A few weeks ago I put out a public challenge to a few local venture capitalists / angel investors:

So — my challenge to the local VC community - which I dearly respect: start blogging.

Here’s my public challenge. I’d like to see the following at least start a blog and post one meaningful article related to venture capital and what they’re interested in:

• Stephen Fleming, Chief Commercialization Officer, GT Venture Labs
• Alan Taetle, Partner, Noro-Moseley
• Fred Sturgis, Partner, HIG
• Knox Massey, Atlanta Technology Angels
• Sig Mosley, Imlay Investments

And here’s my offer: I’ll help in anyway I can - set up the blog, provide the hosting, find the templates - even help give some tips on how I do it.

Almost immediately I received a few emails and stirred up some interesting conversation about the value of VCs and blogging. The value of blogging is still wildly misunderstood - with the usual main reactions:

• “Nobody cares about what I eat for dinner or where I’m going this weekend”
• “I can’t talk publicly about stuff I’m doing”
• “Nobody gets much from personal blogs”
• “I don’t have time”
• “Blogging is just gossip”
• “I don’t want to be self-promoting”

I guess anyone’s opinion of “what blogging is” is just that: their opinion. And everyone has a right to their opinion. From my experience, blogging can be more than the above — and can also include the above — and be successful, useful, interesting and valuable. It can also be a complete waste of time and sometimes not worth the trouble. Blogging is a long-tail implementation in the world-wide, social phenomenon kind of way. How blogging came to be and how it’s impacted the world is probably one of those Internet change agents we’ll look back one day and say “aha”. And the impact, as can happen with most technology trends, are not all positive. And they don’t have to be. You need to take the good with the bad in cases of innovation. Nuclear power can be both used for bombs and for energy. And both, sometimes, are appropriate and inappropriate in different contexts.

For me, it was a hard transition from becoming an occasional hobby blogger to one with purposeful, serious intent - which happened almost a year ago. Before that, I had first started blogging in February of 2003. And, once the transition happened, magically, things changed for me in ways that can be hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. But, the change wasn’t really difficult - it was almost obvious and once it happened it made a lot of other things that are occurring in web 2.0 much more easy to understand. I’ll stop there — since that’s a little too deep and probably justifies a longer post one day.

So, the update on the VC blogging challenge?

Alan Taetle, Partner at Noro-Moseley was the first to take the challenge - which I posted on my blog a few days after the challenge. Thanks, Alan for that nice post - and a topic that merits much community conversation.

Knox Massey, Executive Director at Atlanta Technology Angels - has been raring to start blogging after I had lunch with him a couple of weeks ago. I setup a brand new blog for ATA a few days ago and I think that should launch soon with some great content from Atlanta’s premiere angel group. More to come on this…

Stephen Fleming, Chief Commercialization Officer, GT Venture Labs - Stephen is such a geek and sent me this really nice email after I volunteered to help set something up a few days before: “I was in a conference this weekend with Wi-Fi and a couple of boring speakers (yes, I went to a conference over a holiday weekend!), I went ahead and set something up on Blogger. Turns out that Adobe Contribute knows how to speak to that, so it was pretty simple”. And, the best part is his 2nd post was done from his blackberry from the conference. Awesome.

Well, 3 out of 5 isn’t too bad. And most importantly, this social experiment also demonstrated the power of community and blogging first hand.

technorati tags: vc, blogging, atlanta, southeast, vc, venturecapital