One question I ask every now and then on this blog is, "Who are all you people?"

Through a combination of reporting improvements and overall growth, my subscriber count now stands at 1679...   and, I probably know about 100 people that I think subscribe...  Other than that, the other 1500 or so of you are anyone's guess.

I find myself asking this question even more with Twitter and MyBlogLog.  Little heads pop up on my blog and people twitterfriend me and I have no clue who they are, how they got here, or why they read.

So, as I've done in the past, if you are a new reader and you're pretty sure I don't know you, feel free to introduce yourself to me and everyone else in the comments. 

The garbage you've seen posted here (...to be more specific, the unreadable garbage... erm... I mean.. the garbage in computer gobbledygook....   well...  you know what I mean...) is courtesy of Typepad Mobile, which seems to be on the fritz.

In the last week, I went from about 950 readers to 1100.  Feedburner glitch or real human subscribers?   We'll see if it lasts.

In the meantime, I'm proud to say that my Fordham undergrad class got marching orders last night to start up their blogger blogs.   Last week, they e-mailed some bloggers to get tips and they're building that last as they get responses here.   One student jumped all over it and had his blog up about 40 minutes after class ended.  Should be a lot of fun as, in a couple of weeks, we'll be moving from a discussion on tools to a talk about how specific industries are being affected by technology.  They'll be blogging their responses and thoughts on the subject.  Should be fun.

Plus, I'm going to open up those pages on how industries are being affected to the public...  so you'll have a chance to have some input into the content of my class.

It's snowing here, by the way.  I'm sort of unimpressed. 

Thanks Nicole...

If you still think that everyone who blogs is a member of the same community, check out Buzzmetrics Top 10 Most Linked To Blog Posts of 2006.

The top post has 800 or so links in, and it is a petition in the LiveJournal community not to change the interface.

800...and then they really drop off from there.

So basically, in a community of 60+ million blogs, according to Technorati, no more than 0.00126% of people linked to the same post at once.

Of course, that doesn't count del.icio.us tags, where sometimes posts get a thousand links or two, but even that's just a drop in the bucket.

Even the most popular blogs overall don't have significant mind or market share when you think about the overall blogging audience, let alone the readership.  Engadget and Boing Boing have about 20,000 blogs linking in... or about 0.033% of all blogs.

So, before you think that pitching to the most popular blogs overall is going to make or break your product, get a little perspective.  What is the right audience for what you're trying to do?  Maybe you're better off pitching to a recipe blog that has 200 really active readers versus a tech blog with a hundred thousand readers who mostly just browse and comment to be seen.

So Time picked you and me... the users, as its Person of the Year, holding out YouTube as its shining example of a community driven media revolution.

I have two reactions to this.

First, I don't need old media telling me I'm special.   Like Jarvis wrote, it has always been us.  Only now, it seems to be fashionable and profitable to say so.  Old media giving us a pat on the back reminds me of that line in Pink Floyd's Animals:

"You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You'll get the chance to put the knife in."

So, to Time, I give a big fat thanks but no thanks... the same reaction I have to blogging "A-lists".  We're just people, living out our lives and talking.  That's not special, that's just real.  Unfortunately, it took the web a long time to get this close to reflecting real life.

That being said, my bigger issue is that it really doesn't reflect real life for most people.  Most people aren't blogging or posting on YouTube.

And, in the year where it became obvious that we weren't going to "win" in Iraq, I have to admit, that I feel a little sickened that we're being so self-congratulatory about taking over the web.  We're nearling 3,000 US military deaths in Iraq, now more than the number of civilians killed in 9/11... and we're talking about...  YouTube?  Are you serious?  PS... Newt Gingrich pointed out something interesting today...  60% of young Iraqi males are out of work.  He suggested fixing things over there by instituting an FDR-sized civil works program.  Instead of paying soldiers to shoot people who have nothing better to do than to shoot at us, how about paying citizens to fix their own country and go to work.

Look, I'm impressed and awed by user generated media as much as the next guy.  I mean, hey, I work for an avatar company. 

But, let's reserve this award for the year that bloggers and YouTubers end the War in Iraq, Save Darfur, rebuild New Orleans, address global warming (I'm going to bike into the city today, December 17th and it's going to be 62 degrees in NYC), push voter turnout over 80%, fix our education system, ban Paris Hilton from all media, start getting states to fall like dominos on gay marriage, or all of the above.  Right now, I think we're still doing a little too much talking to ourselves to deserve the proverbial reach around.  We still have a lot of work to do.

Hopefully, enough of you stick around so that this sticks, but for now, my Feedburner RSS feed count is showing four digits for the first time.  Yup...  1,012 readers. 

Now each of you just need to recommend this blog to 150 other people and we'll catch TechCrunch in no time.  :)

Actually, the thing that always gets me is that I have no idea who most of you are.  So, like I've done once before...   Here's your opportunity to introduce yourself, particularly if you've been lurking this whole time.

Please feel free to announce your presence in the comments...  Tell us who you are, how you got here, what you do... feel free to link to your own company, blog, flickr photos, last.fm page, LinkedIn, whatever...     I'm always happy to meet more readers.

And thanks for reading!   

If blogging really is a cocktail party, then I should really be listening and contributing to other people's conversations just as much as I'm expecting people to listen to mine.   I mean, who would really want to engage in a conversation with someone who just talks about their own stuff all the time?   

So, starting today, I'm going to make a valient attempt to comment as much as I post (not including my daily link posts).   

You can track how well I'm doing with my new coComment widget on the sidebar.  I took the Incircles chat thing off, b/c I didn't have a way to see if anyone was using it and the couple of times I popped in there, no one was.  I guess I should finally give up on the idea of embedded chat.  I've used coComment before, but never the widget...  this is take two.

There's even an RSS feed for it.  If and when I figure out how to get that feed spliced into my Feedburner feed, I'll do that.

So, from now on, I'll be trying to write as much on other people's blogs as much as I write here.

We want to claim the nextNY blog, but we have numerous authors.  There doesn't appear to be a way to do this on the site...   what's the right protocall for this?  I don't want to claim it by myself and hog it... because others will certainly contribute more.   Ideas?

Ok, so the worlds of finance, tech and probably to a lesser extent politics are still boys clubs, but I like to point out when my favorite gender makes some noise.

Found two cool new female bloggers...

A video blog on finance called Wallstrip hosted by Lindsay Campbell.  She's still looking for a "booyah"-like catchphrase, but Jim Cramer should still be watching his back.

Ashley Cecil paints politics and other newsworthy items... literally.  I'm really tempted to buy the Bubba painting...  Gotta love that little stubby thumbs up he gives...she's captured it perfectly. 

Also, BizDev2.0 is going to feature some very successful women in technology...  Catherine Levene, formally of the NYT Digital and now working with TheFind.com, Tina Sharkey, SVP of AIM and Social Media at AOL, and now a late addition, Zia Daniell Wigder from Jupiter Media.

Now if we could only skew the 90/10 boy/girl ration in the audience.

Some people think this stuff doesn't much matter, but for me, getting perspectives from a wide variety of people is one of the reasons why I blog and participate in these communities.  I hope we can see more of this in the future.

 As if you couldn't have predicted this when I joined...   Oddcast is now blogging!  Check out CEO Adi Sideman's first post.  I'll be adding posts from time to time as well.

When I shaved off my facial hair, TONS of people came out and told me how much better they thought I looked without it and how they never really liked it in the first place.

Why the hell didn't they say anything before?

I had facial hair in some form of another for like four years!!

Maybe I wasn't listening? 

Oh well, what's done is done.  Its obvious.  My layout is for suck.  Message received loud and clear.

I will change it.  Black background: gone.

So, now I need more ideas, more feedback.

I REALLY don't want to have the generic Typepad page look.  I want something different.  It doesn't even have to be that good, frankly, just different.

How about this:

I have been beaten.  Suggestions welcome.  This took me like three minutes to do in paint.  If anyone takes the time to do a little rendering, I'll post it.

If I met you at a cocktail party and you turned to me and said, "How do I get someone more important than you to listen to me and to pass on what I'm saying," I think I'd prety much walk away right there.

So when Nick Carr rants about how difficult it is to get "A-listers" to link to him and calls its "open and democratic and egalitarian" nature "an innocent fraud", I'm sort of offended... on behalf of all the onesie and twosie readers of really small blogs and all the bloggers with little or no traffic who keep writing. 

When I teach blogging at Fordham's MBA program, I always stress that its not about getting traffic, but its about making sure you're available to be discovered.  Take this blog about custom labeling.  You think he really cares about links from "A-listers"?  He just wants to be known to the
custom labeling community...  his community.   What's great about blogs is that your community will define itself, because discovery is so easy.  Stake a claim on Technorati, tag your posts, and make sure you ping the right servers and the right people will find you.  So, if Peter only has 15 subscribers for his label blog, its probably the right 15 people and I'm sure engaging in a dialogue with them is worth it.

You don't have to influence everyone... and sometimes just influencing one or two people in a meaningful way can change your life, your business, your career, etc.  That, to me, is what blogging is all about.

I like MikeCrunch's take on this as well...  that its all about the power of the community.  Its not about your blog or my blog, but if word of mouth gets passed around that cocktail party, and we're all talking about it, that's very powerful.

I also think that blogging, if you really want it to have an effect, on you or others, needs to be a lifestyle.  I don't mean that you have to post everyday... but, for example... I'm very forthright about the fact that I blog.  Its on my outgoing e-mails as a footer link.  I know so many people who hide their blogs, but one of the most rewarding things is when someone who just happened to get an e-mail from me, six months later, sees me in person and says, "Hey, what you wrote the other day really made me think...   that you're completely wrong."

Can't win 'em all...   

I'm now the top ranked Charlie O'Donnell on Google, surpassing the Wheel of Fortune announcer.  That's gotta hurt.

40 years on nationally syndicated television and he gets outranked by some punk VC blogger. 

You know he's probably Googled himself and seen this, too.  It was a long run, Charlie, but it had to end sometime.  Sorry, buddy.

I woke up like it was Christmas Day, excitedly springing out of bed to see what kind of journalistic present Kitchen Claus had left for me to open online.  While there's no picture online (maybe they didn't come out well... I haven't seen the print addition yet...) the article is a very high level overview of blogs as a career tool... and I think that writing it must have tipped the author off that this whole topic is quite difficult to squeeze into a single column.  There are literally hundreds of things that need to be explored on this issue, such as the problems that were highlighted when people start blogging about their jobs, to the potential for people to start treating blogs like an online professional journal for self promotion as I have discussed before.  The bottom line is that there will be a career blog book the same way the B&N career section is filled with "Best Sites for Job Hunters" and "Using the Internet to Find a Job" books.  The question is: Will someone let me be the first one to write it?

Here's the article.

My thanks to Patricia Kitchen for giving me the opportunity to share some of my experience with Newsday readers.

As a side note, it was very cool to be quoted in the same article as Typepad's mom, Mena Trott.

Link: Real Lawyers :: Have Blogs : Lawyer blogs stream the best CLE to lawyers.

Lawyers are blogging about the article!  Its always worthwhile to make nice with lawyers... those are people you don't want on your bad side.  :)    Kevin the blogging lawyer echoes the growing awareness that blogs are quickly becoming an indespensible career tool.  (I found this by searching for my name in Technorati.)

I just got this in my findmypath@gmail.com mailbox...

Dear Charlie,

             We read the profile of you in Sunday’s “Newsday” and thought your knowledge, experience, and success with blogging as a networking and career building tool would make a great basis for a Learning Annex course.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

If you don't know what the Learning Annex is, you obviously don't walk around the city much, because their little booklets with classes for people to take are everywhere.  Ok, so I'm definately going to do that, AND it could also help me with the book thing, because they have "How to Get Published" talks all the time, so I'm sure they know literary agents.

I may have mentioned this before, but the ultimate irony of all this is that its turning out that what is "going to be big" is the blog itself.

I'm a big fan of Newsgator Online and Brad showed us the other day how to create a blogroll from it.  I still want it to be synced to the /contacts folder that I created where I actually read my blogs, but the creating a new location hack will do for now.

Link: The Mobile Andrew: November 2004.

Did you notice what's hilarious about this pic?

Andrew Anker has been moblogging for some time now, which basically means he has a camera phone that he takes pictures with, and e-mails them straight to his blog with a little note.  He works for Six Apart, which is the company behind Typepad, which powers my blog as well as my Find My Path career site. He snapped off the photo above at Six Apart's recent board meeting.  The picture is of the co-founder of the company, Mena Trott, but what really struck me was the two gentlemen in the backround.  One of them is someone I had the fortune to meet earlier this year, David Hornick, who is a VC from August Capital who funded the company recently.  The other guy... well... the other guy is HUGE... or at least appears that way in the picture.  So David wouldn't make the Sand Hill Road basketball team (which, by the way, would likely be dominated from the guys at ComVentures and John Hummer, who used to play in the NBA/ABA), but still...  this is just hilarious.   

I brought the pic to David's attention and he responded:

"Just clicked on your link.  That's hilarious.  The guy I was talking to was
a mere 6 foot 8.  Of course that seems pretty darn tall when you're 5 foot
4."   

At least he takes it in stride, no matter how short those strides may be.   Good luck guys!  I've enjoyed keeping up with this company.

I was trying to explain to my dad on Saturday what RSS was and I came up with this analogy:

Web content is like pizza and there are a couple of ways to get your pizza.  HTML is like having it "to stay."  Web pages written in HTML are all about getting you to come in, stop in one place and spend some time on it.  RSS is like getting your content "to go"--no tray, dish, glasses... just your food in a box, formatted to be sent exactly where you want it, when you want it.  E-mail content from a website is like having pizza sent to you as well, in that same box, just not always when you want it, which is hardly convenient at all.