The Education of a Late-Adopter Blogger

A few things:

1. Apology 1: I didn't realize that editing an entry causes RSS feeders to send the entry again. As you RSS subscribers know, I make a lot of changes to my entries, so you're getting multiple copies of the same entry as I tweak it. Unfortunately, it's unlikely I'll stop tweaking. I think of my blog like a web page that I can change all the time. I wasn't aware that I'm causing you to get entries over and over.
2. Apology 2: I'm just figuring out how Typepad and Ecto work together. It's been an educational experience in font wars and templates. To put it mildly, I was feeling around in the dark.
3. If anyone knows of a counter that I can put on my blog that shows a running count of visits for the day and then resets each day to 0, please let me know. After a while, a cumulative counter gets boring. I have a counter where I see the daily stats, but I'd like to put one on the blog for everyone to see.
4. If you want me to cover a topic, please leave a comment in one of the postings. I read just about every comment.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Guy

Comments

[av]

Guy:

Given that you seem prone to lists - can you put together a list of before-their-time ideas. By this, I mean ideas that were brilliant, correct and simply failed because of some orthogonal reasons?

-av

[enoch choi]

you asked for topics to blog on... as a christian, i'd love to hear how your faith works into your work. thanks for being open about that in other venues...

[C. Enrique Ortiz]

"you're getting multiple copies of the same entry as I tweak it."

If its OK, to read the tweaks. :-)

[Rick Resnick]

I'm new myself. It does get confusing, doesn't it?

[Chris]

Guy,

As for topics of blogging...

In grad school, I took a course from one of your contemporaries at Apple who was there during release and production of the first Mac. One of my favorite stories was about (without getting deep in to the details) how Apple was brokering gigs with universities, which were wreaking havoc on your production line.

I'd love some kind of post on how product managers can better interface with operations. This is a huge deal in my world right now, as my little company recently booked some serious orders with a single client, but now we're running a steady stream of fire drills to make it happen.

Your thoughts on the interplay between evangelism and actually delivering the miracles from the marketing side of things would be like the stone tablets for me.

But regardless, thank you so much for blogging. And I get you via Bloglines, and seeing updates is no big deal. If it's important, I'll read it, if not, I won't.

[Jon Miner]

Blogs are not traditional journalism, and many of us (even when "we" have a journalism education) wish that more places would updated articles in situ. Revision histories are best, so that a specific revision can be quoted in another article or paper, but the default should always be recent and up-to-date.

Good aggregators will show the changes as they happened and maintain such a history for the reader (to some extent), although most could benefit from better revisioning.

Please don't change to posting and then posting corrections (except maybe to note that you have corrected something, to benefit those with incapable readers, or readers via the regular old WWW.)!

[Michael Sitarzewski]

Guy, check out http://www.feedburner.com/ You can add all sorts of stuff to your feeds. Check out the link on that page for Publishers and Podcasters, then Stats.

[Chris Weber]

Oh, crap,

Wrong URL. Here is Sheridan's:
http://culturehack.typepad.com/notetakerblogging/

Apologies,
Chris

[Chris Weber]

OK. Got it, no html.

Here is the link for Sheridan's Blog: CultureHack (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_education_o.html#comment-12934125)

Chris (again)

[Chris Weber]

Guy,

You might be interested in reading, if you don't already, Kevin Sheridan's blog: CultureHack. Kevin is a professional writer, has an impish affinity for all things: Mac, Aquaminds NoteTaker, Ecto, TypePad, and Applescript; plus, a love for expanding on the interwingledness of all of them.

Best,
Chris

[Glenn Nicholas]

Guy, a multiple choice test for you.

You have 4% of the PC market with tight margins and massive competition. You've got a cool OS with development costs sunk, strong gross profit, differentiation from your (limited field of) competitors, massive barriers to other entrants and good branding. One day your R&D lab calls to say you can sell your OS to an addressable market of 200M a year with a profit margin that makes you weep ....

You:
A. Keep doing what you are doing because even though everyone else will get faster chips as well, you can beat them with better quality hardware.

2. Engage head hunters to hire a new CEO and guide the company to next phase of growth. Someone who understands the living room, perhaps the guy doing Windows Media Centre ..?

3. Lull your enemies further into complacency by telling them your OS will never run on other hardware, while secretly you plan ....

What would you plan to do Guy?

Ok, not that I think you'll be short of blog topics, but here is another I'd like to hear you on. When should founders let go, and when should they persist? Would Steve Jobs have succeeded to this extent if he hadn't "left" in 1985?

All the best, keep on writing :)

[Andrew Hollister]

I use Google Analytics (but you need a gmail account, and an invitation to sign up. Also Measure map. MM would give you a daily hit count, but you have to go to another web page to see it.

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

You’re doing just fine.

Your RSS2 feed has GUIDs (they are optional in RSS2). Your Atom feed inevitably has entry IDs (Atom requires them). Aggregators have plenty of basis on which to detect that edited entries are not new. And these provisions have been around for years, so aggregator developers have had plenty of time to incorporate support for them.

I don’t think you need to restrain yourself in any fashion.

[Harold Jarche]

Guy, we've all been through the same learning curve, and any mistakes that you may have made are very minor. Your book, The Art of the Start, is my business bible and helps me to educate my clients - thanks.
You may want to check out MapStats (http://mapstats.blogflux.com/) as your daily meter.

[Ken King]

I've had excellent feedback from clients since installing Mint (http://www.haveamint.com ) on the sites we manage.

It provides realtime statistics (as opposed to most packages which are based on log files and compiled daily) and is an open platform with a whole whack of add-on modules that have been created by third party developers.

Let me know if you want to check it out and I'll give you a login for one of my accounts.

[Andrew]

Give www.mybloglog.com a try. It has some interesting features that the others do not, like realtime tracking by outbound link.

- Andrew

www.egoventures.com

[José Alejandro Betancur]

Its great to know that you read the comments, its for me a pleasure to keep reading you, I do it since the book: How to Drive Your Competition Crazy: Creating Disruption for Fun and Profit, and yes I would like to have more of that kind of advices in your blog.

Regards,

[Jay Small]

I track hundreds of blogs via Bloglines, and rest assured you're not the only one who tweaks posts repeatedly. If I chose to, I could set Bloglines to recognize each post as "new" only the first time it appears, but I'd rather see updated posts. If I don't think they're different enough to warrant another read, I can just bleep right over 'em. ;-)

[Jacob]

It was suggested, quite a long time ago, that bloggers should refrain frome changing their posts so as to adhere to good standards of journalism (e.g. #4 at http://rebeccablood.net/handbook/excerpts/weblog_ethics.html). Even for small edits. In an ideal world bloging platforms might provide a revsion history. FYI not all aggregators create a new entry but most will flag it as new or updated, but it's not a big deal.

I'm suprised by the number of mentions for Google Analyitics, I'd instead suggest trying Measure Map (http://measuremap.com/). It gives you a simple synopsis and allows dynamic calendar filtering using some nifty sliders.

[Paul Merrill]

You are very welcome to the world of blogging. I hope it's as enjoyable to you as it is to me.

Keep up the GREAT work!

[Raymond Hermans]

Never mind the problems Guy... theres always a learning curve.

Mine is to try to get rid of Trackbacks and Backlinks ( I just cant seem to get the logic of doing it ) ;)

-- click on my name for a short blog on the topic --

Ray

[veerjain]

Hi Guy,

Great Blog.

I would like to hear your views on LUCK factor required for an entrepreneur.

Thanks,
VeerJain.

[Grayson Stebbins]

Excuse me for the broken link - http://www.google.com/analytics/

[Bob]

Late adopter blogger? You're not late -- my mom doesn't have a blog yet. :-)

Seriously, though. Oh, and there's been plenty of discussion about how to amend a post. The general consensus is to update the original post, rather than posting a correction in a different article. Given that, I think people can expect to see updates. If you can you might want to make them obvious, like a bold "Update:" at the bottom or something, so people don't have to wonder what changed or why they're seeing duplicates.

Here's a question for you: will there ever be a reprint of "The Macintosh Way?" I want my team to read it, but I'm also excessively possessive about my copy... :-)

Thanks dude!

[Robert Steers]

Congratulations on the blogging effort. You certainly are another writer that I read avidly.

I can't speak for everyone, but I would love to hear about things you have learned in past lives. Anything from how you started new ventures to what you learned about dealing with people.

Stay passionate, keep up the good work.

Robert