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Sleeper Blog Awakening: Burnham’s Beat

A long-forgotten, dormant blog came back to life today: Burnham’s Beat.   Bill Burnham explains his long silence: it was due to his lawyers’ advice while setting up his new hedge fund, Inductive Capital.  He’s back online and plans to blog on.

Burnham’s Beat was one of my early picks as a favorite blog: Bill did not post every day, but quite regularly on software, startup, VC subjects, and whenever he did, it was worth reading. Here are a few of his “golden oldies”, in no particular order:

For the Love of God People, Enterprise Software Is Not Dead

Software’s Top 10 2005 Trends: #3 Software As A Service

Is Open Source Becoming Over-Sourced?

Honey I Bought The Wrong Company!

Conflicts and Cash: Industry Analysts and Start-ups

Cash Rich vs. Cash Poor VCs

When to Catch A Falling Knife 

Deal Flow Is Dead, Long Live Thesis Driven Investing

 

Back when Burnham’s Beat was still alive there was a good conversation on Dead  Blogs  Walking, the essence of which was:

So I say this to these bloggers, treat your blog like a startup – don’t let your labor of love become labor of lame. Update more frequently or shut it down completely.”

The return of Burnham’s Beat proves the above wrong.  I could easily list several other blogs, that for some reason or other are dormant: 

  • Mayfield VC  Allen Morgan’s Ten Commandments, in fact his entire blog should be mandatory reading for startup Founders, but it’s been in radio silence since January 2006.
  • Joe Kraus’s It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur has become a classic with 167 comments and 107 trackbacks, and is being quoted at numerous panel discussions – yet his last post was more than a year ago.

The list could go on … are these dead blogs?  Who knows…  I’m not about to “delete” them. The key is to use a feed reader that has the capability of displaying only the blogs with new posts. You can have hundreds of dormant blogs in your opml, they don’t waste space, don’t consume resources, won’t clobber yor screen.  The are sleepers.  Some of them will wake up, and when they do, they are worth reading again.

 

Comments

  1. Which feed reader is that Zoli?

  2. Well, I hate to admit that for being an Office 2.0 cheerleader I still haven’t entirely killed off my legacy stuff, which includes Outlook. That said I am using Attensa for Outlook, with trick:

    – Attensa itself shows all folders (a folder for each feed), whether they have new items or not.

    – However, I set up a search folder in Outlook for unread items in the Attensa file, and that’s the interface I read my feeds from. Anything I read automatically falls of the queue, as if deleted, but if I need to, I can still go back to the original (unfiltered) folder and dig it up.

    This is better than the new “river of news” view from Attensa. 🙂

  3. Almost forgot that I blogged about this here.

  4. no good for Mac fanboys then

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