Suspension of my blogging until further notice

Today, Thursday, August 18, 2005 is the six-month anniversary of my foray into the blogosphere. It's been a lot of fun, but it simply hasn't shown any evidence of giving me a significant enough return to justify the level of investment of my time required. So, after careful thought, I've decided to go on an indefinite hiatus from the blogosphere, possibly a year or longer, starting with this final post.

My blogs will remain up with all of my past posts, but I won't be making any new blog posts. Further, I won't be monitoring or commenting on the blogs of others. However, I will continue to receive any comments on my old blog posts and may be contacted directly via email. New content will appear on my main, non-blog web sites, hopefully with greater frequency now that I won't be distracted by the blogosphere.

I thank those who have taken the time to read and even comment on my blog posts over the past six months.

I may check back in six months to see if there are any truly startling new developments in the blogosphere, and in a year or so I will definitely check back again.

Again, my thanks to those who have participated in many interactions over the past six months.

-- Jack Krupansky

Final Status of my blogging cloud on Thursday, August 18, 2005

As of today, Thursday, August 18, 2005, my last day actively participating in the blogosphere, my blog "cloud" is 6,940 hits in Google, but that's 195 displayed hits, and 6,770 total hits, compared to 8,860, 202, and 8,120 on August 15. My blog cloud is defined as the results of a Google search of my name in quotes and the word "blog". Ultimately, the second number is the most accurate or reliable representation of your blog cloud's size. The third number is the hits if you click the Google link that says repeat the search with the omitted results included.

I suspect that the numbers bounce around erratically since blogs sometimes have lists of recent comments, and a number of my older comments simply fell off those lists. That's life, but there is also the lesson that you need to stay current and can't thrive for very long on old contributions.

Over time, a number of blogs will simply disappear, although if they are hosted on a service such as Blogger, their archived content should stay around indefinitely.

Another issue is that Google's web crawler and database mirroring are somewhat erratic, so the numbers can bounce around even if the actual content on the web remains unchanged.

My strategy for raising these numbers had been to make quality comments on the blogs of others, as well as to post my own blog posts when I feel that I have something to say.

-- Jack Krupansky

Final thoughts

I'm about to do my final signoff for this blog.  I think I've about exhausted most of the topics I felt a need to discuss as part of my post-mortem examination of the past six months.

I'll post the formal signoff in a few minutes.

-- Jack Krupansky

Citizen Journalism

Another thing that has bothered me about the blogosphere is citizen journalism.  At first, it seemed like a great idea, with all of us bloggers automatically being citizen journalists.  But then as I started looking into it, it turns out that the focus of a true citizen journalist is as an unpaid volumteer contributing editorial content to mainstream media (MSM), primarily on a local basis.  Sorry, but no slave labor for me, or I should say from me.

The blogosphere is quite a minefield, so watch where you step.

-- Jack Krupansky

No more feed readers

I just completed another step of my disengagement from the blogosphere, removing BlogLines and NewsGator, the two web feed aggregators that I've been using, from my browser menus (both IE Favorites and Firefox Bookmarks).  That's mostly a symbolic gesture, but "out of sight, out of mind" does help sometimes.

The important thing is that I've stopped monitoring web feeds, as of a few minutes ago.  That means I get a big chunk of my time back.

-- Jack Krupansky

Technorati rank of 175,061

Here on my last day of blogging after starting six months ago, Technorati has this blog ranked at 175,061 with 12 links from 11 sources.  That's still well short of being in the top 500, but obviously much better than most blogs.  My other blogs are at 228,224 and 325,457 (three of them).

-- Jack Krupansky

One day left

I haven't yet decided when tomorrow I will officially sign off for this blog, ending my six-month experiment in the blogosphere.  Maybe it will be early Thursday evening.  I hope I'll have some more closing comments, but I've already said so much of what I have to say, so we'll have to see.

-- Jack Krupansky

The Mac killed my inner child

Here's an amusing video that pokes fun at the Mac.  It ends with the line "Mac killed my inner child."

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogging for money?

I just wanted to correct one misconception that I've noticed in some of the commentary about my decision to leave the blogosphere:  It was not my original intention to "blog for money" or to get rich from blogging.

In fact, when I started blogging back in February, I wasn't even aware that anybody was either making big bucks from blogging or even thinking of making big bucks from blogging, other than the providers of enabling technology and services.  I did suspect that some people might make money from being syndicated, but I didn't have any sense that such an opportunity might be available to me.

Second fact:  I didn't even have Google AdSense ads on my blogs at first.  It wasn't until more than a month after I started blogging that I got the courage to slog through the Blogger post template to put ads in my blogs.  Initiallly it had seemed undesirable to run ads, but I gradually noticed how many people were doing it.

Third fact: There was never a point in time where I even imagined that "blogging for money" was a viable possibility for me.  I certainly read people who talked about it, so it did occur to me that it was possible for some people, but I never saw any evidence that ever suggested or convinced me that I should pursue that route.

My primary motives were to promote my non-blog websites, raise their ranking in search engines, and network to find people who might have some beneficial reason for working with me.

-- Jack Krupansky

Status of my blogging cloud on Monday, August 15, 2005

As of today, my blog "cloud" is 8,8600 hits in Google, but that's 202 displayed hits, and 8,120 total hits, compared to 3,390, 178, and 921 on August 7.  My blog cloud is defined as the results of a Google search of my name in quotes and the word "blog".  Ultimately, the second number is the most accurate or reliable representation of your blog cloud's size.  The third number is the hits if you click the Google link that says repeat the search with the omitted results included.

I suspect that the numbers bounce around erratically since blogs sometimes have lists of recent comments, and a number of my older comments simply fell off those lists.  That's life, but there is also the lesson that you need to stay current and can't thrive for very long on old contributions.

Over time, a number of blogs will simply disappear, although if they are hosted on a service such as Blogger, their archived content should stay around indefinitely.

Another issue is that Google's web crawler and database mirroring are somewhat erratic, so the numbers can bounce around even if the actual content on the web remains unchanged.

My strategy for raising these numbers is to continue to make quality comments on the blogs of others, as well as to post my own blog posts when I feel that I have something to say.  Unfortunately, I've been so busy with my move to Boulder, Colorado that I've been remiss in both blogging by own posts and commenting on others.

-- Jack Krupansky

Suspension of my other (main) blogs

I've now "officially" signed off of my other four (main) blogs, with a post entitled "Suspension of my blogging until further notice", that says

Thursday, August 18, 2005 is the six-month anniversary of my foray into the blogosphere. It's been a lot of fun, but it simply hasn't shown any evidence of giving me a significant enough return to justify the level of investment of my time required. So, after careful thought, I've decided to go on an indefinite hiatus from the blogosphere, possibly a year or longer. My blogs will remain up with all of my past posts, but I won't be making any new blog posts. Further, I won't be monitoring or commenting on the blogs of others. However, I will continue to receive any comments on my old blog posts and may be contacted directly via email. New content will appear on my main, non-blog web sites, hopefully with greater frequency now that I won't be distracted by the blogosphere.

I thank those who have taken the time to read and even comment on my blog posts over the past six months.

I may check back in six months to see if there are any truly startling new developments in the blogosphere, and in a year or so I will definitely check back again.

I may or may not make a few more scattered posts before midnight, Thursday, August 18, 2005 when I "officially" leave the blogosphere.

Again, my thanks to those who have participated in many interactions over the past six months.

I'll probably have at least a few closing comments to post on this blog before I sign off from it too on Thursday.

-- Jack Krupansky

Using Firefox

I'm now using Firefox as my browser.  Before today I simply had no compelling reason to use it, especially since Microsoft Internet Explorer was simply "good enough."  Unfortunately, I discovered the IE is *not* good enough, for me, right now.

I had noticed over the past few weeks that my new notebook PC with 100GB disk and 512MB RAM running Windows XP SP2 seemed to be running out of memory by later in the afternoon.  That seemed to be ridiculous, but it also seemed to be true.  A simple reboot always "fixed" the problem, but it worried me a little, especially since I was running all the latest Microsoft software, including downloaded updates.

The primary symptoms were that when I hit control-N to open a new browser window, either nothing would happen, or I'd get a browser window without a menu bar, or the window looked okay but no web page was displayed.

The problem would sometimes be so extreme that even Ctrl+Alt+Del would not bring up the Windows Task Manager.

Closing all IE windows would in fact make the "problem" go away, but I wasn't confident that it was that simple.  The problem still concerned me.

Most of my opening of IE windows is to read news items and blog posts as well.  I do a lot of this.  I do try to reuse existing windows when it makes sense and is convenient, but so many times it's just easier to press Shift+Click to open a link in a new window.

Finally, this morning I had the time and patience and motivation to do some experiments.  I brought up the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and looked at the available physical memory before running IE, after typing Ctrl+N, and after closing an IE window.

I found two things: 1) IE used about 6MB of physical memory to open a new window, and 2) 3MB of that physical memory was still unavailable after closing the window.

In fact, it didn't take more than a few minutes of opening and closing IE windows before I got down to 20MB available and the missing menu problem cropped up.

Closing the last IE window did cause 300MB of physical memory to instantly become available again.

Granted, I knew that IE was a hog, but I hadn't realized that it was this bad.

The real kicker is that I hadn't run into this problem on my old notebook PC with 15GB disk and 256MB RAM running Windows ME and the latest downloaded version of IE.  File this under "Go Figure."

Now, maybe there is an IE setting that is causing some kind of bizarre caching issue here, but I'll leave that for someone else to discover.  Or, maybe after I abandon blogging on Thursday, I'll have the time and motivation to track this issue down.  Of course, then I won't be able to blog about it.  Doh!

As depressing as this issue is, the mere fact that I had narrowed it down to IE and eliminated the operating system, anti-virus software, or any spyware or malware as the culprit was quite a relief.

At that point it occurred to me that maybe Firefox doesn't have that issue.  I hade previously downloaded and installed Firefox since there are some rare occasions when it is useful to test things under Firefox, as opposed to (or in addition to) IE, so running an experiment had essentially zero cost.

Thinking about control-N reminded me about one of the main reasons that I had not used Netscape years ago:  they didn't use standard keys for simple functions.  In particular, they *swapped* the meaning of alt and control keys.  That really bugged me, so I never used Netscape.  I was concerned that Firefox may have kept that same lame, brain-damaged behavior, but a simple check verified that the Firefox guys really had learned a few things over the years and eliminated that one impediment to my use of Firefox.

I did a subset of my opening and closing test case and Firefox used less memory and seemed to give most of it back when each window was closed.  The test case was to hit Ctrl+N ten times and then Alt+F4 ten times to close the windows.  This was quite a relief.

I used the FF bookmark manager to import my IE "Favorites" and then mvoed them to the top level of the bookmark list.

I do have to manually re-enter user id and password info for various web sites (such as NewsGator), but that's bearable.  There was an installation option to carry over all of this info from IE, but I skipped it since I figured the info would probably be outdated by the time I got back to Firefox anyway.

I may not stay with Firefox, but at least I'll be giving it a shot.

Hopefully my publication of this issue and its resolution will save at least a few people a lot of grief.

Parting shot at Firefox:  The good news is that it looks enough like IE that it's easy to hop back and forth, and that's very important to some people, like me.

Incidentally, please leave comments and feedback on this post so that other bloggers can get a sense of how good or bad it was done.

[Note: This post may not "belong" in this blog, but I have no other blog that suits it any better and this is my default "catch all" blog anyway.]

-- Jack Krupansky

More compelling content, more compelling content, more compelling content

After a week of serious reflection, I simply keep being drawn back to the primary reason why my blogs have not drawn any significant interest: lack of compelling content.

People have made all sorts of suggestions and attributed my failure to all sorts of causes, but I have encountered no compelling argument against this thesis that compelling content has to be the foundation of a blogging venture.  All the other tips, tricks, and techniques, including patience, are simply ways of leveraging your underlying content and cannot compensate for a lack of compelling content.

One caveat:  if you are well known, you'll get attention no matter what, independent of the significance of your content.  But few of us are in that boat.

-- Jack Krupansky

Another shot with Technorati tags

I verified that I was properly using Technorati tags in another blog of mine, so I'm making another try in this blog.  My other blog made a reference to my business cards.  I copied that Technorati tag intact from the other blog.  I had done a manual ping for that blog as well, and it showed up in Technorati within about 25 minutes.

Here's another Technorati tag that I hope would be relevant: blogging success.

-- Jack Krupansky

If I stop blogging, am I really out of the blogosphere?

As I initially announced last week, in 8 days my participation in the blogosphere will have concluded since I will cease new posting, cease monitoring blogs through aggregators, and cease commenting on the blogs of others.  But since I intend to leave by blogs in place with all of their old blog posts, will I have technically left the blogosphere?  Those existing post will continue to be indexed by all of the search engines and available through any existing bookmarks that people may have.

I certainly have no intention of destroying any of the work that I've done, so I really do what to leave the blogs intact.

Maybe the proper way to characterize it is that I will no longer be "an active participant in the blogosphere."

-- Jack Krupansky

AdSense for Feeds (AFF)

One of the reasons that I probabbly haven't gotten hardly any AdSense revenue from my blogs (as compared to my comparable web sites) is that so many people are accessing blogs as web feeds in aggregators.  My posts tend to be quite short, so there is usually no reason to click through to see the actual blog permalink web page where the Google Adsense ads are be displayed.

Google's new AdSense for Feeds (AFF) feature is designed to "fix" that problem, but in was only available to people with at least 100 subscriptions back when I was mucking around with this stuff, and it didn't appear to have any documented interface for Blogger blogs, anyway.  Granted, the rules may have changed, and maybe I could figure out how to cause ads to be pushed out on a Blogger Atom web feed, but I've been too busy for the past two months to invest that kind of additional effort.  Why Google hasn't worked with their own Blogger people to put in a simple check box to enable AdSense ads on both blogs and web feeds is beyond my comprehension.

-- Jack Krupansky

My loophole: commenting on my own old posts

I originally stated that my self-imposed exile from the blogosphere consisted of no longer posting to my blogs, no longer commenting on the blogs of others, and no longer monitoring blogs or using blog aggregators.  My blogs will remain out there as is, but I won't make any new posts.  I just realize that there is a loophole which would allow or encourage me to participate in the blogosphere in at least a minor way.  First, people will still be able to comment on my blogs, and I will receive email notification of those comments.  I had forgotten about that when I made my original announcement.  Second, I could in fact make comments of my own to comments made by others on my blog since that would not be a comment by me "on the blogs of others."  Even if I do this, it's not a big deal since relatively few people comment on my blogs as it is.  Further, I wouldn't expect people to comment for very long on my older posts as they get even older.

-- Jack Krupansky

Too much folklore

One of the other things that really bothers me about the blogosphere is that so much of the knowledge about blogging, blogging tools, search engines, etc. consists primarily of unverifiable folklore.  Some people love that kind of thing, but not me.  I don't mind rules and guidelines, but when the tips and tricks and rumors start to have the tone of something that somebody simply made up, I tune out.

-- Jack Krupansky

Stil no luck with Technorati tags

I still haven't uncovered any clues as to why I can no longer get Technorati tags to be recognized in this blog.  This is yet another example of why I'm so inclined to leave the blogosphere:  the way the tools work is so confusing and opaque and I simply don't have the spare time to figure it all out.

My remaining suspicion about Technorati is that maybe they're treating my blog as if it were "spam".  But, there's no way for me to tell.  Whatever.  I only have 9 days of blogging left anyway.  Good riddance.

-- Jack Krupansky

Anonymous comments are now enabled

After yet another complaint that Blogger doesn't make it easy to comment on Blogger blogs unless the user is a registered Blogger user or the blog owner enables comment spam (AKA anonymous or non-registered users), and considering that this blog is for experimenting anyway, and the fact that I'll be signing off in 10 days anyway), I've decided to enable anonymous comments for this blog.  We'll see what happens.  I have no intent to delete any comment spam, for now.  Personally, I find a lot of that stuff amusing anyway.

So, comment away.

-- Jack Krupansky

Retry: Technorati has stopped indexing my web tags

[Same as the last post, but manually edit in Blogger to add quotes around "tag" for 'rel="tag"'. Note: I didn't have to actually add the quotes in Blogger; merely bringing the post up in Blogger's post editor caused them to be added.]

For reasons unknown to me, Technorati no longer indexes my use of Technorati tags in this blog. I had figured out how to do it months ago and it was working fine, but it appears that somewhere around the beginning of June Technorati stopped paying attention to tags in my blogs. And this is even if I explicitly ping Technorati for my blog.

I just noticed this last week when I used the Technorati tag for 10blogs. This is another attempt.

Please, somebody let me know what I'm doing wrong.

-- Jack Krupansky

Technorati has stopped indexing my web tags

For reasons unknown to me, Technorati no longer indexes my use of Technorati tags in this blog.  I had figured out how to do it months ago and it was working fine, but it appears that somewhere around the beginning of June Technorati stopped paying attention to tags in my blogs.  And this is even if I explicitly ping Technorati for my blog.

I just noticed this last week when I used the Technorati tag for 10blogs.  This is another attempt.

Please, somebody let me know what I'm doing wrong.

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger bug: no "home" link on monthly archive pages

I just noticed that Blogger does not put a "home" link under the blog title on my monthly blog archive pages.  In other words, there is no link button to click to go back to the main blog in the same way than you can if you're viewing the permalink web page for a blog post.  Oops.  Blogger: please fix this.

This came up when I was searching using Google and one of my archive web pages showed up in the search results.  This is a case where the web browser "Back" button won't enable you to navigate back to the main page for a blog.

-- Jack Krupansky

Where did all the spam go?

I used to get over 400 spam email messages a day, say a year ago.  In the past 14 hours I got only 38.  It seems like recently I get barely 100 spam emails a day.  What's going on?  Are the spammers on summer break?  Or could it really be that people are doing a cost benefit analysis and simply deciding that the return on investment for spam is starting to suck?  Is Microsoft putting pressure on these guys?  Anybody have a clue as to what's going on?

For reference, I am not using any anti-spam software and not even using any email filters.  Virtually all of my email comes through non-ISP web servers.  And, all of my web sites and blogs explicitly list my email address.

This seems too good to be true.  We'll have to see how spam traffic shapes up after Labor Day in September.

-- Jack Krupansky

Where should I blog about Hiroshima?

As part of the ongoing critique of why I may have "failed" as a blogger, it has been suggested that I have too many blogs and should have started more modestly and then expanded.  The problem is what do do with posts than have nothing to do with the niche for my blog.  I would have started with an all-purpose blog, but it seemed to me that would be undesirable for readers who simply want a niche subset of "me" that interests them, as opposed to notable people whom people want to read everything about.  So, I have four focused blogs, and this "other" blog which was originally created (over a month after the other blogs) for recording the issues with blogging that I was encountering, as well as a place to experiment.  It was never intended to be my "main" blog or to be an all-purpose blog.  So, now I have some thoughts about Hiroshima (yesterday being the Anniversary of the atomic bomb blast), but no blog where they make sense.  I had actually considered creating a political blog last Sprint since that is one of my areas of interest, but I was definitely feeling "blogged-out" at five blogs.  In retrospect, I should have done it, since it's free and it might have gotten some attention, since I had spent a lot of time in Washington, going to congressional hearings and think tanks.  But, that's hindsight.

Back to Hiroshima.  Since none of my other blogs is appropriate, I'll simply post here as an "experiment."

Ever since I was little, I was always interested in anything related to "atomic", whether it was energy or weapons or whatever.  A nuke plant was built in the next town when I was in high school (Oyster Creek in Forked River, New Jersey), so that was a major focal point.  One of my uncles was a nuclear test engineer (testing nuke reactors before they were approved for service), so that also focused my interest.

Back in 1987 I had quit my last real job, to become an independent software development consultant and taken a month off (the company I had worked at was a venture-backed startup that went from nothing to IPO and I had a modest amount of "founders" stock to bankroll me after four years of hard work) to travel a little in the Pacific rim of Asia, including Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and even a little in China.  I had no preconceived plans.  I'd go somewhere and look at a map and see what seemed interesting.  BTW, I was traveling alone, although I did know some people in Tokyo.  I took the bullet train way down to southern Japan, to Kyushu and Mount Aso, a real live volcano.  On the way back to Tokyo, I stopped at several places, including Hiroshima.  Given my interest in all things atomic, it was unresistable.  I just had to see that famous building with the steel dome that had survived the blast.

It was wierd getting off the train in Hiroshima and seeing all these modern buildings when my "memories" were of absolute desolation and despair.

I went to the memorial and park and museum and saw all the displays about the blast and its effects.  There was a piece of stone with the outline of something scorched into the stone.  Seeing the actual scorched stone was far more meaningful than merely seeing even a detailed photograph, which I had seen.   And of source I saw the building with the dome.  It seemed so incongruous, how such a structure so close to the blast had survived so intact.

It struck me how "recovered" the city was from the most massive form of devastation that we know how to inflict.  Of course, I realized that a lot of the human scars were hidden.  I recalled reading some book in high school about a girl who had died from the after-effects of the blast.

A few years later (1989 to 1993) I learned a lot more about radiation and health effects as a result of interest in the Rocky Flats Plant near Boulder, Colorado.  Rocky Flats was infamous for being the primary production facility for the plutonium triggers of our nuclear weapons.  I spent any hours at various libraries (including at Department of Energy facilities) and attended many public hearings.  One of the things that happended around 1990 was that the scientists at at Los Alamos had refined their models of nuclear weapons and drastically revised their estimate of the neutron yield of weapons such as used at Hiroshima.  They decided that the neutron yeild was significanted less than previously though, meaning that the observed health impacts were the results of smaller doses of radiation.  The net impact was that they cut in half the threshold level of radiation that the public is permitted to receive each year (from 200 mrem to 100 mrem, I think).  Another thing that had been happening is that ongoing interviews with victims (in the 1980's, all those years after the blast) became more refined to pinpoint where individuals had been and what direction they had been facing when the blast occurred and what kind of structure (none, wood, brick, concrete, stone) they had been in and whether they were inline with a window or behind an appliance or furniture, etc. to try to zero in more precisely on what level of radiation had caused what health effects.  Neutron radiation is much more hazardous to biological tissue, but more easily stopped than gamma radiation.

My other memory of Hiroshima was of a group of young schoolgirls that approached me in the memorial park.  That was not uncommon.  It seemed like kids were taught in school to approach foreigners (as groups) to talk to them to practice their English language speaking skills.  This happened to me three different times during the week I was travelling around Japan.  This group approached me in Hiroshima and obviously one of the schoolgirls was the leader of the group and one was her assistant.  She asked "May we speak with you?", which sounded rather formal.  I said "Yes", and immediately there was a lot of smiling and whispering and the assistant to the leader pulled out a sheet of paper and unfolded it and proceeded to point to questions on the paper, which the leader then read.  Some of them were general and a few related specifically to Hiroshima and the blast.  They seemed to enjoy my answers.  They had some odd phrase for referring to the blast, but I can't recall exactly what it was.  Maybe it was "disaster".  They asked me what I thought about it, and I simply said that "It was very unfortunate", which they seemed to accept.  They seemed a bit casual about the blast, as if it really was simply a bad event from the past, but not a big concern in their own lives.

I would offer one criticism of the memorial park, the same as I would make about the Dachau Nazi concentration camp in Germany that I had visited earlier: it was too pristine and park-like and even too pleasant.  It just seems to me that the memorial to such a horror should be more desolate and somehow viscerally represent the horror, more than just in the photos and a few artifacts and pleasant-looking monuments.  But, maybe the whole point is that people don't want a total in-your-face reminder of the horror.  It's something that they might want to visit and see a gentle reminder of the horror, but not actually have to live with the full horror every day.

-- Jack Krupansky

Status of my blogging cloud on Sunday, August 7, 2005

As of today, my blog "cloud" is 3,390 hits in Google, but that's 178 displayed hits, and 921 total hits, compared to 933, 171, and 855 on July 29.  My blog cloud is defined as the results of a Google search of my name in quotes and the word "blog".  Ultimately, the second number is the most accurate or reliable representation of your blog cloud's size.  The third number is the hits if you click the Google link that says repeat the search with the omitted results included.

I suspect that the numbers bounce around erratically since blogs sometimes have lists of recent comments, and a number of my older comments simply fell off those lists.  That's life, but there is also the lesson that you need to stay current and can't thrive for very long on old contributions.

Over time, a number of blogs will simply disappear, although if they are hosted on a service such as Blogger, their archived content should stay around indefinitely.

Another issue is that Google's web crawler and database mirroring are somewhat erratic, so the numbers can bounce around even if the actual content on the web remains unchanged.

My strategy for raising these numbers is to continue to make quality comments on the blogs of others, as well as to post my own blog posts when I feel that I have something to say.  Unfortunately, I've been so busy with my move to Boulder, Colorado that I've been remiss in both blogging by own posts and commenting on others.

-- Jack Krupansky

What will the blogosphere be like in a year?

Since I'll be away from the blogosphere for the next year (starting in 12 days), it would seem reasonabe to ask what the blogosphere might be like in a year.  Some suggested questions:

1. How will Goggle's strategy evolve?
2. Will more people know about and use Atom, or fewer?
3. How will Blogger evolve?
4. What is Microsoft plotting even as we speak?
5. Will blogging be simpler, or more complex?
6. Will new PCs ship with a blog all set up and ready to go?
7. What will the A-list look like?  Will there even be an A-list?
8. What kind of shakeouts will have occurred?
9. What *new* blogs will rise to the top of the heap?
10. What scandals will have occurred?
11. What mind-boggling blogging innovations will have occured?
12. What forms of "web feed viruses" (or "RSS viruses") will have evolved and what will the response look like?

What else will likely transpire while I play the role of the blogosphere's Rip Van Winkle?

-- Jack Krupansky

Will check back in a year

As my self-imposed "exit" from the blogosphere approaches (13 days to go), one thought that comes to mind is that blogs and blogging and blog technology and the whole blogosphere are of course going to evolve over time (one would hope), so it makes sense for me to pre-schedule a modest level of re-evaluation of the blogosphere and my own interests, abilities, and skills in a year just in case "something" changes enough to have the net result of blogging having a significant enough net benefit relative to the costs that I would incur.

So, in case I forget, someone remind me in a year to take a second look.

I may even take a peek in six months, but right now I'm not that optimistic.

-- Jack Krupansky

LinkedIn to also go under my ax?

On to the next cannon to clear from the decks so I can have more of my own attention back: LinkedIn.

Nominally, it's supposed to be a great business networking tool, but after 18 months of determined use, I simply am not discovering any significant value with it.  I've put a lot of effort into it and have built up a modest network of 62 connections.  It's a lot of work just to get your first 20 connections.  And what do I have to show for all of this work?  Virtually nothing.  It's hardly more than a not-so-convenient online address book.  Frankly, if I want to make a connection, I find the person's web site or web page using any search engine and fire off an email.  Not to mention the fact that I have a lot of business cards for people who have shied away from using LinkedIn.

I don't have a drop-dead liberation date for LinkedIn, but let's just say that it's on my "hit" list.  Maybe I'll ax it on my six-month blogging anniversary.  Or, maybe I'll simply leave it as is, but not invest another two seconds of my time on it.

-- Jack Krupansky

TypeKey comments for Blogger

If I could make just one "final request" of Blogger, it would be to support TypeKey for commenters on Blogger blogs.  It would enable a large class of commenters who are otherwise excluded from commenting on Blogger blogs that don't allow anonymous comments.

I don't think the subject matter of my blogs is so controversial as to warrant anyone feeling that they are taking a great risk by "exposing" their identity on my blogs.  Besides, getting a Blogger "account" doesn't require you to expose your identity anyway.  In other words, even if you have a Blogger id that you don't want to "expose", just create one for your anonymous persona.  After all, Blogger (Google) is likely to be a fixture of the blogging landscape for some time to come.

-- Jack Krupansky

No escape from the blogosphere

Despite my plans to "leave" the blogosphere on the six-month anniversary of my participation as a blogger (August 18, 13 days to go), the reality is that this won't be a complete escape from the so-called blogosphere.  Even though I will cease posting and cease reading and commenting on blogs, the simple fact is that blog posts are stored as web pages and Google and the other search engines do index them, so there will be innumerable opportunities for me to "visit" the blogosphere as I use Google, et al to as a research tool.  Well, maybe this still constitutes "escape", and merely amounts to "returning to the scene of the crime."  Or, maybe this is a little like being on probation.

There is also the very real possibility that some future consulting work could very well require me to do some blogging.  That would be fine with me.  I have no objection to blogging, but simply presently have no compelling reasons to continue blogging.  I would note though, that none of the job descriptions for software developers and and consultants that I've seen over the past months has even used the word blog as part of what's required for the job.  They frequently mention the need for excellant communication skills, but no mention of blogging.  This illustrates how despite the great clamor about blogging, there are still vast untold swaths of computer-based activity that don't require blogging as a job requirement.

-- Jack Krupansky

The essence of blogging success and failure

I still have plenty of other comments to make, but I felt that it's worthwhile to try to crystallize at least a few things.  Here's my (imagined) list of the top three requirements for achieving success as a blogger:

1. Compelling content.
2. Compelling content.
3. Compelling content.

Evaluating my own failed efforts over the past six months, here are the top three (imagined) reasons why my efforts have been such an abysmal failure:

1. Lack of compelling content.
2. Lack of compelling content.
3. Lack of compelling content.

Seriously, all the various and sundry mistakes I've made along the way could probably easily be corrected using various ideas, suggestions, tips, tricks, training, and better tools, but all of that would be for naught without the elusive compelling content.

-- Jack Krupansky

The celebration continues

The list of six-month "celebration" thoughts goes on.  Here are some more thoughts as I wind down my final two weeks as a "citizen" of the blogosphere.  Let me know if any of this comes across as being too gloomy;  I'm simply trying to render an accurate summary of my thoughts, and maybe some of it will be useful to others who aren't in the upper tiers of blog stardom.  You should probably read my previous comments first.

1. Just try it versus are you sure? I'm all in favor of the "just go for it" mentality, but it does have the great risk that you don't have a plan and criteria for how to cut losses and get out. The alternative of planning out all details has the opposite problem that it will unnecessarily discourage a lot of people who would be able to succeed naturally without any grand plan.
2. What's your angle? You have to have an angle for people to sync up with. One of my problems was that I didn't have any angles that really made sense in the blogosphere.
3. Your name versus your content. There are really only two reasons that people will read your blog: 1) your content is truly compelling, or 2) people recognize your name and want to hear what "you" have to say.
4. Way too much hype that suggests that blogging is really easy and fails to disclose the true costs, especially in time. Sure, some stuff is easy, but if you're not getting success, you end up spending inordinate amounts of time trying to find some way to achieve that elusive success.
5. Not graphical, visual, layout oriented. A lot of bloggers seem to have a knack for the graphical and visual aspects of presenting information. I do not. I'm clueless on that front and don't have the financial resources to hire somebody to do that portion of the work for me.
6. On a different wavelength. People in the blogosphere do seem to be on some special wavelength that I am not on. You can say that I don't get it, but the net of that is that the blogosphere is not the place for me to be.
7. What are the true costs to be successful? Got me, and that's a problem and another reason for me to stay clear of this blogging stuff.
8. Patience? One commenter counseled for me to patient. That's a problem, for me. On the one hand I really don't have the sense of patience that a lot of people in the blogosphere have found to be essential. For me, six months is a *very* long time. On the other hand, I've been too patient, too willing to tolerate things that clearly aren't working, too willing to defer difficult decisions. The bottom line is that I don't have the requisite balance of patience needed to succeed in the blogosphere.
9. Passion? Passion is essential to success, but my forte is logic, not passion. That means that I'm out of luck for ventures that are based primarily on passion.
10. Glad others are being so successful. Hey, I'm jealous and envious that so *many* other people are doing so well with blogging while I'm not. Seriously, I am sincerely happy that a lot of people really are successful.  They provide great role models.  Unfortunately, I don't have the right mix of skills and motivations to follow in their footsteps.
11. Need to be in touch with your target market and audience. Your target audience has hopes, dreams, needs, and desires, and you need to be "in touch" with those qualities so that you can satisfy them and keep them as a loyal audience. That's another strike against me. There is no market or audience that I'm *really* and deeply in touch with. There are lots of markets and audiences that I'm superficially in touch with, but that's not enough.
12. Spread too thin?  I have five blogs, each for a different purpose.  Is this too much?  Is it spreading me so thin that I can't focus enough attention on any of the blogs to make them successful?  I don't think so, since I'm focused only on one particular post at a time anyway.  But, I may be wrong.  It's something for prospective bloggers to pay attention to.
13. Demand results.  I probably should have made lots of changes all along the way as I was discovering that things just didn't feel right.  Unfortunately, I had plenty of other obligations that kept me from putting 110% of my energy intoblogging.  If you aren't seeing results that you like, ask why and don't settle for "I don't know."
14. Some are naturals.  In all disciplines there are some who are naturals and can make it look easy.  If yo're not one of them, you have to find an alternative path that somehow supplements your lack of natural ability.  I enjoy blog posting, but that's not the same as achieving success in the blogosphere.
15. Be a "thought leader."  I knew that I wasn't a thought leader going into this and never expected to become one, but you really do need to find some niche where you *can* be a thought leader.  Anything less and you're not going to be a big success.  I didn't spend enoough time on this.
16. Leadership.  Just in general, you need to have to have a knack for being into being a leader.  After all, you're trying to attract followers.  Trouble is, I've never been a leader kind of guy.  I've never been much of a follower either.  I've always been independent, too independent.  I need to work on how to re-focus independence into a form of leadership.
17. So much of what goes on in the so-called blogosphere deeply offends me, it's just too much effort to look past it all.  That's life.  I wasn't able to connect with a robust sub-community of the blogosphere where the "good" overwhelmed the "bad" stuff.  It's easy to think of the blogosphere as one big (happy?) community rather than a zillion overlapping sub-communities.  For now, that's more effort them I'm prepared to expend.
18. Am I a loser?  In terms of this blogging thing, clearly that's the case.  Clearly it's time for me to move on... after I finish this post-mortem of my efforts.  After all, I *should* make an effort to learn as much as I can from this "experiment".

More comments will be on the way as I further reflect on my decision to "pull the plug" on my bloggig efforts on the six-month anniversary date of my first blog post, August 18, 2005.

It's still a little too early to start digging into what my next project(s) might be.

14 days to go.

-- Jack Krupansky

No encouraging words

I'm grateful that so far nobody has offering me encouraging words to keep blogging. I've gotten a couple of suggestions, but so far the only options seem to requiring investing even a higher level of effort.

The only way that I would continue is if somebody can show me how with half the effort I can get twice as much done and have 200x the results. I don't expect such a prospect, but that merely reaffirms my decision that blogging simply isn't worth the effort (for me).

15 days to go.

-- Jack Krupansky

The six-month blogging anniversary celebration continues

Here are some additional points I wanted to make related to my decision to "pull the plug" after blogging for six months and not feeling that the return on effort was worth it.  These points are in addition to my initial comments.

1. Burnout?  Not really.  I thoroughly enjoy blogging, far beyond the business benefits that it produces.  If I were burned out, I would simply have stopped and not even written this post.
2. It's nothing personal, it's just business.  Just to emphasize, I enjoy blogging, but it's not economically justified, for me.  And I'm not doing it as a hobby or to relieve boredom.
3. It's my perception, with no implications for the efforts of others.  I fully recognize and expect that blogging works quite well for many people and many businesses.  It simply doesn't work for me, from an economic perspective.
4. Blandening.  Blogging seems to be losing its edge and getting more bland by the day.  People seem to be slipping into their respective grooves.  Blogs are getting too predictable.  There was some real excitement six months ago, but a lot of the energy has dissipated.  Is it hardening of the arteries?  Blog cholesterol?
5. Too much hype.  The extreme hype has always bothered me, but now it's simply sunk in, for me, that the hype is insufficient for me to economically justify blogging.  Why can't we make the hype go away?
6. Web pages provide most of the benefit of blogs.  I'm not giving up on the web.  I have five web sites and will continue to update them as I have new material that I feel is worth disseminating.  People find me via my web sites using search engines such as Google, and I enjoy the email exchanges.  Blogs and web feeds provide an additional level of communication, but I've not found that increment to be very dramatic at all.
7. No significant search engine optimization (SEO) effect.  With my very initial blogging efforts I had been led to believe that referring to my existing web site content from blogs would boost my ranking in Google, but I actually found the reverse in some cases.  In any case, I got no dramatic SEO benefit from blogs.
8. Need to focus more on value.  Blogs seem like a great idea, but generating "value" is a more difficult proposition.  Some people seem to suggest that blogs are the *best* way to create value, but I'm even more skeptical now.
9. Negligible in-bound linking.  Consistent with trying to boost Google page ranking, I had hoped to incrementally see more people linking to my blogs, especially over a period of months.  Maybe it's simply the fact that people "link" to web feeds rather than blogs themselves.  Or, maybe people simply don't find any of my content to be compelling.
10. No discernible "traction".  I can understand these processes requiring extended periods of time, but I'd also have expected to see *some* traction as the months tick by.  My rule: No traction = pull plug.
11. Enough "practice" writing; time to do the real thing.  Regular blogging has certainly helped to hone my writing ability, but it's more of an exercise than "the real thing".  I'm feeling a little bit of desire to do some "real" writing.  Blog posts aren't particularly to best place to write full essays or even longer works.
12. Time to move on to the next step or next level.  I've been there and done that for six months, so I'm ready to move on.  If anybody suggests that more time is needed, then my response is that there is something seriously wrong somewhere here.  Six months was a good "phase".  I'm ready for something new that really will take me to the infamous next level, and I'm not talking about podcasting or wikis or merely joining one of the blog "networks".  Even if Jason Calacanis were to FedEx me an engraved invitation and a $20,000 advance, I'd merely yawn and shake my head and say "Is this all there is?"
13. Even the most optimistic prospects aren't that appealing.  Even if I had a 10 or 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000-fold increase in traffic and interest, would it really be so wonderful?  Besides after an initial pop, how do you achieve sustainability?  Even if Google or Microsoft or Yahoo or BusinessWeek said "Please come work for us", that wouldn't be so appealing.  Admittedly, I wouldn't mind getting some consulting opportunities, but even that would probably peter out and become dull and tedious after a short time.
14. I'd like to go out on an upbeat note rather than die a slow death or even a fast death.  I have no desire to simply "flame out."  Better to make a solid business decision and follow through.
15. Be professional about it.  So many blogs have seem to be stamped "amateur".  I'd like to do as professional a job as I can, and if I don't feel that I'm up to being a hard-core professional at every step, then I should at least be as professional as possible about getting out.
16. Not a matter of "pressure to publish".  As I've tried to emphasize, my decision to stop is not based on a desire to stop, but a need to be focusing on tasks that I feel deliver good value.  I don't feel like I *have* to post any messages; I want to publish them.
17. Tools are still a little too tedious.  As I've gotten more proficient, I've started to notice that I'm not as productive as I'd like.  The Blogger interface is easy enough to use and the email posting interface is reasonably efficient, but sometimes I skip or delay a post because I don't feel that I have the extra 30 seconds to compose it and ship it off to my blog and them proofread it and frequently copyedit it as well.  To my mind, blogging should be as easy as an email conversation, maybe easier.
18. There's always more to learn from reading blogs, but I need to digest more of what I've already read.  After a while, too much of the content I'm exposed to really does seem to simply go in one eye and out the other.  I might learn just as much or more by re-reading the last 50,000 posts I've read than reading the next 50,000.  I'm not talking about news or gossip, but solid "knowledge" that will provide me with value in the coming years.
19. Diminishing returns.  I have in fact gotten some value out of blogs, but I'm no longer getting as much value as I got from those first 1,000 posts I read.  Worse, I'm not expecting the rate of return to go up, unless some dramatic improvement in the blog world occurs.
20. No desire to be long-winded.  I think I've probably said most of what I could say over the past six months, so why risk boring people with repetition.  Just last week I though of blogging some topic and suddenly realized that I suspected that I had already blogged that topic, but I simply couldn't remember for sure.
21. Focus more on my real content.  My web sites and their content were starting to get neglected.  I need to get back to emphasizing substantial content rather than simply blogging a lot.  Blogging had become a distraction that I could not offload.
22. Conflict between blogging my own content and commenting on the blogs of others.  Since there was very little attention being paid to my own blogs, it seemed more attractive to comment on the blogs of others, especially since I enjoyed that process and actually got more attention to my writing that way.  The problem is that every comment I post to the blog of somebody else is one less blog post of my own.
23. Business efforts need to scale up (multiply) results, rather than merely limp along.  I *should* have seen increasing returns for my effort, not a flat line.  If you see a flat line after six months, clearly something is very wrong.
24. Lack of clear goals and a "plan"; no criteria for success or failure.  Put simply, I didn't know what I was really trying to do when I started blogging.  Lack of focus is bad news.  I had a vague idea, but enough to give great results.  To some extent, I simply thought that I'd put a lot of energy into it and "see what happens", and that along the way some good things would happen.  At least that was the theory.
25. What does it mean to become a successful blogger?  To date, I still don't have a good, solid answer, other than simply to say that you're a successful blogger if your blogging leads to success.
26. What does it mean about the state of our technology if changed web site page changes cannot be easily located and reviewed?  To some extent, blogs are simply an easy way to discover new content that has been placed on the web.  Why can't I simple focus exclusively on authoring new content and have some automated tools or infrastructure automatically generate the blogs?
27. Serendipity failed me.  There are lots of things, including good and wonderful things, that you simply can't plan for and simply showing up and "being there" is the best way to set yourself up for good things to happen.  Unfortunately, my dependence on serendipity simply didn't pan out this time.

That's it for now, but I'm sure I'll collect some more thoughts in the days ahead.  Only 15 days to go.

-- Jack Krupansky

Difficulty accessing Gmail via POP3

For the past week I've seen quite a number of occasions when I've been unable to access my Gmail mail via POP3.  It times out.  Is Google having capacity problems?  Are they mucking around with configurations?  What's the story?

 

Of course, we all have to realize that Gmail is still in "Beta", so all bets are off.  This is just another gentle reminder that Gmail is not ready for prime time use as your "main" email account.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Celebrating six months of blogging?

It just occurred to me yesterday that my six-month anniversary of blogging is coming up soon, so I should figure out some way to celebrate.

I posted my first Blogger post on February 18, 2005.  That makes my six-month anniversary August 18, 2005.

So, how should I celebrate?

Wait a minute... why should I be celebrating??

I've put a huge amount of work into my FIVE blogs and gotten next to nothing in return.  Sure, I've made a few good contacts, but I was doing that with email and my five web sites before I even started blogging.

In fact, since I could have been doing things that might have been more productive during the past six months, my lost opportunity cost is quite high.

I won't say that it's been a complete waste of time, but I can confidently say that it has not been a productive use of my time.

In conclusion, I've resolved to pull the plug as of my six-month anniversary date (August 18) and re-focus all of that effort into what hopefully will be more productive pursuits.

The blogs will remain intact (thanks to Blogger being "free") and I will continue updating my web sites, but I won't be posting to blogs anymore as of August 18.  I would also expect that my posting will diminish greatly in advance of August 18th as well.

I'll also cease commenting on the blogs of others and also take my two blog aggregator pages (BlogLines and NewsGator) off my browser Favorites list since monitoring the blogs of others has also been a very unproductive use of my time.

I'll continue to maintain my web sites, but the blogs will simply drift away.

I'll continue to post my daily stock market column on my finance web site, but I'll save myself the five minutes a day it took to attend to posting a link for the column on the blog.  I'll also save the time I used to waste every time Blogger would have difficulty processing email posts.

I don't think it's anybody's fault that my blogs have been so spectacularly unsuccessful, but the fact that so few people respond enthusiastically to anything I write tells me that I simply don't have a large enough audience to justify my level of effort.

If I were running a larger business it might make sense to assign someone to be the blogmaster and just think of it as a cost of doing business, but being a one-person business, having financial difficulties, and struggling to find work, etc. simply eats up enough of my time that I need to find ways to reclaim more of my time.

Blogging is a hobby or even a "joy" for some people, but for me it was always intended simply as a business tool.

I've been running Google AdSense ads on my blogs, but the resulting "revenue" is not enough to buy a cup of coffee -- once a month.

I do reserve the right to change my mind, but I can't even imagine what miracle might inspire me to do so.

C'est le vie.

-- Jack Krupansky

My Top 10 blogs

Some blogger named Steve Rubel thinks it would be nice for people to share their personal lists of the Top 10 blogs they would take to a desert island.  To tell you the truth, I don't have any "top" preferences.  I do have 323 blogs on my total list, but none that I would call "top".

 

By placing the Technorati tag 10blogs in your blog post, you'll be automatically included in Technorati's list of people who have Top 10 blog lists.

 

-- Jack Krupansky