Cursed By Knowing The Numbers

If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough.

--Mario Andretti

This blog started on  20JUN06.  This post shares what 100 days of living in this new subculture has felt like.

My goals were:

• become a better professional by using this weblog to gain insight into the trends, pressures and vacuums in the residential development space. Ask the right questions, induce change, and understand the underserved spaces in producing distinctive residential properties;
• develop a more disciplined approach to investing and building by noting issues in this weblog;
• become a better storyteller about producing insanely great places for people to live;
• better understand the roles in the real estate development food chain and utilize network effects to understand where focus is needed;
• develop conversations with architects, investors, land owners, builders and consultants about how we add utility and value to real estate through quality, design and execution--ie become the English Cut for those people wanting an architecturally significant home in Northern California or Hawaii;
• provide a series of essays on getting the development numbers to work instead of just bitching about them;
• find current problems in the real estate production food chain and figure out a faster/better/smarter fix;
• post in one area subjects to be referred back to--ie, not answer the same question twice;
• become a better investor in the the value add process, and
• quantify this amorphous marketing process.

The hardest part was the lack of direct feedback.  The metrics of this subculture are of roughly 100 people--1 of them will blog, 11 will comment, and 89 will view with no feedback.  A very different way of communicating for me.  But yet you have to keep talking, or you risk your blog looking stale and tired.  Now I know what those people on NPR fundraisers must feel like...Feeding the content beast with no well defined feedback is like sailing in the middle of the night with cloudy skies...

Second hardest thing was sitting down and posting 1x day.  I only mustered 71 posts in 100 days.

The easiest thing was the actual posting.  I blog on Moveable Type software.  Not intuitively obvious to set up, but once I was set up, I use Windows Live Writer to compose my posts with, making it one-click easy.   Now I understand why there are 55 million of these weblogs out there--35 million of them in China.

How did the first hundred days go?

• Initial Technorati Rank: 1,387,589 of 42.1 million blogs.
• Final Technorati Rank:  1,699,000 of 55.2 million blogs.

Humbling numbers, indeed.  Insane that you can even track to this amount of detail.

I accomplished:

• putting together a library of technical notes on the issues I repeatedly ran across over the last 15 years of my career.  When I run into them again, I start the discussion by sending the note to who I need to cover the topic with.
• understanding the blog tool. It is a relatively unstructured way to maintain market and project information for future reference, and the ability to frictionlessly share it.
• producing an alternative market development tool to cold calling property sellers and brokers.
• identified competitive open space and new markets for products and spin-off companies.
• a tool for riffing from conversations I have with architects, owners, and contractors.

I did not accomplish:

• building huge traffic to this site. 
• driving visible change to issues that mean alot to me, ie. what is happening out at San Quentin,
• starting up a large number of meaningful conversations.
• finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The biggest positive surprise?  The comments I received back on posts were great feedback--they helped me reframe issues that challenge me.

Thinking about putting a blog together?  Here is Guy Kawasaki's take on his first hundred days.  Here is Matrix' take on why the NYT real estate blog failed.  In short, you need to provide:

1. Consistency: post every day if possible
2. Voice: the language and tone need to be familiar to the reader
3. Passionate: express your views, not what you think the reader wants to hear.
4. Content:  Don’t use it as a vehicle to link to all your feature stories. It ok to do sometimes.
5. Original thoughts:  Don’t glom off of other blogs.
6. Better graphics:  Leverage the photo archives and use charts and graphs.
7. Champion the blog:  Have a representative, the person most identified with the blog.
8. Sense of community: Think about how much you want to orient the content to reader feedback.

Thanks for reading.