There are also wayyyy more ads on this blog.

Online ads really bother some people.  They ruin the user experience and drive some people to using ad blockers.  I don’t think it has to be that way. I think don’t think of ads as a necessary necessary evil.  They’re a challenge.  We can create great ads that fill the side of a building, a page of a magazine, a bottlecap, a stamp.  Why not try to make online ads interesting? Where’s the next great 125×125 designer?

How can we make ads more useful for our users?  I’m not sure, but I’m playing around with ads on Enter Venture.  It has nothing to do with money because, well, there’s not yet enough to support my monthly coffee bill.  Instead, I’m adding ads to Enter Venture to figure ads out.  Here’s what I mean:

1. Designing with constraints

When you mock up a site, it’s easy to think about where you’ll place all of the top comment, category, and media goodies.  With ads, though, you have to figure out what you’re willing to sacrifice and where.  To make ads work, you certainly can’t hide them.  Ads teach you to organize with constraints.

2. Learn the lingo

CPC, CPM, and CPA are just the start of it.  You’ll want to get an idea for what a leader board is, why and when to use an ad network, and how to measure your success.  When you become big enough to sell your own ads, you’ll be glad to have made your mistakes early.

3. Understand your options

Ads are a bit like tattoos (or so I hear).  Once you’ve got one, you want another one.  Once you’ve got a single ad on your site, you’re going to start thinking about how to extract more revenue for less space.  You learn the difference between getting search ads from Chitika, affiliate revenue from Amazon, and direct ads from AdSense.  Your feed is all of a sudden ripe for the picking.  It’s not all banner ads and pop ups — know your options.

4.  A business or hobby?

Putting ads on your site will quickly tell you if you’re running a business or not.  Are you getting any closer to exceeding your blog’s expenses with your ad revenue?  How about paying yourself a salary?  No?  Yes? If not, blogging is your hobby.  (It’s my hobby).

5. Level of Tolerance

I feel similarly about learning advertising as a I do about learning to invest.  With just a little bit of real money, you change your mindset and learn things you just can’t simulate otherwise.  What’re you willing to do for ad revenue?  Are you going to write paid reviews?  Are there products you will not refer?  During the Prop 8 campaign, I saw a lot of “Yes on Prop 8″ ads online.  I definitely would have blocked that — just doesn’t meet my tolerance level.

6. Make it useful

There’s nothing advertised on Enter Venture that isn’t related to Enter Venture readers.  In fact, there’s nothing advertised that I don’t use myself.  I use both Highrise and InMotion hosting, and well, if Google wants to send people to GoBigNetwork, Business.com, and somewhere else to “Find Venture Capital”, I think that supports this blog too.

There it is.  Six reasons to add ads to your blog that have nothing to do with money.  The SEVENTH reason, though, that has everything to do with money.  It’s a recession, after all.  How else am I going to take care of that monthly coffee bill?

Recently, I’ve gotten away from that.  I’d gotten away from writing about tools and entrepreneurial ideas, and I became focused on writing the international startup series.  Now, I’ve really enjoyed the international startup series, but it’s become much larger and takes up much more time than I originally intended. (And in these dire/crisis/trying times, )  I think the size of the series is a great measure of the sophistication of the international startup scene, but it was eating up precious time and keeping me from focusing on what Enter Venture is all about. (And in this time of economic crisis, we need to prioritize)

Now, a post about feedback, that’s what Enter Venture’s all about.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s been said before that being an entrepreneur is all about soliciting and applying feedback. Refining an idea into a business is a constant struggle between trying something new, assessing the outcome, and trying it again.

Whatever you’re doing, no one’s done it before — not the exact thing, in the exact space, at the exact time.  Every entrepreneurial experience is different.  Take some of my recent entrepreneur interview series posts — ZDONK is working to leverage their industry connections in a way most outsiders couldn’t, Ativiti is working by moonlighting, and Baveo is working off of equity, without funding.  All three of these companies approaches the business creation process differently.

At best, someone can relate to your experience.  Someone can relate to your startup and offer ideas for how you can improve.  Some will even criticize your idea and startup.  You might not like the ideas; you might not like the opinions.  The key to being an entrepreneur, though, is your ability to consider all of these opinions and create an advantage out of their feedback.

When I was recently discussing this and Enter Venture with Dennis of ZDONK, he said:

“To be honest, I’ve really enjoyed all your posts but never really got into the international startup series. It seemed like you were kind of investigating and making a list as opposed to really getting into a particular startup or particular software/tools you thought would be useful for a startup. They were definitely interesting but personally I just wasn’t as engaged as I’d been with your previous posts.”

There it was.  I had created the series to try something new, but after a while, it was all that I was doing and alienated at least one of my regular readers.  After Dennis’ feedback and a recent Quick Sprout post about improving your blog by creating that helps people, rather than reports the news. I realized I was writing my own form of news.

You can expect that to change with Enter Venture because I’m mindful of your feedback.  (Feel free to leave it in my newly-updated, Disqus comment system).  I want to get a bit more into the entrepreneurial process and talk about the tools I use and the processes I go through to manage this blog.  I’ve re-organized Enter Venture a bit so there’s even a preliminary Resources section with everything from the blogs I read to WordPress plugins I use, tools, etc.

The entrepreneur interviews will continue — but as a way to illuminate the entrepreneurial process, not as a way of reporting the news.  We’ll save the news for TechCrunch, and the entrepreneur-relevant, feedback-incorporating blog evolution for Enter Venture.

What do you think?

Over the past year (only some of which has been recorded on Enter Venture) I grew attached to the New York City startup scene, Silicon Alley.  It is the only startup hub this early entrepreneur has ever known, and, well, you never forget your first.  I started Enter Venture in NYC, and it is entirely based on shared ideas with friends and colleagues from there.

I tried out a number of different Meetup events ranging from Internet Marketing, Columbia Venture Community, NY Video 2.0, NY Tech, and a Mashable event or two.  The scheduling gods conspired to keep me from attending the New York Web Standards meetings, but for the web standards-curious, these sounded phenomenal too.

I loved the underdog feeling at NY Tech events.  There was a constant sense of mission to prove the success of NY Tech.  There is a feeling that the NYC technology industry is going through a special transition right now.  People are asking questions, but they’re also looking for answers.

I’m not alone in this feeling either.  Mark Davis — a VC, blogger, and leader of the Columbia Venture Community — is in a much better position to make this statement and says the same with his NY Region is Hot post on Get Venture.

While looking for jobs in the Bay Area, I noticed this.  It seemed to me that there were more jobs posted for NYC than the Bay Area.  That’s a highly unscientific assessment, but I have also heard several early entrepreneurs think about, and decided not to move to the Bay Area just to be a part of the NYC community.  Something’s going on in NYC.

Over the past year, I also worked for the NYC Dept. of Small Business Services on the NYC Business Express project and website.  Over the next few years, the site will change the way largely traditional, non-tech businesses interact with city government.  There are too many stories of restaurant, laundry and grocery store owners spending precious hours in line for permits, only to find themselves tripped up on the city’s maze of requirements.  The group I worked with is attacking these problems from every angle, and I was priveleged to be a part of this large, difficult project. (I wont say much more about my time with SBS except that I’ll probably come back to this.  There’s an enormous experience that I need to process a bit more.)

So why did I leave all of this and move my life to Silicon Valley?  The reasons are not all work related, but the ones that are have to do with experience.  Like my process with Enter Venture, I want to experience a wide swath.   There are lessons from Silicon Alley that I’ll take with me, but Silicon Valley, and San Francisco in particular, will require a new perspective.  Whether I fail or succeed with that new perspective, I believe I will be wiser for having taken the chance.

I’ll have a new job with a startup that will color that perspective, but I’ll also have  new events, new lessons, and new experiences to share with early entrepreneurs.  I’m aware that I’m entering the echo chamber but ready to embrace and explore it.  I even have a new whiteboard, currently full of a few months worth of post ideas.

Stay tuned.  Enter Venture has gone west

I’m moving to San Francisco at the end of August, and most of my time is spent figuring out what’s going in which box, trying to find a place to live, and thinking “why are people on craigslist so crazy?”. This moving thing takes up a lot of time, especially with those crazy craigslist people.

Since I haven’t been able to start, or finish, any of these posts, here’s a preview of what’s to come:

• Startup and entrepreneur resources around the world
• Tools to help analyze your blog
• Easy ways to extend your site beyond your blog
• WordPress plugin reviews
• iPhone application reviews
• Impressions of Silicon Valley
• …and a few more book reviews

After this, no more lame “I’m not here right now.” posts.  I swear.

Fortunately though, Kenny Katzgrau was not over his head. I found his blog, Code Fury, where he alluded to a WordPress plugin he was working on that would leverage a stripped down version of Zend_Search_Lucene to greatly improve WordPress searches. As far as I was concerned, this was the best of both worlds. I could play around with lucene, and I could improve Enter Venture’s search function.

After contacting him, Kenny was kind enough to let me play around with an earlier, pre-alpha version of wpSearch. I had a bit of trouble with the initial install, but search results were better than my default WordPress search. The plugin used an Ajax layer to display search results, rather than my native search template, which I didn’t like. Not so anymore.

This version of wpSearch is great. It seamlessly integrates with my Enter Venture search template. It offers the ability to customize the search relevancy on Titles, Content, and Tags, and the results speak for themselves. Just check out the top 5 results for a few keywords with the default WordPress search versus wpSearch:

For the majority of these results, wpSearch finds exactly what I’m looking for while the default WordPress search seems to return the same results time after time. The two have similarly relevant “new york” searches (which is to say, neither is perfect), but wpSearch is perfect on the “book” search as it finds 5 of my 6 book posts in the top 5 results. My 6th book post came in at number 6.

The one knock on wpSearch is that the install may slip some people up. There are a few steps to complete, and it still looks like some kinks need to be worked out based on the WordPress plugins page’s comments. It’s much better than the original version and should only get easier.

Congrats to Kenny for putting together what seems like a potentially great new way to search with WordPress. I look forward to future releases.

Everyone else, let me know what you think of wpSearch.

When it comes to experience, though, early entrepreneurs should broaden themselves. When you’re starting out, participate in a wide swath of activities to better understand each part of a business. Write a business plan. Code part of your site. Try testing the site. Present your pitch. Whereas a scientist knows how to do research, an entrepreneur must know how to do the research, the grant writing, the accounting, and the floor mopping.

Widening your experiences also teaches you what you’re not good at. When it comes time to build your perfect team, experience will tell you that maybe you’re not the best guy for accounting, even though you know how to do it. Find a rock star accountant as soon as you can.

In the spirit of this idea, here are the 5 ways I try to broaden my experiences:

1. Read.

I’m an RSS (and book) junkie. I read anything from typography and web standards to financing and marketing (and biographies, fiction novels, and an occasional book of the Core Curriculum variety).

2. Get out there.

I practice my message and get new material by going to NYC tech events. Try to find events that are targeted to your market but emphasize different parts of your market. I can’t say enough for Meetup to help with your search. NYC has several Meetup web groups, some specific to video, marketing, web standards, programming languages, etc. There are also sites that announce weekly events. For NYC, try Garysguide, NextNY‘s calendar, and Silicon Alley Insider‘s weekly posts.

3. Try it.

Enter Venture is just one way that I try out my ideas. I practice teasing out ideas on my whiteboard and rough site specs for feedback from friends. You can build a local version of your site to practice your coding skills. Open Photoshop, or Gimp and play with some color scheme ideas using tutorials on the web. Sign up to be a software tester at uTest.

4. Analyze.

I’ve been using Google Analytics, Feedburner, and WP Stats to track visitor usage and identify visitor trends. I’m in the midst of using Crazy Egg to better understand usage patterns on the site, which will help drive my next round of Enter Venture updates.

5. Improve.

If you follow #1-4, you should always be improving. Be aware of what you’ve improved on and celebrate it. Be, also, aware of what you need work on and work on it.

Start from #1 again.

(If there are any rock star accountants out there, let me know what you’re up to.)

I had actually been waiting for that as a type of milestone. The last time no one visited the site for an entire day was May 10th. I kept writing and watching my visitor statistics in order to keep myself out of the red. I wanted to see how long I could keep the streak going. 113 days later, I’m happy with the results.

I started this blog on April 16th and have been tracking my visitors and subscribers ever since. (On June 9th, I added both Feedburner stats and WordPress stats. For the next Enter Venture stats update, I’ll have more data to compare all three.)

In my Enter Venture Update post from June 9th, I mentioned the most popular posts up to that time:

1. Columbia Venture Community
2. Dealing with Constraints
3. Back up, what the feed are you talking about?

Now, the most popular posts, not including pre-June 9th data, are:

1. Two Ideas for the NY Startup Scene
2. NY Video 2.0
3. Columbia Venture Community
4. Mashable Exhibit Hall – NY Internet Week
5. The value of engineering education

I’ve noticed two popular trends for the blog — events and ideas. Events bring tend to bring in the most traffic, but it’s more fickle. People go to an event, read about the event, and then the event passes on. Ideas tend to bring in lasting users, users that subscribe, users that comment.

Going back to one of my earliest posts, What this blog will be about, the one thing that hasn’t seemed to break the popular posts lists are my book posts (actually, these updates haven’t either). I think this is a case when I’m going to ignore my users though. I like those book posts and hope that they’ll become a better resource when I’ve compiled a bigger, more comprehensive list for early web entrepreneurs.

Check out some of the other things I’ve learned about my readers over the past few months:

Geography:

• 86% US (Largely NY, California, and Massachusetts)
• 3.8% India (Mostly from Hyderabad — what’s up guys?)
• 1.67% Canada
• < 1% from 23 others (significant time spent by users from Germany, Sweden, and Taiwan)

Referred by sites:

• 47% Direct traffic
• 24% Google referrals
• 6% Gmail referrals
• 3% Read Write Web referral

Using the following browsers:

• 62% Firefox
• 24% Internet Explorer
• 14% Safari

Much can be learned from these few tidbits about how I’m gaining traffic, what my users are like, and where they’re coming from. Stay tuned for future Enter Venture developments that will address what I’m going to do with this information. The first goal was to simply get people reading this blog. Next, I’m going to focus on how to grow Enter Venture.

Enjoy your 4th of July.

Before I go on, Iet’s talk about the furniture in my room. There’s the desk. That was free from craigslist. Then there’s the bureau — also free from craigslist. The bed frame cost me about $50, and my bookshelf about $40 (also from craigslist. That Craig’s got a great list).

My whiteboard, the only other substantial thing in my room, cost me a cumbersome ride on the F train and around $75. It’s by far the most valuable thing in my room.

Now, why was it worth over 75% more than the rest of my bedroom combined? Quite simply, it’s the best tool for helping you get started on almost any project. It is the figurative “blank slate” come to life. It’s perfect for that idea you’ve been thinking through for days now and finally need to dump.

Actually, once you dump it on the board, you realize there are major gaps missing in your idea. You erase the whole thing, start again fresh. (Rinse, repeat, and you get the idea.)

A whiteboard is every early entrepreneur’s best friend. There are numerous different people you need to contact, things you’ve got to learn, and places you need to go. The whiteboard is a great place for all of this and more. Over the past few months, here are the different ways I’ve found myself using my whiteboard:

1. Task lists

This is the most obvious. My whiteboard currently has a few different task lists going on at once. A list of half baked post ideas for the Enter Venture blog are in the upper right corner. There’s a few technical topics I’ve committed to learning on the left, and a few people I need to email are listed just above my computer in the lower right corner.

On paper, you check or cross off your tasks and end up a book full of squiggles and lines. Whiteboards let you erase your tasks completely. This is somehow more gratifying, I think.

2. Blog Schedule

I’ve tried to keep a fairly consistent posting schedule with Enter Venture as well as keep variety in my posts. Creating calendars on the go has helped with this immensely. I don’t need to map out my blog’s calendar for 3 months. I certainly don’t have 3 months worth of ideas figured out, but a 2 week calendar is perfect for my needs.

I can quickly visualize when I’ll be at an event, whether I’ve added a book lately, or when Vik will be posting.

3. Idea Prototyping

Like any early entrepreneur, I’ve always got a few different ideas floating in my head. When I originally envisioned Enter Venture it was going to be a more comprehensive site with a wider range of social networking features. Prototyping these ideas on the white board made me realize I didn’t have a clear picture of what it was I wanted to create. I kept whittling down features until I was looking at a blog. Here you have it.

4. Doodling

Whiteboards are not only a great tool — your friends will love it! You’ll be the ‘it’ destination for various doodles and messages. People will enter your room and leave having felt like they left a mark, an impression.

Let them do it with a whiteboard. I’ve seen people try to do this with markers and a wall. It wasn’t pretty.

5. A fresh start.

This is the most important. Like any truly great tool, a whiteboard gives you the ultimate in flexibility. For a week, my whiteboard will have a series of screen shots on it. The next week, it has a calendar. Changing your frame of reference will help keep you and your ideas fresh.

In fact, I’m going to clean my board now. I could use a few new ideas for my next post…

Web 2.0 Chicken Pox

In a previous post, I talked about how social networking buttons were popping up all over the place, but few people knew what they were. Well, I’ll consider this a bit a journalistic exploration. You can also find these links in the Enter Venture feed.

• StumbleUpon - I completely recommend StumbleUpon to anyone that hasn’t tried it. It recommends really interesting websites. For example, in two clicks from my StumbleUpon toolbar just now, I was taken to a site describing the anatomy of a black hole and a site listing the top censored stories of 2007.
• Facebook – Most of my incoming links have come from facebook. Hopefully someone will find this useful
• Digg This – I just can’t get over how cool ‘Digg This’ looks on the page. Ya dig?
• Email This – Because it doesn’t require you to have 30 different log ins with social networking sites

I came so close to calling this post “version 2.0,” but I couldn’t bear it. It’s probably best to avoid this term like the plague given the strong reactions it can induce.

Email Subscriptions

You can now have Enter Venture emailed to you each morning. This might be best for all of you struggling with RSS overload now that you’re using your feed reader. It’s so much easier to delete an email.

Moderated Sidebar: Humor, New People, Popular Posts

I updated the sidebar to better reflect who’s posting on here and the fact that I still haven’t defined early entrepreneurship. Hint: that’s intentional.

I finally showed Vik a little love by putting him in the sidebar. All kidding aside, it’s great having his posts on Enter Venture. He brings a different perspective with the potential to create new ideas and ensures this site remains interdisciplinary.

I installed WordPress Stats for my own administration, and one of the cool things I can do to leverage that information is report popular posts for Enter Venture. Unfortunately, this doesn’t account for activity prior to the Stats installation that was tracked with Google Analytics, but if you’re curious, here are the top three to date:

1. Columbia Venture Community
2. Dealing with Constraints
3. Back up, what the feed are you talking about?

The Trivial

I made a bunch more seemingly trivial upgrades, but that doesn’t always mean they’re trivial tasks. The modified archive pages that now mirror the main page gave me a few scrapes. There were a few bullet rendering updates, alt tag improvements, and alignment tweaks that were more modest.

I think the rule with all of this is that the less you notice, the better. Let’s hope so — except for those Web 2.0 doohickies. Notice those. Enjoy the new stuff.

I’m not sure that everyone knows where we’re at. I’m not sure everyone knows what’s been created so far. I think there are a lot of basic, valuable tools that are right underneath people’s noses, but they don’t know how to use them.

There are all kinds of buttons popping up on your favorite websites these days like ShareThis, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and [insert more here], but so few people have any idea what these things are. It’s like the collective web viewing public woke up one day to Web 2.0 widget chicken pox and everyone just decided not to scratch. What is all this stuff?

I’ve been informally polling my friends lately and found them reasonably unaware of what any of this stuff does. Are they a wholly web/software centric crowd? No, not entirely. Does that matter? Yes. That’s exactly the point. If no one knows what these things are, how in the world will they get used?

We all know that developers know how to use RSS. Or, as the joelonsoftware.com sidebar states, “We also have one of those RSS thingamajiggies. If you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky.” For non developers though, I feel like it’s the opposite. You’re lucky if you know what readers are, but it doesn’t need to be that way.

See that orange button just under my picture? Looks familiar, doesn’t it?   These buttons are all over the web. They’re on blogs. They’re on newspapers, sports sites, job boards, forums, calendars…

I wont try to explain what feeds or readers are because Wikipedia can do that. But Wikipedia doesn’t really tell you what these things do, or at least, not in a way most non-PhD computer scientists can understand. I think it’s really as simple as telling people that “Feeds deliver your favorite website’s content to you so you don’t have to keep coming back to the site.” Or “Readers are your personally constructed web newspaper.”

I don’t think Wikipedia’s the right place to tell people either. How about some of our Web 2.0 chicken pock’d sites start doing the explaining? Companies, developers, and entrepreneurs are creating an amazing set of tools, but only a fraction of web users know what’s going on. People would love to know what this stuff does. Tell them.

For those of you who don’t use those RSS thingamajiggies, here’s how you can get started. Find yourself a reader. If you’re a Gmail user, you’re in luck. You already have one. Click on that top-left link that says “Reader” (or “More” > “Reader”). Done. If you don’t use Gmail, or if you want to shop around, try a few out.

Once you’ve set up your reader, click on one of those orange (or green) subscription buttons you see on your next visit to your favorite website. Then, do it for a few other sites.

Clicking on one of these links does one of two things, either:

a.) You see a bunch of crazy code that scares you and must surely mean that something’s broken. (It’s not, though I’m really sick of this). Just add the subscription manually in your reader (“Add Subscription”). or

b.) You’re asked to add this feed to your reader with a click of a button. That’s it.

Now, rinse and repeat with your other favorite sites and watch your personal content get delivered to you.

It’s simple and convenient, but the internet viewing public has barely started to use these tools. They see these RSS buttons and widgets all over the web but have no idea what they are. People don’t often click on buttons when they aren’t sure what they do.

You know how you can read a book and skip over words you don’t understand? You can get along just fine without the word and going to the OED isn’t worth your time? It’s something like that.

Why haven’t more publishers made their readership more aware of their RSS feeds? I think there are at least two reasons. For one, they’ll lose their viewership and those eyes are driving their advertising revenue. This can be solved by adding ads to feeds, which some blogs already use. Readers could also offer advertising alongside feeds and share the profit with the content creators.

The second reason I don’t think you don’t hear more about feeds from a lot of websites is that feed readers rob publishers of their brand. People kind of like their brands.

With those two problems solved, why wouldn’t publishers want to alert their users to more and better ways to consume their content? In fact, if any early entrepreneurs out there are looking for an idea, these might be worthwhile problems to tackle.

I’d love to see someone smartly combine an email inbox and a reader. There are opportunities for different types of aggregation and different types of data for distribution. As more people grow to understand feeds, they’ll be more and more ideas and varied uses for this technology.

I think this is all great for entrepreneurs. I think there’s an enormous opportunity to ignore the urge to be the next best thing, and instead, focus on those things that we already have that just aren’t being utilized properly. I think these tools need to mature a bit more. Developers, entrepreneurs, and companies need to better publicize the benefits of their tools. I’d love to see start seeing a greater intersection between developers and non developers, but I’ll leave that for another post. Go try that new fangled feed reader out.

So, what’s new? Well, everything about Enter Venture has changed. Has it? It looks mostly the same as before. Some of you may have noticed my apology to IE users that used to be in the sidebar. I originally built the Enter Venture theme using a blank WordPress framework I found online.

This was the ideal way to get started with Enter Venture because I simply had to add the elements and styles that I wanted. There was no baggage to deal with. A true blank slate.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. It’s not possible to work with someone else’s code without dealing with their baggage. There was a severe crack in my blank slate, and the more I tinkered with this framework, the worse the cracks became. I had trouble getting the design to work remotely similar in IE versus FireFox. I had markup validation problems galore. Everything I did seemed like a hack.

This morning, I ditched the blank slate and decided to re-build Enter Venture using the Default Theme that comes with WordPress. Since I already knew what I wanted Enter Venture to look like, it was drastically simpler for me to work with an existing theme this time around. Also, since I’d already built the Enter Venture theme once, I could remove the Default elements and rebuild with the design and code from the previous Enter Venture template. While flawed, that original blank slate design made this exercise much, much simpler.

Now, the sidebar actually shows up in IE! The header’s bottom border shows up in IE!

Even better, working from this more robust framework gave me several improvements for free. Enter Venture now supports comments. Also, since I’m using the framework for the original Default template, I was able to build my Links list simply from the WordPress admin menu. I also moved the Twitter script to its proper location so it will not prevent the page from loading if (when) Twitter is having response issues.

There will be more improvements to come, but I’d like to focus on content for awhile. For now, “Look ma, no hacks!”

Well, one thing that should become apparent with this blog is my need to define and constrain before I begin working on a project. Definitions and constraints make it easier to focus on the depth of a project, rather than the breadth of a project. For example, having already defined what this blog will be about, I know I don’t have to consider every topic that crosses my mind for my next post. I’m constraining myself to certain topics, but in doing so I’m forcing myself to dig deeper into those topics. Or at least, that’s the idea anyways.

Here are the definitions and constraints that will shape the Enter Venture blog:

Length of Posts

More than anything else in a writer, I value succinctness. I’ll take the shortest version of an idea over a long, verbose version any day. I tend not to be a stream of consciousness type of writer. Rather, I construct my writing around broken pieces of a whole though and figure out how to connect them as I go. Sometimes this leads to terse sentences, orphaned in the midst of other ideas. That’s something I need to work on (see Get Better below).

“If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” – Mark Twain

Twain’s quote hits on another part of this equation — writing succinctly is hard. If given the time, I could spend days on each blog post, extrapolating on extrapolations, whittling out unnecessary words and phrases. I wont though. I have a day job, and this is only one of my night jobs.

Instead, I’m limiting the time I’ll allow myself to write posts to 1-2 hours. If I can’t perfect a post in that time, either my readers will have to live with the results, or my post just isn’t ready for prime time

Type of Posts

I already wrote about what I’ll be writing about, but defining the type of my posts is different. I could say I’ll be writing about web applications and then simply posts links to new web apps. I wont, and that’s what this part of my MO is all about.

I’ll attempt to write medium-sized posts rather than long or short posts. Part of the reason for this is the time constraints I’m placing on myself. Another reason for writing medium-sized posts is that at this early stage in my web/entrepreneur/blog career, I’m much better off listening than talking. Eventually that’ll mean listening to my readers, but for now, that’s only two people. Instead, I’ll save you the long posts and spend more of my time learning my ass off so that I’ll have ideas and experience enough to warrant longer posts.

Last, I plan to categorize my posts, but I don’t think tags are for me.  I’ve yet to completely buy into the utility of tags, and tag clouds are all but useless.  We’ll see if this changes.

Get Better

In just a few posts, I’ve already picked up on where I need to bolster my writing abilities. I need to become better at creating whole, connected ideas, rather than fragments of thoughts. I also need to focus on writing well the first time. This will help reserve as much of the 1-2 hours for ideas, rather than edits.

The blog itself has to get better. I’m happy with my decision to start this blog in minimalist style because I can now focus on adding the right pieces, in the right places, at the right time. Since launching, I’ve updated my feed so it’s directed through feedburner (Who knew the wordpress theme didn’t track your subscribers?). Other updates that I have planned for the blog are as follows:

• Add comments — There are a variety of ways to manage comments. I’m not sure if I want them here or elsewhere.
• Make the CSS standards compliant — I should have done this first, but I didn’t. I’m sure I’ll have learned my lesson when I make the updates. Hopefully this will solve some of the issues I’ve seen with this blog’s theme in IE. I need to get my hands on a PC to fix this.
• Add widgets — I don’t want a blog with 1,000 different widgets in the sidebar, but I’m sure there are some that make sense.
• Add links — After a period of blog subscription overload, I’m in the process of narrowing the list of blogs I really care about. Stay tuned for a Links section in the sidebar.
• Improve the theme — I plan to keep Enter Venture simply designed, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be polished.
• Add trackbacks/pings — I’m not doing this just yet because I want to establish my theme a bit more before announcing this blog’s existence.

This is a sampling of improvements I plan to incorporate into the blog. Some of the changes will be obvious to readers of Enter Venture, some wont. I recently installed the WP-Cache plugin to reduce the WordPress CPU demand. I’m not sure how anyone would recognize this addition other than monitoring their CPU usage, but it’ll hopefully save my site from crashing if I ever make it to the big time.

Have Fun

In the short time that I’ve been writing, I’ve already recognized how valuable this blog will be for my own enjoyment. Enter Venture will be the place where I’ll be able to formalize and broadcast my thoughts. How cool is that?

In future posts, I’ll describe how I’ve finally discovered something that I truly enjoy doing. I like blogging so far, but I know that I love making products. Actually, I haven’t really made anything yet, but I know that’s something I’ll be learning to do during my nights / weekends. After my first few undergraduate classes of Java, I thought I’d never enjoy… Err. Actually, let’s save that for a longer post. I like web products. I’m having fun. On to the next reason…

This blog has even introduced me to new people already! (Shout out to Dave Yen from Michigan / StudentFounders.com.)

Forget Everything

I reserve the right to throw out everything I’ve ever said and start anew. It baffles me that politicians aren’t allowed to change their mind. Who doesn’t change their mind? I’ll argue a point to death if I think I’m right, but if someone convinces me otherwise in a sentence or two, I’ll completely retract. I’d rather retract and be right than be stubbornly wrong.

These definitions and constraints are just guiding principles. If I have an idea for something else, I’m going to follow it. After all, if I can’t make the rules on my own blog, where can I?

That’s my MO. And now, on to the beef!

If this blog were to be about anything and everything, I’d have to weigh what I could write about out of ‘anything and everything’. In other words, if you decide to write a 5 page paper on American history, where do you start?

I hope that having specific, recurring themes will allow me to focus and continuously find new material to write about. That being said, I reserve the right to stray. If I can’t do and say what I want with my own blog, where can I?

So without further ado, the “whats” of Enter Venture:

Entrepreneurs

Or more specifically, early entrepreneurs. One of the things that most interests me about entrepreneurship are those early phases, the ones we don’t know as much about. I tend to think that a lot of the entrepreneurial process is opaque. There are others that tend to agree with me.

We know that writing a business plan is a good idea. I mean, sometimes its a good idea. I mean, not everyone needs a business plan. But you need one. You definitely need one. (Read as if you’re an entrepreneurial consultant).

The truth is, there isn’t just one way to build a successful business. I hope to use this blog as a way to explore the different ways of becoming an entrepreneur. I’ll do this with periodic interviews of other early entrepreneurs and, of course, rehashing my own experiences.

Web Applications

I love technology. It’s true. It’s taken me a while to admit that fact. Unlike a recently confessed alcoholic, however, this is an addiction I’m keeping.

I’m always thinking about one cool app or another that I I would love to see built. I’m working on being able to build the sites I imagine, starting with some experience in front end design. For now, what I’ll probably do is post some of the screen prototypes of things I’ve sketched on my whiteboard.

Events

Once I started looking for them, I was blown away with the number of web and startup events to be found in NYC. Aside from being consistent blogging material, these events introduce me to people in the field, introduce me to new ideas, and stir my desire to join in on the fun.

They also usually have beer at the events. You got me.

Books

Blogs feed directly into my tendency to devour whatever reading material is set in front of me, but there’s so much information that’s still locked in paper and ink. In fact, someone got paid to put those ideas to paper and ink so its often just as good or better than what’s in the blogosphere.

I’ll do my part to help broaden the horizons of the blogosphere by recommending startup, entrepreneur, venture capital, and web design books. I’ll also provide a link for you to buy these books on Amazon, and if enough people do, it might someday support my Chipotle habit.

As of April 21st, 2008, that’s what Enter Venture will be about. It wont be about my current job, it wont be about my relationships. It wont be about baseball (though there’s a thought for the next blog). It wont even necessarily be about me. Enter Venture will be about what it takes to and what it’s like to Enter Venture.

Here are my reasons for blogging right now. I reserve the right to add to this list. I’m keeping this list refined to the obvious because I I’ll aim for succinctness in this blog (and I need material to write future posts).

Being part of the conversation

I previously planned to turn Enter Venture into a social network, which I’ll explore later in this blog, but in researching the potential for that site I became aware of the larger entrepreneurial/web/tech bloggin community.

Armed with my Google Reader, I began subscribing to everything I could get my hands on until I piled up upwards of 200 subscriptions. There was this huge conversation going on out there that I had no idea existed. I also quickly realized I could join that conversation. Here it is.

Writing Practice

Blogs are not the always the most well written texts. However, consistently writing a blog forces you to improve. You need ideas to write consistently. You need to research your posts, write them, edit them. You may be lucky to have comments that help improve your writing, challenge your ideas.

If I want to imrove my writing, this seems like a good way to start.

Marketing

As I said earlier, I previously envisioned a more extensive site for Enter Venture, but struggled to get that project off the ground. I’ll probably always be working or planning on another site. I think writing a blog will allow me to reach a larger audience of potential partners, investors, clients, employees, employers and give credibility to my abilities. Or at least I hope.

Design Experience

The current design is about as basic as can be. A white background, a logo, and a few colors. I’m learning this as I go, and unlike previous experiences, building something on my own. I’ve had to and will continue to be learning about design, standards compliance, text, shading, etc. As I learn and come to better understand this project, I’ll add to the design. Starting with a clean slate should hopefully make it easier to do that.

Money

At some point, this site might make me money. Might. I’ll have to be a consistent poster in order to make money that happen, and it’s only a potential motivation in the long term. (And right now with this basic design, I can’t bare to put an add on the page.

So that’s why I’m blogging, but I think that’s only part of the story. In my next post, I’ll talk about what I’ll be blogging about. That’s kind of important, isn’t it?