Herding Entrepreneurs

Cats are notoriously easy to herd compared to entrepreneurs.  Put two entrepreneurs in a room and three businesses and plans for four more will emerge.  One definition of an entrepreneur is someone who always wants to do it “my way”.  I plead guilty to fitting the definition.

Be that as it may, I am coordinating a network on FeedBurner called “My Way, The Entrepreneur Network”.  What does this mean?

To readers who like to read what entrepreneurs write, there is a single feed through which you can read the thoughts and experiences of a number of entrepreneurs including me.  Fractals of Change posts and those from other blogs will appear in this feed whether the particular post has to do with entrepreneurship or not. (Should it be this way or should only posts actually relevant to entrepreneurship be here?   One of the things I hope you’ll give me feedback on).

In order to read it, you need to either subscribe via RSS or via email (I’ve set this up with FeedBlitz but other email subscription services will work as well).  If you subscribe via RSS and use a feed reader like Newsgator or Bloglines, new posts will appear soon after they appear on the entrepreneurs’ blogs.  If you choose FeedBlitz email, you’ll get a daily email with all the posts and a convenient table of contents.

Some of you may want to look at the feed only occasionally to sample individual authors you want to subscribe to.  It’ll be interesting how this all works out. There is no actual blog site associated with the feed but there will be landing pages which list the network members.

There are three benefits to participating bloggers:

1. being found by new readers who look at or subscribe to My Way;
2. receiving advertisements (and revenue) through FeedBurner from advertisers who have purchased placement in the entire network;
3. cool stuff like badges and other widgets to put on your blog site.

Advertisers benefit by being able to make network-wide buys – good way to get a targeted audience. Click here to buys ads.

Once the FeedBurner network capability is fully released, almost any blogger will be able to establish a network.  The current Beta is supporting only a few coordinators of which I’m one.  I’ve sent out invitations to a few entrepreneur/bloggers whose blogs I know about and whose email addresses I have.  If you are or have been an entrepreneur and blog about your experience and would like to have your blog included in the network, please email me – tom (at) evslin (dot) com.

Comments

[Nat Knox]

"My Way, The Entrepreneur Network" is evidence that entrepreneurship is truly the future of the American economy.

In fact, I’ve recently been so inspired by the idea of entrepreneurship that I have been reading nothing other than entrepreneurial-related books for the past six months. I recently finished The Entrepreneurial Imperative by Carl J. Schramm and since have been seriously inspired.

Not only is this guy president of the Kauffman Foundation (the world’s largest foundation for entrepreneurship) but he has also managed to construct a very solid argument why entrepreneurship is the future of the American economy.

Great read. Had to share.

[Tom Evslin]

Jon:

Thanks. I fixed it.

[_Jon]

The url to your blog is double linked:
(http://blog.tomevslin.com/blog.tomevslin.com).

Good luck with your feed network.

[Chris Brogan...]

Hey Tom. It's funny. I bought the domain hackedoff.net for a cartoon project I'd been doing (but have since gone dormant on). I found you via the My Way post, and that's showing that it's already working.

How are you finding the network wrangling so far?

Drop me an email if you would at the address supplied by my comment.

--Chris...

[Tom Evslin]

Florian:

Thanks for your post. Right now My Way is limited to blogs by enterpreneuers about their experience. Your blog is very interesting but I believe the authors are not entrepreneurs themselves.

You will be able to set up networks in Europe once FeedBurner actually releases the Network capability. Right now it is in a restricted beta and I happen to be one of the testers.

[John]

Tom, thanks for clarification

[Florian Komm]

Hallo Tom,

I first read on Brad's blog about the planned Feedburner Networks. I was right away on fire for this idea. We write a blog on entrepreneurship out of Berlin, Germany. Our Team is built around Professor Falin form the Freie Universität of Berlin. Our blog is in German and English languages. We would be pleased to join your network. If this is not possible, please let us know how we set up our network for Europe.
That I have subscribed your network feed is clear. I am looking forward to read tons of interesting stuff.

[EP]

This is a great idea, congratulations. Look forward to reading some great posts.

[Pat Phelan]

Great idea!
I subscribed

[Tom Evslin]

John:

Right now the ability to create networks is in beta test at FeedBurner and only open to a few invited beta testers.

Once they've worked all the bugs out, they plan to make this capability much more broadly available and I'm sure the FeedBurner site will explain how to do this.

[John]

Tom, How do I create one as My Way,The Entrepreneur Network. I wanted create one for me. Could you help it