So following my post on Marc Andressen's blog i had the pleasure to see that Marc came and left a comment i am copying right here. Although i found it hard to believe, this blog is the fruit of an on going work starting in June this year and not from past potential publications meaning Marc has an outstanding capacity to write fast (although as he points that the ideas themselves have been flourishing for a long number of years). Being myself not too slow, i think i know what i am talking about. But given the length of the comment he left, i think i would tend to be less sceptical about it.
The good news is that he mentions he will take some of my suggestions to improve user interaction on his blog :) Thanks Marc for passing by and see you soon at TechCrunch20
Hi Ouriel -- thanks very much for the kind comments!
I'm flattered that you think the content is good enough that it must have been written in advance :-). Truth be told, it wasn't -- although in a sense I have been working on it for 13 years, since I arrived in Silicon Valley in 1994 -- it's just all been in my head the whole time.
I began the blog as an experiment and frankly wasn't all that sure what I'd write about. Then my repressed opinions started to come out :-). And the more I write, the more ideas I have for things to write, which is fun.
I usually write and post in the same day. The posts never start out long but sometimes they are by the time I finish. I try to edit them down as best I can.
I doubt I will ever do a book -- one of the things I love about blogging now that I'm doing it is that it fits much better with my style of work, which is short concentrated bursts. I'm not sure I'm capable of sitting still long enough to do a whole book, even assuming it would result in something that people would want to read.
I totally take your points on interacting with the community -- I'll be doing a lot more of that and I think your suggestions are great ones. I'm going to try to do more stuff like you suggest in my new design. I think comments are a nonstarter for me at least for right now -- too much spam, too many trolls. I think cross-linking and trackbacks and blog search engines like Technorati are a much better approach because they result in each person having responsibility for their own content. Will be writing more about that topic in the future.
Frankly, I bet there are some good startup ideas in that area :-).
Adrian -- I completely agree that blogs would be a new way to release books -- I think John Battelle very effectively used his blog to help seed his book in a way that was very interesting and helpful both for him and his readers, for example. Tim Ferriss is another guy who has really thought this through. My #1 recommendation to anyone who is going to publish a book would certainly be to have a blog going on the topic of the book at least six to twelve months in advance of the book, and to have real content on the blog that then ties into the book.
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