bloglash

Andrew Keen says in his new book, The Cult of the Amateur (which I have not yet read but certainly plan to), that the Internet is killing our culture and harming our economy. Keen apparently argues that a see of amateur content is drowning out the important voices. I’d say "let the bloglash begin" except there’s been a bloglash for almost as long as there have been blogs.

In my personal case, I’ve been experiencing a bloglash over the past month. I’ve been playing around with new blogging paradigms like microblogging on twitter and tumblogging on tumblr and have this huge but insatiated desire to switch platforms. You’ll all ask, what’s stopping you? Time, energy, inertia, and my googlejuice addiction.

I’ve also taking a whipping for various positions I’ve taken on this blog. I realize that comes with the territory and if you can’t take the heat you should get out of the kitchen. I think I can take the heat, but it’s still uncomfortable to sweat.

And it’s plain hard work. I like to blog at least once and ideally twice a day. I never lack things to write about, but it takes time to articulate a thought cleanly and concisely. And I only do it right about a third of the time anyway.

I’ve got an audience that’s pretty significant, but not growing much. Each day I get about 6,000 visits. About 3,500 come via the web. And about 2,500 come via the feed. Over the course of a month, this blog is visited by about 70,000 people on the web and I’ve got about 35,000 subs to my two primary feeds. So 6,000 per day and maybe 100,000 over the course of a month. That’s a big number, but not huge. Not top 100 for sure, probably not even top 500. And it’s been pretty stagnant over the past year. Here’s my web visits over the past year.

So you can see that it’s large but stagnant. I guess I’ve reached all the people who have an interest in reading my musings on venture capital, technology, music, new york city, and whatever else interests me. I’ve come to grips with that and realize that AVC is not a growth opportunity.

So I’ve been struggling with the blogging thing. But yesterday Jackson sent me a link to this post where he talked about two of his guitar heros, Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. And guess what, Dick Wagner replied and then joined the conversation. That’s simply awesome. It happens like that to me all the time too. And that’s all it took. The bloglash is over. I am in love with blogging again.