I got an email from a close friend last night in response to my recent post of Stratify’s press release.. His comment – which follows – struck a chord.
You’ve begun to illustrate one of the problems with blogs… now I go to your blog and half of it is stuff you’re trying to promote (e.g., your companies, WIT). So it’s already only 50% as interesting as it was when you started. Think about it — you actually are a smart guy with stuff to say, and half of what you’re doing is spam. What about people who have nothing to say but lots to sell!
While part of my goal with my blog is to keep “you” (where you = “you, the reader”) informed on stuff that I’m interested in and working on, I realize that simply reposting press releases without any insightful commentary is not necessarily useful or interesting (ok – it’s probably bordering on spam). So – I will solve this two ways. First, whenever I post something about one of my companies, I’ll make sure that I’m commenting on what I’m posting – so it’s actually “my view” of what’s going on and is relevant, rather than simply a canned press release. Second, I’ll set up a separate press release page on my web site (which is now framed within a Movable Type blog) and create an RSS feed for this page separately for anyone that wants to get these press releases.
In addition, I’m very interested in feedback like this as I continue to evolve this blog and tune it to what’s interesting to “you, the reader” (as well as what’s interesting to “me, the writer”. One of the problems with blogs is that there are no particularly good user profiling or feedback information build into the blog infrastructure yet (other than comments, which we all know are pretty lame). For now, my only real feedback mechanism is email, so please use it if you have anything to say (good, bad, or what you are interested in).