of relationships one and two, and I feel extremely fortunate and am grateful that we can give it another go. Our collaboration has undeniably resulted in big things in the past and once again I feel something special is happening.

In the past few months we've figured out how to work with each other again. I've grown, as has Dave, and we know where the pitfalls of the past are, and are careful to route around them.

This time around, it's all about the work. That is the vision we share. We don't have to agree (its good we don't always), and most of the time we leave our personal lives out of the conversation. I have goals for the work to achieve, as does Dave, they intersect in many important places.

I am proud to a part of a growing team who are working on these great projects. I'm reconnecting with more people from the past as well as meeting many talented new ones.

I have learned a lot since 2005 and am a better person for the breakup we had then (wow, that sounds like a lyric from a country song!). Some of the old irritations are still there, but they are now a part of our relationship instead of a hinderance. In fact, Dave writes that he doesn't like my twitter icon. This is great, and I won't change it, because some of the work we're doing will obfuscate the need for him to ever look at my twitter icon again :-)

 4/19/2011; 9:47:47 AM.   .