90 Days of BzzAgent

So 90 Days has run its course.

Since about Day 73, I’ve been thinking about what the subject of the final post should be. Helpful Hive denizens suggested many clever ideas. One of them was to make up a shocking Balter-related revelation — perhaps that he had blown the entire $13.8 million on mint condition Wacky Packages — and post it on an exact replica of the site that only showed up on Balter’s screen.

I decided, instead, to take this farewell opportunity to blog a bit about blogging itself.

I was a virgin blogger. Although I have written in many forms, I didn’t have a clue about how to write a blog, so I floundered a bit. In the first couple of days, a few outsider observers — bloggers themselves — logged on and decided that 90 Days was not up to their exalted standards and logged off, never to be heard from again. This annoyed me. Was I going to spend three months under constant attack from unknown blogospheric blowhards?

For the first few weeks, everybody had suggestions about the posts. I wasn’t ranting enough. I hadn’t gotten enough dirt. I should follow a single character. I should talk more about management tensions. I myself wasn’t sure that I was getting it right or that I was painting the whole picture. But, the more I wrote and the more people read, we came to accept that 90 Days was its own thing. It was telling a story, but it was a story of many tiny parts, told out of sequence, with no fixed cast of characters, and no conventional story arc.

In a file called TOPIC CANDIDATES I collected ideas for posts — fragments and tidbits, moments and comments — but I ended up using very few of them. I came to realize that a blog must be about whatever is blogworthy at the actual moment of blogging. What seemed compelling yesterday is uninteresting today. What I had expected to sit down and write about just didn’t get my wheels spinning when I stared into the screen. It has to happen in the moment and on the page.

Gradually, my process became routinized. I would leave home and head for the Hive with a blank mind. On the drive in to Boston, or while hiking up the stairs, or as I set up my computer in whatever empty workspace I could find, something would pop into my brain. If it didn’t, I would wander around the office — like a pelican looking for juicy fish to dive at — chatting with people, observing interactions, snatching bits of conversation, conducting interviews or mini-polls, or sitting in on a meeting. Something, usually many things, would present itself as blogworthy. Then I’d sit down, log onto the 90 Days admin site, click on WRITE POST, and tap away. It could take an hour or two to come up with a few hundred words.

From the beginning, I wondered what effect I was having. Was anybody reading? Did anybody care? The most immediate and exciting response, of course, comes in the form of reader comments. I came to understand how the press can get addicted to topics and hot button issues that create a gush of reaction. My major gusher was Free Stuff which provoked 56 comments from agents, Hivesters, Dave, and a variety of outsiders, including my 16-year old son.

Often, the dialogue about a post was more interesting than the post itself, bringing in a variety of viewpoints and additional information. Sometimes, a comment would be totally unrelated to the main topic of the post. For example, Profile of a Com Dev was about the the stresses and strains of reading Agents’ reports for a living. But, to one commenter, it was a minor detail in the story — the fact that Nutella could be heated up and poured over ice cream — that moved her to write: “Wow, I never thought to heat up Nutella! Great tip!”

That’s one of the beauties of a blog. It’s a collaborative effort, even though you don’t know who your collaborators are, have no idea where the collaboration might take you, or what impact it could have. So thanks to everyone who appeared in, read, or commented during the past three months. Like word-of-mouth, the quantitative effect of 90 Days is virtually impossible to measure (at least until Mr. Clemens and his team crack that particular nut) but, for me, it has been an invaluable experience.