All in The Blogosphere

Have you been wondering about the tabs that appeared recently on my banner at the top--especially the peculiar "Pimp My Web" tab?  Well, wonder no more, because the Pimp My Web section of this blog is now functional, at least in Beta, anyway.  (We've wondered at Union Square Ventures why anyone would ever remove the "Beta" tag from a product.  Why would you ever say anything is done?  There's always room for improvement.  Shouldn't you always be working on something to make it better and soliciting audience feedback?)

The point of Pimp My Web is simple.  I'll be posting screencasts here on how to get the most out of your online experience... mostly for more novice users.  It will be the kind of site you e-mail to your mom to show her how to set up del.icio.us or maybe to view yourself before you set up del.icio.us on your girlfriend's computer and make her think you're smarter than you really are.  Starting a new blog?  Send folks here so they can learn how to use your RSS feed in Lesson One. 

These screencasts are just a start.  Two other things I use are the universal IM client, Trillian, and Linkedin.  Got other suggestions for future screencasts?  How about podcasting?  Drop a comment and let me know what every webhead needs to know at a minimum.

I participate in a listserv for my high school's alumni.  Today, someone asked for some career advice and I replied with a note.

Not long after I got this e-mail.

Its so unbelievably obnoxious...   I love every word of it!

"hey, thanks for helping tim out, the dude needs it... i keep forgetting to mention that your blog layout is bizarrely out of sync with your apparent tech-savvy.  that thing looks like an aol member homepage circa 1997.  when i look at something like that i kind of expect the writer to be either barely computer-literate or barely
literate period, which makes for some weird cognitive dissonance given your breezy and confident blogspeak.  maybe you know this already but don't have the time/money to get it fixed.  it might be worth putting just a little time into.  one really important thing is making it more readable--the content just doesn't have enough space."

And you know what?  He's totally right.  My blog layout is for suck.

Here's my issue:    I need/want all this playspace on the side for blogrolls, tags, counters, etc.  Now, Pete gives about half of Mashable to playspace and his stuff is readable.

Is it the black?   Can there be no readability with these colors?  Am I destined to succumb to Ajaxian whitespace?

I think I can still get away with black and perhaps the fix is simpler than that.  I have a feeling that if someone could just play around with the actual posting column, break the grey up into rounded ajax looking boxes (one for each post), and fix my titles and footers, it would go a long way.

I don't have the time to do that at all.  If anyone wants to play with my template, I'll e-mail it to them and give them a shot at it, or they can just view the source.  I'm debating whether I care enough about it to pay someone to do it.  Maybe I'll take them out to lunch for their trouble.

Pete Cashmore's Mashable and Chris Baum's User Experience Blog

I've been ranking all my blogs... well, most of them little by little, in FeedDemon by title, renaming the titles 0-5. 

My important front line reads are 1's.  This includes Fred's blog and Rob May's Businesspundit.

My 2's are solid.  They fill out the rotation with quality...   but I don't need to read them everyday.  That includes Alex Barnett and Charlene Li. 

3's are things I need to pay attention to, but aren't really part of regular content consumption, like the blogs of our companies, who we hear from anyway, and some MSM feeds.

4's are for something else...  4's are del.icio.us feeds of fun stuff to do and restaurants, and PubSub feeds.

5's are friends.

Then, there's the 0 category.  That's a test.  0's are short lived...   for like a week.  Its a watchlist of stuff I might want to read.  Pete and Chris have graduated from the zeros.

I'm so fascinated by who reads this, especially because of the great people I've met through this blog so far.  That's why I did a demographic survey last week.  I got 95+ respondents, and given my estimate of 2000 readers (roughly 4x the people that show up on Feedburner), that's statistically significant.  Thanks to Pollhost.com for their cool survey service.  It was really easy to setup.

So here are the results:

Gender?

Selection  
Votes
Male 76% 74
Female 24% 23
97 votes total
Poll results are subject to error.  Pollhost.com does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.

Age?

Selection  
Votes
Under 25 17% 16
26-30 33% 32
31-35 21% 20
36-40 8% 8
41-45 10% 10
46-50 7% 7
Over 50 3% 3
96 votes total
Poll results are subject to error.  Pollhost.com does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.

Selection  
Votes
NYC Metro Area 20% 19
Boston/New England 13% 12
Southeast 8% 7
Midwest 10% 9
Silicon Valley area 2% 2
Other West Coast 15% 14
Europe 12% 11
Asia 1% 1
Somewhere else 19% 18
93 votes total
Poll results are subject to error.  Pollhost.com does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.
What do you do?

Selection  
Votes
Entreprenuer 32% 32
Investor 7% 7
Programmer 15% 15
Other IT 16% 16
Non-IT 29% 29
99 votes total
Poll results are subject to error.  Pollhost.com does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.

First, I was a bit surprised by the gender gap, not because it was so wide, but because I figured it was even higher.  Blogging, especially vc/tech blogging, is so male-dominated, that I was glad to see 24% female readership.  However, I have a feeling that most of that female readership is more of my friend base than anything else.  I don't know very many female entrepreneurs and technologists and I don't think I've had any of them comment on my blog or contact me through it. 

As for the age spread, this I wasn't surprised by.  I've had this theory that I get a good chunk of the younger end of Fred's more normally distributed age spectrum, mostly because people can more relate to me being a guy on the bottom end of the ladder.   

Location turned out to be really screwy.  I can't believe that only 2% of my readership is Silicon Valley based.   Perhaps it is, in fact, true that more of the Web 2.0/web services crowd is more diversified geographically because they're not as tied to hardcore tech centers.  Perhaps it is, in fact, true that more of the Web 2.0/web services crowd is more diversified geographically because they're not as tied to hardcore tech centers.   The other screwy thing is the 19% somewhere else crowd. Is that Canada?   South America? Where are those people?

No surprises in the job area...and in fact its what I want..  While I do like hearing from other investors, I'd much rather be chatting with the creators, operators, etc. than have this blog be a bunch of VCs chatting with themselves.