I know I'm going to have to reset my catagories.  I'm realizing that most of my blogs fit into like eight catagories and then I've also got both a "Friends and Outings" and "Outings and Friends" catagory.  I don't know how that happened.  So I'm at the airport now, shelling out another six bucks for 60 minutes of TMobile wireless.  Actually, I don't mind it, because I use it sparingly, since DTUT covers me pretty well in terms of wireless usage. 

I was reading apophenia and she commented on the nature of the blogger/audience interaction...

"For me, the plausible deniability invoked in blogging is strong. I can convince myself that i write for me and me alone ::wink:: and convince myself to be shocked when i receive feedback. I can check my stats, but those are just numbers - nameless, faceless people. Yet, here i am, speaking to nameless, faceless people, only i'm required by this situation to convince myself that you do really exist, even if i cannot see you. In this situation, i have the expectation that i am a face to you and you're just an assumption to me. It really brings life to the idea that i'm just a talking head."

She's actually studying the socialogy behind blogs and social networking over the web, among other things and she writes some really thoughtful stuff.  Her archives go back to 1997, making her the earliest blogger I know.

This trip was fantastic for me.  I feel reenergized.  Beware my next big project.  I hadn't actually taken a real non-family vacation since.... well, I can't actually remember.  Perhaps it dates all the way back to when Deirg and I went to Jill's wedding.  This vacation thing could be a good thing, even if I am enjoying my life.  Sometimes, its good to get a restart.

So, I'm looking at my fellow passengers waiting to get on.  These are all the cheap people, because there was a $200 difference between the red eye and the afternoon flight.  I'm debating what will make me sleep easier....  light food or a big turkey sandwich.  Either way, even if I don't get good sleep, I'm heading straight to the gym when I get into the city.  That will make me feel better.  I'm looking forward to that post-gym shower.  Ok, boarding soon.   I gotta figure out what zone I am.

Oh, PS...   Good for the Scott Peterson jury.  We all knew he was guilty.  Of course, I still can't figure out how, where, when, or why... but I suppose that doesn't matter.  You know some goofball will marry him while he's in prison, too.

Link: apophenia: impression management: blogs as terrible representations. 

Last week, we got to meet some of my readers, which was very cool.  Now, I'm thinking about, after reading danah's article, what the impression is that I give off.  I don't think I've ever really met anyone through my blog after building up any kind of substantial online relationship anyway.  I wonder what kind of impression I give off here and how that compares to my offline persona.  I think part of the issue is that a lot of people only blog on one topic.  Fred and I are probably very much like we are in person as we are on our blogs.  In fact, Fred is pretty much his walking blog.  As for danah, I'm sure she's probably much more chill in person as she is on her blog, because she tends to get into some heady academic thinking on there.  In fact, as I get into some of the more well known bloggers I met through their blogs first and then in person, like Mena, Jarvis, and Steve Rubel, I think they're pretty much what I expected.  If you keep up with a blog, I think a lot of someone's personality comes out.  Its difficult to write everyday and hide major aspects of your persona... at least for me it is anyway.  So, I think I'm probably much like my blog.

Link: Recapping the year for Autoblog - Autoblog - www.autoblog.com.

The guys at Autoblog do a great job satisfying my car fix and its very cool to hear the personal story behind how they flourished in the Blogosphere in 2004.  I hope 2005 is an even bigger year for them.

Too funny...  Clothes and novelty items for bloggers and venture geeks.

     So I got another call from Patricia Kitchen, the Newsday reporter who interviewed me a few weeks ago.  We left off last time talking a little bit about blogs and I had pointed her to my attempt at a Career Q&A blog, which I haven't quite yet put the full court press on.  Anyway, this time, she's going to write an article about how blogs can help you with your career, and again, I talked her ear off for a good long time.  As I talked about it, I think she was overwhelmed, and admittedly, I was to, about the scope of uses blogs could have in terms of helping you out with your career.  In fact, at one point, she said, "I know you have your other book that we talked about, but you almost have enough for a book right here."
     At first, I kind of blew that notion off...  "Haha.. yeah, right."   But, after I got on the phone, I thought about it.  Actually, there was a lot of useful stuff here, and it was cutting edge and ahead of the curve.  More interestingly, I was as qualified as anyone else to write something about it.  I've seen how blogs change the interviewing process and blogs have enabled me to develop industry connections.  Not only that, their ability to keep me informed on a realtime basis about what's on the minds of the thought leaders in my industry is invaluable.  I started thinking about blogs as a career learning tool when I passed some marketing and brand related blogs onto a recent college graduate looking to switch into the marketing field.  She found them really useful, and I realized after talking with Patricia that there aren't a lot of good resources available to introduce people into this blog world, and more specifically, how really explore its value as an extension of your offline network.
     In fact, I'd go as far as to say that blogs will fulfill the promises that all of these professionally themed social networking sites will ultimately fail on.  For example, I filled out a LinkedIn profile about two months ago.  I think I used it once and that's about it.  Its not because there aren't interesting people to connect to on it--in fact, there are lots of top tier people who have LinkedIn profiles.  Its just that the site and really the concept, is very static.  There just isn't enough to do on them.  There's nothing active going on.  I'm just going on there to actually try to connect with someone (i.e. pinging people with hat in hand, which I hate).  There isn't any of that non-networky networking that really builds relationships.  Like, for example, offline, when you speak at a conference, it begets a lot of great conversations, builds your reputation, and connects you to a lot of feedback.  You don't explicitly speak at conferences to network, but its a valuable underlying benefit that gets you connected to people with them necessarily feeling like you're using them.  Blogs have the same effect and that's where their real value is.  When you write an interesting post, people comment on it, link to it from their own posts, and it helps build your own reputation as an interesting thought leader.  The more people who connect to it and read it, the more they are likely to bring you into their circle of "People I Read" lists, which, to me, is just as valuable a network as anything you can create on LinkedIn or Friendster.  You might not get the scale, but the connections you make are stronger, and to be honest, it doesn't matter if you get the online scale.  You get scale by being connected to the offline networks of people you're linked into online.  You don't need to be connected to 100,000 Friendsters... all you need is five or six people who regularly link to your blog and pass your thoughts around to their on and offline colleagues.  Plus, unlike conferences, anyone with great insight can become a thought leader.  You don't necessarily need a fantastic resume to be thoughtful about a particular field that you follow and anyone can blog about what they're up to.  I think for any professional wanting to get ahead and make a name for themselves, no matter what industry they're in, a regular blog is a must.  Think about it.  If you were a middle manager at some no name company, and you've been blogging for the past year about the ways you would streamline your business if you got the chance or the initiatives you took with your little group, that could be very impressive self promotion if you got someone to look at your site and you put it on your resume.  Instead of having your self worth reduced to bullet points on a single sheet of stock paper, a potential employer could scan through months of your thoughtful accounts on management.  Plus, obviously, your writing would say something about your communication skills.
    Obviously, there are pitfalls.  You have to decide what things you can say for confidentiality reasons and what you can't, as well as where you draw the line in terms of putting up personal information, political views, etc...  but I think the benefits for career advancement are huge.
     Therefore, I've made the decision to put my current work on career advice for young college students aside and start writing a book about blogging to help your career.  Ms. Kitchen has unknowingly inspired me, and I really think this idea has a good shot of taking off, because, thanks to the election and Dan Rather, blogs have jumped into the public spotlight in a big way, and a lot of people are still scratching their heads over the practical uses for blogging. 

    The ironic thing is that when I named my blog "This is going to be big...", it never occured to me that what would be big was the blog itself.

I am mentoring a Fordham freshman and she just started a blog to keep track of her career development and organize her thoughts.  I think its a great experiment and I, for one, am very excited to see where this leads.  I'd appreciate if you could pop over and leave a word or two of encouragement or advice for Christina--either about blogging or about finding her niche in the business world in general.

I just posted an article at Success Blogging on Adwords and why individuals and institutions should be paying a bit more attention to them.  Don't forget I'll be teaching a class on blogging as a career tool at the Learning Annex on March 16th.   Please feel free to recommend it to anyone in NYC job searching or looking to get a little more serious about developing their career who might not know too much about the medium.

I just added a nifty piece of code to each of my blog posts.  It makes it easy for readers to send blog posts to their friends.

Here's what it looks like in Typepad or Moveable type:

| <a href="mailto:?subject=Check out this blog post from Charlie&body=<$MTEntryPermalink$>">E-mail this post to a friend</a>

I found the "mailto" commands here. 

I'm a big fan of Equity Private, a blog about the bottom rung of the investment banking ladder...  and yesterday, Yong the Analyst (my replacement at GM), suggested that perhaps the writer is female.

It reminds me of the time that I was looking at an unbelievably slick financial model one time--one that had some very powerful, but very simple..even elegant... VB code built into it.  We were so impressed, that we looked up the author.

P. Chung

Well, from that moment forward, anytime we were stuck on something in Excel, we thought to ourselves...  "P. Chung...  he'd be able to figure this one out."  "P.Chung" became a mythical figure between us.  Master of the Spreadsheet.  A man for all formulas.

Only later we found out that P. Chung was really Patricia Chung, Queen of the Spreadsheet.

Serves us cavemen right for assuming it was a guy. 

I was talking to someone in the elevator yesterday and someone else chimed in with a "That happened to me, too... that's so funny."

I turned to her and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I don't allow comments."

let us think back about the good old mail. Maybe it can help us to think about the problem from a different angle. Yes, mail!

Do you know the ROI of your mail account? Does your company know the ROI? Sure, it does know the costs. Even IBM and Microsoft cant tell you the real value of mailing. You cant calculate the ROI of mailing systems. Nobody ever could. Even if its a 30 years old technique!

Why? You cant live without mail. Everybody has mailing systems now. 20 years ago some rare users had mailsystems. But know everybody communicates with each other by mail.

So, its not about ROI, its about communication infrastructure(!). The costs of infrastructure systems can be huge. Think about the transportation infrastructure (via highways, via railroad, via air). Very expensive, but if you havent invest into that, your economy will suffer badly. Its a vital factor!

As you need transportation systems for your economic goods, you need your communication infrastructure. If everybody uses mail today and suddenly tomorrow they use blogs to communicate you have to invest in your communication infrastructure once again as years ago into your mailing systems. But if you ask about the ROI you never will get into blogging :-) Therefore you will cut your future communication channel. You will suffer from the lack of investments in this area.

So, after moving all of my stubborn Typepad feed consumers to Feedburner, I received a bump of 100 subs.  I'm now up to 750.

I'll be honest, its hard not to look and to get excited when it goes up.

But to be honest, what it should really be, at least for anyone who blogs about their industry and is looking to make professional connections, is a measure of your contribution to others, not their consumption of you.

So, as the theory goes, if I make an intentional effort to post more useful things here, take part in more conversations by linking to other blogs and commenting on other blogs, my subscriber numbers should go up--more so than if I was just trying to get more people to come here to read.

Its a subtle philosophical difference, but I think it means a lot in a culture of authenticity.

So, basically, I'm going to try, over the next month, to contribute a 1000 sub's worth of value.

Welcome Equity Private of SubRosa Capital to the blogosphere.

I've been blogging for two years now. 

In that time, I've applied and failed to get into grad school, switched jobs, moved, shaved my head, my dog died, hurt myself many times, met Bono, started a meme, not to mention all sorts of emotionion personal life things. 

What a long strange trip its been.

Where will I be in two years?

ooops...   Somehow when I did the new format, I forgot to put my Feedblitz box back.  So, now, if you type in your e-mail address on the right, you can get this e-mailed to you.  This is good for people who aren't into RSS and my dad. 

Have you been wondering about the tabs that appeared recently on my banner at the top--especially the peculiar "Pimp My Web" tab?  Well, wonder no more, because the Pimp My Web section of this blog is now functional, at least in Beta, anyway.  (We've wondered at Union Square Ventures why anyone would ever remove the "Beta" tag from a product.  Why would you ever say anything is done?  There's always room for improvement.  Shouldn't you always be working on something to make it better and soliciting audience feedback?)

The point of Pimp My Web is simple.  I'll be posting screencasts here on how to get the most out of your online experience... mostly for more novice users.  It will be the kind of site you e-mail to your mom to show her how to set up del.icio.us or maybe to view yourself before you set up del.icio.us on your girlfriend's computer and make her think you're smarter than you really are.  Starting a new blog?  Send folks here so they can learn how to use your RSS feed in Lesson One. 

These screencasts are just a start.  Two other things I use are the universal IM client, Trillian, and Linkedin.  Got other suggestions for future screencasts?  How about podcasting?  Drop a comment and let me know what every webhead needs to know at a minimum.

I'm finally upgrading my site template over the holiday weekend...

I participate in a listserv for my high school's alumni.  Today, someone asked for some career advice and I replied with a note.

Not long after I got this e-mail.

Its so unbelievably obnoxious...   I love every word of it!

"hey, thanks for helping tim out, the dude needs it... i keep forgetting to mention that your blog layout is bizarrely out of sync with your apparent tech-savvy.  that thing looks like an aol member homepage circa 1997.  when i look at something like that i kind of expect the writer to be either barely computer-literate or barely
literate period, which makes for some weird cognitive dissonance given your breezy and confident blogspeak.  maybe you know this already but don't have the time/money to get it fixed.  it might be worth putting just a little time into.  one really important thing is making it more readable--the content just doesn't have enough space."

And you know what?  He's totally right.  My blog layout is for suck.

Here's my issue:    I need/want all this playspace on the side for blogrolls, tags, counters, etc.  Now, Pete gives about half of Mashable to playspace and his stuff is readable.

Is it the black?   Can there be no readability with these colors?  Am I destined to succumb to Ajaxian whitespace?

I think I can still get away with black and perhaps the fix is simpler than that.  I have a feeling that if someone could just play around with the actual posting column, break the grey up into rounded ajax looking boxes (one for each post), and fix my titles and footers, it would go a long way.

I don't have the time to do that at all.  If anyone wants to play with my template, I'll e-mail it to them and give them a shot at it, or they can just view the source.  I'm debating whether I care enough about it to pay someone to do it.  Maybe I'll take them out to lunch for their trouble.

Pete Cashmore's Mashable and Chris Baum's User Experience Blog. 

I've been ranking all my blogs... well, most of them little by little, in FeedDemon by title, renaming the titles 0-5. 

My important front line reads are 1's.  This includes Fred's blog and Rob May's Businesspundit.

My 2's are solid.  They fill out the rotation with quality...   but I don't need to read them everyday.  That includes Alex Barnett and Charlene Li. 

3's are things I need to pay attention to, but aren't really part of regular content consumption, like the blogs of our companies, who we hear from anyway, and some MSM feeds.

4's are for something else...  4's are del.icio.us feeds of fun stuff to do and restaurants, and PubSub feeds.

5's are friends.

Then, there's the 0 category.  That's a test.  0's are short lived...   for like a week.  Its a watchlist of stuff I might want to read.  Pete and Chris have graduated from the zeros.

I'm so fascinated by who reads this, especially because of the great people I've met through this blog so far.  That's why I did a demographic survey last week.  I got 95+ respondents, and given my estimate of 2000 readers (roughly 4x the people that show up on Feedburner), that's statistically significant.  Thanks to Pollhost.com for their cool survey service.  It was really easy to setup.

So here are the results:

Selection   Votes Male 76% 74 Female 24% 23 97 votes total Poll results are subject to error.  Pollhost.com does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.

Selection   Votes Under 25 17% 16 26-30 33% 32 31-35 21% 20 36-40 8% 8 41-45 10% 10 46-50 7% 7 Over 50 3% 3 96 votes total Poll results are subject to error.  Pollhost.com does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.

Selection   Votes NYC Metro Area 20% 19 Boston/New England 13% 12 Southeast 8% 7 Midwest 10% 9 Silicon Valley area 2% 2 Other West Coast 15% 14 Europe 12% 11 Asia 1% 1 Somewhere else 19% 18 93 votes total Poll results are subject to error.  Pollhost.com does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.

What do you do?

Selection   Votes Entreprenuer 32% 32 Investor 7% 7 Programmer 15% 15 Other IT 16% 16 Non-IT 29% 29 99 votes total Poll results are subject to error.  Pollhost.com does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.

First, I was a bit surprised by the gender gap, not because it was so wide, but because I figured it was even higher.  Blogging, especially vc/tech blogging, is so male-dominated, that I was glad to see 24% female readership.  However, I have a feeling that most of that female readership is more of my friend base than anything else.  I don't know very many female entrepreneurs and technologists and I don't think I've had any of them comment on my blog or contact me through it. 

As for the age spread, this I wasn't surprised by.  I've had this theory that I get a good chunk of the younger end of Fred's more normally distributed age spectrum, mostly because people can more relate to me being a guy on the bottom end of the ladder.   

Location turned out to be really screwy.  I can't believe that only 2% of my readership is Silicon Valley based.   Perhaps it is, in fact, true that more of the Web 2.0/web services crowd is more diversified geographically because they're not as tied to hardcore tech centers.  Perhaps it is, in fact, true that more of the Web 2.0/web services crowd is more diversified geographically because they're not as tied to hardcore tech centers.   The other screwy thing is the 19% somewhere else crowd. Is that Canada?   South America? Where are those people?

No surprises in the job area...and in fact its what I want..  While I do like hearing from other investors, I'd much rather be chatting with the creators, operators, etc. than have this blog be a bunch of VCs chatting with themselves.