A year under the blogosphere belt

Thanks to everyone for stopping by this site during our first year as bloggers. I’ve tried to stick to the rules of the road as laid out by my pal Rick Segal: 1) don’t rely on the “I read this somewhere and this is what I think about it” angle; and 2) talk about things in your business that are relevant and instructive to people.

With 1.93 million hits so far this year from 97 different countries (vs. 589k hits for all of 2006), and 651 posts, we feel like this is growing to be a useful corporate tool; even if it can never achieve the fabulous reach of an Andy Nulman. And there’s undoubtedly the challenge to keep it focused on the business at hand: venture debt/venture capital/lending/technology in general. That said, the three best read posts over the past 6 months (according to mybloglog.com) had nothing to do with venture debt, the credit markets, or even technology. Here are the top 5:

1. Paul Kedrosky reads blogs
2. Domain name scam alert
3. Goodman and Carr: the backstory
4. Has the deal of the year become a nightmare?
5. Arms are the next shoe to drop

A sincere thank you to everyone that sent along encouraging remarks, and to the people that have been so kind and complimentary in person. And a thanks as well to the folks that posted comments about how inane we were being on a particular topic. Even though none of us actually believe that “Rowdy Roddy Piper” is a reader, we are bemused that he cares so deeply about fair market value accounting.

Lastly, some advice. If you aren’t currently doing a corporate blog, but think it might be useful to your firm or business plan, be careful about jumping into the fray. It is a beast of a task, unless you don’t mind getting up at 5am. And an occassional post is as likely to drive people away as others are to open doors; frankness can be overrated, I’m told.

Fortunately, we are in the process of closing our 13th transaction in Fund III during the past 13 months here at Wellington Financial, with another five deals underway…so it hasn’t appeared to undercut our day jobs. No need to do a study on blogging and corporate productivity, in the spirit of the Danish study that found a link between negative share price performance and the construction by CEOs of monster homes.

Hat tip to you all.

MRM