Posts from February 2006

I am now moderating all my comments and track backs to eliminate comment and track back spam.  I wish there were an automated way to do this, but I have not found one that works for me.

I hate moderating comments for a bunch of reasons, mostly because I need to do it at least three or four times a day and because the people who post them don’t get the immediate result of seeing their comment posted.

But there is one other reason that I hate moderating comments.  I do not want to censure censor the readers of this blog.  I have never deleted a comment that was posted (even if it was insulting to me personally) as long as there wasn’t pornography or hate speech in it.

But when you look at the comments and have to decide to let them in or not, it puts you in a different place.

Today, I am faced with a comment on my Heather Wilson post that is really offensive to me.  The commenter who otherwise makes a pretty decent point about knee jerk liberalism stepped over the line with a really offensive comment about the gay marriage issue.

And so for the first time in the two plus years that I have been blogging, I am not going to let a comment go up on my blog.

It really pains me to do this.

The Gotham Gal was at a dinner party this past week with a bunch of smart people we know and the discussion turned to Wikipedia.  A comment was made that 50% of Wikipedia is wrong.

Talk about wrong.  100% of that comment is wrong.

The truth is that >95%+ of Wikipedia is true and there are thousands of people who make it their business every day to make that number go higher and higher. The BBC recently published a study by British academics that backed up the accuracy of Wikipedia.

But there are some concerns for sure.  I spent time on Wikipedia doing research on Heather Wilson prior to posting my thoughts on her.  I had to pause and wonder if what I was reading was true.

Because the NY Times had a piece in the editorial section about senate and congressional staffers editing out parts of Wikipedia entries on their bosses today.  That is so uncool. 

Tom Harkin, Norm Coleman, Dianne Feinstein, and Joe Biden’s entries were mentioned as examples of entries that had seen mysterious edits of embarassing items.

Well those politicians just went down one more notch in my opinion of them.  If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.  The truth may hurt, but if its the truth, it should not be edited out of Wikipedia.

UPDATE:  The 95% number I use in this post is based on my personal experience.  If you read the comments, there are people who think that’s too high.  One commenter says "I liken it more to 80/15/5 accurate/not quite right/incorrect". Whatever the number, its not 50% by a long shot.

So who is this Republican women congresswoman who had the nerve to stand up the President and tell him that she has "serious concerns" about his domestic eavesdropping program?

Well she’s my age (actually six months older than me).  She shares my last name.  She’s a gaduate of the Air Force Academy and a Rhodes Scholar.

And in addition to national security, her pet projects are jobs, public education, health care, and simplifying the tax code.

But she’s pro-life, had a tizzy fit over Janet Jackson’s nipples being shown at halftime, and took a ton of money from Delay and Abramoff.

I wouldn’t vote for her, but I am glad she has the guts to stand up to the President and tell him when he’s wrong.  He could use more friends like that.

There aren’t that many records that you keep coming back to year after year.

For some reason, that is particularly true of the newer records in our collection.

But there is one record which came out in 2000 that we still listen to fairly often.

It’s from a guy named Damon Gough, a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy and the record is called The Hour of the Bewilderbeast.

Apparently it’s a song cycle detailing the life of a romantic relationship.  I never knew that until I read it on Amazon this morning.

They call it futuristic folk.  I call it great.

It’s a bit like 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields, which made my Nuggets list late last year.

These records take a while to fall in love with.  But with repeated listens they sink into your consciousness and never leave it.

Great stuff.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that Valleywag is over the top?

I am really not interested in the private lives of people when they leave work.

Maybe others are, but I find it really distateful.

It’s out of my feed reader as of now.

  On Top Of South Mountain 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

One of my friends and fellow VCs suggested we blow off lunch and go mountain biking instead.

What a tremendous idea.  Right behind the hotel where DEMO was held there is a state park called South Mountain Preserve.

We took the Mormon trail up and the National trail down.  I have never ridden a trail as "technical" as the National trail and ended up walking down a fair amount of it.

But it was a blast and the views were stunning.  A great two hour diversion from a really great conference.

I have spent some time watching the Senate Commerce Committee hearings on whether telcos and cable companies can charge web services a fee for delivering service to their customers.

I have blogged about this issue before and I will reiterate that this is about jealousy and greed plain and simple.

Let’s take Google since they are front and center in this debate with Vin Cerf representing them before the Senate. Users love Google.  Google gives them a lot of value and its free.  Even the ads are relevant.  One of the reasons people pay Verizon, Bell South, and AT&T a monthly fee is so they can use Google.

Google is a value added service that runs on the carrier’s networks.  It ADDS VALUE to their networks. Without it, the carriers would have a LESS VALUABLE service.  And yet they want Google to pay them for improving their service.  This is nuts.

Let’s talk about bit torrent.  It sucks up a bunch of bandwidth on the carriers networks.  But it sucks up less than video streaming.  It’s a more efficient service than what came before it. The carriers should be happy that Bit Torrent showed up.  It makes consuming video more popular.  It’s going to drive demand for more bandwidth, which at the end of the day is what the carriers sell.

Let’s talk about Skype. It’s a fantastic service. It is more efficient than VOIP services that don’t run on P2P networks. And it is ten times easier and better to use than the crappy plain old telephone service (POTS) that still generates most of the revenues for these carriers.  Skype tells me if the person I want to talk to is available BEFORE I make the call.  And it lets me IM with the person if they are on another call. Why didn’t the carriers invent this service?  Because they were getting fat and happy by charging exorbitant fees for bad services.

If the government lets the carriers get away with this greedy move, I will discontinue Internet service from any carrier who seeks to get paid by the value added services.  And I will encourage everyone else I know to do the same. 

Surely there is some new carrier eager for AT&T’s customers who will align themselves with these value added services.  I’d rather buy my Internet access from a company who understands how valuable Google, Bit Torrent, and Skype is to me and how much of a commodity their Internet access is.

Frankly I don’t really care what the government concludes on this issue.  Because I am confident that the market will speak.  The web services companies aren’t going to stand for a tax without putting up a big fight.  And they have way more customer loyalty than the carriers.  Who has a better brand – Google or AT&T?  Skype or Verizon?

What the carriers need to do is develop better and more reliable services. EVDO is a good example of something they’ve done right. Give us more bandwidth in more places with more price/value options. Why don’t we have a 12mb down/3mb up Internet service in NYC?  Apparently they have it in France.  Why doesn’t Verizon spend money on developing that service? I’d glady pay more for a true high bandwidth service.  That’s how the carriers should be looking at things.  But instead they are trying to take money from the wrong side of the table.  And it’s not going to work.

The morning started out with some VOIP oriented serivces.  None of them blew me away but eqo.com is pretty cool.  It allows you to connect your Skype account on your computer to your mobile phone.  Your skype buddies appear on your phone and you can start talking to them. I saw another similar company in Boston whose name escapes me.  How long until Skype offers this?  It’s certainly a nice thing to have.

Then we had four search demos.  All of which were interesting.  Steve Levine from Transparansee did a very nice demo of Transparansee’s fuzzy search solutions for database driven web services. I particuarly liked the use of slider bars in the results page.

Nexidia blew me away with their audio search service.  You type in a word or a phrase and they can find it in a spoken word in an audio or video file.  It doesn’t use close captioning or tags.  It literally searches the audio.  Very nice.

Truveo, which was bought by AOL recently, demo’d their video search service. It seems to work very well. I’ll have to start using it to find SNL skits on the web.

The rest of the morning session was not as interesting to me. I did like the demo of NewsGator’s new web based reader for publishers.  SimpleFeed was also interesting to me given our investment in Feedburner.

The afternoon was all about security.  It’s not an area I have a lot of feel for.  I realize the need for security, but its not an area I can get passionate about.  Just ask Rich, who does the technology work in our office.

If you want to hear what it’s like negotiating with VCs about the right to sell stock in a public offering, check out these two back to back podcasts.

First Episode

Second Episode

They are a fictional negotiation based on a chapter in Tom Evslin’s book Hackoff.com and feature real VCs and CEOs acting out their roles (including me).  Here’s Tom’s entire post explaining who was involved and how he put it together using Skype.