Slowing down the pace

When there is time to start, there is also time to stop.  I remember my college English professor's definition of self control.

Self control is knowing what to do, when to do it, when to stop, and doing it.

It's little over two and half years since I've started blogging on Future of Social Network.  Starting January 2012, I've committed myself to write every single day to improve my writing and get in the rhythm of daily writing routine.  Just like I've decided to write every single day on the spur of the moment, I have decided to slow down my blogging schedule.

Instead, I plan to blog once a week.  I want to try this schedule for a few reasons:

Blogging: Quality vs. quantity

I have heard that quality and quantity can go hand in hand.  In context of writing, the idea is if you write often, then there is a higher chance of writing an article of higher quality.  Also writing more will help you be more disciplined and learn the skill of writing clearly faster.

This is obviously this is true if you don't write anything versus dedicate time to write something.  If there is no writing, the quality of writing is non-existent.  It is the worst possible case.  As you write more, you are taking more shots.  Assuming that your writing quality is not even, there are bound to be some qualitative fluctuation.  Therefore there are bound to be some higher quality writings and some lower quality writings.

But that can be said about anything.  Statement like that can be made about any normal distribution.  There will be some above average, some below average.

Danielle Morrill: Refer.ly and Distribution Hacks

Danielle Morrill is a co-founder of Refer.ly, and was CMO of Twilio.  Refer.ly launched May of 2012 out of Y Combinator 2012.  It's an affiliate program for everyone where users can recommend products for cash incentives from companies.

She has been writing her blog since 2007 sharing her perspectives on marketing and startups.  Recently she shared lots of insights from running Refer.ly.  Here are a few sample entries:

• Timeline: Starting Referly Took Me Three Years
• Don’t Waste a Single Moment
• The Best Advice My Dad Ever Gave Me (for Demo Day) - from Distribution Hacks
• Who Owns the Website, and Why - from Distribution Hacks

She also runs Distribution Hacks where she shares her marketing insights.

It's broken, someone please fix it

The other day I wrote about creating an open bug tracking system.  Instead of tracking bugs that users find in software, the idea is to track bugs that we sees in our every day lives.  Think of Bugzilla for our lives.  We all can report what is broken.  And the hope is that someone looking for startup idea or weekend hacking project can take some ideas and solve some of them.

So I decided to set up a Tumblr site to document these bugs.  It's called It's Broken, [Someone Please] Fix It (itsbrokenfixit.tumblr.com).

I made it so that anyone can submit their bugs as well.  I hope I see lots of bugs that we run into in our lives.

Looking for bug reporters and startup idea seekers.
Source: http://itsbrokenfixit.tumblr.com/

Blogging: Importance of learning from feedback

When you blog, it's difficult to get any reader.  Even after you get some readers, it's really hard to get honest feedback from the readers.  So when you get some feedback, you hold on to them, try to analyze what each one meant, and see if you need to make some course corrections.

Good news is that I have been getting a few feedback.  Bad news is that I have been getting some honest feedback.  One in particular stuck with me today from Reddit /r/startups:

"This blogs fails . You shouldn't be encouraged to be stupid, it should be encouraged on any idea, how do you validate you can not only execute but find customers. You can talk about a billion crazy ideas, but doesn't matter if you can't execute or don't know how to "

I thought about it for a bit.  What is going to be my response?  Should I reply at all?  Then my focus gradually shifted to the substance of comment.

Steve Sammartino: Startup Blog

Steve Sammartino is a founder of rentoid.com and a long time blogger of Start Up Blog.  He has been sharing his lessons learned from running his own startup through his blog since 2006.

Here are a few interesting blog entries that I found:

• The big job
• Negotiation and motivation
• The Big Shift – a business manifesto
• Would you like some pie?

Quora, the next blogging ecosystem

I made a mental note to myself to check out Quora's blogging platform.  Quora has launched its standalone blogging support, and now allows any user to create a blog on its site.  Earlier today I had a chance to register futureofsocialnetwork.quora.com and wrote my first quick article.

User experience of setting up a new blog was a breeze.  Writing an article was also a very pleasant experience.  With minimal UI for the blogger to write an article and easy edit feature, it was a joy to use Quora to write.  All the lessons that Quora has learned over the years perfecting Q&A site shine through its bare essential UI/UX.

But they are not what makes Quora a strong contender among other blogging platforms.  The reason why Quora is an interesting blogging platform is because it can help both readers and writers.

What are you doing to get better?

When I look around and see many people who achieved greatness, they seem to share a few things in common.  Dedication, passion for what they do, and persistence are there to name a few.  In addition all those who achieved mastery seem to do one thing very well.  That is practice.

It's not any practice.  They ask the following question, and then practice to master the craft.

How do I get better at what I'm doing?

Asking this question seems to be at the core of achieving greatness.  Masters always ask themselves how to improve their skills.  Then make efforts to get better at it.  They expend their attention to consciously practice the area where they want to get better.

It's important for a few reasons.

Set your goal, measure your steps

Let me talk about how to do things.  I come to realize there is a simple binary logic to getting things done, and improve the performance of getting things done.  My algorithm is as following:

• Write down what I want to do.
• Is it obvious how I can do it?
• If not, I have a goal; subdivide the goal into multiple steps that will get me there.
• If obvious, I have a step; do it.
• Repeat until the original 'want' is done.

In this algorithm, everything is either a goal or a step.  A goal is something that you want to do, but don't know how to achieve.  A step is something that you know how to do.

Blogging: Help others to help yourself

Blogging is by nature sharing.  It's putting my thought out in the open so that everyone else can take a look.  Anyone can take the idea, use it, play with it and build on it.  When people do, the idea gets stronger, more refined.

The final product is no longer my idea.  It might have come from me typing away on my blog.  But all the life experiences and perspectives it gained from traveling out of my blog is certainly none of mine.  I was in effect medium.  The idea was the one that traveled from person to person touching their lives in many unexpected ways.

Blogging: So you want to start a blog. Here's how.

I got a note from my sister asking for a few pointers to start her own blog.  I thought I would share them as a blog post.  Hope that you find something of value.

---

Ok.  So you want to start a blog.  Welcome to blogging.

Although it may not seem obvious to you, blogging is a journey.  I encourage that you get your pleasure out of writing.  Writing is of curious art.  It not only creates something that you can leave behind.  It also helps you think about things.  Learn to enjoy how it makes you feel.  Because as you will discover, finding readers in this vast World Wide Web is not going to happen over night.  Unless you draw your pleasures from writing itself, you will get frustrated and stop.  More on this later.

Today let's get started with blogging.  There are many crafts that people will tell you about.  Just google 'how to start a blog.'  From Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners to Commonly Made Mistakes by Bloggers, there are many self-guided instructions.  Don't get overwhelmed by them.  They tell you what you need to do to sell your blog, look for audience.  That's great, but it all starts out with far simpler, but disciplined act of writing.

This is the most important lesson there is in blogging.  Once you start, you have to write.  Set a schedule, whether daily, Mon-Wed-Fri, every week, every month, you have to carve out time to seat down and write. It's a promise that you are making with yourself to consciously serialize your thoughts.  Your most important audience is you.  Don't let yourself down.  Write it religiously.  Thankfully there are many inspirations scattered all around the web.  I will share them with you along the way.

To get your blog started, let's talk about what you need to do:

1. Decide what to write about
2. Set up a blog using Google Blogger
3. Write About Me page
4. Post the first blog
5. Email friends about your blog

Simple enough.  Let's start.

Questions for 2013

Happy new year!  

I hope everyone had a chance to think about what their goal is going to be for this brand-new year.  I have been thinking about what I want for the new year, and I have several ideas in my head.  They are a bit amorphous still.  But having them listed out will help me come back to the ideas swimming in my mind (just as I could go back what I was thinking about last year around this time).

Because they are goals in progress, let me write them in questions.  I will look for opportunities to answer them as the year winds down.

• How can I help product managers or those who want to become one learn the craft?
• What practical advice can I offer as an engineer now practicing product management?
• What are the practical implications of social media and ubiquitous mobile internet access to our lives?
• How can enterprise learn from fast changing social media landscape?  What can enterprise do to get ready for changes coming up?
• What can we learn from the latest discussions on leadership and managing a startup?
• Who are interesting independent bloggers, and what are they talking about?

These are the questions that are swirling inside my head at the moment.  Surely they will evolve and take on a different form, perhaps from more relevant angle given the late breaking news at the time.  Hopefully I can spend my new year answering some of these questions.  Let's see how we can do it.

Please join me opening the new year 2013.  If these questions are interesting to you, subscribe to email update or follow me on Twitter @jaeho9kim.

Closing 2012

2012 is about to become a page in history book.  Looking back at 2012, I am happy that I was able to maintain the Future of Social Network blog daily.  It was not easy to set aside time to read, decide what to write about, and write a blog each day.  If someone else were to suggest a year ago that I take on this challenge, I would have said that it was not for me.  There simply weren't enough hours in a day for me to read and write, I thought.

Having done it for 365 days in a row, I know now what it takes to do daily blog rain or shine.  But I still don't think that I will have enough time in a day to get it done.  Instead I now know it's about prioritizing my daily tasks so that I can carve out the time for reading and writing.

One thing that I learned in the process is that I need to focus on short-term milestones to achieve a long-term goal.  It may be daunting to visualize blogging every day for a year.  But it comes down to carving out the time to read and write.  Whether that happens in 24-hour cycle or 72-hour cycle depends on how I can schedule my time and stick to the schedule.  I have realized that as long as I can break my goal into small enough pieces, I can take incremental steps to get closer to making it happen.  When I have my head down plowing forward, all I have to focus on is the next milestone.

While I'm thankful for the 365 day streak, I have some regrets as well.  I wish I had spent more time listening to the readers.  One thing that I realized was that I do appreciate the readership from all of you.  If I write things for my own benefit only, I am not getting the full value out of putting it on Internet.  If it were to be available out in the open for everyone, it should be written in reader-friendly way so that as many people can benefit from my blog.  Although I was focused on my daily blogging milestones, I may not have been as diligent in making it readable and useful for all the readers.  I should have raised my head once in a while to adjust my goal.  (I'm taking a step to listen better.  Please fill out three quick questions to help me make this blog more useful to you.)

With these lessons, I am ready to close the year 2012.

Adieu 2012.  It's been good working with you.

Dear readers, tell me something

Dear readers,

While surfing Chris Guillebeau's article 279 Days To Overnight Success, it suddenly dawned on me.  Although I was looking for your feedback, I have not stopped to ask for them.  I have been resorting to passively responding to comments that I receive occasionally.

Today, I want to take time to thank you for your readership and ask for your feedback.  I have put up a quick SurveyMonkey site page to ask three questions.  These three questions will help me make more useful Future of Social Network.

If you can take 5 minutes to answer them, it would make the best gift for me and for all the fellow readers of this blog.  You can answer them here.

I wish you the peaceful closing of 2012.  I also hope you have many opportunities to realizing your dream in 2013.

Thank you for your continued readership.  

Sincerely,

-Jae Kim

Merry Christmas!

I have a lot to be thankful for this year.  We welcomed a new member of our family, a lovely little girl named Abigail earlier this year.  I have a healthy three-year-old boy, Tobias.  I have a fantastic mother-in-law who's been helping us smooth out all the unexpected turns in our lives.  And the most importantly, I have have a beautiful wife who is thoughtful and wonderfully supportive of me.  Without her help, I would not have been able to continue blogging this year.

When I sit down and think about all the things that I have done, it is really true that I owe everything that I have to wonderful people around me who have been helping me every step of the way.

I want to thank them for what they have done for me.  I also want to thank everyone who gave me encouraging words along the way.

So let me wish everyone merry Christmas.  Have a very merry Christmas.  I hope you can find something that you can be thankful for this holiday season.

Source: http://www.thelogomix.com/

Blogging: How do you find the user/reader?

Most games are straight forward.  They are easy to play because it lets you know whether you are doing well or not.  It has scoreboard and tells you whether you are on track to make it on the top leader board.  It has short feedback loop.  Therefore it's rewarding to play.

Unfortunately most things in life are not as straight forward.  Learning programming language, mastering art of coding to write an easy-to-understand program, and figuring out how to build your user base are all hard problems.  Out of them, it's especially hard to build user base on a new product.

It's very important to let people know of your product.  If no one knows of the product or no one can find it,  no one will use the product.  It's a classic problem: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Bloggers need that sales guy with the magic system...
Source: http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/f/falling_trees.asp

Art of learning by doing it

I believe in learning-by-doing principle.  It is about doing things with my own hands and understanding what is involved to do things right.  I found that it is very time consuming and difficult to do this.  But I feel that it is absolutely necessary to have greater ownership of what I do.

Source: http://jackyyapp.com/2012/01/03/learn-by-doing/

This blog is a good example.  I am learning a lot about running a website, and what it takes to generate traffic to a site.

Blogging: How do you pick what to write?

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to do lunch with my ex-colleague.  It's been a while we had gotten together and there were lot of things to catch up.  After going through news from our family, topic changed to what we were working on.  I mentioned to him that I still blog every day, and have been doing so since January 1st this year.

Friend: Wow.  How much time do you spend to write a blog?
Me: About an hour to an hour and half.

I answered the question with what I thought the average was.  It's true that once you pick a topic and start writing, I can write an article in about an hour.  But the big if is the picking a right topic to write about.  It's really hard to pick a topic every day and write my perspective on it.