Despite my best efforts, there was no way that I was going to actually manage to blog while I was still at the TED conference this year. I don’t know how anyone can do it. I suppose that is why there was such an explosion of tweeting at TED — you can do it on the fly. But if you want to sit down and write anything vaguely coherent, it takes time. And the TED conference isn’t about free time. In fact, I managed to get about 10 hours of sleep over the last three nights of TED. But now that I am back and rested, I figured I’d tap out some thoughts.

As with every year, now that TED is over, the debate has begun — is TED an elitist event that is nothing more than a party for the rich and self-involved? I am reluctant to jump into the fray on this one. Not because I don’t have an opinion. Nor because I fear angering those who will see my defense of TED as … well … elitist. Mostly because I think this debate is pretty well trodden territory. In fact, Robert Scoble just wrote a great post on the issue called “The Elephants in the Room at TED.” But before getting to the content of this year’s excellent TED, let me share a few thoughts on the democratization of TED.

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As Twitter has risen to prominence, many loud voices have declared it the future of media, the future of journalism, even the future of the free world. I am a fan of Twitter. It is a powerful service that is unbelievably flexible and versatile. But, as I contemplate Twitter, it strikes me that Blogging remains the king of new media.

Given the nature of Twitter, Tweets are necessarily abbreviated and ephemeral. I don’t necessarily mean that as a criticism. There are certain real advantages to the brevity of Twitter. Anyone can Tweet. You can do it on the fly. You can do it quickly. And there are virtually no barriers to getting started. What’s more, the fleeting nature of Twitter may be a feature as much as a flaw. Twitter put the “real time” in the “Real Time Web.” Want to know about a fire or earthquake or service outage that’s happening right now? Twitter is your best source of that info by orders of magnitude.

But there are also real limitations to 140 characters about the here and now. A tweet may be well suited to quips and status reports. But when it comes to debate or deeper commentary, a tweet is at best a teaser. Meaningful discussion remains the domain of blogging, not tweeting or status updates. In fact, this blog entry is about 3,100 characters — the equivalent of 22 tweets. No one would read 22 successive tweets. Nor would anyone try to post them. It is well understood that Twitter is a pointer to the debate, not a home for the debate itself.

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I received an email today from ExecSense Webinars advertising a course on “How to Create a Personal Brand as a Venture Capitalist.” That’s right, for $250, I can learn “specific ways to use speaking engagements, published articles and social media web sites as a way to establish [myself] as a thought leader.” Who knew it was so easy?

VCs don’t often talk about brand. Brand is a dirty word in the venture business. Yet just today I had two different conversations about VC marketing. The first conversation was with Jennifer Jones. Jennifer has been working with VCs on marketing for two decades now. And she’s really good at it. I suspect that in a VC marketing death match, Jennifer would pretty handily crush ExecSense Webinars. She wouldn’t talk about generic speaking engagements and social media websites. She would talk about finding “your people” (my phrase) and how to reach them in genuine, engaging and unique ways. She would know that anything you can learn in a VC marketing webinar is insufficiently differentiated to have a real impact. She would know that Venture Capital is a people business and VC marketing is about connecting with people, not giving some soulless speech at an industry event.

The second conversation I had was at lunch with a couple of friends in the VC business. We were chatting about early stage investors and got to talking about Josh Kopelman. I made the assertion that Josh was the best marketer in all of venture capital, to which one of my lunch companions replied “he’s a marketing savant.” Trust me, it was pure admiration. If you want to appreciate what “people marketing” is all about, ask a few entrepreneurs what they think of Josh Kopelman and First Round Capital. Josh understands how to connect with “his people” and make a splash. Remember, this is the very same guy who convinced a little town in Oregon to change its name to “Half.com” and to feel good about it.

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