I am not interested in wading into the complicated waters of what to build or not to build at Ground Zero, but I am very interested in the football stadium wars that are taking place in NYC right now.

First there was the idea to build a Jets stadium on the west side of Manhattan which was part of Bloomberg’s Olympics folly.  That rightly got shut down.  That site is too valuable to be used for a football stadium and Manhattan has a lot of traffic and mass transit issues to solve already.

Then I heard the Jets and Giants were negotiating to build a joint stadium near the current Giants stadium in the Meadowlands. I guess that makes economic sense because they can amortize the cost over two teams instead of one.  But apparently the Jets and Giants can’t make a deal.

So now the Jets are talking about building a stadium in Queens, near Shea Stadium and LaGuardia Airport, where they started out (they are called the Jets afterall).

I suspect that this is negotiating more than anything else in an attempt to bring the Giants to the table and get what the Jets need in the Meadowlands.

But if its for real, I am all for it.  It’s a pain to take mass transit to take the family to the Jets game.  We have to get into the car, drive through the tunnels, sit in traffic, and then deal with the parking nightmare that is the Meadowlands.

I’d love going to a Jet game to be as easy as jumping on the 7 train and heading out to Shea.

So here’s my vote for bringing the Jets back to Queens.

My two previous posts on this deal were two of my most popular posts in the past 30 days.

I have no idea why people chose this blog to discuss, comment, and link to a deal that I had no part of (other than being a user and fan of both services).  But the fact is I had 19 trackbacks, 28 total links (according to Google), and 40 comments to my original post.

I had 5 trackbacks, 2 links (according to IceRocket), and 10 comments to my follow up post.

That’s a fair bit of discussion for this blog anyway.

So, after reading Tom Evslin’s complete trashing of the deal (from eBay’s perspective), I figured it was time to weigh in once more.

Tom says that eBay could have gotten IP voice talk technology for way less than what they paid for Skype.  Tom was one of the first guys in the VOIP space, so he knows what he’s talking about on this count.

He also says that while Skype does have a large user base in the developing world, its the availbility of payment systems (ie PayPal) that matters in those markets, not the ability to talk to the seller.  I am not sure that is entirely true, but again, they could have gotten voice IP voice talk technology to build into eBay for a tenth of the price.

His final point is that Skype is not a great standalone business. 

There is where I sort of disagree with Tom. Skype has amassed an enormous user base and its growing every day.  It’s either Metcalfe’s law or Reed’s law, not sure which, but we are seeing serious non-linear value creation going on in the Skype network.

Tom calls Skype an asset, not a business. I guess the distinction is one has value, the other has cash flow.  If that’s the distinction, I agree with Tom.  But I would be willing to bet that Skype will (and would have if it had stayed independent) generate significant cash flow in the coming years.

My first instinct is to Skype someone if I can.  I only reach for the phone if I have to.  Skype offers me presence detection, the ability to initiate a chat first to set up the call, and then one click and I am talking.  That is a much better user experience for me.  When Skype appears on a mobile device, that’s going to be great too.

The big thing Skype needs to do is open its network to other networks.  I want to be able to Skype someone on AIM, Yahoo, or MSN.  That’s when it will get really interesting.

But back to Tom, I agree that the eBay deal was kind of nutty. And have felt that way since my original post.

But I don’t agree that the $2.6bn was necessarily an overpay.  Maybe for eBay, but not for the asset itself.  It’s a jewel of a business.

Last week I was flying through my blogroll and I saw some cool charts on Bubblegeneration.

I love math and charts.  So I stopped and gave the post a serious read.

Umair said at one point in the post, "This is Metcalfe vs Reed, if you like, although I think several economists were first to these ideas."

I’ve been trying (and sometimes succeeding) to invest in Metcalfe’s law for a long time.  Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network scales with the square of the number of nodes on the network.

V = A + BN^2

Non linear value creation is a wonderful thing.

So I said, who is this guy Reed?  Gotta go figure that one out.

Well I am pretty late to this one.  Reed is David Reed, of the MIT Media Lab, and he published his ideas around group forming networks (GFNs) i.e Reed’s Law in the spring of 1999.

I am going to simplify this because its a blog post, but Reed pointed out that if each node of the network was itself a network (a GFN) then the value of the network scales with the exponential of the number of nodes in the network.

V = A + BN^2 + C2^N

Exponential value creation is way more cool than non-linear value creation.

And that was what Umair was showing in his graphs.  Umair thinks that Google is showing exponential value creation.  Who knows if they are or aren’t?

It’s too early to tell.

Because the thing is A is normally a lot larger than B which is normally a lot larger than C.

For those math challenged readers, that means that the initial value of a business (A) is much larger than the rate at which a network value goes non-linear which in turn is much larger than the rate at which a network goes exponential.

Or, maybe more simply said, you gotta have a boatload of nodes on the network before the non-linear thing starts to matter and you have to have way more than that before the exponential things starts to matter.

I have to give some credit to my favorite math geek entrepreneur here. Tom Evslin took some time away from launching Hackoff.com to send me a long thoughtful email on Reed’s law and its implications for startups.  I know he’s going to blog it, so I won’t frontrun that post, but Tom really helped me think about what this means for startups.

So you’ll be hearing more from me on this topic and hopefully more from Tom too, which I will reblog when he posts it.

Stay tuned.

Summer of 1999 –  we were moving back to the city from the suburbs, Jessica went to sleepaway camp for the first time, and we were obsessed with this record.

Bicycle is a wonderful record.  It’s fresh air running through your hair driving down the highway with the top down with everyone singing the words at the top of their lungs.

Plus it’s got the first song I ever heard with the words "dot com" in it.  And a dog barking at the beginning of that song too.

Every single song on this record is great.

Get it on Amazon.

It’s not available at iTunes or Rhapsody.  Which sucks.

UPDATE: Jackson has started his own Nuggets list.  I’ll try to link to his posts each week when I do mine.  And I bet he’s wrong and I will find one of his to put on my list.

ONE MORE THING:  Since Jackson is doing a Nuggets list and maybe others are doing a similar thing, I’ve created a delicious tag so we can start a linkroll of all the Nuggets posts by anyone doing them. If you create or find a post about a Nugget, simply post it to delicious and tag it with words nuggets and music and share the love.

I am all for transparency with the sole exception of military and espionage stuff.

This blog, my delicious posts, my flickr posts, our podcasts, etc are all about opening up my world, my views, and who I am to everyone so they can make a judgment about me, whether they want to be my friend, share music with me, or show us the opportunity to invest in their company.

I dislike people who hide their views, dodge questions, and are not open.

It is for this reason that I oppose the nomination of John Roberts to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

He actually seems like a decent guy.  He is easy to like.  He’s got a nice family.

He could have been honest, told us what he thinks about the right to privacy, Roe vs Wade, etc.

But instead he said something like "I do not believe I should address issues that could come before the court".

Well what the hell should he address?

His favorite basketball team?

I have had enough of obfuscation, of trying to hide stuff from the american public.

And I have had enough of John Roberts.

I hope and pray his nomination goes down in smoke and teaches judges to be honest about their views before asking for a lifetime nomination to the top court in the land.

The New York Times ran a front page story yesterday called Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.

The Gotham Gal, who has tried mixing work and family a number of different ways posted a very thoughtful response yesterday.

As her husband and the father of two girls who will face this issue in time, I must say that Jessica’s quote at the end of the post is spot on – "It’s tough being a woman".

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the phrase, "its binary, either we succeed or we fail".

Mostly its used to justify some kind of risky financial move, like borrowing a bunch of money instead of doing a safe but dilutive equity financing, or taking on a big lease, or licensing some technology that has large payments out in the future.

The logic goes like this.  It really doesn’t matter what the terms of this deal are because either we make it and the cost of these deals will be manageable, or we don’t make it and we go under and we don’t have to worry about these payments in the future.

But I am telling you that every time I hear this line of reasoning come out of someone’s mouth, I cringe and feel like running away.

Because nothing is binary.  It’s naive to think that way.

The truth is "making it" is an evolutionary thing.

I’ve never seen a business plan executed exactly like it was drawn up on paper.

The best entrepreneurs get into a market and evolve, weave and bob, and get where they want to go with a few twists and turns.

And it always takes more money and more time.

And so when you buy into this "it’s binary" thinking, you are making a huge mistake.

Because just when the bills start coming due, at a point when you thought you’d either have "made it" or not, you will actually be in the middle of your second weave and bob, with not that much to show for it, but lots of promise.

And then the bills will crush you, make it impossible to finance the company, and you’ll be hosed.

I’ve seen this movie and its always ends badly.

Because nothing is binary.

When I did my initial take on Google Blog Search I said that I did not see the spam blogs that Jeff Jarvis was complaining about.

Well I am seeing them now, in spades.

One of the problems with Google building blog search is spammers will build blogs designed to appear in the results pages.

Like this one that links to my blog

Or this one that links to my blog

I sure hope Google has a strategy to get these spam blogs out of the index more quickly than they get in.

Is up now.

The police interview the CFO.

The plot thickens.