I think the problems with most venture capital blogs are greater than just not being conversational, as Jarvis points out, but also go to the matter of the discipline that is required to post on a regular basis, how blogs can come back at you when raising a fund, and finally, and that the venture business itself is deliberately opaque once you get beyond the "how to be a VC for dummies" part, which is summed up in Feld's Term Sheet Series, co-authored by Jason Mendelson.
Tim Oren also makes a great point that the Valley thrives on word-of-mouth rather than publicity, which translates into VCs being reluctant to broadcast what they communicate in their circle of friends and colleagues. This is a valid point and something that really puts a governor on how much you blog because so much of this business is word-of-mouth that you will create tension among your peers if you blog too much of what is considered privileged conversation.
Jarvis is critical of most VC bloggers by asking:
"I wonder whether they are following a leader or whether this is just the way VCs think and talk."There's a lot of experiential knowledge that comes from working in the venture business over time that could be communicated
through story telling, but most VCs are not story tellers, they are
primarily story listeners. Instead, the VC blogging model seems to gravitate to wanting to distill things down to bullet lists and formulas, hence the "top 10 lists" ad naseum.
As for Kawasaki's blog, this just feels like another way for him to publish himself... instead of a book it's a blog, the style is the same. I'm not offering a judgement, just an observation and opinion.
For the record, I've never considered myself a venture capital blogger, even less so now that I have moved on from that business; I have always been interested in things much broader than the venture business and I have always made it a point to write about what I think about and to write like I speak.
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