I like Ben Casnocha’s blog and I read all the stuff he writes but at the risk of sounding like I hate all the tech bloggers, I have to voice my objections. I feel like he’s not being entirely truthful. If Ben is the rarity that we’re rightfully to believe he is (one of the Philalawyer Ten Percenters) then he has not met his ethical burden. What I am talking about it the sunshine and rainbows tone of everything he writes about his time as a 14 year old entrepreneur, and now successful author while still in high school. The implication that the path to success at an early age, the ballsy choice to screw convention and bet it all on yourself is an easy road.

What we never see him write about is the isolation it entails. Anyone, more so the adults who have already arrived than the youths on their journey, can tell you about the burden you’re forced to shoulder. He doesn’t mention the awkwardness of being in a room where the majority doesn’t think you deserve to be there. He doesn’t tell you that you have to learn to thrive on it or it’ll crush you. Nor is their a mention of what it feels like to understand that most of the people your own age have a vested interest in seeing you fail–hell, many of them wish for it. It’s very easy to sit there with your Jr. brass ring and talk like anyone else can have one too. The difficult part is understanding why you have one and most people don’t. It’s not fair to everyone else who comes to you for advice to tell them that there’s nothing to it. The perils of such a pursuit are great and there are some very, very real trade-offs. Some of us might get lucky, but as Machiavelli said, virtu is the only way to ensure it. That means cunning, and dedication. It’s ditching your friends to handle an emergency, it’s working every weekend, it’s forgoing day dreams for mental strategy sessions, and it’s accepting the strain it puts on relationships.

But more than the work load and the responsibilities, it is something more intangible. In order to be the kind of person that it takes to run the marathon, the way you look at the world must be different. Those who are there or a struggling with it can speak to you of the hardship in cutting whole segments of society out of your life. The pain period is nothing you have dealt with before. Watch as you shed the deadweight, the haters, the distractions and see how much is left. If it’s 5 people then you’re lucky. And even then, count on most of them letting you down. Bet on asking yourself over and over “Why does it always have to go this way, why do they always have to do that?” Consider it part of the job to predict meltdowns and let downs and betrayals. Consider it your “philosopher’s burden” to talk yourself hoarse trying to convince people that they deserve and are better. Accept that you must acknowledge objective disparity between you and some others, and that you’ll feel coldhearted and shitty having to do so. And most importantly, understand that you are constrained by things that do not concern others and that you’ll miss the Hobbesian freedom that they partake in.

Some of this may seem condescending or whining, but those too are labels you must endure. It is simply the truth. Clearly they do not outweigh the positives, the accomplishments and the meaning, but they do exist. In order to truly overcome them, they must be put out in the open–to both discourage tourists and prepare the idealistic next generation. I would never complain about the gifts I have received–and like Frederick Douglass said, it is often in the darkest of places that we are reassured of humanity and kindness–and I have never been as happy as I am today. But again, it is not an idyllic walk through the countryside and it never will be. Only when you know and accept these as forces you’re willing to take on, are you mature enough to deserve the potential success–and you can actually appreciate it.

Robert Scoble has a good enough sense of humor that he ended up linking to yesterday’s post and dropping me a comment. But one person took issue with my comment that there aren’t 600 good blogs on the internet. I’d like to make a clarification: I don’t think there are 600 good sites on the entire internet. Blogs are just a subset.

But this illuminates a very real opportunity for exploitation–both the reality and the delusion. First, good content is INCREDIBLY rare. Think of all the sites you read, how many of them actually produce what you read? Most of them are just portals to the people who are the real producers. At this point, almost all the A-list, high traffic bloggers have been done book deal. They all failed for good reason: They have very little to offer. They couldn’t expand their stories, delve into issues they’d only scratch the surface of. The idea that the internet is any less susceptible to the woes of Hollywood is ridiculous. It’s not so much that we have a system or a platform problem–we have a people problem. The wrong people are gatekeepers, the wrong people are creating, the wrong people are marketing and the rest of us simply have to accept it. So just like I can’t think of 600 good sites, I can’t think of 600 GREAT movies or 60 current great musicians. The opportunity then–as it always has been–is original and passionate art. Now, the mantra of “just have good content” is too easily tossed around but that doesn’t make it untrue. The problem is no one takes it seriously, no one really tries. But the idea that we can replace Hollywood megalomaniacs with Silicon Valley dorks isn’t going to cut it.

Two, people are so desperate to consume content that they’re willing to accept up to 600 sites a day. That means there is a ton of opportunity, and being talented makes you a commodity. So what you have is a massive market and no one is serving it. The latent demand for quality is there but the people who can satiate it have fallen down on the job.

But you tell me: Is there anywhere near 600 blogs worth reading on a daily basis? I have a solid 150 and maybe–and I mean maybe–6-10 posts a day do I find myself glad I to have read. If so, where are they hiding? And why is Scoble the only one who seems to have tracked them down?

And as a sidenote: Where I’m working now in Hollywood is gobbling up anything of quality it can find, so if you have friends or are fans of anything, pass it along and I’ll vet through it.

SpeakingFreely which is a GREAT blog posted yesterday on something I’ve been meaning to talk about.

I’ve been really busy lately, so I had to find a way to gain some more time. So I started by eliminating feeds from my RSS reader. What did I cut?

Every feed that regurgitates news, comments on news, has nothing but opinion on news, etc. There’s simply no reason to hit 3 fora and 30-300 blogs all letting me know that Terry Semel is no longer the CEO of Yahoo.

He is exactly right. Whenever I find myself marking “All as Read” on Google Reader more than a few days in a row, i immediately unsubscribe from the feed. Your reader is supposed to be a means to a more efficient internet, one that tolerates little waste and puts the power in your hands. What seems to have really happened is that with the imposition being so little, people are just accepting garbage posts. As you move down the Long Tail and down the newsroom hierarchy, the simple reporting of news has less and less value. I lost count of how many awful and uninformative posts I read about the Facebook Platform or Semel stepping down. And you know, thank God Steve Rubel wrote about the iPhone, otherwise I would have had NO idea it was coming out.

The point is this: Your time is valuable, don’t let people waste it. Robert Scoble brags about reading 600 blogs a day. That doesn’t make him smart, it makes him an idiot. I haven’t found 600 good websites on the entire internet–and my job is to sit at a computer all day and look. If a feed starts getting redundant and derivative, unsubscribe. How else will they know that users are finding their content less than satisfactory? Only when they see the numbers decline will they bother to do anything about it.

And writers: Blogs rose to prominence not for their ability to break news but to provide more detail and more perspective. What good are you doing if you turn my reader into a nerdy AP Wire? If you can’t ADD to the discussion, just sit back and listen. Not every story needs to be commented on by everybody.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble has a good enough sense of humor that he ended up linking to yesterday’s post and dropping me a comment. But one person took issue with my comment that there aren’t 600 good blogs on the internet. I’d like to make a clarification: I don’t think there are 600 good sites on the entire internet. Blogs are just a subset.

But this illuminates a very real opportunity for exploitation–both the reality and the delusion. First, good content is INCREDIBLY rare. Think of all the sites you read, how many of them actually produce what you read? Most of them are just portals to the people who are the real producers. At this point, almost all the A-list, high traffic bloggers have been done book deal. They all failed for good reason: They have very little to offer. They couldn’t expand their stories, delve into issues they’d only scratch the surface of. The idea that the internet is any less susceptible to the woes of Hollywood is ridiculous. It’s not so much that we have a system or a platform problem–we have a people problem. The wrong people are gatekeepers, the wrong people are creating, the wrong people are marketing and the rest of us simply have to accept it. So just like I can’t think of 600 good sites, I can’t think of 600 GREAT movies or 60 current great musicians. The opportunity then–as it always has been–is original and passionate art. Now, the mantra of “just have good content” is too easily tossed around but that doesn’t make it untrue. The problem is no one takes it seriously, no one really tries. But the idea that we can replace Hollywood megalomaniacs with Silicon Valley dorks isn’t going to cut it.

Two, people are so desperate to consume content that they’re willing to accept up to 600 sites a day. That means there is a ton of opportunity, and being talented makes you a commodity. So what you have is a massive market and no one is serving it. The latent demand for quality is there but the people who can satiate it have fallen down on the job.

But you tell me: Is there anywhere near 600 blogs worth reading on a daily basis? I have a solid 150 and maybe–and I mean maybe–6-10 posts a day do I find myself glad I to have read. If so, where are they hiding? And why is Scoble the only one who seems to have tracked them down?