9 new ideas that may sway on-the-fence entrepreneurs

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Are you considering entrepreneurship? It’s all the rage right now because the bar at the start line has never been lower. Here are nine new ideas about entrepreneurship that will make you feel like you can do it, too. Right now:

1. You don’t need a venture capitalist, you are the venture capitalist.
Today, you can make something people want without spending money. Technology is simple enough to use that you don’t need to pay for high-end software to get a business off the ground. If you can figure out how to pay for food and lodging (hello, mom and dad) then you can fund your own startup.

2. For a killer marketing plan make a list of your friends.
“Businesses these days are built on word of mouth,” says Scott Fox, author of Internet Riches. You know 200 people. Send them an email telling them about your business. If it’s great, word of mouth will generate a customer base. If your business isn’t great, you’ll know right away.

This can be true offline as well. Daniela Corte started with an even smaller base than 200. She gave five friends custom-fitted pants. “I wanted this pair of pants to be their favorite pair,” she says. And it worked. After interviewing the friends about fit and texture preferences, Corte created pants that were buzz worthy, and she grew a multi-national business from those first five women raving about their pants.

3. Globalization is good for you.
As long as your needs are well defined, hiring a programmer in India is a great way to save money. When Katherine Lee wanted to create a database of yarns for her business Sweaterbabe.com, she paid an Indian programmer $250 — a significantly lower price than US developers would have charged.

But you have to know what you’re doing when you outsource to India. If you’re looking for someone to hold your hand and teach you about online design, forget it. But you can pay the online design maven her US rates and then send the design plan to the guy in India to execute.

4. You only need to master a small niche.
Google makes searching so effective that customers with a very specific interest can find businesses with a very specific interest — at such a high rate that niche businesses are more viable than ever before (like mobile game development). This is the premise of Chris Anderson‘s book, The Long Tail, which encourages entrepreneurs to focus on the small areas of the world that are neglected by big retailers because the market is not big enough.

And Fox points out that everyone knows a lot about something, so the best place in the long tail to start experimenting is where you have a good deal of specialized knowledge — which is likely to be a niche.

5. You don’t need a widget, you can sell yourself.
The idea of an Internet startup is to grow an audience first, and then figure out how to make money. So a logical place to turn to is yourself, because if you can build an audience, then you’re an expert in something.

At the sprightly age of 24, Ramit Sethi writes the very popular personal finance blog iwillteachyoutoberich.com. He has parlayed this success into a public speaking career (seriously — Fortune 500 companies are paying him to come talk to employees about finance) and a book-writing career (stay tuned for his advice on how to recruit hotshots like him to your company).

6. You don’t have to quit your day job.
Jessa Crispin did not set out to start a business. She was just writing books reviews and posting them on her web site, Bookslut. The reviews were so popular that eventually she was able to quit her job and make Bookslut her fulltime job. But she built the business while working at another job.

Of course, not everyone is a genius on the first try like Crispin. But Fox points out, “The feedback loop is short. So you can try several different things to see what works.” The trick is to recognize when your idea is going nowhere before you’ve sunk too much time into it.

7. Entrepreneurship is about choosing a lifestyle.
Most entrepreneurs don’t start a business to get rich, they start a business so they can live the life they want. Maybe they want to be creative, maybe they want to do what they’re passionate about, increasingly, they want to have flexibility to manage their own workday.

When Corte had a baby she realized that her current business model with daily fittings was too time-intensive. So she moved her retail business to online in order to continue to be able to offer her clothes direct to consumers but to regain time for her daughter.

8. You don’t need to wait to cash out.
The 1980s brought us real estate flipping; the new millennium brings us web site flipping. Not only are people auctioning their companies on eBay for denominations formerly reserved for successful garage sales, but there are more than 70 Internet locations where people are buying and selling web sites 24 hours a day.

Tom Kuegler, partner at New Concept Factory, runs an incubator that is starting eight Internet companies each quarter. He estimates that most of these companies he’ll “unload at a low price” and two out of twenty-four will grow into “super companies.” If this sounds pie-in-the-sky to you, consider that Kuegler is no neophyte. He’s been starting and selling Internet companies since 1994.

9. Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, and you can change the world.
This idea comes from eighteen-year-old Ben Casnocha, who founded Comcate, a leading software company for governments, when he was twelve years old. Yep. That’s right. Twelve years old.

Casnocha says, “Entrepreneurship has a lot to do with business but it is a way of thinking about things that everyone can do: Seeing individuals as empowered as agents of change; Trying to figure out the status quo, the normal thing, and then thinking about what we can do differently. If more people thought like entrepreneurs the world could be a better place.”

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Friday smorgasbord

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Here are three tidbits I’ve collected that haven’t fit in other places over the week.

Condoleeza has a workplace crush
Maureen Dowd brings to light the evidence that Condoleeza Rice has a crush on the Canadian Foreign Minister Peter McKay. Scroll down in Dowd’s column to see a great photo of the two of them looking at each other, which reminds me of all the times I’ve fallen in love — how exciting it is. The photo also reminds me of all the crushes I’ve had with people I worked with. In each instance, unfulfilled sexual tension at the office made my work life more productive. Really. Probably due to some sort of synergy and that I was so in tune with how the other person was working. Side note: Peter McKay is so cute.
(Hat tip: Ben from AMVER)

Homework in grade school encourages bad habits in the work world
Doing more than 90 minutes of homework a night in middle school means lower test scores, according to Claudia Wallis writing for TIME magazine. She shows why excessive homework is ruining kids’ childhoods and family lives for no purpose. One expert suggests extending the school day so kids get all their homework done before they get home, because home is for family. My friend Mauri points out that when we encourage kids to bring school work home and do it at the expense of family, we set those kids on a path to bring office work home at night and do it at the expense of family.

How to make useless career lists useful
CareerJounal has published what seems like their five thousandth list this year on which are the best careers.What can we learn from this list? First, lists with juicy titles get linked to a lot, and I should have made this post “Three essential things for September”, or something like that. Second, the criteria someone uses to come up with the best career list is more useful than the list itself. Some editor decided that the question to ask is, do you have these things in your job:

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The funeral industry can teach you how to specialize in your career

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I write a lot about the importance of specializing in your career. The bottom line is that if you are great at what you do, you will get better hours, better pay, and more flexibility in how you run your life. But no one is great at everything.

Specializing means figuring out what you don’t do. If you are a programmer, you can’t be great at hardware and software. If you are in marketing, you won’t be great at marketing to kids and business-to-business marketing. You need to know your niche if you want to be great.

But I receive tons of mail from people arguing that if you specialize, you run the risk of being great in an area that no one hires for anymore. This is true. Especially now, when the workplace is changing so quickly. The solution to this problem is that everyone, no matter what their career, must be not only a specialist, but a trend spotter as well.

For a good look at how people become trend spotters in order to stay relevant in their field, check out the new book, Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death, by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. The book is filled with characters like Lou Stellato, a sort of a futurist of funeral directors, who declares, “Funeral service as we know it is over.”

Cullen’s book explains the issues of the shifting funeral industry, and incidentally, the process that individuals take to shift their careers so as not to get left behind. This is a great lesson in specializing because the funeral information is hilarious (for example Costco breaking the casket monopoly) and shocking (people turning their loved ones into diamonds – yes, there’s a new process…).

The biggest problem for funeral directors is that by 2025 most funerals will not involve caskets. This means no big profit from the panic of a last minute, overpriced casket. No profit from renting a room for a viewing. In fact, there is the possibility that most funerals could bypass the funeral home altogether.

But something happened after 9/11. People needed to hold funerals without having any part of the body to bury. And, since many of the dead were very young and well-connected in the community, the funerals included literally thousands of people. So funeral directors became event planners.

And then, the smart funeral directors noticed that if they honed their event planning skills then they would be useful even as the industry shifts away from casket-centered funerals.

Your industry is like this one. Whatever industry you’re in is shifting because all aspects of culture and business are shifting. These funeral directors are not happy about having to change, but they face the need head on and they figure out, in the funeral world, how they can be specialists in a way that will keep them relevant to their customers.

Remember Me shows that there are many ways to adapt to change, and you only need to find one that works. For example, not everyone is abandoning the casket world. Some are adapting it – Goliath Casket Co. is making caskets to fit the obese (at least one overweight body was squeezed into a standard-sized casket with a shoehorn.) And Batesville offers low-cost wood veneer alternatives (positively revolutionary for the price-gouging industry). And to address the fact that more people are choosing cremation, some funeral directors are focusing on audio add-ons, a one casket company partnered with Nambe – the renowned purveyor of wedding registry silver — to create coffee-table quality containers for cremains.

To become a specialist in your field takes a little vision and a little luck. Usually one’s specialty comes by dint of the opportunities that present themselves. The way I got to be a career writer is a process of finding a specialty. I started writing fiction, but I was not that great at it. I realized the only thing I was getting paid good money for was business writing. And within that field, I found that the way I really stood out was in my approach to writing about careers.

Trend spotting takes diligent information gathering with an open mind, but there’s big payoff in having a relevant, specialized career. I always aim for a dynamic, innovative career like one of those trend-spotting funeral directors, and you should, too.

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How my friend copes with her disability at work

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Wendy Waters suggested that I write about how to deal with disabilities in the workplace. So here’s a story about my friend Ann, who has a really deep voice. It isn’t a sexy deep voice; it sounds more like Oscar the Grouch with a sore throat or Darth Vader on Prozac.

Her voice, which is a result of a birth complication, is a disability that she must deal with daily and for the most part, has overcome. While I know this now, and it’s the basis for this story, I didn't always see things that way.

I knew Ann in grade school where I confess to having had evil thoughts:

1. Why is she first chair in saxophone and I am last chair in oboe? She has the right mouth for wind instruments, and I don't. It's not fair.
2. Why is she class president and I am not even getting invited to boy-girl parties? How can someone with such an awful voice be so much more popular than I am?

But Ann and I ended up on the high-school track team together, and we became close friends. I spent so much time with her that I stopped noticing that her voice was different than other people’s. It seemed normal to me.

But there were constant reminders: restaurant customers stared when they heard us talking. Often sales people did not hear what she wanted because they were so stunned by the sound of her voice. Ann never lost patience, never seemed uncomfortable. I never knew how she did it.

In the track world you meet tons of kids from schools all over the state, and when Ann walked by, I heard lots of them say: “What's wrong with her voice?”

When I asked Ann if she felt weird about how she sounded, she'd say no. “A deep voice sounds authoritative,” she’d tell me.

Ann flourished in college. She learned to be extra nice to people because they usually would be extra nice back. She became very loyal to friends who stuck by her because so many others shied away after hearing her speak. Naturally, she knew she was different, but good grades could help her overcome prejudices and she excelled in school.

After college she went to a top advertising firm. I assume that her voice was not a problem during job interviews, or at least that interviewers believed Ann could overcome her voice impediment enough to impress potential clients.

But then she was assigned to a manager who hated her. He berated her intelligence, made sexually offensive comments around her, and generally let her know he did not want her around. In truth, his actions amounted to harassment. But her harasser had leverage, so Ann had to leave the company.

Once you leave a high-profile company without recommendations, you can pretty much forget going to another company in the same industry. So Ann returned to where she flourished — school. She took programming classes, and a classmate liked her so much that he got her a job. His software firm needed someone who knew advertising and someone who knew programming, and the company liked the idea of Ann wearing two hats.

The company went under in the tech meltdown of 2002, but Ann found that by switching gears, she had developed a new specialty, which is in a very narrow niche that she now dominates (and doesn’t want me to identify because she wasn’t thrilled that I was writing about any of this). But the bottom line is that things are good for Ann now. She weathered many storms and is successful despite her disability. Here are her tips for others who are struggling with some kind of impediment. But the tips are applicable to all of us:

1. Don't blame other people for your failures. Take responsibility for your life and move past people who don't help you.
2. Have patience with yourself if you don't choose the right career on the first try. Trust that you will find a place that’s right for you, and keep looking.
3. Convince yourself you are great. Then convincing other people is much easier.

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9/11: Digging myself out of the debris

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I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. At each anniversary that passes I write my story, and each year it changes a little. This year, I have been thinking about that moment when I accepted death.

I was at the corner of Liberty and Broadway when the first tower fell. I was too close to the building to be able to see what was happening. It sounded like a huge bomb, and it felt like a snowstorm of dirt. Everyone ran. But in just a few seconds, the world became dead silent and no one could see. I crawled over piles of people. My mouth was full of dust and I could barely breathe. I had no idea where I was or how to preserve myself. I thought I might be the only person alive. As breathing got more difficult, I settled into the idea of dying.

Time got very slow and I seem to have had an hour’s worth of thoughts in seconds. At first I worried that my family would be sad. But then I was disappointed. I would not see my brothers as adults. Would not know what I was like as a mom, or what it was like to grow old with my husband. My to-do list was overflowing with things I wanted to achieve, things I had been looking forward to. But the minute I thought I was going to die, that list didn’t matter. I was sad that I would not get to hang out and watch family life unfold.

It’s surprising because like almost all New Yorkers, I was not the hang out type. And in case it’s not clear from the obituaries and essays that have come from 9/11, the World Trade Center did not attract the slow-lane types.

Like many New Yorkers, I went to a World Trade Center recovery group. The groups were divided into the kind of trauma you experienced. People who watched the scene on TV were not in the same group as people whose spouse died. I was in a group with people who were there the ten minutes or so before the Tower fell. Some of the people in my group felt the impact of the plane while sitting at their desk. Some of the people ran from their building and were splattered by body parts from jumpers. All of us felt lucky to be alive.

All of us vowed to make life more meaningful after 9/11. Almost all of us changed jobs to do something that gave us more personal time. The few of us who could, had a baby.

Now I know that if I die tomorrow, what I’ll regret is not getting to watch my life unfold. So I have been changing my life, a little at a time, to give myself more time to watch life go by. I made a career change from Wall St.-based business development to home-based writer, I had two kids, and I encouraged my husband to reject jobs with long hours. We vowed to cut back our spending 70% to create a more simple life.

But cutting spending is not so easy, especially in New York City. It required making a lot of difficult choices. Finally we decided we could not reach our goals without moving. So this year, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I am making a new home in Madison.

Sure, I’m still competitive and ambitious when it comes to my career, but what 9/11 gave me the strength to make the scary decision to slow things down. Slowing down means missing opportunities, missing a chance to shine or a serendipitous meeting. It’s hard to simplify life because a complicated life is so stimulating. But nearly suffocating in the rubble showed me that what I want most is to be present: Consciously watching while my life unfolds.

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Don’t post naked photos of yourself. From work. Duh.

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Check out this experiment, which shocked even me. Here is the description of it from Waxy.org:

A Seattle web developer named Jason Fortuny started his own Craigslist experiment. The goal: “Posing as a submissive woman looking for an aggressive dom, how many responses can we get?”

He took the text and photo from a sexually explicit ad (warning: not safe for work) in another area, reposted it to Craigslist Seattle. In 24 hours he received 178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress.

In a staggering move, he published every single response, including full names, phone numbers, and email addresses. Read the responses (warning: sexually explicit material).

So why is this on Brazen Careerist? Because among the many responders was a guy who used his Microsoft company email address. And included a naked photo of himself. Or at least a part of himself.

Casual sex on Craigslist is a lifestyle. Whatever. But the work email address. That’s another story. My first reaction was, what an idiot. But then I decided that it’s not that idiotic.

At this point in the history of the Internet, adults understand not to use their work email to send naked photos of themselves. Adults know this will come back to haunt them. So I am convinced that people who flagrantly ignore common workplace precautions are actually looking to get caught.

Guy Kawasaki addresses this issue on a smaller scale. He didn’t back up his computer, and it crashed, and a friend recommended he read Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. The four reasons people do stupid things apply to Mr. Kawasaki and Mr. Microsoft as well: Hubris, arrogance, narcissism, unconscious need to fail.

The question is, degree. If you are very [arrogant, narcissistic or in need of failure] you will do something very big and stupid. Most of us just do small stupid acts. I immediately recognized my problem as unconcsious need to fail. I wish I could say it was arrogance, because I think that might sound better.

But, as usual, understanding what motivates someone to do something stupid at work automatically makes me have more empathy and less judgment. Understanding peoples’ motivations is a good exercise to keep you evenhanded and compassionate at work — two skills that are essential to leadership success. And if it can work with Mr. Microsoft, it can work with anyone.

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The new wave of entrepreneurship: Three things you need for success

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Matt Rivers became an entrepreneur at age 17 when his favorite surf shop went out of business and he used his dishwashing money to buy it. “At first there was only one T-shirt rack and one shorts rack and when I sold a T-shirt I bought two more.” Today his Cape Cod-based business has one of the most recognized names in east coast surfing thanks to his sponsorship of the Pump House surf team. And of course, Rivers surfs every day.

It used to be that people started out in a large company, and after ten or fifteen years of little fulfillment, they tried entrepreneurship as a way to get out of a bad spot. Today many young people recognize right off the bat that corporate life will not be fulfilling, and according to the Entrepreneur's Organization, the most common age for starting a business has shifted from 35-45 to under 34.

A new view of entrepreneurship has swept through a generation that has seen their parents' loyalty rewarded with layoffs and their parents' pensions destroyed with impunity. The goals and values of today's younger workers make entrepreneurship look more appealing than ever as the bad rap of the twentieth century fades. Consider these comparisons:

Twentieth century: The hours of an entrepreneur are insane and you live at your office.
Millennial: Entrepreneurship provides flexibility necessary for a balanced life. Harris Interactive reports that men in their 20s and early 30s value making time for their family more than they value landing a powerful job. For women, the numbers seeking a career with flexibility are even higher.

Twentieth century: Entrepreneurs need a trust fund or an appetite for living on the edge.
Millennial: Working for yourself is not that risky. Dun & Bradstreet estimate that 76% of new businesses survive more than two years, which is hardly high-risk odds. Andrew Zacharakis, professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, says, “You can make a nice living,” and besides, “there is no longer such thing as a stable, corporate job.”

Twentieth century: Entrepreneurs are self-aggrandizing. (Think: Colonel Sanders on all the buckets.)
Millennial: Starting a business provides a way to give back to the community. Ask Nate Wolfson, founder of Thrive Networks, what makes him most excited about this IT consulting firm and he says, “We're a two-time winner of the fifty best places to work in Boston.” Ask Rivers how many employees he has grown to and he says, “It's not like that. We're a family here. Each year the store grows, the surf team grows.”

Most of you under the age of 34 have contemplated, at one point or another, the idea of starting your own business. Rich Farrell, founder and CEO of Boston-based technology company FullArmor, says it's easier if you do it earlier. He started his business right out of school, when his parents' basement seemed like reasonable living quarters. “I couldn't do that now. My wife wouldn't live in the basement and my parents wouldn't live with my two-year old 24/7. If I were starting today I'd have to raise money from angels or VCs.”

Do you wonder if you have the entrepreneurial chops to forward? Andrew Zacharakis, professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, cites three traits that make successful entrepreneurs:

1. Strong knowledge base in the arena you want to enter. Rivers, for example, grew up working at the very store he purchased. On top of that, as an expert surfer he's able to build a surf team that garners national attention for the store.

2. An extensive network both inside and outside of your field. A strong network can give you leads to customers, suppliers, and partners. Networking is something you need to feel comfortable doing every day. Don't underestimate the value of a surf team, but don't overestimate the value of knowledge you cannot leverage at a cocktail party.

3. Commitment. As in Ramen noodles every night. Zacharakis' warns, “you need to be prepared for some lean years during which you draw little or no salary.” Wolfson adds, “When you're an entrepreneur you're never not working. You're always trying to think about what you can do next. I drive my fiancé crazy because I talk about it nonstop.”

Do you think you have what it takes? Not so fast. The first step, for everyone, is finding your passion. According to Zacharakis, “Passion is something you have to look for every day of your life. It’s likely to change over time, but finding your passion is good practice.” It’s the first step to finding a balanced life, and the first step on the path to a committed career.

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How to deal with depression at work

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Kristen Ryan graduated a year ago and accepted a position in public relations. After two months on the job, she started having anxiety attacks, and after six months on the job, anxiety attacks were almost daily. Ryan says the anxiety was from the “pressures of life changes: Moving away from family, staring new job, transitioning to a completely different life from school to work. And,” she says, “I broke up with my long-time boyfriend.”

The most common age to experience depression for the first time is in one's twenties. Typical triggers are those Ryan cited, resulting from the stress of entering the workforce. Recently, these triggers have been exacerbated, as the new generation of workers takes for granted that challenging and rewarding work will come their way. This is a generation whose parents oversaw each moment of their schedule to ensure proper mentoring and enrichment. So a job standing at the office copier is a big comedown that many new workers are not prepared to accept. For those who have no choice, the result can be depression.

Depression is serious: Fifteen percent of clinically depressed people die by suicide. The illness is more common in women than men, and according to the Canadian Mental Health Association, one in five working women has suffered from depression or anxiety.

The good news is that depression is very treatable, so getting help is important. Dr. Stuart Koman, president of the mental health clinic Walden Behavioral Care, says there is a preponderance of scientific evidence to show that a combination of medicine and talk therapy can solve most cases of depression.

Ryan found that sessions with a social worker helped her to get back on track. But not everyone recovers so quickly. Like Ryan, Rachael Chaump joined a public relations firm last year, and after a few months, she realized that she had a severe problem. She says, “I was crying at my desk every day for no reason. And finally I called my dad and told him I hate my life and I can't go on like this.” Chaump ended up on temporary disability in a treatment program that included drug therapy to treat what was a chemical imbalance.

Both women had to move carefully in order to keep the jobs they had. Ryan took meditation classes and then, when she had an anxiety attack she “went to a secluded place at work to meditate.” She also took long walks outside in the middle of the workday. Chaump was not able to hide her depression as well, but she says that even with all her crying, “People just got used to it. As long as I kept answering the phone no one said anything to me.”

If you think you're depressed, you need to do two things: Figure out how to keep your job, and figure out how to get help. According to Jonathan Alpert, associate director of the Depression Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital, “One of the most difficult calls is to recognize depression in oneself. This is true even for people in mental health fields. Often the first step is getting feedback from someone else.”

Enter the employee assistance program — EAP — that helps workers confidentially identify mental illness in themselves. Denise Curran is a therapist at ComPsych, an employee assistance program serving six thousand organizations. She describes her role as sort of a referral service. Curran, like most EAP therapists, can give you advice over the phone or online as to whether you seem depressed, and who you can go to, locally, to get help.

The EAP process is completely confidential, but crying at your desk is another story. Chaump's company, FCF Schmidt Public Relations, was incredibly supportive and gave her paid leave even though that is not the company policy, per se. Other companies are not likely to be so gracious, so be careful. A good resource is the book Working in the Dark: Keeping your job while dealing with depression. Author Beth Gulas, a specialist in corporate critical intervention, says the book can help you determine if it's a safe environment to tell your boss about your depression. The book also gives advice on how to keep working through depression if you have to (example: set fifteen-minute goals for yourself.)

Before you curse the fact that you have to show up for work every day, consider that work might be a godsend for someone who is depressed. According to Gulas, “One of the typical symptoms of depression is choosing to be alone. But it is likely that depression will be exacerbated if you stay at home.”

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Taking good care of a family is relative

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In response to my musings about what it means to be a blogger who is just a blogger, Alexandra Levit sent me an article about bloggers who support themselves blogging. I read it twice. Then I started checking out all the blogs, trying to uncover the secret of the million-dollar blog.

Here is what I uncovered: Heather B (who is truly a wonderful writer) is cited in the article as “bringing in enough money to allow her family to live comfortably.” But it turns out that she and her husband recently participated in a study where they get injected with whooping cough so that they can get $50 and a free tetnaus shot.

I know that everyone has a different idea of living comfortably. But I happen to know the guy who wrote the article for Business 2.0 — he’s my old editor. And I’m certain that he would not be comfortable in the whooping cough study.

This reminds me of something I hate: Articles about women that focus on the dual acheivment of doing well at work and with kids. We never hear from the kids. We never see the inner workings of the household. What does it mean to do a great job with kids? It’s all relative. All self-reported. It’s all BS.

In fact, I did a followup on one of these stories. I looked up an article from Working Mother from a few years back — one of those articles about “How I successfully balance home and work.” I called the woman to find out how things are going with her business and her three school-age sons. I interviewed her and her teenage son.

I was appalled at how little time she spent with the son. And then he said he’d never want to be like his dad because his dad (Fortune 500 COO) was always at work. I couldn’t even bring myself to write about the family using their names because it was so bad. And the woman continues to believe that she’s doing a great job balancing work and family.

I put these topics in the same category: Reports about bloggers who live comfortably and women who do a good job at both work and home. It’s all subjective and relative and hearsay. Useless information.

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TIME Magazine mentioned my blog. Now what?

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Yep, it’s true. This week TIME Magazine quotes me, tells tidbits of my life, and pretty much makes it sound like my job is blogging.

So next time someone asks me that all-important question, “What do you do?” I’m thinking of saying, “I’m a blogger.”

Right now, when someone asks me what I do, the conversation goes like this:

“I’m a career columnist.”

“Oh. Where is your column?”

“I write for the Boston Globe, and my syndicated column has appeared in about 100 publications.”

“Oh.”

That’s it. No fireworks. Maybe a nod. And then I ask the person what he or she does.

But if someone asked me what I do and I said, “I'm a blogger,” we’d talk about it. They’d remember me. And maybe they’d check out my blog. To most people, being a blogger for a profession is like being an astronaut: Shockingly cool.

But I’m starting to think that no one really is a blogger. In my quest to understand the blogsphere, I have easily spent 100 hours combing though Technorati to understand the ranking system. (I have a spreadsheet full of stats on all career-related blogs like I am playing fantasy baseball or something.) I have a good understanding of who the top bloggers are, and let me tell you, they are not blogging for a living. They are using their blog as a tool.

For example, Guy Kawasaki’s blog is part of his venture capitalist brand: He is in the know and you need to know who he knows to be in the know. Curt Rosengren’s blog, is a platform to launch a book career, speaking career, one of those multi-pronged adventures in passion that he promotes through his writing. Seth Godin’s blog, fuels his book sales which fuel his consulting business.

Let’s look outside the work world, though. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who writes DailyKos is not a blogger per se, he’s a political pundit, and maybe a political fundraiser, or political gate-breaker. But you can’t just be a blogger and get all that attention. Cory, at BoingBoing, quit his day job to blog. Maybe is the closest thing we have to blogger, only blogger. But really, he is a cultural critic. Maybe a community organizer. Or, you could argue, blogging gatekeeper, since it’s hard to hit blog paydirt without getting a link from someone like BoingBoing. (HintHint)

But I don’t care that blogging is an amorphous job. I want to call myself a blogger because I want to see what happens when I do that. The way you answer the question, What do you do? tells the world how you see yourself and what’s important to you. And the world responds differently, depending on what you project. Maybe I’ll think of myself or my career in a fresh light. At least I will get to talk to people about blogging, which is what is at the front of my mind right now.

But one thing is for sure: My syndicator will tell me this is not a good idea. He is adamant that my blog is an offshoot of my print columns and not the other way around. I am not so sure. But, as always, it comes down to this: I get paid for the columns, not for my blog. So I’d be hard-pressed to talk about my blog if the question were not “What do you do?” but, “How do you keep a roof over your head?”

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