AVC's Creative Commons License

Comments (Archived):

1. I love that this is your policy. I have Creative Commons licenses on a lot of my stuff.While I’m glad that the CC licenses open up the right to use others’ work, I was concerned about the recent news of Yahoo! selling Flickr images that had CC licenses allowing commercial use and not paying some of the photographers. http://online.wsj.com/artic… My hope is that everyone will figure out which license to use for the right occasion.

2. I cringe when some pubs ask you to write something and want to retain all copyrights, and you can’t re-publish it anywhere after. That kind of policy belonged to another era.I noticed the linkage to Onename whereas it used to be a Twitter link 😉 subtle hint.

   1. In marketing and tech this is not as common, at least in the requests I get and my policy for my blog is the same as Fred’s.The wine world is archaic. I get asked frequently to write pieces and always say no. The payments are token and honestly, the audiences not that interesting or large.

      1. yep, I forgot about the payment thing. In the hey days of print, back in 1998/99/00, I used to get paid $1/word, so I’d get $800 for my monthly 800-word column for Business 2.0, and Computerworld used to pay me $500 for a 500-word Op-Ed. At the time, they provided a lot more readership exposure than my own blog would. Getting emails back from readers was the equivalent of “community” and comments.

3. I suspect that if you were to write elsewhere and they didn’t have Disqus then your bar wouldn’t be so full and the conversations at the bar wouldn’t be so interesting.Just take a look at the comments section on NYT Bits as an example.

4. Your content your platform freely shared

5. I attribute and link back to the original articles ALL the time. It’s just really bad manners and editorially unethical not to.One of the big negatives about the Internet is when people try to pass off other people’s writings, ideas etc. as theirs because the “content is free”. Yes, it is free but someone also put a lot of their head, heart and soul into creating it so the least we can do is credit, attribute and link back.Soapbox moment over, :*).

6. I got into blogging by initially trying to write for other online publications. First attempt here and it’s not very good…..but at least it proved to be right. http://pjmedia.com/blog/tre… I was so pissed off with the things that were happening and it seemed there wasn’t any educating of the market going on. That morphed into other things.I don’t like to write for other publications. I had a deal where a publication took my stuff and published it the next day, but I got zero benefit from it. My personal policy has been to link back and clearly show when I quote or use someone else’s stuff. Yesterday, I linked to Fred, Brad Suster, and Marc Andreessen’s Twitter. But sometimes I will write for other publications if I think I can make a difference. Example of that here. http://www.futuresmag.com/2…I think it’s good to link to other people because no one has the market cornered on good ideas.

   1. Correct !!!

   2. I think Google benefitted when there was a more vibrant blog community, but now individual bloggers have a lot of power in relation to Google to due to the algorithm. Especially if your blog has been around for a while. I have mine up and post infrequently, but regularly receive solicitations to review things. Yet for better or worse I do most my posting onto Facebook because all its hooks into OS X make it so easy to share things and then the algorithm automatically makes sure that the relevant people see it. Maybe time to change that soon.As a reader, I appreciate it much more when people share their interesting sources.

   3. I had a deal where a publication took my stuff and published it the next day, but I got zero benefit from it.This is a “kiss 100 frogs” concept. You can’t expect that doing this on a casual basis will lead to a good result although it might. I spent a few years writing to reporters back in the day and one day it paid off. If I had looked at it from “nothing happened I wasted my time so why bother” I wouldn’t have stuck around for the good outcome. (Same with online dating of course kept plugging away and hit paydirt for sure..)Separately I don’t think it helps that you have a somewhat common first and last name. (You may want to consider including your middle name in your byline).The idea with this is to build on the credibility that you have writing for unimportant publications and parlay that into having your name appear in a major publication. Then you can use that in your credentials to gain favorable benefits.

7. Aside–topic that I’d be interested in Fred.What you are learning from the usv.com format and what it tells you about content based communities?Bet it is both non conclusive and interesting both.

   1. That it is hard!We are working on a new version that de-emphasizes real-time as hacker news and reddit do that so wellWe will emphasize topics that tend to be popular in the USV communityWe will see if that works better

      1. Community is just so hard to platform.Interesting I bet for you to realize just how much of a market exception this blog community is.

         1. So true.

         2. Yup. Maybe I’m wrong about this but I think timing of launch mattered. AVC launched in 2003. Reddit and Hacker News came in 2006/2007. I added Disqus to AVC in the summer of 2007.People have established the communities they are part of nowMobile may change that. That’s what our investment in Amino is about

            1. Engag.io showed us that, indeed, how few communities we actually do engage with.Time and human nature dictate this.Need to check out Amino.The only purely mobile community that is important to me is InstaGram and honestly, as Disqus is predominant not mobile, it is becoming more and more a desktop based and spare time activity to me. This includes avc and that concerns me a bit.

            2. I recently bought a Sony a6000 and one of my favorite features is that I can “beam” (over WiFi) pictures I take with it directly to my iPhone, then easily post to Instagram. I don’t use it often but the amount of engagement on that platform seems pretty high.

            3. There are some strong communities there and unlike Facebook it is constructed to find new connections, not just aggregate ones you already have.Super powerful in the wellness world where I have an investment and follow closely.

            4. I’m actually kind of confused as to how you use it to find communities? Is it like searching certain hashtags? I only have my friends on it.

            5. Hashtags and with a touch of magic.Since my work is not very visual, it is not great for the advising I do.For me as a lover of NY, Travel and Wine–it just works.For Lulitonix, my investment, the entire Wellness community, seems to be there.

            6. I really wish Disqus would get a better mobile implementation. I’m SWAMPED at work lately so don’t get to comment here nearly as much as I’d like because of the slower interface on mobile vs. desktop.

            7. @JimHirshfield:disqusIs there a plan for mobile that you can share?

            8. People have established the communities they are part of nowI agree.However keep in mind also these differences, to name just a few:Hacker News appears to be both more independent (not serving a particular master even though it is of course serving a particular master). Obviously. When you get to the site and you are a new user it’s not apparent that it’s actually a shill for ycombinator. It appears to be a separate entity. Only after you read it do you find what the agenda is and how things that are more likely to be supportive of YC are given air time by the community and it’s leaders.Hacker news is able to scratch more backs so there is an incentive for those that want their back scratched and ticket punched to pay attention to it. And keep dreaming. USV simply doesn’t have as much “cheer” to go around. Hence people, newbies, would have less reason to pay attention to it. Even the top commenter on Hacker News has mentioned he’d love to be a partner at YC.In order to take on HN (or reddit whatever) you’d need a separately branded site and you’d also need to poach the top commenters and give them an incentive to leave where they are now. That’s not all that difficult or impossible to do either. Then you’d need to have a way to get the “freshly hatched” to pay attention to your site as well. Difficult but not impossible.

      2. “Over time is *way* more interesting than real time” <- something I’ve been saying/ranting about for many years now.

      3. I think that was Pando’s idea when they spun up. They didn’t want to break ‘deal’ stories because every other part of tech media was covering that well enough. They decided to focus on the in depth stories that were/are relatively rare. They do a pretty good job of it, at least then, I don’t read them much now.

8. I mean this with all seriousness; from DRM video to subscription commerce, the porn industry has been at the forefront of technology since the beginning of the Internet.Also, isn’t ~15% of all Tumblr content porn?Maybe being commingled with porn wouldn’t be so bad, eh? You kind of already are, aren’t you? 😉

   1. Not to speak for Fred, but if you can naturally work any content that is first produced here in any form of pornography, then you are both a genius and deserve the one-time right to use the content. (Again Fred may disagree)

      1. That sounds like a challenge. 🙂

         1. Not at all: Bitporn…The coin to pay for live porn chats.#isaiditdoesntmeaniwantit

            1. Good one!I’m sure Fred just loves this little thread tying him to porn. Lol.

      2. financial porn…or in Fred’s favorite word as of late…BLOCKCHAIN.

      3. or humor

   2. only 15%? Cumblr made web porn investable.

   3. I agree. My tongue in cheek litmus test for any new technology: Is it good for porn industry? If a technology improves porn, it is likely that it will catch on.

9. What’s your policy on speaking? I always thought your policy on writing and commenting was interesting.

10. If the content gets duplicated, as in you write it at someone’s request and that party subsequently republishes it online, wouldn’t Google’s search algorithms penalize both rankings? At least, that’s what I had understood from reading a blog post by Matt Cutts. I do have a request for a story, since I don’t have your email address, if you’re inclined one day to do so, and the title would be “What it’s really like to be a VC”. The joys, the disappointments, the apprehensions, the day-to-day minute details that you normally wouldn’t think of talking about — in other words, the personal side of it all.I appreciate that this request falls outside perhaps of what you meant, but what the heck, you do fun Fridays anyway, right?

    1. if there are delays, possibly not.

11. You once wrote a great post about missing on Airbnb. What I’d love for you to write is a post about what it’s like when a deal you may have passed on initially becomes a deal you ultimately decided to do.

12. Top things going through my head at the moment, obviously with a B2B focus:1) wordpress as a CMS for large media organizations…is it possible to shift not only smaller news products, but migrate the whole website over? sideline business for @nickgrossman 2) I see a fundamental change coming in how businesses will consume information. As the technical barrier to plugging into APIs comes down, companies won’t want to deal with websites if they can get the data delivered directly into their own systems. 3) How do you onboard people for an API product? HT http://www.apievangelist.com4) What will GDP figures look like with the increasingly significant impact of the ‘sharing economy’.

    1. 1) yes2) maybe, APIs are not good at displaying data, just carrying them3) see 2, you need to figure out how to display data4) unclear, gdp isn’t built around people sharing stuff

       1. 😀 thanks! on the first point have you seen any large media companies go in full heartedly, mostly seems like the rebel and experimenter employees playing around the margins rather than an organization commiting to it.–www.linkedin.com/in/russellbc@rbc_nyc

          1. how big is big enough?

          2. there are media organizations on it, and parts of media organizations on it as well. WordPress has a custom cloud for big companies on wordpresshttp://en.wordpress.com/not…that said, to do really radical in media, you need to build your own cms. WordPress is not build for high scale/high reactivity to analytics and optimization techniques. (aka what buzzfeed and vox does, which is why both are on custom cmses)

13. Fred, thanks for doing this. I run a seed fund in Chile and we’ve been translating some of your MBA mondays posts, as there’s a huge lack of entrepreneurship information in Spanish for entrepreneurs and we think the ecosystem will get better if they have access to the best posts in their native languages. Thanks again, you’re having an impact not just in the english speaking world!For example:http://magmapartners.com/es…

14. I would ask you to write about how do you learn. What are your sources? Blogs, people you follow, books you read, etc. How do you optimize your learning process?Thanks for sharing!

15. So if you would like me to write something for your publication, send me an email, I might write about it here, and then you can repost it on your publication.With respect to policy issues that are important to you you should submit those to both the WSJ and New York Times for publication. That has to be exclusive. But the impact and reach can’t be matched.http://online.wsj.com/artic…http://www.nytimes.com/cont…If it were me I would engage the services of a PR firm or at least explore the advantage that they can provide in terms of getting something published.You have a big advantage here by the way. You can write a post on a subject and then you can use the comments here to refine your argument and include the appropriate and well balance “to be sures” which will help in getting them published. Most people don’t have that advantage and it’s a big advantage.I’d study the style of the people who seem to get the most pieces in the paper as well to see if there were any patterns that were important. Easy job for an internKarl Rove for example has done a bunch for the WSJ:http://www.rove.com/articlesShould be easy to reverse engineer most of this (or just use the PR firm for guidance).

16. This is great. I’m not an expert in this area, but I do think it’s important to specify which CC license you would like to use (https://creativecommons.org…. Sounds like you might be granting the most accommodating form of the CC license here (CC BY).

17. interesting. could you say more about your motivation for only writing on avc.com – was this for IP/CC reasons, branding, other?

18. is there anything on the site that isn’t cc licensed?

19. My blog Netizen http://technbiz.blogspot.com/ requests a guest blog post on, um, Bitcoins — ur, wait, looks like you already have a bunch of posts on the topic! 😉

20. Thanks Fred!

21. I’m flying to Europe tonight and so I wrote two posts this morning. “Today’s post” will run tomorrow

22. I rarely disagree with you Charlie, but I have to on this point. People assume that everything in the footer gets read. Sometimes it helps to call attention to the small print. Particularly as it is such a USP for Fred. I was thinking of doing a book on the MBA mondays at some point, but didn’t have the time to actually run it.

23. One of my MO’s is to make sure shit is all over the place. So it’s there when someone needs it. Unless there is a specific reason for it not to be handy and accessible.I’ve complained to the local chinese restaurant that they don’t put the date on the “specials” flyer that you pick up when you go there. Like which flyer in my desk is the current one? Mrs. Owner Lady gives me blank stares when I mention she should do that. And include her phone number. And the name of the restaurant as well. Stupid.Here’s another one. You visit a restaurant website and download a pdf of the menu. And the pdf doesn’t have the restaurant name, address and phone number on it.

24. I didn’t say I exclusively disagree with you either 😉