Posts from November 2005

Positively 10th Street

Our new weekly podcast is up.

The whole family got together for this podcast after going to see the new Harry Potter movie. We reviewed the movie, talked about some concerts we saw this week, and heard about Emily’s class trip to Williamsburg. At the end, the whole family gave me a hard time about being sick this weekend.

Here’s the song list:

Jessica’s Song – We Drink On The Job – Earlimart
Emily’s Song – Always Love – Nada Surf
Josh’s Song – Backstreets – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Joanne’s Song – Sunken Treasure – Wilco
Fred’s Song – Feltham Is Singing Out – Hard-Fi

Listen live here.

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes (version 4.9 or higher), then
select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the
box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

#My Music

Living On The Edge (the rise of the edge feeders)

I believe that the value in any network is created on the edge. 

That’s where my blog sits.  That’s where Gotham Gal’s blog sits.  That’s where Ted’s blog sits.

That is not where Google Base sits.  Google Base is in the center.

In the freebase model, you give your content to Google and they keep it.

In the myspace model, you create your content on your page and you keep it.

I am for the myspace model and against the freebase model.  And so is most everyone I know who has spent anytime thinking about this stuff.

Michael Arrington says this on CrunchNotes this morning:

Google Base has a lot of problems. The big one for me
is that is another centralized content play, when all of the really
interesting content is created at the edge. Jeff points out some other
issues with Base, including the fact that the data is not only
centralized but there is no API for non-Google search engines to access
the data.

Jeff Jarvis says this on Buzzmachine this morning:

If I were a VC, I’d be investing in a company that tries to use tags and microformats and social interaction to link together the topics and opinions and information people care about
on that distributed web. For that’s the company that won’t waste effort
and expense trying to get people to change their behavior and reverse
the natural flow of the web out to the edges — ‘come to us and give us
your good stuff’ — but instead takes advantage of the essence of the
web and leaves control out at those edges by saying: ‘We know you have
good stuff and we’re going to help people find it.’ The consumer
proposition is then clear: This is how you find the good stuff. This
will be the real successor to and competitor against Google. Oh, Google
could do it, too, but judging by Base, they’re not doing that. They’re taking control rather than giving it.

Well I am a VC and I sure would like to find "the real successor to Google" so I pay attention when someone as smart as Jeff is giving free advice to me and my colleagues.

But as a content creator living on the edge, I am not sure we are ready for microformats and tags and social interaction to do all the work for us.  We’ll get there, I am sure of that, but we need an interim step and that step are services that feel centralized but are really application specific edge feeders.  I need a better word for these services, but for now I’ll call them the edge feeders.

What edge feeders do is provide mechanisms to faciliate the content creation on the edge.

Flickr is an edge feeder and the best one I know of.  I could take my photos and simply post them to my blog.  But I don’t do that.  I put them on Flickr and then from Flickr, I post them to my blog.  Flickr makes that dead simple.  But they also give me a badge to show aggregated photos. And they let me post other’s photos to my blog.  They are the photo feeder of the blog world.

Blip.tv, vimeo, and youtube are the video feeders.  I could post a video directly to my blog, but I don’t.  I post it to vimeo, youtube, or blip.tv, and then from there I post it to my blog.  These services are rolling out lots of video specific blog integration techniques that will make it even easier to be a video content creator living on the edge.

Delicious is a link feeder.  I could post a linkroll to my blog, but I don’t.  I use delicious to host all of my links, and I use a tag (mine is linkroll) to feed my linkroll.  Delicious makes it easier to be a link content creator living on the edge.

And the service that got Jeff, Michael, and me talking about all of this today, Riffs, can be a feeder too. Jeff points out in the same post that I quoted from above that, "Gotham Gal has all kinds of
reviews already on her blog."

Yes, Gotham Gal writes a lot of reviews.  But its a pain to do that.  She’s got to find a permalink of the movie, restaurant, record, book, whatever.  She’s got to find a thumbnail.  And then once she’s done all that, she can blog it.

A review/opinion feeder will do all that for you. When I review a record, I go to Amazon because its the one place I know that I can find a permalink and a thumbnail.  I use Amazon as my review/opinion feeder.  But its not built to do that. It has no blog integration other than what Typepad has built for them on top of Amazon’s API.

Riffs has some work to do if it wants to be a review/opinion feeder but that’s an opportunity that is worth pursuing.

The other thing these feeders do, as pointed out by Bruce Spector (one of the people who built Riffs) in his comment on Jeff’s post, is that feeders also make great lightweight blog platforms for those who may not be willing to make the committment to seriously blog.

Mark Ghuniem has an amazing blog that is built on delicious

Missinfo has an amazing video/audio blog that is built on blip.tv

Thomas Hawk has an amazing photo blog that is built on Flickr

Some of these people have blogs, some don’t, but these application specific blogs they’ve built on these edge feeders are really compelling, more compelling than most blogs I come across.

So to summarize, centralized is bad, really bad.  It won’t work in the world we are headed into where all the value is created on the edge. But just because a web service has a centralized organizing structure doesn’t mean it is centralized.  The key is what they do to feed the edge. If they can become an application specific edge feeder, and the best of its kind, then they will help facilitate a massive amount of content creation on the edge and will also build a centralized organizing system (like Flickr’s interestingness) that can create enormous value.  If the centralized organizing system itself can be distributed out to the edge, then its a home run.

In reading this over a couple times, I hope this isn’t too dense and obtuse.  It makes a lot of sense to me.  I hope it makes sense to you too.

#VC & Technology

Online Music Musings - Snocap and Mashboxx

Saul Hansell has a long front page business section story this morning in the New York Times on Snocap, Mashboxx, and the idea of a legit peer to peer music service.

I must say that I have been a fan of this concept ever since I heard about it a couple years ago.  The idea is pretty simple.  Snocap creates an index (they call it a registry) of all the files it finds on the peer to peer networks, no matter what it is.  It creates a digital signature of the file so that it can be reconciled against a content owner’s catalog. This allows Neil Young to find all of his music that is out on the peer to peer networks by simply giving Snocap his catalog. Snocap does the reconciliation.

Then Snocap allows the content owner (ie Neil Young) to register (or claim) its content in the registry and set rules and prices for it.

The key to this model is the participation of the peer to peer networks.  If a peer to peer network participates in the Snocap model, they will check Snocap’s registry before allowing a file to be pulled off the network.  If the file has been registered (claimed) then the rules that the content owner has imposed will be enforced.

The reason I have been a fan of this model is that I believe peer to peer networks are better than closed systems like iTunes. They include most, if not all, of the music that is available online because the users are the ones creating the network (peer production).  Peer to peer networks include bootlegs, mashups, and most anything you’d ever want to find.  So the peer to peer networks are comprehensive whereas iTunes is not.  Further, peer to peer networks are efficient in the distribution of the files.  They scale much faster and are extremely reliable.

Of course, the peer to peer networks have also been free which is certainly the biggest reason why 10 times more music is consumed on the peer to peer networks than music stores like iTunes.

As I said, the key to this model is the participation of the peer to peer networks.  To date, they have not embraced Snocap’s model.  But that is changing.  Enter Mashboxx, the legit peer to peer network formed out of the ashes of Grokster and with the endorsement of Sony Music.  Mashboxx has agreed to use Snocap’s system and so if you use Mashboxx as your peer to peer client, you will be asked to pay for content that has been claimed by its owner.

I use peer to peer networks all the time to get music that isn’t available on iTunes or some other legit online music store.  I’d be happy to pay for the privledge, but have never been asked to do so.  I suppose that makes me a thief, but I suggest that it makes me a lost customer instead.

So when Mashboxx launches, I will gladly use it and pay for the music I am finding on peer to peer networks that is not on iTunes.

But I have two and half big issues with this model that I cannot wrap my head around and that is why I am not more enthusiastic about Snocap and Mashboxx.

First, and most important, are the intentions of the content owners.  We have learned that we cannot trust them to understand the value of online distribution.  The last line in this paragraph in Saul Hansell’s article is what concerns me:

Then they will enter into the registry the terms on which those files
can be traded. It could be just like iTunes – pay 99 cents, and you own
it – or it could be trickier: listen to it five times free, then buy it
if you like it. Or it could be beneficent: listen to it free forever
and (hopefully) buy tickets to the artist’s next concert. Of course,
the rights holders could also play tough: this is not for sale or for
trading, and you can’t have it.

If that’s the approach they take, I’ll just keep using Limewire.  Content I can’t have isn’t an acceptable answer in my book.  I understand that there are rights issues.  But I don’t really care about them.  If its available online, I’ll get it one way or another and you can’t sue all of america just because you’ve made some stupid deals on the rights to your content.

My second issue is that I don’t want to pay everytime I consume music.  That’s why I like music dial tone (ie Rhapsody, Yahoo Music Unlimited, etc).  I want to pay a set monthly fee, $15, $10, $5, I honestly don’t care as long as its reasonable.  And then I want to consume as much music as I want without having to whip out the credit card every time.

And pricing by the song is tricky territory as Joel Spolsky describes in this insightful post about pricing entertainment and the signal it sends to the consumer.

If Mashboxx or some other service can make an "unlimited" deal with the content owners, then they will be on to something really big.  Until then, a legit peer to peer network is still a stop gap measure in my mind.

My "half issue" is the consumer reaction.  Will the dogs eat the dog food?  We have trained a ton of music consumers that the content is free.  Will they start paying if we make it easy to pay, price it fairly, and provide a comprehensive set of online music?  In theory, yes.  But in practice, it may not work out that way.

I hope this works out at least well enough to encourage the content creators and the content owners to continue to move in the direction of peer to peer networks, open and comprehensive catalogs, and easy payment mechanisms.

It’s a step in the right direction and potentially a big step.  But I have been trained by the lessons of the online music disaster to be skeptical and I remain so.

#VC & Technology

Riffing

There’s a new web service launched every day it seems.  In fact, Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft are each launching new web services almost daily, certainly at least weekly.

So it’s hard to keep track of all of them.  But we try and services like TechCrunch help a lot.

In order to understand all of these services, you have to actually use them and that’s pretty time consuming.

One service that I like launched quietly yesterday.  It’s called Riffs. It’s a recommendation and reviews service, much like epinions, but with a social networking bent and blog integration.

The Gotham Gal writes a weblog and much of what she does is reviews.  Gotham Gal is mostly a riff blog.  For those of you who’d like to rant and rave, but don’t want to blog, there is Riffs.

You can go there, sign up, and start riffing.  You’ll also benefit from all the riffing that others are doing via Riffs’ recommendation engine.

The cool thing about Riffs is that they’ve loaded in a huge database of stuff that you might like to riff on; music, books, gadgets, restaurants, events, travel destinations, cars, etc.  So you don’t have to load in the item to riff on it. But if you do want to load in the item, you can post with a bookmarket like delicious.

I’ve been riffing this morning and I’ve added a Riff Roll to my blog on the lower right, below my Flickr bagde.  As I riff, you’ll see my raves.

It will be interesting to watch and see what develops as more people use it.

#VC & Technology

Partisanship's Coming Home To Roost

I read somewhere recently that over 70 percent of Republicans think that George Bush is doing a good job and something less than 20 percent of Democrats think so.  When asked the question if the country is going in the right direction, you get similar numbers.  We have distinct and very different points of view in this country about our leadership and direction.

And now we have this tension spilling out into the open on the floor of the House.

The war in Iraq is clearly a part of this debate, but so is economic policy, environmental policy, abortion politics, supreme court nominations, and the classic second term stench of corruption that is emanating from washington these days.

John Warner, elder statesman of the Republican party, was quoted in the NY Times this morning saying:

"Today’s debate in the House of Representatives shows the need for
bipartisanship on the war in Iraq, instead of more political posturing"

I am afraid you can’t ask for bipartisanship when you’ve crafted your whole governing approach on partisanship. That’s coming home to roost now and its not going to be pretty.  We do need a mature, honest, informed, and open debate about the wisdom of staying in Iraq and also about a withdrawl plan, if that is what is going to happen. But in the poisoned atmoshpere that exists in Washington these days, that’s not likely to happen.

#Politics

Down In The Flood - Minstrel Music

Jason Chervokas is back with another episode of Down In The Flood.

This episode is called The Minstrel Roots of Country.

Jason is am amazement to me. I have no idea where he gets all this old music and the history behind it.  But I am thankful that he shares this music and the history with all of us.

I have just listened to this one twice and its great.

If you want to listen live, you can do that here.

Or you can subscribe to the feed in iTunes and listen on your iPod.

Thanks Jason.

#My Music

A Match Made In Heaven

Seth_and_lewSeth Goldstein has finally made public (on his blog of course) his partnership with Lew Ranieri.  The two of them are building a company together called ROOT Markets.

For those of you who don’t know who Lew is, he’s the father of the collateralized mortgage market which revolutionized the housing finance market in the 1980s.

Seth and Lew have designs on doing the same thing for Internet advertising and lead generation. They see an online advertising market which is large but still relatively inefficient and want to use the same formulas used on wall street to open up the mortgage market.

Seth calls it "Wall Street Meets Madison Avenue" in his long and thoughtful post on his partnership with Lew and the ideas behind ROOT Markets.

For those of you who aren’t inclined to click on the link, I’ll give you my favorite part of the post:

In the same way that the mortgage security market transferred credit
risk away from the balance sheet of operators and into the portfolios
of professional investors, a media futures market will enable
non-advertisers (aka speculators) to take on the risk from the balance
sheets of publishers.  Publishers will be happy to hedge out their
inventory, limit earnings volatility, and focus entirely on creating
value-added programming; rather than spending their time speculating
whether CPMs are going up or down.

Similarly, companies (ie the buy-side) can concentrate entirely on
developing better products and service.  Their marketing groups can
focus on creating and communicating their brand images, while their
sales organizations can simply specify the kinds of customers they are
looking for and the prices they are willing to pay; the Media Futures
market will take care of the rest.

It’s a big idea with plenty of execution risks in front of them, but it’s fascinating to watch these two guys bring the lessons of wall street in the late 70s to the online ad market in 2005.

The tagline of Seth’s blog is "somewhere between Madison Avenue and Wall Street lives the future of both".  If you live in NYC, you know that historically Madison Avenue was in midtown and Wall Street was downtown.

ROOT Markets, Union Square Ventures, and most of the interesting companies working in the online business in NYC are located between Soho and 34th Street.  I totally agree that between Wall Street and Madison Avenue lies the future of both.

#VC & Technology

Happy Birthday Born To Run

Born_to_runRecords can be like old friends who you haven’t seen in a while but immediately get you right back to where you left off.

So it is with Born To Run.  I left this record off my top 50 and went with Darkness which I slightly prefer.

I hadn’t listened to Born To Run much lately, but Bruce’s rendition of Backstreets plus the 30th birthday celebration have gotten me right back where I left off.

So in the past several days, I’ve listened to the record a bunch. The piano intros to these songs are so great. 30 years ago these were teenage anthems. Today, they are works of art.  A masterpiece actually.

I’ve also listeed to all seven Born To Run podcasts, which come from the Wings For Wheels DVD about the making of Born To Run. If you are a fan of the Boss, I strongly suggest giving these podcasts a listen.

And in the grand finale of my personal celebration, I am watching the DVD of the 1975 Born To Run tour show from London’s Hammersteinsmith Odeon. Bruce and the E Street Band were sure something special to behold in the winter of 1975. 

Jersey street punk soul.  So good.

#My Music

Nuggets

I am in big time Jeff Tweedy/Wilco mood this morning after seeing Jeff live last night.

So I am going to give you a Nugget that almost made my top 50.

Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s daughter, wanted to have new music set to Woody’s "lost songs".  The "lost songs" are lyrics to which Woody had music set
in his head, but where he had never published the music.

MermaidShe recruited Billy Bragg and Wilco to do the music and in 1998 they put out a record called Mermaid Avenue, named after the street in Coney Island where Woodie spent his later years (and where a young Bob Dylan found him when he got to NYC).

Woodie Guthrie wrote wonderful songs, many of which we all know by heart.  These songs are more of the same.  The powerful simplicity of the words are trademark Guthrie.

Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy do more than justice to these songs.  They made an amazing record.  There are a number of songs on this record that have become classic Wilco numbers, including California Stars, At My Window Sad and Lonely, and One By One.

Billy Bragg contributes some great songs too, including Walt Whitman’s Niece, Ingrid Bergman, and The Unwelcome Guest (with Jeff doing backing vocals).

If you haven’t heard this record, you owe it yourself to do that, and soon.

#My Music