There's A Community Here At AVC

This isn’t news to many of you but I feel like posting about it anyway. There’s a community here at AVC and what goes on here is less and less about me every day. Thanks to HockeyDino for suggesting I post about this.

The community that has developed here are AVC is thousands strong. Way more than the 967 who have joined MyBlogLog here at AVC. I’ll tell you about some of the community members.

There’s Jackson and Tony Alva, two people who have come along from my real world to my web world. I’ve known Jackson since the day he was born and Tony for about thirty years. They are best friends and have been for almost as long as I’ve known Tony. I can always rely on Jackson to be the contrarian/grump on digital media and lend some much needed humor to the comments. I can always count on Tony for his right of center hawkish views and reasoned take on everything. My other brother Rod comments a bit from time to time, largely on the music posts.

There’s Howard who has turned blog commenting into an art form. He reads and comments on more blogs than anyone else I know. Howard took the opposite path from Jackson and Tony, he’s gone from my web world to my real world.

There’s Scotty The Body who left his first comment on 10/29/03 and his most recent on yesterday’s post about being sick. Scotty’s not the most frequent commenter but he’s the most durable. Scott’s also gone from my web world to my real world and is the first member of this community that I didn’t already now that I met in person.

But Scotty is not the frequent commenter with the most tenure. I think (but don’t really know) that that title goes to Simon who posted his first comment on 10/1/03 and his most recent on 2/4/07. Simon is from australia and he loves the web, technology, and music. He’s a natural for this community and I am glad to have him.

How about Grandegress? I fell like its Point/Counterpoint with him. He’s always got a contrarian view, whether its about politics, technology, society, economics, or basically anything. The thing of it is that Grandegress is hard to argue with because he makes a lot of sense even when articulating a polar opposite view. It took me months to figure out that I knew Grandegress. He’s an entrepreneur we backed in the mid 90s and one of the best we ever backed.

This community is full of entrepreneurs, of course, and one of the most vocal is Erik who has been hanging around AVC since early 2006 and has emerged as one of the most frequent commenters, particularly on issues around the web, technology, entertainment, and media. That’s not surprising because he ran entertainment at one of the top Internet portals and now is doing a startup in an adjacent market.

Given that everything that is said in this community is here for posterity, it’s a good thing that my lawyer for over 15 years, JayR, hangs out here too. But he’s not highlighting comments that are going to get us in trouble. He’s adding to the discussion, particularly when it heads toward music, sports, and family. It’s good to have you Jay.

At this point, you are probably saying, wow this community is a men’s club. Unfortunately that’s largely true. There are plenty of women in the AVC MyBlogLog community (including a number of pretty faces that are just front ends for spam blogs and dating sites) but for whatever reason, only about 25 of the last 500 comments on this blog were made by woman (with screennames it’s always a bit hard to tell). KarenE has been a faithful commenter since early 2005 but we only hear from her about once a month. Candice has been commenting for about as long as KarenE with about the same amount of frequency. The GothamGal, my girls, and my mom have never once commented on this blog. I’ve seen comments recently from Susan Wu, Lindsay Campbell, and longtime reader Sandy. But for whatever reason, the “read to comment” ratio for the women in this community is much lower than the men.

I could go on and on, but this is like an Oscar night speech. I am going to piss off all of you loyal community members who aren’t getting called out. I am sorry. I am going to write more about this topic in the coming weeks and hopefully I’ll recognize more of you in those posts.

And I am going to put some more community tools on this blog soon that showcase what is really going on here. As HockeyDino said in the email that inspired this post “I’ve met many cool people from being on your blog, and have benefited in different ways.”  That’s great to hear and I am going to try to make more of that kind of thing happen.

#VC & Technology