Posts from March 2006

"I need a crowd of people
But I can’t face them day to day"
Neil Young – On The Beach

The blog world is abuzz with news that Dave Winer will stop blogging sometime this year.

I hope Dave turns his considerable talents to something equally big and interesting. He has kept me entertained, informed, and interested for the past ten years.  And I thank him a thousand thanks for that.

Dave started down this path long before I did and pretty much anyone else did and his decision is encouraging to me because it shows me that there is a way out for me too at some point.

I wrote yesterday in my Too Much Blogging? post that "I don’t think blogging less is the answer, although I may have other reasons for doing that".  The fact is that blogging is both an outlet and a burden for me.

Robert Scoble wrote today:

Anyway, I totally understand why Dave would want to walk away. I’m
staring at hundreds of emails and just don’t want to deal with my inbox
right now. I’m gonna take the rest of the day off and hang out at SXSW.
My sessions are over and now I just have to catch up with the email. I
totally understand why Dave wants to take off from his blog. The
pressure is just incredible to do more, more, more.

That pressure that Robert talks about is completely and totally self imposed, the worst kind.  And when you get your head around the fact that 50,000 people read your blog last month (those were my numbers in February) you get kind of caught up in it.

So Dave is showing the way once again by walking away. 

I hope I can do it as easily when the time comes for me to walk away.

I wrote my original post on this topic last August.  It wasn’t a great post.  It was a combination of geek speak and technology overload.  All it really said was I had too many toys and couldn’t get digital music to work right on any of them.

My two favorite comments to that post were:

From Giordano – ah… the problems of the very rich.Good that I´m broke, so I don´t have to worry about this kind of things :)¨

From Jackson – I’m sure you’ll work it out. Gee, this new media makes everything so
easy, it’s right at your fingertips huh? 🙂 Excuse me, I’ve got to go
flip the record over…..

Thanks guys for putting me in my place.  I deserved it.

But reading Tom Watson’s post today on the same topic took me right back to the point that I failed to make clearly and concisely last August. 

Here is my attempt to make that point clearly and concisely:

DRM, as it is currently implemented, is not about protecting content owners from theft, it is a way to lock in consumers to proprietary hardware solutions and marketplaces and force consumers to pay multiple times for the same piece of content they already own if they want to play it on multiple devices.  Until DRM fixes these issues (which I predict they never will), it is consumer unfriendly and will be rejected and lead to more, not less, copyright theft.

UPDATE: For a less heated and more rational explanation of all of this see my friend John’s post on the same subject from earlier this year.

The news is on the TACODA website and the Union Square Ventures weblog.

The press release and the Union Square Ventures post has some interesting data about TACODA’s network business for those with an interest in such things.

  IMG_0079 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

I was walking down 23rd Street from Sixth Avenue toward Fifth Avenue this morning and saw this large wrap around billboard for a new Motorola phone.

This model had a street lamp sticking out of her upper lip.

Sometimes the real world enters the world of advertising and when it does, it’s often not pretty.

Seth Godin (the first blogger I ever read) says we are blogging too much and its leading to a tragedy of the commons as we use up precious reader attention.  It’s a theme I have mined myself in previous posts.

I agree with Seth that we are approaching an attention crisis, but I don’t think blogging less is the answer, although I may have other reasons for doing that.  I think we’ll get more bloggers over time, not less, and as we get more content creators and more or less the same number of readers, we’ll need new ways of consuming this content.

Although I use a bunch of feed aggregators (newsgator, bloglines, iTunes, MyYahoo, netvibes, etc), I really don’t read blogs in a feed reader.  I have way too many blogs to consume that way (at least for my brain).

I use tools like delicious, digg, reddit, memeorandum, tailrank, technorati, blogs themselves, etc to filter the noise and give me the best of the blog world every day.  My method isn’t perfect, but its good enough. I don’t miss too much that’s important. 

And then I have blogs that keep me real, like Savage Distortion, Trickster, Chartreuse, Brooklyn Vegan, and Gotham Gal (among others) that don’t seem to pop up on those blog aggregators.  We need a way to incorporate what’s important to us into these filters and I am already seeing signs of that (see Tail Rank’s filter feature for example).

Umair says (in a rambling post where he takes some possibly deserved potshots at the US):

I think Seth’s post is this kind of misuse of economics. The genius of
micromedia is that it blows apart the notion of distribution of a
scarce resource. The whole point is that attention is no longer a
commons; now, it’s about individual expectations and preferences.

I take that as a sign that Umair agrees with me on this one.  I can never be sure.  But in any case, I think Seth is right that there is a ton of blogging going on, but I am not sure he’s right about what to do about it.

McLean suggests that kids are leaving MySpace. It’s possible, I see my 15 year old daughter spending more time on Facebook these days because "it’s cooler". 

I think Facebook has a distinct advantage with its older crowd.  The younger crowd always wants to hang out with the older crowd.  But a related question is whether the older crowd on Facebook will resent the younger crowd being let into "their place".

The bottom line is these are social networks and are subject to all the social behavior we have witnessed in our own lives.  Which makes them tricky businesses to own and operate.

UPDATE: Ben, a high school kid himself, and a regular reader of this blog, posted this "myspace is over call" to his blog a couple months ago.  Thanks for pointing that out Ben. There are a number of high school and college kids commenting on this post and providing interesting anectdotal data so go read the comments.

We have this saying around our firm, the "zero billion dollar business".  It describes a business, like Craigslist or Digg, that enters a market, like classifieds or news, and by virtue of the amazing efficiency of its operation can rely on a fraction of the revenue that the market leaders need to operate profitably.  These zero billion dollar businesses are highly disruptive and change the economics of their industries over time.

Well Bill Burnham (not be be confused with my partner Brad Burnham) hints at something similar in this well written post about the challenges facing the venture capital industry.  We may be looking at the zero billion fund someday soon.  In fact, the time may be coming sooner than any of us know.

Union Square Ventures was designed as a "zero billion fund" in a sense.  Both Brad and I had come from firms managing around a half a billion dollars and we felt something much smaller was necessary in the new environment. We figured $100 million was a reasonable size, we ultimately raised $125 million, and I think it is a very good size in this environment.

But we are also witnessing the rise of the angels and "super angels" like Mark Cuban and Pierre Omidyar who can act like angels but have the balance sheets of VC funds.  And we are seeing VC veterans like Alan Patricof and Vinod Khosla strike out on their own, presumably managing mostly their own capital.  Again, the rise of the super angel or micro VC.  It’s basically the same thing when it comes to pros like Alan or Vinod.

I don’t think VCs need to worry about the demise of the venture capital business however. There will always be a business supplying risk capital and "advice capital" and "connection capital" and even "human capital" to startups.  However, the supply and demand dynamics are in flux, at least in the technology business, and its important to right size your capital under management to be sure you are operating in the sweet spot of the market.

I wrote a post about "discovery pages" last december.

I talked about delicious popular, digg, reddit, and memeorandum.

Since then, I have become a fan of another discovery page, called Tail Rank.

I met with Kevin Burton, who built Tail Rank, at eTech and he laid out an interesting way of thinking about all of these services.  He said that digg and reddit are basically slashdot style community driven discovery engines.  Delicious’ popular page is also a community generated discovery engine, but it uses a different approach than digg and reddit.

Kevin described Tail Rank and Memeorandum as "memetrackers" and the essential difference is that they are designed to follow a meme and the links to it that develop over time. They work as discovery pages as well but they serve a slightly different purpose.

I like Kevin’s description of a memetracker and I am using both memeorandum and Tail Rank about evenly now.  I think both services are great.

I suggested an idea to Kevin last week and it is already implemented (that’s impressive).  It’s called "memetrack this blog" and it allows a blogger or anyone who publishes to the web to enter the URL of their domain and see all the "memes" they’ve started and track them.

Here is the memetrack for this blog.

I’ve added a link to the stats section on the lower left sidebar so that anyone can memetrack this blog anytime they want.

I think this will be a very useful tool for bloggers to track how their posts develop and get linked to and its one more reason to use Tail Rank which is developing into a really useful service.

Last summer the Gotham Gal and I went to Town Hall to see The Eels in concert.

It was an amazing show which you can read all about if you click on the link.

They were filming the show and lo and behold there is a DVD of the show that you can buy on Amazon.

And, of course, there is also a live record, which you can also buy on Amazon or on eMusic.

I bought my copy on eMusic and its on the In Heavy Rotation list (sponsored by Sonos) now.

The record captures the show perfectly, except they left the killer version of Souljacker off.  That kills me.

So for my MP3 of the Week, I’ll go with the acoustic version of Railroad Man that Mark dedicated to Laura Bush.

Railroad Man Live At Town Hall