Posts from August 2014

Well the photoblogging experiment yesterday was mostly a failure. I posted images I took on my phone via my phone and they came out too large and loaded too slowly. The whole point of the experiment was to see if I could post quickly and easily from my phone and avoid the laptop entirely. I was seeking efficiency and did not find it.

But one place where we have found efficiency on our trip is our car. We got this Peugeot convertible for our trip.

It is a stick shift and takes diesel gas. The tank was almost empty when we got it so we filled the tank at the start of our trip. That cost 85 euros (roughly $110) but we’ve driven almost 500 kilometers so far and we still have over half a tank left. So we are getting roughly 900-1000 kilometers on a tank of gas which is 500-600 miles.

I’ve never owned a diesel car and finding diesel in the US isn’t easy and with the move towards electric, I suppose diesel will never be a thing in the US.

But I’m impressed with the fuel efficiency you get with diesel. It’s kind of amazing that you can drive almost 600 miles on a single tank of gas.

Several people suggested I do some photoblogging on my vacation. So here’s my first attempt. If it goes well there will be more.

We woke up to this

And then did this

Then this

That took all of twenty seconds on my phone. Very efficient. Now back to vacation.

I wrote this post almost nine years ago, before our investments in Twitter, Tumblr, Wattpad, SoundCloud, Kickstarter, and a host of other bottoms up media businesses.

I can remember the moment. I was in my home office in our old home at 11 West 10th Street. That was a sweet office, top floor, with windows facing front and back. I wrote it on my laptop on the conference room table that I took from Flatiron’s offices when we shut that firm down. I have no idea what happened to that table. I’m going to find out what happened to it.

I recall the feeling of writing this post. I was filled with inspiration. It was as if I was Moses and God had just handed me the ten commandments, but there were (and are) only four.

I still think it’s one of my best posts. I hope you agree.
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I have seen the future of media and it looks like this:

Mashed Up Blog Posts at tech.memeorandum

Mashed Up Funny Videos at delicious

Mashed Up Playlists at webjay

Here is the future of media:

1 – Microchunk it – Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 – Free it – Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 – Syndicate it – Let anyone take it and run with it.  Thanks Dave.
4 – Monetize it – Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.Thanks Feedburner.

Leaving aside the rights issues, which I know are large, if I were a television executive right now, I’d take my content, microchunk it, put a couple calls to a video ad server in the middle of it, and let it go whereever it wants to go, safe in the knowledge that whenever the show is viewed, I’ll get to run a couple 15 second spots in the middle of it (which I could change whenever I wanted to and which I could measure).

This is where media is going and its not going to be stopped.

I know that Jason Calacanis hates the really simple stealing that goes on with Engadget or Autoblog posts.  But you know what?  He’s not going to stop it.  What he should do is monetize each and every post with an ad of some sort and a tracking mechanism of some sort and let the content flow.

RSS is a new medium.  It’s not like the web any more than the web was like print.  Remember back in the late 90s when the media execs tried to use the web to sell more papers?  It doesn’t work.  Content wants to be consumed in the media its delivered in. 

So RSS content is not going to be used to send people to the web.  It’s going to be consumed in the RSS medium, whatever that turns out to be.

The data is pretty clear about this. The publishers that put only an excerpt of their posts/stories in their feeds get pretty low click thru on those excerpts. Those that put the full post in get a lot more readership.

So the trick is to figure out how to monetize RSS right in the medium, not as a way to send traffic back to the web where it can be monetized with the traditional web techniques.

Why did I decide to write this post today?  Because in the last week I have gotten between five and ten requests to use my RSS feed in some sort of syndicated and mashed up RSS or web service.  I’ve told all of them to go for it.

Here is the deal with my RSS feed. Anyone is free to use my RSS feed to produce whatever content they want to produce with the following exceptions.  I do not want and will not allow my content to be used in pornographic or hate related properties.  And the posts must be shown in their entirety with any advertising and tracking tools that I decide to use in them.  And I must be given attribution for my work.

Other than that, go for it.  Take it.  And build something great with it.

So we are heading off for four weeks in Europe this evening. I’m going to start reblogging a lot of older stuff as a way to keep AVC fresh while I’m not posting every day.

So I thought about what posts would be the most worthwhile to dust off and bring back. I went to Google Analytics and looked at data from the past two years to see what posts that are older than that (ie written before August 2012) got the most traffic during that time.

It’s an interesting list. There’s a lot of MBA Mondays content in there, particularly around employee equity and valuation questions. And there are a few really popular guest posts, like this one from Fake Grimlock. And there are a few classics like this one.

I am going to queue up a bunch of them to autopost over the next few days while I figure out what my blogging routine is or isn’t going to be in Europe.

I’m curious to get everyone’s suggestions on this. I’ve written over 6,500 posts at AVC so I can’t just wade through them to find the best ones. I need some sort of algorithm. Another that comes to mind is most commented. I’ll take a look at that later today. Any other ideas for surfacing the best stuff to reblog?

There’s a bit of a renaissance of real personal blogging here in NYC. Two of the original NYC bloggers have, after years of writing professionally and editing others, returned to their own blogs.

It started with Lockhart Steele, the founder of Curbed, Racked, and Eater, who started that media business on his personal blog.

Then the next day, Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor/blogger at Gawker, dusted off her blog and started writing on it again.

It feels so good to link to both of them.

There was a comment on Elizabeth’s kickoff post that suggested she go to Medium. She replied:

I already write for (and on) Medium. My most recent piece is here. But I don’t think it’s quite the same thing as maintaining a personal blog, where you control all of the visual elements and maintain a custom URL.

I wanted to reply to that comment, but could not for the life of me, log into WordPress to leave it. So I’ll blog about it instead.

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

When I started blogging here at AVC, I would write about everything and anything. Then, slowly but surely, it became all about tech and startups and VC. It is still pretty much that way, but I feel like I’m heading back a bit to the personal blog where I can talk about anything that I care about.

Today, that thing is the fact that the Gotham Gal and I are taking our youngest child, Josh, to college. As my friend Bob told me over email last week about sending his son off:

I am surprisingly emotional at least to me ……….. Sending Josh off as your last must be something.

Yeah, it is something. I’ll miss him a lot.

Our daughter Emily is working on a senior thesis this coming year. She’s studying the choices women make to balance their careers and families. This is a subject Emily has some personal experience with having watched The Gotham Gal quit her job when our son Josh was born and make a number of other career sacrifices so she could care for our young family.

Emily wants to capture real stories from real women and has built a website she calls Opting Out For The Kids where women can share their stories with her and the world.

It’s a pretty basic website. Anyone can read the stories and upvote them. But you need to log in with Facebook if you want to post a story. Once you log in, you will see a link that says POST and that’s how you write a post to tell your story.

Emily alpha launched this website at the start of the summer but it had some quirks and she recently fixed them and is now re-launching it.

If you are a woman who has an “opting out for the kids” story to tell, please go here, login with Facebook, and tell it.  And if you have followers on Twitter or Facebook who might be women with these kinds of stories, please post a link to Opting Out For The Kids so that other women can find this website and tell their stories.

And, as I mentioned, anyone can read and upvote these stories and I would encourage everyone to do that.

Emily will appreciate it and so will I. And I will ask Emily if I can post the results of her research here next spring when it’s completed.

For the past four years, The Gotham Gal and her friend Nancy Hechinger have been running a conference called The Women’s Entrepreneur Festival. The goal of the conference is to showcase successful women entrepreneurs to other women. As Marian Wright Edelman famously said, “You Can’t Be What You Can’t See.”

But even as The Women’s Entrepreneur Festival gets bigger and bigger each year, it can never scale to reach all women who might want to be an entrepreneur and it certainly can’t reach young girls who might be inspired to become entrepreneurs.

So that’s why I backed Dream, Girl this morning after seeing this Gotham Gal tweet:

Let’s redefine what it means to be a boss & teach girls to dream big by donating to Dream, Girl http://t.co/dUQo6z5884

— joanne wilson (@thegothamgal) August 25, 2014

Here’s the Kickstarter video:

I hope you’ll be inclined to back this project as well after reading this blog post.

The NY Times has a post up this morning about a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Red Hook where they have built a hyperlocal mesh network to service the entire neighborhood, from housing projects to townhouses.

Red Hook is a cool place. We were there last night to sample Hometown Bar-B-Que‘s massive beef ribs and a bunch of other great stuff. Red Hook is isolated from the rest of Brooklyn by the BQE Expressway and sits right on NY Harbor. It has a collection of different housing situations, from single family homes, to factory lofts, to housing projects. The only public transportation in Red Hook are bus lines into downtown Brooklyn and the occasional Ikea Ferry. It’s a neighborhood all to itself in many ways.

Red Hook was badly flooded in Hurricane Sandy and living there in the weeks after the storm was dicey. The neighborhood has bounced back strongly however and there are construction jobs seemingly on every block. In the wake of Sandy, a local group called the Red Hook Initiative led an effort to build a hyperlocal mesh network throughout Red Hook.

For those that don’t know the difference between a mesh network and a traditional network, the big thing to focus on is that the nodes (think of them like public wireless access points) talk to each other and form a network that operates even if its is not connected to the public Internet. Most mesh networks are connected to the public Internet, but if that connection goes down, the local mesh continues to work. In Red Hook that means that you could make voice calls (over IP) from your housing project to the local hardware store to see if its open. Or you could email a friend who lives in the neighborhood.

If every neighborhood in Brooklyn had a public mesh like Red Hook has, and if they were all meshed with each other, then Brooklyn would have its own local Internet of sorts.

At USV, we think this is an important part of how we (meaning the entire world) get a mobile Internet that is not controlled by the large mobile telcos. We have made one investment in this area (which I don’t think we have announced yet) and we are looking to find other smart ways to invest in this trend.

But the biggest investments that will be made in mesh networking will be made by local groups like Red Hook Initiative. It is not terribly expensive to construct one of these mesh networks and every neighborhood ought to be thinking of doing something like this. If everyone did this, the mobile Internet would look a lot different than it does today.

A few weeks ago, I spent most of the week in the upper midwest. I started out on Tuesday in Buffalo, NY, the location of my first venture capital investment, Upgrade Corporation of America. I did office hours at the Z80 accelerator and then did a lunchtime Q&A in the beautifully renovated Larkin Square with Eric Reich.

This is a video of that talk. If you want to skip all the intros, go ten minutes in. The talk is about 40mins long.

Q&A With Fred Wilson and Eric Reich – Aug 2014 from Z80 Labs Technology Incubator on Vimeo.