How to Capitalize on Blogging

Today I spoke at Fastlane Ventures How to Capitalize on Blogging workshop. As promised, the slides from my presentation are available in graphic and text-only formats. I’ll probably turn my speaker notes into a set of blog entries or an article when I get the time.

Being heavily involved in blogging, it’s easy for me to forget how outside the mainstream blogs really are. Most of the people I talked to today had only a vague idea what blogs are. I kept hammering the point that blogs are simply faster, easier ways of publishing content. Blogs aren’t some mystic new thing, but the ease of use and informality of the tools are breeding conversations in new ways.

When discussing RSS, someone asked Bill French if developers would blog about the changes they made to an application, could the tech writers use RSS to track what was changed? Later I pointed out to her that the developers already are blogging the changes, they just don’t know it. Every time they commit their code into the source control system and put in their comments, they are blogging it. Those comments could easily be published to the Web in the style of a blog. Those comments could be published as an RSS feed.