All in The Blogosphere
From Steve Rubel... Great quote...Link: Micro Persuasion: How Not to Pitch a Blogger.
Back in my early career my mentors used to tell me never put anything in email to a journalist that you wouldn't want on the front page of The New York Times. Well, nowadays you need to think bigger. I say, never put anything in an email to a blogger that you wouldn't want to stick on your own forehead for life!
We had an interesting discussion yesterday about blogging. In particular, we talked about my blogging in relation to my employment at Union Square Ventures. Blogging is a very powerful medium, and you never know who is reading. While its very easy to put up a "My opinions aren't that of my company" note, that doesn't mean that there won't still be some entrepreneur who reads my blog and decides that USV isn't the kind of firm they want to work with. Of course, my penchant for flip commentary and shooting from the lip doesn't help that. Now, of course, flip commentary about baseball or kayaking is unlikely to have that kind of effect, but opinionated commentary about companies and technology might.
In addition to my potential for saying something out of line that isn't reflective of my firm, I'm more concerned about putting myself out there as more of an expert on something than I am. Its so easy for blog content to proliferate around the net, and perhaps I'll post some kind of groundbreaking insights that everyone will want to trackback to. (It could happen!) All of the sudden, I've put myself out there as someone who knows something more than they really do, and, at this point, that's not something I'm particularly comfortable with.
Therefore, I've decided to institute some new policies around here, in the form of a policy statement:
- I am employed by Union Square Ventures as an analyst, not a partner. The opinions expressed on this site are not necessarily reflective of the opinions of other employees of the firm, nor of the official positions of the firm (if there are such things) and should not be construed as such.
- I have decided not to post my opinions, for the foreseeable future, on technology and venture capital related topics in terms of their viability or potential success as a business. From time to time, I reserve highlight what technologies I find useful from a technology consumer standpoint or point out what features I would like to see added to existing products as a consumer.
- I will not be posting any discussion about companies that Union Square Ventures is looking at for a potential investment or is currently invested in. However, I may actually use or link to some of their publicly available services on my blog as a user. Obviously, if we like a company enough, its not unlikely that we would use their services.
- I will not be posting any internal business and technology related discussions, whether it be with Brad and Fred or with any companies I might speak to. Fred can post on such discussions if he so chooses on his own blog, and Brad, well, I'm sure Brad will cave eventually on the blogging.
- Please send any business plans you might have to Union Square Ventures through our website, and not directly to me. This is my personal site and while Charlie as a person is an analyst for a venture capital fund, this site is not about that fund and mention of its activities are incidental to descriptions of my life.
I attended this "webinar" in December... its a very professional discussion on the more serious side of blogging. Very informative for beginners who might be looking to do something a little more serious than writing online diaries. When you're done, perhaps Success Blogging will make more sense to you.
You can now register for my class at the Learning Annex! I'm not thrilled about the "And fatten your wallet" tagline and its not how I'd like to portray the class. Its really for serious minded professionals interested in career development, not people looking for get rich quick schemes. Alas, they're trying to bring people in and sell the program hard, so I can't knock them too hard. :)
Thanks to Mike R. for forwarding me this link from Dave Taylor's blog. I just browsed it, but sounds like this would be a good person to share thoughts with...
Link: "Would you buy a book on blogging?" from The Intuitive Life Weblog.
"...Here are my two cents on this subject: books about blogging are going to be boring, just another subset of books about writing (the vast majority of which seem to miss what I view as the essence of learning how to write, which is to write. Peter Elbow captures this in his great book Writing Without Teachers).
To me, though, blogging is just a tool..."
Boring to bloggers, perhaps, but there are still a lot of people out there who actually like to read books AND use computers. I know, I know. It blows my mind, too. I always liked Harold Ramis' line in Ghostbusters, "Print is dead." I'd prefer to read everything of a screen, be it on a laptop, desktop, TV, Palm, phone, whatever, but people still insist on cutting down trees, so we have books. Anyway, point being, yes, I agree that you really learn about blogging, and about yourself as a blogger by actually blogging, but some people just need a head start or a few tips. Dave also writes "maybe I'd buy a book if the author had a unique perspective on what to do with blogs, but it sure doesn't seem like a very big market." Well, the "what to do" part is where the market lies, and in fact, it is very large. When you come up with unique applications of blogs, you tap into the 64% of internet users who have never heard of them by identifying blogs with something they're already doing, like, career development, for example. Blogs are, just as Dave puts it, a tool, and a there are lots of books on how to use tools, from socket wrenches to C++. Sure, the real tool masters use by doing, but sometimes, beginners need a book to get them started, or at least feel comfortable with getting started. Speaking of which, my Success Blogging site, is nearly complete and I will probably replicate this post on there for discussion.
LiveJournal has been down for over 24 hours, not less than a week and a half after they got bought. Of course, the two have nothing to do with each other, but you have to think that at least a few of the 2.5 million active LJers are having their doubts. This has got to be extremely embarrassing for Six Apart. Oh, and PS... what's with the "9:12AM... We're back at it..."? I think if you're going to be serious about capturing the innermost thoughts of millions of LJers, you call in the reserves and you find some people who can spell you and work through the night. 12 hours? What kind of stamina is that? I stay at work longer the day before our internal strategy reviews. I'm sure there were plenty of LJers trying to post in the middle of the night who didn't shed a tear for the LJ team's 12 hour attempt. Kind of reminds me of the day AOL went out.
This goes back to the question of what exactly Six Apart bought. I would bet that free blogs are pretty far down on the stickyness list. Perhaps the "community" aspect is what will keep everyone on... the same reason most of us are still using AOL IM... only because everyone else we care about is still on it.
And what's going on here? Greatestjournal.com apparently has 700,000 members. I never even heard of them, but apparently they're using the LJ open source code. I have to be honest, after I saw this, I thought to myself, "I know a lot of LJers, but I don't know anyone on GJ." How easy would it be to put up a journaling site with LJ code, totally inflate the numbers of users, and try to get lots of people to donate to you? You could even write some fake blogs to make people think that there were lots of other people on there. Ok, maybe I'm just being cynical, but 700,000 bloggers seems like a big population to never hear of, especially when we were all commenting to death on the 6A-LJ merger. I don't think I'll believe that number unless I get 700,000 individual comments from GJers.
Link: Mena's Corner: Current Mood: Optimistic.
So its true... Six Apart bought LiveJournal. I think the funniest thing was that, by the time they announced it, it was old news... a whole day old. We all posted and commented the thing to death before we knew anything about it including myself (you thought CNN was bad about making 24 hours of news out of nothing.) The truth is, we don't know what this means until at least a year from now, if not longer, and I don't think either of the companies knows either... well, not exactly anyway, which, to me, is what a marriage is supposed to be about.
I've always said that, if you're truly in it for the long haul, you're in a marriage for like 50 or 60 years. What could you possibly discover about each other in even a year or two that would somehow prepare you for 60... its insane. You need to just find someone who compliments you as a team and decide that, no matter what, this is the person I'd like to face the unknown with. I knocked this thing at first because I couldn't figure out why and I couldn't point to tangiable reasons that would create value. But, that doesn't matter. Inevitably, the landscape changes and all of the "best laid plans" go awry. I think marriages and mergers fail when people are too locked into a plan and what the future will bring, instead of just saying, "we have great resources, they have complimentary resources, we think we're better together." You can't predict the future and things won't always go your way... so just pick someone you love and hold on tight... seems that's what is happening here. I may not get it, but I can respect it.
Its too bad this didn't happen earlier, because had Howard Dean's blog had a little Current Mood: "So excited I might scream uncontrolably" smiley, we might have seen that coming and taken it better.
Link: Om Malik on Broadband ? Six Apart to buy Live Journal.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure I agree with OM's comment that Six Apart is somehow a natural fit. Certainly the LiveJournal audience is a drastically different crowd than the paying Typepad crowd or the Moveable Type users, but diversifying your audience by buying a group that is unlikely to ever pay for your product, well, I'm just not convinced that's a good way to go. I mean, how many fifteen year old girls are going to fork over a dime to get their site hosted, even if you do give them all of the fantastic features of Typepad/MT which I have come to know and love. Where's the payoff here? Perhaps it makes Six Apart more attractive as an acquisition candidate itself? It seemed like their growth would certainly make it attractive enough, and I can't honestly believe that LiveJournal's growth is any better.
Om writes "It also gives the company a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces." Fighting chance against MSN Spaces? I'm sorry, but I don't see the droves of people flocking to Spaces, and I can't really see any blue blooded blogger letting Bill and Steve host their little baby. I haven't seen numbers, but I never got the impression that MSN Spaces had any initial success. And as for Blogger, which is currently the biggest site, well, I never really thought of it as a "winner" takes all scenario. I always thought of Typepad/MT as a place for more sophisticated and professional bloggers that need more features and Blogger as the place to go for a simple, free service. There should be more than enough of the prior space to go around, if you include all of the corporate blogs, to build a viable business. That segment of the market, currently the only paying segment, is prime real estate and will be huge at some point.
I'll stop, because I definately don't have enough info to work with here so I'm not going to go guessing as to why they did it. But, let me tell you, if they try to generate revenues directly from LiveJournal members (I won't make that statement more explicit for fear of starting up the rumor mill), hell hath no fury like a fifteen year old LiveJournaler. Forget the backlash when they changed the MT pricing scheme...that would be nothing.
I'll think more about this on my way to work, but I can't really think of a good reason to spend your venture money on LiveJournal. If I'm missing something, I'd love to hear it.
