Posts from Anil Dash

Inclusivity

One of my favorite bloggers and thinkers about social media, Anil Dash, has a blog post up on Medium titled You Can’t Start the Revolution from the Country Club. Go read it because he's talking about some important stuff.

In his post Anil observes that in many of the most interesting new social media services, there is a sense of exclusivity built into the experience. A velvet rope as it were. And in many cases, this is being done to produce signal instead of noise, to make the consumption experience easier, and to produce "quality content." Anil calls bullshit on that. And so do I.

I have learned the power of inclusivity from writing this blog and watching this community evolve. Everyone is welcome here. Everyone can comment. Nobody's comments get nuked unless they are spam or hate. And I have a very high standard for hate. The community can and does police this place. And that allows anyone to come in here and be a regular. And that is what has created the magic.

If you look at some of the best communities on the web, like reddit for example, they all follow this approach. It makes for a noisy and messy experience. But it works and it scales.

This is my basic argument for free as a business model. Once you insert money into the equation, you are excluding important voices. Once you insert exclusivity into the quality model, you are excluding important voices.

Some of these "country clubs" as Anil calls them may succeed. But they don't inspire me. They don't invite me (in the behavior sense of that word). I'll hang out in public if you don't mind. It suits me.

#Weblogs

The "Fred Wilson School Of Blogging"

Tom Anderson, the Tom we were all friends with on MySpace, wrote a guest post on TechCrunch suggesting that there is a "Fred Wilson School Of Blogging." I'm not sure about a "school" but I do have some points of view and Tom mentions some of them.

Here's how I do it:

1) Have a long form blog on a domain that you own and that is permanent. Like Anil Dash says in the comments to Tom's post, this is about compiling a set of work that is substantial. Anil says:

Based on the past dozen years that I've been writing it, I expect that my blog will in some ways be one of the most significant things I create in my life.

I'm 100% with Anil on this. People ask me when I am going to write a book and I laugh at that suggestion. AVC is more than a book will ever be. It is live, it is deep (in terms of total posts), it keeps going, evolving, and ends when I end.

2) Have a short form blog an a different domain that you own and is permanent. Mine is at fredwilson.vc and hosted on Tumblr. This is where I put the things that fill out the story but don't belong on a long form blog.

3) Participate actively in the social distribution platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Build profiles, followers, and credibility in these communities. I use Twitter for broadcast to a wide group, I use Facebook for friends and family, and I'm still trying to figure out how to use Google+. These distribution platforms are great for getting your work out there but I don't personally want to use them as the place where my work is hosted.

4) Build community on your domains. In the case of my longform blog, Disqus is the tool I chose and after that decision, our firm invested in the company. I've seen and used all the various community tools out there and I believe Disqus is the best at building community on long form blogs. In terms of community on short form blogging, I think Tumblr has done the best job and that is why it is growing like a weed right now.

5) Engage everywhere. That means on Hacker News, other blog communities/comments, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. This takes a lot of time. Too much time. But I get so much value back from doing it that I make the time.

The most important part is to engage. The second most important part is own your online presence. Marco Arment has a great post on this point. He says:

If you care about your online presence, you must own it.

So if there is a "Fred Wilson School Of Blogging" this is it. It works for me and it can work for you if you are willing to invest the time and energy.

#Web/Tech#Weblogs