We develop software that lets you check you rankings (amongst other things) once a month, but some people still insist that athey need daily updates to their rankings!

I've just joined the Search Marketing Salon on LinkedIn, think I'll request a connection also.

Starting new companies is tough at the moment with the global cedit crunch impacting everybody.

Good luck with the new company.

Take this time, measured by whatever metric you want, to listen and learn from others. Comment on their blogs when applicable.

Link your name with your portal to all things you, e.g. your blog, your Twitter feed, your Facebook profile, whichever. By the law of social proof, if enough people see your name in enough places relevant to them, they will click over to you and see what you have to say and comment when they feel it is applicable.

Maybe it's not 80-20. Maybe its 70-30 or 50-50 or 20-80. Point is make the web community about “us” and not so much about “me” or “you.” Make sense?

When you say 80% reading 20% new content do you mean 4 out of 5 of your posts are “reblogging” others' content with your comments added or did you mean you spend four times as many hours reading as you spend writing?

I am sometimes lax on this but I try to read other people's words and comment when inspired 80% of the time and add new content of my own 20%. That's a useful metric you might want to try.

Additionally, I clicked over to your blog and saw that you have a feed counter showing the number of subscribers. Taking the advice of Dan Schawbel, I'd suggest removing that widget until you have over 150 or so subscribers. This is because, sometimes, people won't subscribe or comment on blogs that have a lower number. Additionally, if you want to follow Jacob's advice (which I agree) to not obsess over analytics, then remove any indicator of such, i.e. feed counter.