Posts from October 2005

I tried out audioscrobbler last year and found it really interesting, but not sticky.

The idea is that you upload your iTunes xml file to audioscrobbler and they analyze what you listen to and recommend new stuff you should like.

That approach works pretty well at Amazon and we use it to find new music there all the time.

But audioscrobbler was missing something.

Earlier this year, they added a web front end called last.fm on top of audioscrobbler. 

I’ve had it on my "to do list" for months to check out last.fm and I finally got around to doing it this weekend.

So far, I like it.

Here is my last.fm page.  You can see what I’ve been listening to.

You can also see my neighbors, who are people who like the same kind of music I do.

I don’t think I know any of these people, but I’ve checked out their last.fm pages and they do indeed like the same kind of music I like.

I could think of so many things I would love to do with this list of like minded music fans. 

For example, how about the band that is most listened to among my neighbors that I haven’t listened to?

Maybe that’s possible in last.fm but I haven’t found it.

I know a lot of people like Pandora.

I signed up for it during the summer and tried it out. It didn’t do it for me.  I don’t want a computer recommending music for me.  I want people doing it.  As Ross Mayfield said at the Web 2.0 conference, "Web 2.0 is about people".  I totally agree.  That’s what turns me on about last.fm.

The one thing I really wish for is a Rhapsody agent for audioscrobller/last.fm.  I listen to as much or more Rhapsody as iTunes.  And it’s usually the new music that I am discovering that happens on Rhapsody.  As long as last.fm is missing my Rhapsody listens, it won’t be a true representation of what I am listening to right now.

But I am still into last.fm and am going to play around with it some more.

I’ve incorporated a link to my last.fm page on My Music Links about halfway down the left sidebar on this blog.

It would be great if they had a "badge" like Flickr where I could showcase my most recent listens.

If you listen to a lot of music on your computer, give last.fm a try.  You might like it as much as I do.

Our new weekly podcast is up.

The girls were all out and Josh and his friend Ben and I were watching the Jets play (and ultimately lose to) the Bills. We decided to do this week’s show with Ben as our guest. It was fun even though the Jets game was a bit of a downer.

Here’s the song list:

Four Fellas Song – Sheena Is A Punk Rocker – The Ramones

Fred’s Song – Like A Rolling Stone (demo) – Bob Dylan
Josh’s Song – Sympathy For The Devil – The Rolling Stones
Ben’s Song – Acadian Driftwood – The Band
Fred’s Song – Destroyer – Crooked Fingers

Listen live here.

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes version 5, then
select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the
box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

Two weeks from today, I’ll be at Tedstock.

Regular readers of this blog may have seen this logo running in my sidebar.

In fact 84 of you have clicked through from the logo to find out that Tedstock is a rock concert.

But not just any rock concert.

It’s the 40th birthday of my brother Ted, who is also known as Jackson in the blog world and spends most of his days making or recording music at a recording studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called Smoke and Mirrors.

Tedstock will take place in Williamsburg at The Trash Bar.

It will be a benefit for Autism Awareness which is a great cause.

And it will be One Day of No Peace (ie it will rock).

The show is open to the general public.

The Four Fellas will open Tedstock at 4:30pm.

The rest of the show goes like this:
Geek Farm – 5:15
The Lost Patrol – 6:00
Via Skyway – 7:00
Microdot – 8:00
The Horse You Rode In On – 9:00
#12 Rock and Roll Noodle – 10:00
The X’s – 11:00
Just One – 12:00
Figo 1:00

If you know any of these bands, if you want to support Autism Awareness, if you want to spend close to 12 hours (or just one hour) listening to rock and roll, or if you just want to wish Ted a happy 40th, we’d love to see you there.

There has been a fair amount of discussion in the blog world about the bidding war going on for AOL.

Jeff Jarvis reminds everyone that AOL is a "nightmare".

Henry Blodget says there are pros and cons for everyone in such a scenario.

What do I say?

AOL is an aging online business whose audience consists mainly of people who have shown no desire to step out and join the roll your own web that is emerging as the best place to be.

It may be of some value to the big guys as Henry lays out, but its a brand with problem and it may be a big problem.

According to Media Metrix, AOL’s audience has been flat at 85 million unique visitors a month for the past year.  It has a reach of about 53% of the total Internet audience and that has also been flat for the past year.

If it were removed from the other Time Warner online properties, alone its audience size would be tied with Google for third after Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Remember, at one time AOL was the biggest thing on the Internet.  It’s demise has been slow and sad to watch, but it is a declining asset and Time Warner has not done nearly enough to energize it and turn it around.

Don’t get me wrong though, I am a fan of many of the moves that Jon Miller and his team have made, the main one being the move to a fully web centered business.  But it took too long, way too long, to make this move.  That’s not Jon’s fault.  It’s Time Warner’s fault.  They weren’t willing to walk away from the dial-up business back in 2000/2001 when the writing was on the wall for that business model.

As I was working my way through the Media Metrix report getting the numbers that I quoted above, I came across a stat that honestly shocked me.

Here are the six web properties with the most pages viewed (remember ads run is mostly equal to pages viewed on the web):

Yahoo! – 43,700MM
Time Warner – 31,600MM (AOL is roughly 70% of this)
Microsoft – 21,800MM (MSN is part of this)
eBay – 10,900MM
MySpace – 9,600MM
Google – 6,300MM

Notwithstanding the somewhat interesting fact that Google is a relatively small page view generator, which makes sense given their reliance on search, the shocking fact is how fast MySpace is catching up to the big guys.

And what’s even more amazing is that MySpace’s page views have grown 50% in the past three months.

Web 2.0 baby!

But I am not really surprised by this because of what is happening in my house.

The Gotham Gal and I left AOL years ago, opting for Netscape for web browsing and email in 1996 and AIM for instant messaging a couple years later. We’ve never looked back. Never.

But we’ve kept not one, but two AOL accounts for my kids.

But the girls are never on AOL since falling in love with MySpace earlier this year.  They do continue to use AIM, but they "live" on MySpace.  It’s the first page they look at when they log on and the last they look at when they log off at night.

I see what’s happening.  AOL is losing its core audience of IM/email driven teenagers to MySpace and they are losing it fast.

And MySpace is ramping big time.

If MySpace could grow its page views 50% per quarter for another six months, they’d have close to 15,000MM pages viewed per month by year end, and would catch Microsoft and AOL by March of 2006.

Don’t bet against them.

Who is the smartest guy on the Internet right now?

Maybe not Sergey and Larry.

Maybe Rupert Murdoch.

Does $500mm sound like a bargain?  It does to me.

We like to make our initial investment sometime between the formation of a business and the first dollar of revenue coming in the door.  Sometimes that time period lasts a while.  In the interim, how do you monitor how an investment is doing?  Even after revenue starts rolling in, its helpful to have alternative metrics to monitor the growth and health of a business.

What we do is develop metrics for each investment, usually jointly with the management team, that we will use to monitor progress.

I know that this smacks of the bubble era when public companies were being valued on the basis of page views. But absent revenues, earnings, and cash flows, you need something to work with.

Page views are one metric that we look at.  Another is unique visitors per day, week, month. With the advent of RSS, its important to monitor how much consumption happens via that channel.

Most of our companies do something that is more than just content on a website.  So we like to identify a company specific metric and monitor that.

In the case of Indeed, we like to watch the number of searches per month.

In the case of Delicious, we like to watch the number of postings per month.

In the case of Tacoda, we like to watch the amount of behavioral data being captured in the TAN network.

We do not attempt to turn these numbers into a valuation.  That kind of thinking is foreign to us.  I read recently that the Weblogs/AOL deal values blogs at $600 to $900 per inbound link.  That would make this blog worth $2.3 million.  I am not a seller at that price or any price, but that still seems like a crazy way to value something.

What we do is use these numbers to monitor our investment thesis and make sure the opportunity is playing out the way we think it will.  And we use them to find places where we need to work harder on the service to make it better.  And we use them to show new hires, new partners, and new investors that the business is on a solid trajectory.

I was emailing with my friend Tom Evslin yesterday about some data he was looking for. I called him a "data junkie".  It was a compliment.  He wrote back that:

We gotta know whether
we’re making this stuff up or it’s real

Exactly.

Web based businesses have incredible amounts of data that they spit out. It is critical that the management team and investors monitor that data closely to keep a handle on the business and its progress.  It’s a skill we work on every day.

The Gotham Gal is a fan of Paste Magazine.

They have this column called Four To Watch and this month they featured The Magic Numbers.

So we played the record on Rhapsody last weekend.

And we haven’t stopped playing it since then.

Maybe the music goes with the non stop rain we’ve had since last weekend.

Who knows?

But in any case, its time I shared our secret.

This is a great debut record.  I almost don’t want to describe it.   

I will say that its pretty mellow, relaxing, great chill out music.  Amazing melodies.

Just get the record and listen to it.

My first post on the video iPod prompted some good debate in the comments.

Last night we were sitting around the kitchen table talking about the video content that is available via iTunes.

Jessica said that she doesn’t watch Desperate Housewives.

Emily said that iTunes needs to make a deal with Fox (The OC) and WB.

I told them to forget about paying for video on iTunes.

That we were gonna synch the video iPod to the Tivo.

Their eyes lit up.  Wow Dad, can we do that?

Honestly, I wasn’t sure we could.  But after reading this post, I think its possible.

I am going to try to make this work once we get our video iPod.

This record is not for everyone.

The Flaming Lips are an acquired taste.

And old Flaming Lips are even more of an acquired taste.

But like a single malt scotch, once you acquire the taste, it’s a great one.

Of all the old Flaming Lips records, the one I like best is called Transmissions from the Satellite Heart.

It has She Don’t Use Jelly on it, which Josh featured on last week’s Positively 10th Street.  But it also has Turn It On, Be My Head, and a bunch of other wonderful tunes.

It’s weird, distorted, noisy, and wonderful.

Check it out

On Amazon

On iTunes

On Rhapsody.

Brad says web services are different than the things we’ve been investing in IT for the past 20 years.

And he explains why.

Check it out on UnionSquareVentures.com.