Tweet

I Blog, I Tweet, But Why

Written by: Brad Feld

Article Overview: Fred Wilson has a great post up today titled Can We Live In Public? If you go back in time to May 4, 2004 when I started blogging, you'll see that Fred was one of the key inspirations with his post Transparency to my question of To Blog or Not to Blog. At the time, my interest came from a very simple place.

I Blog, I Tweet, But Why

Fred Wilson has a great post up today titled Can We Live In Public? If you go back in time to May 4, 2004 when I started blogging, you'll see that Fred was one of the key inspirations with his post Transparency to my question of To Blog or Not to Blog. At the time, my interest came from a very simple place.

I'm a professional emailer / phonecaller / meeting taker (aka a venture capitalist). Much of my time is spend writing, reading, thinking, talking, and learning. As a result, I've been fascinated (and deeply involved) with the evolution of email and web-based communication and technologies.

I just wanted to learn how this stuff worked. Blogging, RSS, user generated content. All the corresponding web-based tools and technologies that were emerging in 2004. To me, learning how this stuff worked wasn't just reading about it and observing, but actually participating. UGC was a big part of it - I believed that I wouldn't really understand it unless I was a content creator. So, while my blogging was motivated by transparency, my meta-goal was ultimately a selfish one - to learn.

I massively underestimated the value of this to me. When I reflect on the last four years of my blogging, it's been one of the most interesting, enlightening, stimulating, and - ultimately - rewarding things that I've done professionally. It's resulted in new investments, new friends, lots of stimuli I doubt I ever would have encountered, plenty of healthy conflict that has caused me to think through things I otherwise wouldn't have thought much about, and an outlet for my desire to write that is clearly aligned with what I do every day for work.

The notion of living in public is an unintended side effect of this. It's part of the package if you really want to engage with this stuff. I've had my share of bad moments; like Fred the worst is when I piss off my wife Amy with something I write. It doesn't happen often, but every now and then I get an email saying approximating "please delete that tweet".

Over the past year or so, the ideas swirling around my head have coalesced into a construct that at Foundry Group we are calling Digital Life. As I continue to live in public, the friction and overhead associated with it increases geometrically since I am both a generator and consumer of content. I'm continuing to work on understanding (and investing in) the tools, technologies, and services on both sides of this equation, but I also want to knit it all together at a higher level.

I've got a long way to go. I learn a little every day. By doing. Thank you for helping.

Read this post in Brad's blog.

Related Articles
  How to Avoid Twitter Cluelessness
  Blogging, Articles and Twitter - A Powerful Marketing Combination
  The Last Blog Post
  The Re-Tweet is the New Way to Prospect
  The Remarkable Power of an Automated System

Article Tags: conflict, content creator, desire, email, emailer, evolution, inspirations, investments, meta, new friends, notion, selfish one, stimuli, transparency, venture capitalist, wife amy



Related Forum Posts
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Hi David, I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest. Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - That's great GT! What method did you use to put up the Entrepreneur Blog Network in your Wordpress Blog? We're always looking for the easiest methods to help bloggers who are not techies get involved.
EvanCarmichael.com suggestion - Maybe I missed it but I would like to suggest that a Blog be created to support the Forum. The idea is that in the blog you put in snippets of some of the biggest conversations with a 'read more' link to the forum itself. Setting up the Blog and clipping some conversations onto it wouldn't take very long.
Jen's Blog - Spam protection - Jen, I like the Blog and just posted a comment to one of your articles. From my experience you need to implement some sort of SPAM capture tools. i use them on my Blog and it's been a life saver as I'm getting hit by spam atleast 5 times a day. I use Wordpress and they have plugins like Captcha and SPAM Karma installed.
Blog Marketing Anyone? - Hi Kevin I suppose you could use the same SEO principles on a Blog as you can for a website but the more content you have within your Blog, the better rankings/traffic you would receive. Would you have time to write a full length article with tips in it every day or second day to get the article count rolling over every week? I would also like to know if anyone has had any experiences with marketing blogs and the traffic they received.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Providing Feedback

Your Local Small Business Online Marketing Funnel

Remind Me...

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.