I've had a busy few days. Looking forward today to a bike ride, catching up on some development projects, thinking and ideating.

One take-away from the meetings: I want to find out more about the people who read my blog. It's very quiet over on my end of this "conversation." Some very interesting people are thinking about what I'm writing, and coming up with ideas of their own. And since so few people blog these days, the ideas don't flow back well.

When I posted that thought on Twitter, Fred Wilson, who has one of the most prolific comment sections on any blog, ever -- says his commenters keep him feeling the connection. It clearly works for him, we're different people, different temperaments, and different blog history. When I use his style of comments on my blog I get a different result.

I've found that when I have comments, I don't get very many, and a lot of them are spammy. What I want is to hear from people who don't speak publicly that much, just a few of their best ideas. 

Yesterday at lunch with Dave Carlick, who I worked with at Living Videotext in the 80s, we talked about regcards. When we shipped a new product, we'd get back bundles of regcards in the mail every day. When they came in, I'd close the door on my office, and spend hours reading the comments and thinking about them. There were phone numbers on the cards, and sometimes I'd call people and ask followup questions. I kept reading them because I learned so much from them, they gave me narratives to go with my product designs. The stories could now include what it was like to use the product, with no inside knowledge of how it was made. 

I want the web equivalent of a regcard. A way for readers to, when they have a free moment, tell me and only me who they are. Not a broadcast to the world. Just one person to another. As far as I know this doesn't exist today. The closest thing is the guestbook page. 

Anyway I feel like I just came back from an exciting conference. I forgot how energizing they can be. Not the speeches and the time spent in the audience scribbling and checking email. The hallway and lobby conversations that give you ideas. That's the gold. 

PS: I really wanted to find an image of one of the Living Videotext regcards, but I'm afraid they're all gone. Too bad. We put some amount of work in evolving them, to ask better questions that would get people to say more. And the cards themselves would have been interesting to read, 30 years later. I have to rely on my very imperfect memory here.