This Skin We're In by Dale Beermann

Understanding an Entrepreneur's Passion

I've written before about what I believe it means to be an entrepreneur. To me, it's a desire to innovate and grow. It's also a desire to avoid failure.

This isn't to be confused with having a fear of failure.   Most people will never get out on their own and start a company if they're hampered by a fear of failure. Rather, those that do start their own companies do everything in their power to keep them running.

Recently, the story of StumbleUpon made me think about this again. StumbleUpon was bought back by its original founders, with some help from a few new investors. There is a follow-up post that expands a bit on the potential reasons the founders bought it back as well. I think that their job wasn't quite done and they couldn't see a product with huge potential fail without another push.

Something similar happened here in Madison a few years ago, with the buy-back of Guild.com. The more you poke around, the more you find other stories that follow the same trend. Some might say that the founders saw an opportunity for easy money when they bought the company back.  I don't believe that entrepreneurs think this way.

You might guess that the resources of a company such as eBay might increase StumbleUpon's chances for success.  The second TechCrunch story talks about efficient allocation of resources. I find it hard to believe that StumbleUpon was hampered so much by the bureaucracy of eBay. Yet, eBay has a history of similar moves, such as the monumental overpayment for Skype.

Personally, I see is a sale to a company that didn't understand how they could best use the product and the acknowledgment on the part of the founders that their baby was dying. They knew how it could be improved and its growth could continue and wanted to make sure the effort was made to realize their original vision.  What do you think?

On MsPixel.com: Coming of Age in the Gaming Industry

I wrote a little guest post over at MsPixel.com.  I don't write much about the gaming industry so this was a great outlet for me to talk about something that's been running around in my head lately.  Please head on over and check it out.  Here's a little tidbit:

"At the pop culture family gathering the gaming industry sits at the kids’ table.  In order for gaming to grow up and prepare its own plate of food, the industry needs to be criticized in the same way as music, movies, and television. "

Read the rest...

Your Blog's True Identity

If you haven't played around with Wordle, go now.  And then come back.

The image above is a word cloud of text from my RSS feed.  There are a lot of things that you can learn from a visualization like this, so let's break mine down:

Category Analysis

It's easy to see that I write about entrepreneurship. I've done a decent job of staying on topic but I can also see the other themes that I talk about: blogging, careers; education; and writing.  If you have categories on your blog this can help you better determine what they should be.  In my case, the categories don't match the content too often and I'll probably update them as a result.

What I didn't realize about my content was that I write about blogging more than I thought.  I'm fine with that but I don't market my blog that way.  Maybe I'll cut down some of these types of posts, I don't know.

SEO Optimization

From an SEO perspective the word cloud helps me understand how my posts are affecting my blog's search engine ranking.  I can see that "entrepreneur" doesn't show up as much as a lot of other words, yet it's in the description of my blog.  I was surprised by this.  It isn't awful but I will probably work on using it more in my titles or headers.  If the terms are coming up in places that I didn't expect I might want to work on this as well.  It's good to concentrate your core keywords in titles, headers, and links as search engines mark those types of fields as more important than normal body text.

Becoming a Better Writer

In many ways the word cloud above is also embarrassing.  I'm not a trained writer but I don't think that I'm a bad one.  The fact that the the word "really" shows up prominently is disheartening.  I think that my biggest issue as a writer is using adverbs throughout my material.  It makes the content fluffy (!) and there are betters ways of getting your point across.  There are other words that I'm not fond of seeing either: "though," "lot," "like," and "just."  I can do better than that.  Unfortunately I now have to make up for the content that I've added as a result of this post.

The Blogger Beware

The word cloud is based solely on frequency and lacks context whatsoever (and it's case-sensitive).  While "blogging" shows up more than I thought I would would have to look over my posts to see how exactly I'm using it and whether or not I should fix it.  These tips are sweeping generalizations so think about it before you rip your blog apart.

A Challenge to the Reader

My original title for this post was "What your blog is really about."  I would love to hear other suggestions for good titles for this post.  Please leave yours in the comments.