Friendster has just added a tool that allows people to see who has viewed their profiles.  In the last week, my profile has really become popular.  The interesting thing is that where its become popular is a bit fishy.

3/4 of these clicks are coming from Malaysia and the Phillipines.  Now, of course I realize the power of my universal appeal, but perhaps we might consider something else going on here.

Clickfraud?  I think that's a real possibility.

There are advertisements on my profile...    I mean, seriously, why the heck would straight Phillipino guys click me... and a lot of them, too. 

Unless its a case of my head looking like the logo of some Asian product, like Homer in the Simpsons.  Maybe I'm the next Mr. Sparkle!

I'm certainly not trying to knock Friendster here, because they've done a lot in the last few months to revamp the service, but this is just kind of weird.

I want to learn some basic MySQL and PHP in order to build a wikipedia-type wiki...  I have a great idea for one.

I want to sit down with Ning for a little while.

I'm curious about Second Life.

Its STILL on my to do list to collaborate with Sean on a new blog about younger VC analysts.

I also really need some more time for original research.

And then there are the people who take my wacky ideas, combine them with their own much better ideas and run with them...   I've got to add a "Don't try this at home" disclaimer.

So much to do.

Will all of you people stop innovating and creating and give me a chance to catch up, try out, and possibly create some stuff on my own?

Or, at least just invent another day.  I'd invest in that. 

Listening to Al Gore talk about the lost "marketplace of ideas".  TV stations used to (it doesn't seem like they do anymore... at least I can't find it) have some requirement for educational programming?

Should MySpace, Friendster, and the Facebook have the same thing?  Especially when it comes to news.

In fact, I wonder whether or not Newscorp is interested in MySpace to reengage youth from a news a political perspective.  MySpace News...     pump a bunch of news stories into those kinds of networks... an opportunity to research facts, etc...   give them the tools to collaborate and discuss.  That's the way to engage the youth...  not with a young people's version of Fox News or MSNBC.

Jason just sold Weblogs, Inc. for $20-35 million.  Nice job.  Two years... no office, a bunch of bloggers and AdSense.  In fact, that's more than a nice job.  That's hustle, because here's a company with no technological barriers whatsoever.  Anyone could have done this, but not everyone did. 

There's a great line in the Fountainhead where somebody asks Howard Roark, "... but who's going to let you?"   His answer?

"Who's going to stop me?"

That's been Jason's approach.  And this won't be the last thing he builds either, I'm sure.  What's cool is that he's a Brooklyn guy...   he's from Bay Ridge, where I live now, and he went to Fordham.  Now, I wouldn't be surprised if Fordham doesn't know he went to Fordham.

Do you think that having an alum sell a blogging company for up to $35 million would convince them that maybe they should have a blog?

Congratulations Jason!

I sent my roommate from college a link about beer ratings that I found on del.icio.us. 

Where'd I find it?   The beer tag of course!

He doesn't know what RSS is and probably won't become a tagger.  However, he does like beer, so I'm making the beer tag into a Feedblitz e-mail that he can subscribe to.  That way, once a day, he'll get all the links that the community of del.icio.us users have tagged "beer".

Apparently, this is a beer loving crowd, because there are a lot of cool links on it.

Want to subscribe?  Just type your e-mail address here:

I'm the worst gifter ever.  I'm usually late and I never know what to get. 

How about a service where I plug all my gifting birthdays, anniversaries, etc from my cal, the vitals of the giftee and our relationship and it recommends like five gifts for me to choose from. 

I especially have this problem with my nieces in Tampa, mostly because I'm not really in touch with the tween and pre-tween scene.  Anyone have any ideas on gifts for a twelve year old and a nine year old? 

I think you could even run a service like this for free.  I think enough companies would pay for inclusion or ranking on a service where you wouldn't have to charge for the actual recommendations.  Perhaps you could even set it up so that anyone could offer up suggestions  and get paid when people actually purchase the item--recommend items and get paid.  Also, you could probably generate revenue from the metadata one could generate when people selected among recommended items and any kind of post-gift "Did they like it" rankings.  When you're shopping, they could even throw in a "how about something for you" gift or a "while you're shopping for your mom, get your wife some flowers" suggestion.

There have been a number of sites that have been successful playing into the way women shop, mostly because women do something like 70 percent of the non-electronics, non appliance shopping in this country.  This site would particularly play into the key aspect of the male shopper-we're idiots.  We don't have any idea what's good or what to get for anyone.  Plus, we're probably less price sensitive, because we shop less in general and we're willing to pay the idiot tax if we could significantly improve our chances of the gift we got actually being liked.

If this were free, I'd sign up now.  Even it wasn't, I'd still signup and probably pay about $5 an item if the recommendation was really good.

Oh, also, our Annual Meeting is coming up.  What's the best "lovely parting gift" you've ever given/recieved at one of these events?

This is a neat little tool to figure out how far you went, especially if you're a runner or biker.

Last night, my fall softball team, "Not Enough Friends to Have Our Own Team" (so named because we all signed up with Zog Sports as individuals) won 12-3, pushing our record to 3-0.  I biked back to my eh-hem... second home from 145th and Lenox Ave.

Here's the route.

Its funny, because the driving directions put it at 14.5 miles.  Turns out I only did 12.9.  I guess I wasn't going as fast as I thought.  Still, it took less than an hour, so it was a good clip. 

One thing I noticed along the way was how much new build there is along Lenox Avenue.  Its really clean and there are a lot of new buildings going up.  I was pleasently surprised by how far that area has come... its definately been a few years since I was up there last. 

Here's my daily commute to work in the morning.  The last little turnaround is because I bike to the gym, work out, shower, then go to work.  And no, I don't bike on the Brooklyn, Queens Expressway... the BQE is elevated along 3rd avenue there.  I bike under it. 

I hate the phone... for feedback anyway.   I write much more clearly and can organize my reaction to something  much better over e-mail.

What's bad is that this is a necessary part of my job.   I'm terrible at my conversations with entreprenuers over the phone.  They always want to get on the phone, and I understand that.  One, its more personal, and two, I can understand how, for some people, they can present better over the phone. 

Rob clipped this:

Link: BusinessPundit: Google's Marketing Challenge.

Google's no-frills, fast-loading site has been key to its growing popularity among Internet searchers, particularly as rivals vastly improve their own search technologies.

But it also poses a dilemma for Google: How can it draw attention to its many new products without cluttering the site and turning off its core constituency of searchers?

Actually... I don't think Google has a marketing challenge.  Frankly, I find Yahoo! to be marketing challenged.  Everything that Yahoo! does gets stuffed onto that front page, and, therefore, I discover absolutely nothing on it.  Its like when they tried to stuff their whole service onto the My Web 2.0 toolbar I downloaded... I couldn't even find the posting button.  When you try to stuff the channel, you succeed in getting absolutely nothing through.

Marketing today is more "sideways".  Few people come in and discover off the homepage anymore.  The Google homepage is a search tool...  its not how I get to Gmail and its not how I fould Google desktop.  When you've got lots and lots of features, you've got to seemlessly interconnect them, but in a particular way.  Here are the 5 things that I think are key to marketing a range of services like Google, Yahoo, etc.  (Are these lists getting repetitive?  I feel like I keep saying the same thing over and over again.  Blogosphere, are you getting this yet??)

1. You can't make being connected to the whole thing your only value proposition. That's what AOL tried to do previously.  They focused on getting everyone to do everything on AOL.  You either downloaded this clunky software with too many boxes on the screen or you didn't use it at all.  All or nothing, Rob Deer style.  (Hey, look at that...  two Rob Deer references in one week.)
2. Know the narrow point of the wedge.  Google did this perfectly with Desktop.  Search my own computer?  Sure... I'll install that tool.  Upgrade the tool and get a cool sidebar?  Ok, I'll check that out.  However, if they just would have said, "Install our sidebar" I probably wouldn't have even tried.
3. Make it subtlely more valuable to be connected to more than one of your services. You can read your AdSense stats in the toolbar.  You can index Gmail with desktop.  It wouldn't kill me if I wasn't connecting these up, but its better to be on all of them.
4. Make your stuff so good that you can't help but tell other people how cool it is.  You have to try Gmail.  Oh yeah, and Desktop, too. (Don't worry, I'm not all Googled out... Gtalk, as I predicted, sucks, because no one's on it.)   What's more effective?  A person telling you to use something or it being on the Google frontpage?
5. Play well with others. So, I can see my Flickr photos in my Google sidebar if I want to.  It would be even cooler if it showed my Trillian Buddy List.  Because of RSS, I even use it as my for:ceonyc tag notifier now.  That makes me want to use it more.

So I'm walking through my RSS feed list and with the exception of danah, its rather male dominated (and white male, at that...well, I think so...  I'm really not sure in all cases, to be honest).   

Does anyone have a few recommendations to help me out with a more balanced perspective?  Female or minority entrepreneurs, academics, etc. in and around the technology services space, specifically around identity, personal information management, user interface, etc?

I had a meeting today that made me think of the changing role of college career development offices.  Twenty years ago, before the internet, the career office was the one and only place you could go for connections to jobs.... save for the random cousin you had that your mom guilted into helping you.  I'm sure every single student made it their business to walk through the doors of that career office...otherwise, you'd be hard pressed to find employment.

Today, things are different.  I know plenty of students who never even set foot in a career office, and its not because they're lazy.  In fact, quite the opposite.  They're using a host of online tools available to them to connect to the right positions in a much more effective way than resume dropping.

Consider this:

Let's say I'm a student interested in a market internship.  I go to Indeed, because Indeed has nearly every job listing there is on the net... from Monster, Careerbuilder, etc... down to individual jobs posted on corporate websites.  I type in "Marketing internship" in "New York, NY."

The first job that comes up is this one:

Internship - Fall - International Marketing
            ESPN - US-NY-New York
             Internship - Fall - International Marketing US-NY-New York RESPONSIBILITIES ... of consumer promotions in coordination with Marketing departmental staff
                 From                 New York Times - 2 Days 21 Hours  ago

Hmm... well, that's pretty good.   I could drop a resume, but that's very impersonal and that's what everyone is going to do.

Instead, I'll see if I'm connected to that job somehow on LinkedIn.

I do a search for people who work for ESPN in the NYC Area.  I find Sharon Otterman.  She's the Vice President of Integrated Media & Market Planning.  Since the job is working with the Marketing departmental staff, seems there's a good chance that she's either the right person to talk to or knows who that is.

Now we're getting somewhere.

But wait, what will I even talk to her about if I connect?  I don't really know too much about sports marketing.  Perhaps there's a blogger who works for ESPN.

Type in "ESPN Blogger" in Google:

Get this guy.  Ok, so the post is old and now it appears that he now works for Foxsports Interactive Media, but still, he probably knows a lot about the industry.  And look!  Down at the bottom left, he's got his e-mail address right there.  I could ask for an informational interview and talk to him about sports marketing... get his advice, insites, etc.

What about other sports marketing blogs?

I google for "sports marketing blog" and get this one.  This is a branding blog with a whole category of interesting stories about sports marketing.

What about del.icio.us?  Does del.icio.us have any good links on ESPN?

Well, most of the people tagging ESPN seem to be tagging the site itself as a bookmark, but look down at the bottom, its a link to a recent story in Wired:

Wired 13.09: ESPN Thinks Outside the Box

The article is all about ESPN taking advantage of technology to be a ubiquitous sports presence on cell phones, the computer, tv, radio, etc.  Interesting stuff.  Certainly I should talk about some of this stuff when they ask me on the interview why I want to work for ESPN.  Its definitely coverletter material as well.  Nice job, del.icio.us community.  I would have never found that just Googling "espn". 

So, now I'll contact the Reemer guy for some insights by e-mail.  I'll read the sports marketing posts and the Wired article.  Then I'll use LinkedIn to connect to the interactive marketing woman regarding the job that was posted in the New York Times that Indeed found for me.

So, tell me, if I'm a student, what, then, do I use the the college career office for?  Resume help?  Interview help?  Perhaps...  but then that makes career planning more like an academic department than anything else, doesn' t it?  It seems that, instead of actually doing the placing and connecting, they just need to do a lot of teaching.

So why don't they just get out of the "placement" end of their task entirely? Teach them how to use LinkedIn, how to use Indeed, how to blog professionally and read other relevent blogs and then let 'em free on the world, guns blazing.  No more job fairs that don't get all the students or all the companies.  No more maintaining a seperate job board specific to the school.  The web connects better than a single office ever could... why would anyone try to compete with that?  Its interesting that a lot of career offices are looking for ways to keep the students coming to their centralized web presence first, instead of focusing on getting them to create their own web presence via blogs and to comb the web for opportunities via vertical search, tags, RSS, social networks, etc. 

The answer I hear a lot is that students don't know how to use these and they're too technical.  Is that really a good answer if they work?  Where are the courses on managing your online identity and using it to your benefit?  Why aren't students flocking to linkedin?  Why doesn't every career office in the country say, "Hey, to heck with this Monster thing, we get all those jobs on Indeed plus all the rest"?   Ideas?

Ugh...  I'll just start cleaning up my spot in reception now and get that Indeed job search up and running.  I concede.

No, but seriously...    Someone should hire this guy.

Link: Bubblegeneration - Evil Corporations Only.

"Hi everyone, just a quick note to let you know those of you I don't know personally that I've decided against continuing towards a PhD and am looking for a new full-time position.

Ideally, I'm thinking an Associate spot at a fund, or a strategy role in www/media/tech, but I'm open to interesting ideas."

Remember when your mom told you not to take candy from strangers?  She knew that candy was what strangers used to lure kids into their cars and drive away with them... and she also knew how our stupid candy seeking minds worked.  We'd do anything for candy.  We didn't care about the consequences.

Well, security is the new stranger candy. 

Jack everything I see and do on the net in exchange for "security."  No thanks. 

You can keep your Snickers Bar, Google.

Link: Google Secure Access Installer.

My softball team got caught up in a "reply all" fest over the past week and we kept getting "system administrator" bouncebacks from this guy who worked at Goldman Sachs.  We figured he gave Zog the wrong e-mail or something.

Nope...  we went on vacation and his mailbox was full. 

So, basically, Goldman Sachs limits the mailbox size of this guy who works in Risk Management to something like 75 or 100 MB, and decides that anything above that should get bounced back.  GM used to limit my mailbox size as well.

Why?   To save server space... i.e. money.   

GM did the same thing on our file server.  They'd send out notices to everyone to clean out their folders on the common drives to conserve space.  For e-mail, they taught everyone how to "archive" by putting their old e-mails on their local drives.  Archiving was long and slow.

Up until yesterday, it never occurred to me how UFR (Utterly Fucking Ridiculous) a practice this was.  How is it possible that Google can offer 2+ gigs of storage and Goldman Sachs only gives its employees 100MB? 

First off, let's estimate the costs of e-mail limits.   Let's say that, in GM's case, everyone managing the pension fund spend just twenty minutes every two weeks cleaning out their inbox.  If the average person there makes 75K, which is probably right given that it was a buyside, mostly Post-MBA shop, it works like this.

75k/52weeks/45 hours a week = $32.05 an hour.

$32.05 an hour x 26 weeks x .33 hours a week= $277.78 a person in time lost managing e-mail storage.

$277.78 x 150 people = $41,666 a year in wasted e-mail storage management time.

I think you can buy storage servers cheaper than this, no?   :)

PLUS, what about the other costs?

Like, what if someone e-mails you with a major deal with lots of revenue for your firm and gets a bounceback because your mailbox is full?   Is that what you really want to have happen?

What about important notifications that you miss?

How unprofessional will your firm look when it can't match its server capacity with its storage demands?

There are lots of technologies out there that de-dupe corporate mass e-mails, attachments, etc. and save lots of storage space, if its that much of an issue.  But seriously, its 2005... I make spreadsheets that are 50MB.  Let's stop playing e-mail storage tiddlywinks, suck it up, and buy another server.  Your best people should spend ZERO time worrying about staying under 100MB.

Link: Bubblegeneration - Evil Corporations Only.

More simply, Web 2.0 is about the shift from network search economies, which realize mild exponential gains - your utility is bounded by the number of things (people, etc) you can find on the network - to network coordination economies, which realize combinatorial gains: your utility is bounded by the number of things (transactions, etc) you can do on the network.

The point is that this shift is combinatorial - each person can do X activities in a combinatorial network, and it's combinations of these activities that make value explode. Contrast with a exponential network, where it's the number of people on a network that create value. That is, a relationship between any two people is 1:1 in an exponential network, but many to many in a combinatorial network. It should be intuitive to you that the former kind of network has more potential for value creation.

[10:28] [Spambot]: hey wats up
[10:28] Ceo21: hi...   Who am I speaking with?
[10:28] [Spambot]: we met at your place a couple of weeks ago
[10:29] Ceo21: That's a bit vague...   can you be more specific?
[10:29] [Spambot]: sean
[10:30] [Spambot]: mixed blk and wht we had oral sex
[10:30] Ceo21: riiiight...  Yeah,  you have the wrong IM.
[10:30] [Spambot]: just kidding i know
[10:30] [Spambot]: this is amanda
[10:30] [Spambot]: we meet at the club the other night
[10:31] Ceo21: ah... IM spam... nice
[10:32] Ceo21: So what else do you have to say for yourself?
[10:32] [Spambot]: we met at the club
[10:33] Ceo21: I think your IM spam engine needs a little work.
[10:33] [Spambot]: ok srry to bother u

"...You know what they don't realize?   

People are smart.  They're not stupid--especially smart people."

        - Fred Wilson

When I was at Fordham, the students wanted to see teacher ratings.  The teachers weren't a fan of making those public, because they didn't want it to become a popularity contest.  Several online efforts were tried, but they failed because it was tough to get one to become the central place for everyone to rank teachers.

Well, teachers, sorry, but you can't stop information from being free, because now the biggest student network has added teacher recommendations.  MySpace now has a place where students can rate their profs--something that a lot of schools either couldn't do or tried to squash.

I'll add my own ratings, but I was curious about some of my faves... here's how they fared:

Prof. Bob George, Finance... I took him like four or five times.  Fantastic teacher... tells it like it is and doesn't let people shovel the bs in class.

4.37 out of 5.0, even though he's not rated as being so easy, which he isn't for finance novices.

Comments:

Tests may be intimidating at first and you may not be satisfied with your first few grades, but if you work hard and study the book and his notes (do problems, etc) you'll get a good grade at the end. Take him, to the point and smart.

Great teacher...very sarcastic. Doesnt take attendance but he knows your name and will hold it against u if u don't show up. Doesn't really teach out of the book...he doesn't have to...as far as I know he could have written the whole thing in one night. V

The only option for finance majors. Untouchable when it comes to his subject matter (go figure - Wharton MBA, Chicago PhD). You will learn so much in his class and will see if you have the mind to handle true finance. The most difficult class at FU.

And of course:

DON'T TAKE HIM - You got it?

As for Dr. Darryl Tress, Philosophy:  4.23 out of 5

The intro course to Aristotle was ambitious reading, but Tress does a very good job of examining the basics, and certainly keeps in mind that the course is intro level. Extremely helpful--don't worry about the big words--she'll explain!

Dean Nancy McCarthy:   4.8 out of 5

If it were not for this woman I would never have graduated. If you ever need anything, she is the person to talk to. One of the best

Link: VentureBlog: Pandora and Persistence.

So many things to blog about.  So many people to get back to.  Lots of connecting to do...

I've been thinking a lot about Pandora lately.  A few months ago, Toby from MusicMobs came to meet with us and we talked about whether or not people could make businesses out of recommendations when content was widely available and approaching incremental costs near zero.  When you get the "music dialtone", finding new music (new to you) becomes the challenge.

Pandora was free for a while and now they're going to start charging $36 a year...  so, are recommendations worth $4 a month to me.  Maybe, but for how long?  Admittedly, I did find some groups from my Pandora station Rammstein Me, including Icon of Coil, which I LOVE and listened to on my bike ride into work today.  (Great sound, kind of cruddly lyrics, but I'm not a big lyrics guy).  But, I don't want to just listen to the stream on my computer...  I want to take it around with me.  That's why I have XM.  I can take the console out of my stereo and plug it into my car when I get it.  Mobility is worth something to me.

Plus, recommendations without a built out download service remind me a little bit of a social network for social network's sake.  If Pandora would power iTunes or Rhapsody, that would be great, but to just listen... I dunno...  my own streaming internet radio station really isn't worth $4 a month to me...  not if you compare the value I get out of the same price for Flickr.

I'm really curious to see if they can built a sustainable service out of this.  I'm really surprised they couldn't make enough from affiliate sales of the tracks or at least didn't try to.

Link: Nerdvana: A Better Tool For Communication (I Can Dream, Can't I?): Corante > Get Real >.

Stowe (Who is hilarious to watch tear apart panels at conferences, btw...) is trying to tackle an issue that I've been discussing with Keshava.  The current modes of computer communication, particularly with people that you know, suck.  They don't tie identities together.  He's totally on point that having a meeting with someone, an IM convo and an e-mail exchange with the same person should all sit in the same place or at least be viewable from the same place.

But there's one application/communication form he missed... its collaboration around a subject and wiki's or wiki-like things.  My world isn't just divided up by people, its divided by people+subject.  For example, Fred, Brad, and I have continual reply alls about firm management.  Are we closed today?  Aren't we?  Should we try a cheaper conferenceline service, etc?   In a people focused app, these conversations would be tied together with conversations about one of our portfolio companies.  That makes no sense, and what's more, what you want to do with those conversations differs greatly depending on the subject matter.  A conversation about the a/c that hardly works in our office doesn't need to be tagged, indexed, collaborated on, etc...    It just needs to be a priority for all of like 10 minutes and then hopefully we come to a quick conclusion on it and then its done.

But what about a conversation around Indeed?  What if Brad writes something really insightful over e-mail?  Perhaps we want to revisit that again, or even build on it.  Fred can't build on top of Brad's e-mail... he can copy and paste and resend it, but that's just kind of a silly, cludgey way to do it.  Plus, what if we want other people in on it?  Perhaps Brad's interesting comment is best built upon by Paul and Rony--the guys at Indeed, or John Battelle.. all of whom were never part of the original e-mail.

Well, we could go and build a wiki and then ask everyone to collaborate on it, but that's not very lightweight.  Plus, maybe we don't want the whole world in on it.  Maybe its just for our little small group.  Its so much easier to reply to an e-mail thread, and some e-mail threads can be very interesting and insightful reads.  The problem is permissions.  Paul and Rony can't read our e-mails...  and even if we cc'd them, an e-mail to you kind of implies that we want you to write something and you're rude if you don't.  No, what we want is to give people permission to get into our small group discussions.

Ok, so we could probably cc the Indeed guys, b/c we know them well enough that it wouldn't be too random, but what about loose connections.

For me, its more about random new people who are loosely connected by subject interest, like Greg.

Whereas Stowe seems to have met Greg and even had dinner with him, according to his mockups, Greg and I have only exchanged IMs and read each other's blogs.  So, for me to start randomly cc'ing him on my identity related e-mail would be sort of weird.  But what if there was a place that Greg could connect to that he could post all of his identity related thoughts to, and see the identity related thoughts of others who wish to include him in a small group.  I'd give him permission to contribute to my little small group thoughts on that.

Its kind of like wikis remixed the way del.icio.us remixes content.  On del.icio.us, you can find the most popular stuff related to blindness, and you don't really care that much about where it comes from, whether its the AFB or a gaming magazine.  Tags take all the content from everywhere, organize them by subject, and make it easy for people to consume subjects, often in a socially connected way. 

But what about the two-way web for collaboration?  How do you colaborate and communicate in a remixed way?  Blogs allow you to contribute to a group of interested parties, but they don't really allow you to collaborate--to build a knowledge base together.  Complaints about comments not being on the same level as posts are the tip of that iceberg.  What's bringing all the related blog posts together and letting people build on top of that in a social way?

Some attempts are being made to do this with