That's a question I used to get all of the time in the early days of this blog. I don't get it so much anymore. Because slowly but surely people are wising up to the fact that blogging is work and its a very valuable use of my time

Take yesterday for example. I wrote a longish blog post on the Union Square Ventures blog about our most recent investment, Boxee. That post got picked up on techmeme where it ran for most of the day yesterday. I don't yet know how many people visited that post yesterday but I am sure it was thousands of readers

About 75 of them left comments on the post asking for an invite to Boxee's invite only alpha. I got a bunch more invite requests on this blog where I had linked to the USV blog post yesterday.

So this morning I spent an hour, between 5am and 6am, going through all of those comments, harvesting the email addresses from disqus, and inviting everyone to try out the boxee alpha.

That's about 100 trials. Not that many when you think about it in the context of the 50,000 registered users of boxee.

But the time and energy I've put into this blog for the past five years has built a unique and very sophisticated audience. You are connectors and hubs of influence.

I know that one person out of the 100 I invited this morning will be incredibly impactful for boxee. It could be five people, it could be ten. Who knows?

But in the world of social media, word of mouth and word of link marketing, it is connectors and influencers like all of you that make the difference.

And that's one of the main reasons I keep writing, commenting, discussing, and participating in blogs, tumblr, twitter, disqus, and the social media world at large.

Its about the "realest" work I do.