Posts from June 2008

My partner Albert and his wife Susan started a cool company last year called DailyLit. The idea behind DailyLit is you subscribe to a book and they deliver it in short bits to your email every day. I’ve read Dracula and Moby Dick this way and it’s a fun and easy way to read a book.

Yesterday DailyLit announced three daily read books on Twitter. They are:

DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM by Cory Doctorow
100 WAYS TO
SUCCEED/MAKE MONEY by Tom Peters
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Jane Austen

The way this works is if you follow any of these books on Twitter (click on the links above to do that), each day you’ll get a tweet with a link to the section of the book to read that day.

Email is an easier way to read (particularly on a mobile device), but the neat thing about daily reads on twitter is that there will be a group of people reading the book at the same time you are. I can see @replies and conversations developing around these group reads.

It will be fun to see how this works out. I’ll be reading Cory’s book. Join me if you’d like.

Related articles

• All my stuff on DailyLit — books by email in page-sized chunks [via Zemanta]
• DailyLit Delivers Books Daily Via Email & RSS [via Zemanta]

I went on a bike ride this morning with my friend Jimmy and we got to talking about business (not the venture business because Jimmy’s not in tech/venture/web/startups). I asked him if he takes a lot of meetings that he’d rather not take. And whether it would be better to stop taking them.

We ended up concluding that taking meetings that are likely to be unproductive for you is a worthwhile thing to do, but you have to know how to manage these meetings.

Here’s some guidelines we came up with:

1) Limit the length of the meeting upfront. Seth Godin once told me (or maybe he wrote this in his blog) that he always limits his meetings to 30 minutes. If he chooses to make them longer, he can do that. But going in, they are set for 30 minutes and the person he’s meeting with knows it. Jimmy told me that for many "informational interviews" that he offers young people looking to get into his line of work, he limits the time to 15 minutes. I don’t do this religiously but I am going to do more of this going forward.

2) Have a hard stop and let your assistant (if you have one) know what it is. Ask him or her to interrupt the meeting when the hard stop has come. This is helpful if you are having a hard time ending the meeting gracefully.

3) Set an agenda up at the start of the meeting and be very focused on getting through what the person who asked for the meeting wants to cover in the time you have allotted. This means less small talk at the start of the meeting. That said, I think it’s always good to have a little small talk at the start of a meeting to set the tone.

4) Don’t say yes to every request that is made during the meeting (an introduction, reviewing some material, another meeting, etc, etc). Ask the person to pick one thing that is the most impactful thing you can do for them and agree to do that (if you can deliver on it).

5) Try to do it right in the meeting if you can. A quick email or phone call right during the meeting can be a great way to get the thing done you agreed to do. Jimmy told me he does this a lot and I agree that it’s a great trick if you can pull it off.

6) Ask the person who you met with to follow up with an email with the specific request they are making of you. I do this all the time. I find that it is much easier than writing it down during the meeting.

I tend to take a lot of meetings that others might feel are unproductive. And they often are unproductive for me. But there is a lot of serendipity in this world and you never know when an unproductive meeting turns into a productive one. Plus what goes around comes around. Particularly with younger people who are in need of career advice. That’s a particularly hard category because I could fill every day with those kinds of meetings and I can’t do that. But I think you have to do some giving back. And when you do, you need to figure out how to be productive with the time you are giving away.

We announced the hiring of Eric Friedman today on the Union Square Ventures blog.

And he responded with his thoughts on his marketing.fm blog.

Please help me welcome Eric to our team.

Man I hate the term "blogging 2.0". It’s just that blogging is evolving and we need something to call it. Anyway, the term blogging 2.0 refers to the disaggregated posting and microblogging trend that twitter spawned and friendfeed and others have fueled. When you’ve got something to say, you say it wherever you happen to be at that point in time. It could be a twitter post, it could be a comment on disqus, or a share link on friendfeed. And the conversation ensues. Just like a blog post, except that it happens on one of many services. Sometimes the conversations are aggregated back up to the place they started and sometimes they are not. This is a source of debate, concern, and disagreement for many, but try as hard as we might, and I am for trying hard, we aren’t going to put blogging back in the bottle. The genie is out.

So where does that leave techmeme and the other "blog aggregators"? Their goal is to capture the most interesting conversations happening in the blog world at any one time and present them on a single page. And they are fantastic. Not a day goes by where I don’t visit Techmeme, Hacker News, delicious popular, and several others at least once.

But what if the most intersting conversation is happening on twitter or friendfeed? Then what?

That was the point of my tweet last night:

Q: what will be the first twitter post to get picked up on techmeme and who will post it?

I got a bunch of great responses, which can be seen here, including:

I don’t post as much about music and digital technology as I used to. I have come to the conclusion that most artists and their managers get it these days. And the ones who don’t are a lost cause. So better to move on and start thinking and writing about something else.

But this post by Bob Lefsetz on AC/DC doing an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart was too good to pass up. Here are some choice lines by Bob on the subject:

To limit AC/DC sales exclusively to Wal-Mart is akin to limiting bubblegum sales to Tiffany.

and

AC/DC is the biggest band still alive in the minds of teenagers.

and

But AC/DC cares not a whit about all this, about the new generation.
It’s like they’re having a fire sale, trying to get everybody’s dough
one last time. They don’t understand what they MEAN TO PEOPLE!

and

What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a band won’t let
its fans buy its record? One where the only thing that matters is
money? Where music takes not even a back seat, but rides in the trunk?

and

The closest Wal-Mart to me is almost twenty miles away! Assuming
there’s no traffic, that’s an eight dollar fuel surcharge on the disc.
But at least I’ve got wheels… Kids, home from school, music addicts,
but without their driver’s licenses, are inured to getting their music
online. And if you won’t sell it track by track, they’ll steal it that
way. If you don’t know this, you’re still living in the twentieth
century, still waiting for Napster to come along and blow your mind.

My son Josh loves AC/DC but if it’s not on iTunes, it’s not going to get on his iPod. Clearly AC/DC and/or their manager is in the category of clueless.

I subscribe to Steven Johnson‘s premise in his book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, in which he details why videogames and other "bad forms of entertainment" are actually great learning experiences for kids. We have always encouraged our kids to play games and master them. There are limits like anything else in our home, but we certainly do not think that games are bad.

But this year we went one step further. We got our son Josh a young teacher who came over in the evening once a week and taught him how to write code and make a rudimentary computer game. We didn’t know of anywhere in the city to send Josh for this kind of class, so we contacted a local company, Blue Tomato, that provides supplemental tutoring and test preparation. They located an ITP student named Pravin who was fantastic. I mentioned Pravin in this post about the ITP spring show.

So it is with that background that I came upon David Kirkpatrick’s weekly Fast Forward column in Fortune Magazine. David writes about doing a panel at the Games For Change Conference last week. And he says:

But some educators are going a step further, teaching kids to make the
games themselves. It turns out to be perhaps the ultimate form of
liberal arts. In order to create a computer game you have to think
about the content. You have to write a script. The programming involves
logic, math and science. And to understand how you distribute a game
you have to get into issues of marketing, sociology, and Internet
culture.

I sent David’s column to the Director of my kids’ school. I believe in engaged education and I believe in pushing the envelope and trying new things. Things like this.

Our kids are growing up in a different world than we did. We have to teach them using these new tools. Not just the ones that were used on us.

Related articles

• SXSWi: Steven Johnson, Henry Jenkins talk youth and collective intelligence [via Zemanta]
• Harvard researchers: Violent video games OK for kids [via Zemanta]
• Promoting peace, not violence, in video games [via Zemanta]
• Sandra Day O’Connor: Game Designer [via Zemanta]
• Sandra Day O’Connor, Henry Jenkins Back Socially-Conscious Gaming At Games For Change [Games For Change] [via Zemanta]

I plan to spend a fair amount of time in europe this summer between some family vacation, scoping out some new web startups in europe, and attending the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh in August where my daughter is putting a play on with some schoolmates.

I want to be a social media monster with the new Nokia N95 I am getting. I’ll have qik, twitter, flickr, tumblr, and a host of other services tightly integrated with the phone and I want to post directly from the phone. I am sure I can get all of this to work pretty well.

But the thing I want some advice on is what’s the best way to deal with the carrier on the phone. I am currently thinking that I’ll keep my blackberry for email and phone calls and get a good roaming plan from t-mobile and keep using my phone number while I am in europe.

And I am thinking of getting a good data plan for the N95 and maybe not even get voice for that phone. Given how much texting and MMS and data I plan to use on the N95, I think I want to get an unlimited plan. And I’d like to use it throughout western and eastern europe.

Anyway, I think you all get the picture. What’s the best strategy for me to use this summer?

When you type fred wilson into google, you get this blog as the first result. It’s been that way for the past three or four years. You also get my bio on the Union Square Ventures weblog, the wikipedia entry on me, my tumblog, and my twitter feed, all on the first google result page. I am getting a ton of "organic" value out of google. I haven’t really tried to achieve this. I’ve just been an active social media participant and this is the result.

I’ve thought about moving my blog from this lousy URL (avc.blogs.com) to something better. But I can never get past the google juice issue. If you type scoble blog into google, you still get his old blog that he moved from in 2005 as the top link. Google doesn’t forget so easily.

And google juice is important for all sorts of reasons. Take my post yesterday about Zemanta. If you type zemanta into google, that post is already the seventh link on the first page of google’s results. That’s largely because [avc.blogs.com] has some serious google juice.

It’s not like this blog relies on google for traffic. Here’s the stats on the most recent 30 days:

When you factor out the other search engines, google is responsible for about 30 percent of the visits to this blog. That’s pretty low compared to most web services I’ve seen over the years.

But back to the Zemanta search. People who are searching on Zemanta are the kind of people I’d like to visit this blog. I want placement on those serps and the google juice this blog has gets them for me.

So I think I am stuck at avc.blogs.com for the long haul. I’ve come to accept it and I don’t fret too much about it anymore. I’ve got my personal URL at fredwilson.vc and the traffic there is growing. I use it for different things and this blog has gotten to be more about business and that blog has gotten to be more personal. And if this blog is about business, then google juice is an incredibly important business asset.

One of my favorite VC quotes comes from Bill Kaiser of Greylock. He once said, "when I hear about a company once, I often ignore it, when I hear about it twice, I pay attention, when I hear about it for the third time, I take a meeting".

It happened to me this week. I met with Reshma who runs seedcamp, the european version of Y Combinator, on Monday and she told me about Zemanta which came out of last year’s seedcamp. Then I saw this blog post about Zemanta on Techmeme the next day. And then on Thursday, Alex Iskold, founder of our portfolio company Adaptive Blue, introduced us to Andraz, one of the founders of Zemanta.

Three hits in one week is absolutely a "pay attention" notice. So this morning I am trying Zemanta out. The image and most of the links in this post were automatically provided by Zemanta.

Zemanta is a blogging tool plugin that provides a set of advanced services for finding related content (photos and related posts). It also provides something I’ve wanted for a long time, a way to do a tumblr style reblog in typepad.

The company is based in Slovenia and was funded through relationships it made at seedcamp. I am very interested in what’s going on with seed stage web startups in europe right now. I’ll be over there next month and will spend some time trying to get a sense of things. One stop is likely to be Slovenia to meet the Zemanta team.