Blogging

I tweeted today about conference I spoke at this morning on the subject of the role of social media in venture capital and private equity (not from an investment perspective, but how VC and PE professionals can use social media – blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. – to be more successful investors; more on that idea in a separate post).  I joked in two tweets after the event: “one person in today’s crowd (of 150) had a twitter account. i definitely had my work cut out for me!” and “forgot to mention that i was also the only person in the room wearing jeans (not that this fact was all that surprising to me)…” The 2nd inspired Theo Skye from Medialets…

I’ll admit (since it should be obvious to anyone who follows this blog) that I’ve done a terrible job this year of blogging consistently. I’m sure that much of it has to do with my schedule, but then again there are a lot of people who blog regularly who are plenty busy, so that’s not such a great excuse. I suspect that much of my problem is that I’ve just gotten out of the habit of regular blogging. What’s doubly frustrating from my end is that one of my explicit goals for the year for myself was to “blog more consistently”.  So far, not so good on that front. So with this in mind, I’m going to throw my hat…

Apologies for falling out of the blogging habit over the last month. A nice, mostly off-line vacation was followed by a few weeks of slowly catching back up.  Blogging (and keeping up on my blog reading as well) fell to the bottom of the list.   Or maybe I was just being lazy.   Either way, I was off the blogging circuit for a while and I apologies for any of you who may have been waiting with breath held for the next post (hopefully you didn’t delete me from your feed reader).   I’m back. With plenty to write about.   More soon.

I know what you’ve been saying to your self: “Self – I’ve been looking to read a blog written by a reformed drummer, software guy and lawyer who is now a venture capitalist. Where can I find one of those?!?” All joking aside, I’d encourage you to check out the blog that my partner Jason Mendelson (who is all of those things and many more) has just started. Jason is actually a long time blogger – writing regularly on Brad’s blog and as one of the founders of and main contributors to AskTheVC. Mendelson’s Musings will have a more personal flair (although will continue to cover investing and venture capital topics as well). Along those lines be sure to check…

I participated in a panel presentation last week on corporate blogging.  While each of the panelists brought a slightly different perspective, the overall message to the group of a few hundred local small business execs that were in attendance was that blogging can help their company.  Specifically blogging can allow them to participate (or lead) conversations in their industry; increase significantly the meaningful content on their site; provide a way for them and their key customers to evangelize their products; help their search rankings across their site; allow a platform for talking about corporate culture (to both an internal and external audience) and in many cases save hard dollars spent on press releases and certain marketing activities. Here are a…

I’ve got some great corporate blogging use-case stories for my panel presentation on blogging next week. Now I’m looking for some embarrassing ones.  They can be personal or corporate related.  Feel free to leave them in comments (if you’re ok with the world seeing them) or just email me directly.

I had the chance last week to speak to a group of non-profit executive directors from about 80 local Denver/Boulder/Longmont non-profit agencies as part of a session sponsored by the United Way on “Getting the Word Out – a Mass Communication Seminar”.  I sat on a panel with a bunch of local newspaper editors which consisted of an hour of the editors talking about the best way to fax or e-mail them stories so they’d get their attention followed by 15 minutes of me saying that instead of all of that, their organizations could actually be their own media, that there was larger conversation going on across a much broader community which they could/should tap into, and that perhaps rather than…

Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, has another of his series on the evolution of the blogosphere up on his site.  Most interesting to mere were the results on the dominant languages of blogging. Here are his key takeaways (quoted directly): Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs. Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days. About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts. About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati’s filters,…

Finally!  FeedBurner and TypePad are now integrated.  Before yesterday, if you had a TypePad blog (like mine) and burned your feed through FeedBurner you were only taking partial advantage of FeedBurner’s services (TypePad generates a number of feeds in different formats, and up to now, FeedBurner only captured one of these feeds).  Not only will this give you a better view of your subscriber base and their behavior on your blog, but it will also allow TypePad bloggers to take full advantage of FeedBurners’s advertising and feed management services. You can read the FeedBurner announcement here and the SixApart announcement here (along with instructions on how to get your TypePad account fully integrated).