Posts from September 2005

Get Yer Ya-Yas Out starts out with the following statement:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, the greatest rock n roll band in the world, The Rolling Stones"

The Gotham Gal and I took the family to see the Stones last night at Giants Stadium and I am happy to report that they remain the greatest rock n roll band in the world.

Last week at Coldplay at the Garden, Josh said to me, "dad, Chris Martin needs to go to the school of rock"

Mick, Keith and the gang don’t need to go to the school of rock because they invented half of those moves.

And last night they showed us that they haven’t forgotten any of them.

I am not suggesting that the Stones are at the peak of their live brilliance which was recorded at Madison Square Garden in 1969 and is available for posterity on Ya Yas, but they really haven’t lost much.

Most importantly, they entertained my whole family for the entire 2 hour show and not once, even past 11pm, did the kids want to go home. Josh said to me as we were leaving that it was the "best rock concert he’s ever been to" and he’s been to a bunch.

Here’s the set list, with color commentary

Start Me Up – of course
You Got Me Rockin – just so so
Shattered – with a NYC intro
Tumblin Dice – great version
Rough Justice – much better live
Ruby Tuesday – i loved it, the kids thought it was weak
Heartbreaker – great, best it could be without Mick Taylor
Night Time Is The Right Time – Ray Charles tune with duet with Lisa Fisher
The Worst – Keith sang a couple tunes while Mick took a break
Infamy – better live too

Then a small "club style" stage breaks off from the main stage with the band on it and starts moving into the crowd.  It ends up at the other end of the floor.  Great effect.  They played four songs on it.

Miss You – with Mick on guitar while stage was moving – a highlight for sure
Oh No, Not You Again – the kids loved it.  their favorite from the new record.
She’s So Cold – I never liked that song
Honky Tonk Woman – while the stage moved back

Out of Control – off Bridges to Babylon – i might have to get that record!

Then they went into a four song rock orgy to finish the main set which consisted of:

Sympathy
JJ Flash
Brown Sugar
Satisfaction

The whole family was up on our chairs dancing and we basically went nuts when they did Satisfaction.

Encores:

You Can’t Always Get What You Want – Josh’s favorite
It’s Ony Rock N Roll – with fireworks to finish

Basically, these guys know how to put on a rock concert and they put one on last night.

The test is if you leave singing the songs.

We sure did that last night.

And we had a blast.

So this blog has crossed the $1000 mark so far this year.

That’s right, over $1000 has been earned so far year to date between Google AdSense and Amazon’s affiliate program.

Most of that money, more than $800, was made with AdSense and is going directly to the Grameen Foundation.

I find this encouraging on all sorts of levels.

But AdSense is still way too inefficient for me.

So I spent some time trying to fix it up a bit.

I’ve moved it back above the fold.

And I’ve changed the color scheme.

And I am going to go back to text only ads.

I may try some other things too.

My goal is to get AdSense to produce over $10/day, up from less than $4/day now, by year end.

Delicious turned 2 years old today.

It’s kind of funny to think that a company so young can have a service so old.

Business Week is running a vote to see what its readers think are the best services on the web.

It’s a noble cause.  There are so many services with new ones popping up every day.

So doing a survey should surface the best,right?

I doubt it.

It will surface which companies do the best job of getting their friends and supporters to go vote.

So in that spirit, if you happen to be fans of delicious or Indeed, please go tell Business Week that.

Vote for delicious

Vote for Indeed

If you like other services, go vote for them too.

You can even write in new services.

So roughly one week after I started my search for a Technorati replacement and just as I was settling into a nice relationship with IceRocket, the 800 pound gorilla (ie Google) finally showed up as we knew they would eventually.

Yes, Google launched blog search and link tracking today. 

Interestingly, they did it under the Blogger brand, not the Google brand.

After playing with it for all of 10 minutes, and doing blog searches on things like Social Bookmarking, Treo 650, Bloc Party, Portastatic, Behavioral Targeting, and more, I have to say Google has done a nice job.

I did not see the spam blogs that Jeff Jarvis noticed, but maybe I didn’t click on enough links to see them.

I don’t entirely understand the brown links at the top called "Top Blogs".  I’ll have to figure out what that is.

The one thing I don’t like is the redirect on every link.  I prefer going direct to the blog like IceRocket does it.  The redirect slows down the experience noticeably.

The link tracking seems very good as well.  They don’t use the "sort by date" results page that IceRocket uses which I really like for link tracking.  The "sort by date" results page really helps me notice what’s new versus what I’ve seen before.

But they do seem to be capturing more blog links more quickly than either Feedster or IceRocket.  IceRocket also seems very slow this morning.  Maybe a lot of people are doing what I was doing, running parallel searches on both.

I noticed that you can’t search for links farther back than March 1st, 2005 with Google.  I guess that is how far back Google’s blog search index goes.  That is interesting in its own right.

Feedster goes a long way back and they have captured 3,062 links to my blog going back to January 11, 2004.

IceRocket and Google both seemed to start crawling my blog around the same time.  Google started March 1st of this year and IceRocket apparently started on April 14th of this year.  Google has amassed 946 links in the 6 and 1/2 months they’ve been crawling it.  IceRocket has amassed 894 links in the 6 months they’ve been crawling it.  Both average out to 4.9 links per day so that tells me that Google and IceRocket are picking up basically the same links.

So, I am going to put Google on my link tracking list on the left sidebar and start using it along with IceRocket and Feedster.

And I am going to start using Google blog search to look for stuff on blogs more often.  I am not sure its the best, but its certainly good enough for most people.

After all, they are the Starbucks of the Internet.

I was talking yesterday to a couple friends about how you can tell if a VC will do the things they say they’ll do when trying to get into a deal.

One of my friends said, "watch what they do, not what they say they’ll do".

And it reminded me of Bliss, one of partners at Euclid where I first learned the VC business, who would always say about entrepreneurs, "watch what they do, not what they say".

It’s good advice for everyone involved in the VC equation.  People say lots of things and many of them turn out to be untrue.  Not necessarily because they are lying, although there are certainly plenty of liars in the startup world on both sides of the table. 

But more often its just human nature.  People believe they are doing one thing when in fact they are doing something completely different and they don’t realize it.

A VC might say, "we are really active investors, we’ll fly anywhere at any time to help our companies".  They’ve said this so many times, to their investors (LPs), to their partners, and to their portfolio companies, that they believe its true.  And in some cases it is.  But in many cases, it isn’t true.

How do you find out?  Ask around.  See what they actually do, not what they say they do.

An entrepreneur might say, "I only hire people who can replace me within a couple years".  They want to believe its true.  They’ve said it so many times; to the people they recruit, to their board, to potential investors.  But in fact, the entrepreneur only hires order takers who will do what they are told and who do not threaten the entrepreneur. 

If you have the opportunity to watch someone in action, to observe their behavior, you will find the truth every time.  The longer you can observe someone, the better.  Sometimes patterns of behavior develop over longer periods of time.

And that’s a problem because many times you need to make a decision about someone, whether or not to take their money, whether or not to invest in their company, whether or not to hire them, and you have only a month or two to make that decision.

So I have two suggestions:

First – Create as many situations in the short period as you can where you can observe how the person behaves in revealing ways. Spend as much time with the person as you can.

Second – Ask around.  This is harder because nobody likes to give a bad reference.  So you have to listen to what the people don’t say as much as what they do say.  You also have to find people (possibly via LinkedIn or some other network) that you know well who also knows the person well.

It’s critical to find out what people actually do.  Because talk is cheap and you can’t rely on what people say.  When it comes to people, watch what they do, not what they say.

I want to repurpose a bunch of content that is in this blog. 

I’ll let you all know why I am doing that shortly.

My plan is to create an RSS feed by self tagging certain of my posts in delicious.

But I need a tool that reposts from the RSS feed into Moveable Type.

Does anyone know of a tool/service that will do that for me?

If you do, please leave a comment or email me.

I’ve talked about this before, but I want to say it again.

The problem with podcasts is you can’t link to a specific part of the podcast.  You can link to the entire MP3, but if there is a funny joke or a great song, you can’t highlight that and take me right to  it.

Last week I was walking to work and listening to the one of the earlier Smoke and Mirrors podcasts which is no longer available online (another problem – need permalinks).

Jackson played a great tune that was apparently lifted from the Expensive Wino sessions at Keith Richards’ home in Connecticut and then treated to a superdub. I instantly wanted to blog it, but could not.  Jackson sent me the MP3 and here it is in case there are any Keith Richards/Stones fans out there who want to sample it.

We need the ability to link into a specific point in the podcast and we need good inexpensive hosting services so people can keep their podcasts up forever the way we keep our blog posts up forever.  What’s a permalink worth if its not permanent?

I am a fan of podcasting and have even called myself a podhead in a prior post.  I listen to at least five and sometimes as many as ten podcasts a week.  Yet we have not made any of the podcast related investments that have been out there to make.  I guess that even with all my enthusiam for podcasting as a creator of them, a listener of them, and an advocate of them, I still find myself in the camp of David, Jeff, and Russell for now.

David Beisel just wrote a great post and got himself on my blogroll (whatever that is worth – but it means I am going to read him every day going forward).

He lists the seven things that will quickly kill a young startup.

He pretty much nails it.

I’d like to emphasize a few of them.

Authenticity – David says, "most successful entrepreneurial endeavors are sprung from a genuine
idea born from true experience or direct & tangible observation."  Exactly.  I remember 1999 and 2000 when investment bankers were leaving wall street and sitting around in their apartments and dreaming up a "dot com".  That didn’t work.  We look for entrpreneurs who have lived the pain point they intend to address.

Communication – David says, "Rapid progress and constant adjustment in a new endeavor requires continuous communication of these changes."  It’s hard to scale a company if the founder keeps all the ideas, plans, and priorities in his/her head.

Focus – David says, "The beauty of a startup is that there are endless possibilities. The
difficulty is to concentrate on one opportunity, not every opportunity.
The sooner that a new company can find its focus and make strides, the
better."  Charlie says a similar thing in his 10 Steps post – "Solve the smallest possible problem (that is still big enough
to matter) for the user and know exactly what problem you’re trying to
solve."

Do David a favor and post and tag his post in delicious.  This one is prime for the popular list.