I think oral and written communication is probably the most overlooked skill for engineers. Write. It gets easier with practice. As you get better at it, it will come more naturally and you will be more confident. Quality, fluency, and confidence all make people much more likely to believe what you are saying and act favorably towards your suggestions.<p>At a practical level, you can write your way into jobs (or investment), and if you do it right writing does not rot, so you can continue to reap benefits from things you've written long before. That lets you store time in a bottle, which has really nice implications for time-strapped entrepreneurs.<p>(This also implies that you'd probably be better doing public writing than writing which winds up in the email archives of BigCorp or behind a logistical and cultural wall almost nobody will pierce at your institution of higher learning.)
"Information is meant to be consumed. It's meant to be free. It's meant to reach as many people as humanly possible, shared, and discussed."<p>Let's be fair. Different information is "meant" for different things. My email password is not meant to be free. And I think if Calacanis has decided that his writing is now meant for a different level of freedom, that's his call. If others aren't jumping ship with him, they probably just have different needs/goals (and these may change). Thoughtful and open writing really does have a great power for networking/community-building, but there are trade-offs.<p>A good essay on the whole, I just don't think we should appeal to the moral aspirations of raw information. The current state of the internet seems to show that the world wants (often demands) free information, but we're still reeling (economically and otherwise) from this movement, and waiting to see where it ultimately will lead.
As a technologist at feel at times that web entrepreneurship <i>is</i> all about writing: most entrepreneurs I have met outsource coding to someone else and all they do is write: blog posts, tweets, emails to investors, answering support forum questions...<p>It's common to hear stories that begin with "Sergey and Larry..." but I doubt those guys spent any time blogging and tweeting about how awesome Google was going to be. Just one more reason to be more like S&G, that's all :)
Another reason to write more is that there tends to be a positive correlation between Writing More and Sucking Less [At Writing], and in the business world there's really something to be said for Sucking Less [At Writing] because regardless of how smart you are or how great your product is if you can't string together a coherent sentence on your blog you run the serious risk of making yourself and your colleagues look dumber than you all probably are (at least in the eyes of people who care about Sucking Less [At Writing]).
<i>Almost anything paragraph size can be squeezed down to 140 characters.</i><p>While I agree with the article at large, I disagree with this. There is definitely value in writing things between 140 characters and essay-length, if only to jot down complete ideas without grooming them into a lengthy piece of essay quality.
I completely agree... I would also add that it allows you to get feedback on your ideas. I wrote about this a couple months ago: <a href="http://techneur.com/post/524363996/the-best-exercise-any-entrepreneur-can-do" rel="nofollow">http://techneur.com/post/524363996/the-best-exercise-any-ent...</a> I truly believe it's the best thing for a business that every entrepreneur should do.