Venture Creators Blog

I've decided to take a foreseeably long break from blogging, as I have no time now that I'm now neck deep into Business Development.Update: I have gone and started my own company, which is making things even worse. Expect nothing more than sporadic posts.

Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist and the driving force behind the brilliant gapingvoid business cards.

If nothing else, a cartoonist’s mission is to cram pearls of wisdom, social critics or just downright funny stories into a single panel (or 2–4 panels depending on the medium).

However, some of these pearls of wisdom come not in the form of drawings but in the form of blog posts. Here’s one of my favorite basic advice on blogging:

I’ve been saying this for a while: you don’t necessarily need a huge audience to be a successful blogger. You just need a good audience, relevant to which ever industry you choose to be in.
Niches are good. We like niches.

Yes, we like niches. But the Venture Creators Blog niche is not a niche, however. I’m not in a single industry. I don’t blog to be a recognized player in a given industry. I blog on all the industries as long as innovation, entrepreneurship and business are somehow involved. (And yes, I admit to a certain bias towards technology).

Rajesh Setty created an excellent Squidoo Lens on starting your blog: Blogging Starter Checklist.

The highlights:

It’s been a year since I started blogging, time to take a step back, look at signs and learn some lessons.

On both my strictly personal blog and my business blog right here at venturecreators.net/blog, I believe I’m finding my voice.

I use my STRICTLY personal blog to keep a diary of what I’m thinking, doing and reading, the places I’m visiting, the people I’m meeting… it’s purely a tool for my friends, my family, and myself.
My blogging rythm here has been erratic. Periods of some frequency are interspersed with periods where I don’t blog that much, which is fine with m, as my personal blogging reflects my state of mind and spirit: sometimes you just don’t feel like talking to anyone.

Perhaps more interesting is my business blog, where I’m finally finding my sweetspot, despite an erratic blogging rythm and the blog being virtually unknown.

My first experiment with business blogging, through the now defunct ideas de negocio blog over at typepad, essentially a multi-auhor blog, was a total failure. Unwilling to give up, I went at it again with the first incarnation of the venture creators blog. This failed too, and for the same reason: most people are reticent about blogging their ideas and their projects, particularly in a new blog that has no established reputation and no established audience, and in which they’ll have to share the spotlight with other authors. Too much trouble, too complicated, too many variables. It simply didn’t work.
During this period I was blogging at my most frequent, even if irregular on a grander scale, in part to encourage others to do the same. My posts were mostly about blogging and about news I read, and I focused on building a blog for my fellow authors and not for the public.

These days the venture creators blog has adapted and now supports only one author – me – and I must say I’m much happier about it now, and the result shows: I’ve been blogging at my most regular pace since I went solo, I’m focusing on a wide variety of themes that interest me (and which are the themes of the blog), and I even feel I’m developing my own blogging style. All good stuff.

The "bad" news are that I’m still building a pretty much self-oriented blog, with little interaction with other blogs, which in practical terms means a reduced number of comments. I’m fine with that for now, and I plan to increasingly “open up” to other blogs this year.

All in all, not a bad Year 1, although it could have been better if I had put more effort into it. But I’m happy.
For Year 2, I want to improve on the regularity and, more importantly, start “opening up” by interacting with other blogs.

Glad to be around. — Diogo

1. Because I like to communicate, even if no one is listening.

2. Because “a blog may become as important, if not more important, than your resume. The resume may get you onto the long list, but the blog is definitely a tool to get onto the short list. If you're trying to position yourself as an expert, then you should be blogging about your topic and building relationships with other people in your industry who are thinking about and talking about the same topic. And when I say you want to position yourself as an expert, I'm not talking about being a professional info-guru. If your business value is centered around your expertise on a particular topic, then you should be writing about it.” (Scott Allen, entrepreneur, blogger, interviewed here)

That pretty much says it all. See what several famous bloggers have to say about why they blog.

I think this article nails it right on the head: in “Developing a reputation”, blogger/entrepreneur Scott Allen defines what I think are pretty much the core values of a blogger that will win him his reputation:

• Part 1: Your Most Valuable Asset
• Part 2: Be Prolific
• Part 3: Be Ubiquitous
• Part 4: Be Generous
• Part 5: Be Dependable
• Part 6: Be Credible

I’ve already stuck these on my wall. Now the tough part is enforcing them.

What type of people can bloggers be, and what makes any type of person into an effective blogger?

I’ve starting thinking about posting about this through Problogger’s “Seven Habits of Effective Bloggers” project. Many bloggers have contributed to the project by posting what habits they believed made an effective blogger. Many interesting habits have surfaced.

The post I connected most with was Effective Bloggers are Learners, Thinkers, Explorers and Dreamers, in which Dorai Todla says the following about effective bloggers:

1. They share their learning
2. They share information and knowledge
3. They are idea generators
4. They are explorers and discoverers
5. They are transparent
6. They generate conversations
7. They are T-shaped (more on this here)

 Why do I identify with this post so much? Simply because instead of focusing on the relatively simpler “Habits”, Dorai focuses on the characteristics of a blogger in terms of generating and sharing knowledge. I like his post so much I’m having a hard time not doing copy&paste (with the proper reference to the source) of it all here.

But these characteristics require a larger context. Bloggers can come from all walks of life, but I believe there are some traits they must share in common:

1. The passion for learning
It’s pretty much accepted that we’re in for a lifetime of learning, these days. The speed at which the world around us is changing makes it imperative that we keep learning to do things better, faster, stronger. This is the linchpin, the underlying reason why we have to keep learning in faster, stronger, better ways.

2. The wisdom to see that it is in the sharing that the future rewards are to be reaped in an ever-increasingly connected world
The need to learn better, faster, stronger and the advances on communications are leading us into the conclusion that we have to collaboratively learn from each other. Once a set of isolated entities, our world is now a connected one. We don’t reinvent the wheel: we collaboratively build on it. We learn from others, others learn from us. But there is NO direct reward mechanism, i.e., we do not have a direct nor measurable reward for sharing your knowledge.
Acting on this belief requires some wisdom and faith, as the direct rewards aren’t there anymore. In particular, this is wreaking havok in the business world. Companies aren’t traditionally managed on leaps of faith or on sharing, and managers are ill-prepared to deal with indirect-reward mechanisms.

3. The faith in that you reap wht you sow
Sharing knowledge is almost like doing good deeds: you do it in the belief that it will improve the world just that tiny bit, and that that is also better for you. With an advantage: you create relationships and discussions that can more directly benefit you. You engage in wider discussions, get under public scrutiny, and become stronger through it. By sharing knwledge you’ll be better off. We’re not in a divided world anymore, we’re in a connected world.

4. The openess to engage in discussions transparently
Marketing and PR are being turned upside down on the blogosphere. Blogs are inherently more personal, less polished and with a hell of a lot less PR in them. Companies are adapting by becoming more transparent. A blogger is someone that can give as well as take constructive criticism, articulate its criticisms in a clear and structured manner, and be smart enough to avoid B.S.

5. The courage and discipline to effect change through exposing yourself to the world in a constructive and consistent way
Blogging will also reveal your consistency and your persistence. Because a blogger is much more exposed to the world than a typical non-blogger, masks are harder to keep up. In the long run, this will inevitably bring about a more transparent flow of information, won’t it?

How do you like the design, layout and colors here at the Venture Creators Blog? Robert Scoble hits it on the nail in his The role of anti-marketing design, where he advocates that blogs that are "anti-marketing" are stickier and build better brands. What's an "anti-marketing" blog? Well… an ugly blog. Insightful post from Scoble… makes me think twice about doing the planned rework of the look&feel here. Must read.

I am not sure about the rest of you, but I am pretty new at blogging. Therefore it would be great if the more experienced bloggers could reccommend their favourite blogs and expand my horizons… 

In How Users Read on the Web, world guru on web usability and readability Jacob Nielsen is clear:

They don’t.People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.

Therefore a good strategy is to use the Inverted Pyramids approach (a June 1996 post, also by Nielsen): start by the conclusion to hook up the reader, then quickly make a couple of examples, then go into the discussion of the fundamental issues.

This succinct introduction [about frames] is an example of the inverted pyramid style: start[…] with the conclusion. If I wanted to write a column about frames I would continue with one or two examples of why frames suck (can’t bookmark or print a view) and conclude with a discussion of the fundamental issues (frames impair the user’s navigation and break the fundamental user model of the Web as being composed of unitary pages).

Sounds like it’s good advice for bloggers…  or not?
Doesn’t each one of us have its own style? Should there be a standardized way of writing when blogging?