Blogging

Here are a couple of high level thoughts on the Syndicate Conference held a few weeks ago in New York (ok – I’m weeks late getting this up, but the next Syndicate conference isn’t for another 6 months, so from that perspective I’m early!). First – Here’s the conference website Next – Here’s IDG’s marketing spin post conference (which does highlight some of the announcements that came out of the week) Finally – Here’s the conference blog site My quick 3 take-away’s were as follows: there was a lot of traditional media there (Hearst, USA Today, etc.) – early adopters but mainstream nonetheless there were a number of large companies poking around (for example both FedEx and UPS where there)…

Andy had a good comment to my “its just technology” post, which I’ve been meaning to pull up to the front page.  Here it is: I think this is a wider issue. I believe that most, if not all, early stage high tech companies suffer from the “what it is” versus “what it does” disease when selling their products.  Only the early adopter prospect who “gets it” will respond to this sales approach.  Many prospects that should be great targets may get excited about the hot technology but won’t understand how it benefits them or solves any problem they care about.  They will relegate the offering to “nice to have” and won’t buy – often after pulling the salesperson through…

I’ll be at Syndicate NY next week.  They’re actually giving me a speaking role (scary, I know – something about the future of Syndication . . .).  Drop me a line of you’re going to be there too.

Dave Sifry from Technorati put up another in his ‘state of the blogosphere’ series. This one has some pretty interesting data on the language of the blogosphere. Being a narrow-minded American I naturally assumed that English was the dominant language of the blogosphere (it certainly was by far the dominant language of the early Internet). It’s not. Not even by a longshot. English doesn’t have anything close to a plurality in the blogosphere. It’s not even the most common language of blogging (Japanese is). Hmm.

Wow. Has it really been a month since I posted? Lots of excuses about being busy and traveling a lot, but I’ve done that before and not stopped blogging. Not sure what happened – sorry about that (for those of you that noticed, that is). One interesting observation about my unplanned hiatus: When I’m actively blogging, I often find myself viewing the world through the “blog lens”. Those of you that are bloggers will get this right away – what I’m referring to is the tendency to start looking at everything in terms of whether it would make a good blog post or not. Kind of a funny way to look at the world, but it happens when you blog…

Despite being in pretty much separate areas of technology investing, I continue crossing paths with Adam Rubenstein in a way that reminds me how small the Denver/Boulder business community really is. Adam is involved in a number of local bio related initiatives – MycoLogics, High Country Ventures and the Fitzsimons BioBusiness Incubator to name a few. We recently had an e-mail exchange on how he might encourage more thought leaders and venture capitalists from the bio-sciences to participate in the blogosphere and I suggested that he consider using his own blog as a platform and invite VCs and business leaders to write guest posts. You can imagine my surprise today when I saw that he actually took my advice and…

I’ve put up a back page on my blog where I can play around with new stuff — called etcetera. There’s a permanent link to it just below the ‘e-mail me’ on the top of the left nav bar. I’m just starting to put some things up (tag cloud, a swicki and my del.icio.us cloud). If you bump into stuff that looks fun, send me a note about it. I’ll put up some reminder posts as I populate the page with new ideas.

My friend Daniel (sorry no link – he’s not a blogger) pointed me to the BlogPulse 2005 Year in Review.  I particularly enjoyed the Top Wikipedia References (especially #5 – nice to see that Wikipedia made its own list). Enjoy.

Yahoo buying del.icio.us makes total sense. I have to admit that around the time Union Square invested in the company I didn’t really get it – I hadn’t understood the power of a user generated hierarchy. A few months ago I got a clue about it – late to the party, but at least there. Congrats to Fred, Brad and to the del.icio.us team – nice work!

When I asked ealier this year how you view your news I didn’t exactly have this in mind, but now that I know it exists I can’t imagine any better way to stay informed. Yes – those are your RSS feeds being printed out on toliet paper.  See the engadget link here. Thanks to Ross for sending this over.