Remember to check out the Q&A I promised about here.
Testing Out FeedBlitz
I’m testing out FeedBlitz as an email subscription method for people to get blog updates of the Feedburner feed of this blog. I know that there are still some renegade RSS feeds out there, but I haven’t got the bandwidth to consolidate. See the righthand side of the blog for the new FeedBlitz form window. Hat tip to Fred Wilson.
On Monday Will Run Q&A With A CIO Blogger
This coming Monday, I will run a Q&A with Will Weider, CIO of Affinity Health Systems, who blogs at The Candid CIO. Affinty Health System is network of 17 clinics, three hospitals, a long-term care facility and a health plan, so it’s quite of mix of clinic, ambulatory, etc. environments which not all healthcare providers have. The first Q&A at The CIO Weblog will provide some insight as to why he blogs, what blogs he follows, and his perspective on employee blogging. If you are interested in healthcare and/or a case of CIO blogging, be sure to tune in next week. Thanks in advance to Will for making himself available!
Feeling Humble In Dallas
If you are ever in Dallas, I think that it is worthwhile to see perhaps the largest fossilized sea turtle in the world at the Dallas Museum of Natural History. It is called the Protostega, and is estimated to be around 90 million years old. The one I link to here (photographed next to a person in 1929) is apparently one the other large turtles (10%-15% shorter) in the world at the Yale Peabody Museum. When you stand underneath the Protostega in Dallas, it looks bigger than a car by a lot. Although dinosaurs are impressive too, the Protostega is basically a turtle. Imagine snorkeling up next to one of these things in Hawaii or something.
Although I enjoy art, wine, education, music, and playing the drums, this is one example of life that reminds me to stay balanced in life. Live, Love, Learn, & Leave and Legacy.
New Paper On Corporate Blogging By Deutsche Bank Research
Stefan points folks to a new paper by DB Research entitled, "Blogs: The new magic formula for corporate communications". Some interesting charts in here. Also a nice chart of blog growth in Germany.
Fred Wilson On Geography And Venture Capital
Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has expanded on my earlier post related to the relationship of venture capital and geography. He outlines some concrete examples of board meetings and other f2f items that aren’t as effective remote. People shouldn’t get too discouraged by "location, location, location", however. Venture capital is not exactly real estate, but geography surely plays a strong role (accentuated for early-stage ventures) in ways too detailed to go into here.
As an additional note, remember that VCs are also networked, networked, networked. In a prior post, I related a prior recruiting encounter with a VC in another geography as brokered by a VC in a different geography. I’m not even sure my contact information was public at the time when the brokering occurred. Deals and information of all kinds get passed around (hopefully, not passed on). So one can’t give up just because of geography. Just be very sensitive to it and recognize the customer concerns.
What Are We Talking About? (Somewhat Long Post)
I think I’m getting dense. No doubt many non-bloggers will be confused too. I’ve been trying to make sense of all this business around:
- the fuss about A-list blogger lists
- most popular lists
- reinforcing wheels and how A-list bloggers are self-perpetuating (see here)
- how one should track links
- why links reflect popularity
- discrimination of certain bloggers (e.g., by virtue of a men’s club)
#1-3 basically have to do with introducing blogs to non-bloggers or new blogs to existing bloggers. OK.
I think I understand #6 too. A-list bloggers are protected by reinforcing and amplifying patterns in how other bloggers link to them. This sort of thing may discriminate against certain classes of bloggers (e.g., women). Makes sense to look at that for certain professions.
But #4 and #5 … what is this supposed to do for anyone? Blog readers at a micro-level do not care. And as for blog writers, at least what I care about are three things: a) finding out who is saying things about me, b) searching for relevant information to doing my job or carrying out a cause, and c) figuring out what people are reading on my blog so that I can write more relevant stuff. I’m not running the Intel computer of blogs, and most people are not. Why should bloggers care about either a global measure of popularity or how links should be tracked if you can answer the three things I’ve mentioned here?
The sad thing is that it is hard to measure readability through tools today. Inbound links only relate to bloggers and discriminate against readers/non-bloggers. There are way more than 3 times as many readers of blogs out there compared to bloggers. Although I could care less about popularity, if one is going to measure popularity, shouldn’t the measure include non-bloggers? Measuring stuff has also been complicated by RSS. RSS has created a situation that people don’t even have to visit a blog to read it, but then there’s not that many people that use RSS so if one gets metrics about RSS usage, one is still stuck with an incomplete answer. If one puts some software code veneer on the blog, it may be possible to measure stuff better, but you need a PhD in computer science to do this. I can barely teach long division anymore.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in a huff about this. I just know I’ve lost track about what folks are trying to accomplish in the blog search engine space and what the fuss about lists is all about.
As for something I do care about is how customer loyalty plays a role and how it may shift given the explosion of blogs. I’ve not come to any conclusions on this yet, but Jeremy Wright’s post on unsubscribing to A-list bloggers makes me pause to think about where the market will go. Is there a macroeconomic trend that we may see beyond the Long Tail stuff? I’ve seen a lot of blogs that I used to like to read move to del.icio.us tagging instead of blog writing. Maybe the information market is getting saturated in terms of bloggers as individuals.
Anyway, this post was triggered by Andrew’s post at Changing Way, and then a quick flurry of research on A-list bloggers by me. Suffice it to say that I think this post at Blogger’s Blog does a nice job of summarizing some of the A-list blogger issues and characterizing some of the things I’ve mentioned above. Mark Cuban’s post does a good job at providing some insight at what blog search engines are doing. Mark is a very smart guy, and I like the openess he is doing regarding exposing the code, but I have little clue how some of this search engine stuff helps the average blogger (provided one can get reasonably close to the three items I mentioned above).
On CIO And C-Level Blogging
Charlie Russo, News Writer for SearchCIO.com, recently interviewed me for his article "C-Level Bloggers Follow The Rules". The article includes some thoughts on why there aren’t more CIO bloggers out there. Regardless of public blogging, one has to wonder why there isn’t more intranet blogging in IT organizations given the benefits. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that it is more atypical for hosted blogging solutions to have built in intranets.