Suffice it to say that, for me, your written voice is one of the very few that clearly articulates fleeting thoughts and ideas that have crossed my mind that I’ve never been able to solidify and organize myself.

This is a rare gift that we all appreciate and continue to follow.

Many thanks.

Next time you wish to bump up the comments/posts ratio, ask readers for criticism on your style, frequency, length, bias and anything else. Given the questions you asked in this way and seemingly tied to an important decision, one had to refrain from, uh, you know… Just kidding.

The specifics of your comments validate for me what I was hoping was true: that there is enough coherence here that I can presume to call it a ‘voice.’

My preliminary sense of direction is that I do need to drive towards a shorter average, say 1000-1200 words, but still well above the norm. I’d like to believe that my ideas always deserve 2500 words-plus treatments, but if I look at things honestly, length inflation is at least partly due to laziness and the lack of a teacher/editor yelling at me to tighten things up . As people on a long-winded BBS I used to frequent often said, by way of excusing themselves, “I don’t have time to be brief.”

Erik and Dorothy: I would actually love to become a completely ‘distributed’ writer with this blog serving just as an index, but that actually seems to involve more work, rather than less, since finding a large enough set of guest-blogging spots with enough thematic variety to host any idea I might come up with… that’ll take way more time investment in marketing myself than I have available. Perhaps when/if ribbonfarm gets sufficiently large to attract enough high-quality inbound guest-blogging requests…maybe I should put up a page explicitly stating an guest-spot-seeking agenda.

But thanks again guys. You’ve helped me clarify my thoughts. Now it only remains to pick a couple of change vectors and start.

I love what you do, but it doesn’t make sense to drain your energies writing long and complex articles that only 500 people will read. Build your brand by finding established publishing platforms who will expose your work to a wider audience. And I’d ditch the Ribbonfarm thing entirely and register a site in your own name.

Since then I don’t post much, and when I do its for me and not for an audience. I’ve also trimmed my list of blog that I read down to about 20. This gave me back several hour a week. Then I realized that stepping out of the echo chamber was the best thing to do.

Hopefully I’m not disuading you from blogging — you are after all one of the 20 I read. But I do want to say that you shouldn’t put any pressure on yourself to blog. Pressure kills the fun, and without fun you’ve lost the point of it.

1. I think people have a natural length in which they like to write. I have a similar problem to you: I can’t do short blog posts, I feel I have to explore a topic in some depth in order to do it justice. I suggest that you continue the long-form posting, and skimp on the frequency if you need to. If you want to do short-form posting, do it through some other medium like Twitter or del.icio.us tagging where the form itself enforces brevity.

3. Like Ganesh, I think you don’t have a niche per se but rather a singular perspective on a group of related broad questions and issues. Again, I have the same problem as you — I lose interest in a specific narrow topic after writing a few times on it and saying everything I’m personally capable of and interested in saying about it.

The reason I read Ribbonfarm is for the serendipity factor — true serendipity, not mere novelty. You’re the opposite of someone like Andrew Sullivan. I like reading Sullivan, but his blog is extremely predictable in the range of topics he addresses and the things he writes about them — it’s the blogging equivalent of a mass-market best-seller or a hit TV show.

6. Regarding “which customers do you want”, I think realistically your audience is unlikely to be broad; as noted above, you’re just not a mass-market least-common-denominator blogger. I agree with Ganesh that you shouldn’t worry over-much about your audience, but just write what you think is interesting; it will likely take a while, but I think your audience will find you — which reminds me of the advice Bob Lefsetz is always giving musical artists: Concentrate on making something great, cultivate the fans you have, and don’t try for the quick kill and the sell out — but at the same time realize that success is far from guaranteed and that unless you’re truly great (and sometimes even then) this may always be just a personal sideline and not something that will replace the day job.

P.S. Since Ganesh couldn’t buy you a cappuccino, I’ll buy you one for both of us.

Your first three questions are easy to respond to. Short replies to those with a summary note below.

1. As you yourself put it so well: Going shorter without getting shallower is seriously hard.

2. Whether you can and should do other gigs is entirely your call. It is also irrelevant to ribbonfarm readers. You decide, based on time/inclination. Hint: did you pick up any new habit after attending the GTD summit

3. Niche focus shiche focus hocus pocus. I like the variety but also think it hardly qualifies to be called all over the place. In fact your themes seem to cluster around thinking, ‘deep’ communication and social aspects of technology and organization.

The above also boils down to one thing: what kind of readers do you want to attract regularly to ribbonfarm. Many so-called popular blogs put me off with the gush-gush, self-indulgent, self-promoting and simplified-to-the-point-of-dumbing down nuggets. And often thriving in a mutual admiration circle of guest posting. Puh-lease, if that is a even remotely the kind of popularity and subscription quantity you have in your mind…

4. Tough to recommend what is ‘right’ for you and your book blog. If you maintain the style and some variety (could we settle for a 3:1), it doesn’t matter whether you expand on your book or someone else’s here.

5. A rare unclear, circular, self-answered non-question from you. Enough said.

6. The right question but one that you need to answer. My two-bit is that you cannot base your assessment solely on web identities or analytics.

FWIW, I can share the key reasons that makes me check out ribbonfarm regularly (more frequently in recent weeks):

-Non-shallow posts on any topic, laying out the contours of your thoughts, opening up interesting new perspectives, somewhat provocative

-Lots of references that often are not the obvious connections

-Freely opinionated but with care to offer multiple/balanced views, even at the cost of verbosity. You don’t just lob catchy sound bytes (though you have some new coinages to your credit).

I know these are the same reasons that would not attract thousands to ribbonfarm but go there at your own peril. Maybe your book will be the first of a bestseller series linked to their own blogs with professional online marketing and tens of thousands of followers…

Bottomline: Keep thinking and writing medium-to-long posts at whatever frequency you can muster (what was that about enjoying too much? Remember talents and strengths from Buckingham/Gallup!) but don’t ponder so much–especially self-referentially–it always leads to bouts of doubt. I am not buying you a cappuccino, using an Indian credit card at the current INR to USD rates, but promise to do so next time I happen to be in DC or whenever you come to Mumbai.