Posts from Howard Lindzon

Being Naked Online

I saw this tweet from the start of Howard Lindzon's talk in Boulder yesterday:

 

 

I don't know exactly what Howard means by "naked" but I feel the opposite way. I have always tried to be naked online. To me that means real, authentic, and who you are.

I suspect that is what Howard is talking about but he will have to stop by and comment to explain his meaning to us.

We've talked about this ad naseum here at AVC, but the blogging revolution is more than a free publishing platform and a new model for media. It is self expression at its core. It is people being who they are, talking the way they talk, and doing it in public.

I have an agenda. I do not hide it. I wear it on my sleeve. I believe in certain things. I want the world to be a certain way. I make investments. I promote them. I want them to be successful. And hopefully everyone knows all of those things when they show up here. I think that is being naked online and that's how I want to be.

#Weblogs

The AVC Network

Disqus (a portfolio company of USV) has rolled out a really sweet analytics service as part of its "add ons" that were released a few weeks ago. You get the analytics as part of every add on package, including the $19/month Plus service.

There are four main parts of the analytics service; snapshot, activity, people, and network. It's the network tab that has me the most interested. I'm always curious where the most active AVC community members hang out when they are not on AVC. Since Disqus is first and foremost a commenting system, "hanging out" means commenting for the purposes of this post.

Here's the answer:

Disqus network

I'd like to see more than the top six. Ideally I'd like to see the top 25 or more. But this is a good start. Happily I call each of these bloggers a friend, and one of them is my wife. If we had a dinner party with this group, it would be a blast. I'd sit Dave Winer next to Mark Suster and Howard Lindzon just to make things interesting.

This suggests a whole new set of features for Disqus. If they know the communities with the greatest overlap with this community, they can and should build network tools so that readers of this blog are aware of what is going on across the network. If there's a great post/conversation going on at Suster's blog, we should know about that here at AVC and have a quick link to get there from here.

Fortunately the team at Disqus knows that. I'm not announcing any features here. But I am pointing out that communities like AVC don't exist in a vacuum and there is a network of communities out there and Disqus is powering most if not all of them. And so there's a lot Disqus can do to make the network come to life in powerful ways. I'm looking forward to watching them do just that.



#Web/Tech#Weblogs