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.

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.