About 6 month ago, I had thought that the world of entrepreneurship has really changed and that various factors had make it much much more accessible to the “average joe.” I called it the rise of Armchair Entrepreneurship

Today, I realized I was somewhat wrong . . . Nicholas Carr of Harvard wrote an enlightening post, FON’s unsavory buzz, reflecting on a WSJ article regarding FON’s blog-lebrity advisory board.

The blogosphere works on the echo principle. When an influential blogger says something, his or her words reverberate across other blogs in the form of, usually, brief excerpts. Disclosures in the original post are unlikely to appear in those excerpts. The effect is that the buzz builds, but the fact that some of the sources of the buzz may have conflicts of interest gets lost. It may be that, to protect their integrity and that of the blogosphere, bloggers will need simply to refrain from blogging about any startup in which they have an interest of any sort.

The is something else here that Nick is implying . . . which is that getting in good with this virtual “blog-lebrity” network has replaced the old boy network of yester-years as the pre-requisite to generating buzz for a startup. For anyone that has been reading tech blogs for a while, he/she would have already realized the amount of ass-kissing in the comment section of any of the famous blogs.

Furthermore, many lesser known blogger spent most of their time trying to get link-backs (read pagerank juice) by posting “me-too” posts that does nothing but “second” the opinion to the original one . . . creating more useless noise for search engines to crawl and index . . .(you can call this post one of them ) .

So what does that mean? It means, if you dont have millions to pay for a real marketing campaing, you better get to know one of these bloggers by creating an useless “echo” blog or just commenting religiously on their blogs with lemming like comments trying to “build” a virtual relationship hoping that once you start your company, you get some coverage.

We used to call VC’s lemmings and sheeps for the way they chase after the latest trends and the hottest startups. . . we need to take a good look at ourselves for the way we behave . . . otherwise, the pace of innovation will slow . .. not increase if this keeps up. . . the real contrarian voices are being drowned out by the group-think lead (certainly not purposely) by the “blog-lebrities” . . . and perpetrated by ourselves. This virtual cast system needs to end . . . soon. . .

Being an entrepreneur is like being naked. . . at a club. . . AND required to hit up every single women in the room. . . .

All your flaws are left wide open for the world to see, especially those who might judge you the most. Everytime you get a phone #’s you feel like Brad Pitt, everytime you get rejected, you feel like . . . Pauly Shore? (actually no, that guy gets play ) … Deuce Bigalow. One moment you are at the top of the world and the next the lowest of the low. Not only that, you HAVE to sell sell sell to everyone at anytime and everywhere. . . even the ugliest girl in the room. . . and most likely, she’s gonna reject you too. . . cause you are the freak who goes to a club naked!

Being an entrepreneur is NOT for the faint of heart. . . everything is on the line, and no one will hold you up except yourself. You keep going cause pausing and thinking is not good for anyone sane enough to realize all the risk and improbabilities required to make your vision come true. For the tens of dependencies that need to happen, even if all of them are highly likely, the compounded probability of it ALL happening is probably close to 10% . . . if you are ultra lucky. . .

In my life, I’ve met generally two types of (successful) entrepreneurs. . . 1) the strong silent type and 2) manic depressant. Type 1 is strong enough to shoulder the responsibilities and cope with all the stress and not externalize it too much. You see them at meetings . softly asking some tough questions but always polite and considerate. Type 2 is the social butterfly, the networking fool . . . they guy you wish you can become . . . but once in a while, they cross the bounds of passion into mania and irresponsibility. They might scream or yell at employees, partners, or VC’s . . . than they get depressed or contrite for being the way they are . . . the world is black or white, and so is their mood. . .

For now, I’m not sure which one am I. . . maybe neither . . . ?