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