Monday, July 07, 2003

What do blog readers like to read? Coming from the other angle, I ask myself, what should I and what should I not post here? Should I post brief one paragraph comments with links to stuff of interest? Or should I post much longer multi-paragraph discussions on ideas of mine that might be of general interest? Should I post ideas which traditionally one might have considered to be "intellectual property" which you would keep to yourself? I believe (despite the preceding post) that a blog works best when the postings are short bits with or without a link. I also believe that I should write mostly on topics where "I have a right to an opinion" - a favorite phrase that you hear in VC circles. I mean I am quite comfortable pontificating on collaborative software, but I really have no business pontificating on finance or theology or quantum mechanics. 10:22:34 AM  >  trackback []   comment []

Notes from a blogging newbie, part 3 I continue to write here from time to time and introspect (I am an introspective kind of guy) about why I do it, and also what is and is not appropriate to write in this kind of a medium. Here are some random personal observations: It has strange persistence characteristics - What happens when I write something that I think is important and that I would like people to know about? There is probably very little traffic to my blog, so who knows who sees it, and on the other hand, as I post more random snippets, the "important" think is scrolled off and lost. It has a strange relatedness to email - Sometimes I see something or think of something which I would like to record, document or share. I have three major choices: (a) write it up in a document on my computer, which I can refer to later and remember and refine; (b) email it to one or more friends that I think might be interested; or (c) post it on a public web page, such as a blog. As I like to write and often find myself refining my ideas by writing them down, I actually have numerous little documents on my pc which are private musings on ideas, products, people etc. Some of these should remain private but others are clearly ok to have public. Option (b) is ok, but of course you have to be careful to send stuff to people that they would be interested in. And option (c) is on the one hand a little bit scary because essentially anyone on the planet can read what you write, but on the other hand, it can feel like talking to yourself or into an empty room because you have no sense of who does or does not read what you write. It has strange ego characteristics - Here's where I go out on a limb. It's a kick (for me, but I guess this is not atypical of others) to be linked to, especially to be linked to by someone whose writing you admire. I would venture to guess that the reason that folks think trackback and referrer logs are essential features of a blog is that they are ego-support tools which tell you that you are not alone and that in fact, in the famouse words of Sally Field, "You Like Me, You Really Really Like Me!" 10:11:15 AM  >  trackback []   comment []

Blogging is again covered in the popular press, in this New York Times Article by William O'Shea. Having been through the business-enterprise collaboration universe a couple of times now, I have some thoughts on this. I am very interested to understand where the Next Big Thing in that space is going to come from. I firmly believe that the type of software variously known as social-, collaborative-, team-, group- software will occupy an equally important place as email and IM do today for computer users in business. It doesn't yet. While there are lots of hurdles to using them as mission critical business applications, I am coming to the opinion that Blogs and Wikis might just be the seeds of the Next Big Thing in that arena.  I am still formulating my thoughts on that but I think the more we read articles like the NYT piece referenced above, the more it reinforces that belief. 9:55:58 AM  >  trackback []   comment []

John Markoff in the NYT on a "new and improved" approach to encryption. I've learned much that I know, and much of my skepticism about new encryption algorithms from Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram mailing who teaches us over and over to be careful before embracing the latest greatest trick. I haven't looked at the underlying research that Markoff alludes to but it's odd that this is the first that we've seen written on this new approach. 9:43:15 AM  >  trackback []   comment []

Scott Kirstner of the Boston Globe distills the key measures that he feels Venture Capitalists use to judge startups. It's pretty accurate, although one of the biggest ones is left off, unfortunately: "What do other VCs say or think about this?" There is a huge amount of me-too in the VC world which makes pitching a project to VCs something that takes some careful game-theory tactics. 9:33:49 AM  >  trackback []   comment []