Have you been wondering about the tabs that appeared recently on my banner at the top--especially the peculiar "Pimp My Web" tab?  Well, wonder no more, because the Pimp My Web section of this blog is now functional, at least in Beta, anyway.  (We've wondered at Union Square Ventures why anyone would ever remove the "Beta" tag from a product.  Why would you ever say anything is done?  There's always room for improvement.  Shouldn't you always be working on something to make it better and soliciting audience feedback?)

The point of Pimp My Web is simple.  I'll be posting screencasts here on how to get the most out of your online experience... mostly for more novice users.  It will be the kind of site you e-mail to your mom to show her how to set up del.icio.us or maybe to view yourself before you set up del.icio.us on your girlfriend's computer and make her think you're smarter than you really are.  Starting a new blog?  Send folks here so they can learn how to use your RSS feed in Lesson One. 

These screencasts are just a start.  Two other things I use are the universal IM client, Trillian, and Linkedin.  Got other suggestions for future screencasts?  How about podcasting?  Drop a comment and let me know what every webhead needs to know at a minimum.

AOL trying to make a social network out of AIM reminds me of when the A-Team used to make tanks out of junkyard parts at the end of every episode...it might look messy at first, but whatever they build, it just might work. 

All the pieces are definitely there... more AIM users than people tied to any particular social network.  I love it when a plan comes together.

Link: AOL: MySpace Invader.

...  Or at least let me CTRL+D or something.   

Link: Official Google Blog: It's in the mail....

Google replaced the "trash" like in their Gmail drop down with a delete button.  Fine for people who like buttons, but I was used to the drop down and now I keep going to it and finding nothing.  Its very frustrating.

Matt wrote a follow up post to his popular "New Media Deal" piece and I just want to comment on one particular part of it.  Matt writes:

"A big part of peer production is that most people fundamentally, if quietly, want to belong to any bit of community they can find."

I disagree. 

I'm in the middle of reading Bowling Alone in America: the Collapse and Revival of the American Community.  Granted I'm only up to the collapse part, but so much of this story rings true to me. Participation in groups is generally on the decline.  Sure, there are "membership" groups out there like the AARP that are growing, but they're not actual groups, they're more like mailing lists.

I'm talking about real communities, both on the web and offline.  I think the average person is just more concerned with paying bills, raising their kids, etc.  Its really unfortunatel, but I don't think we are the society of "joiners" that the web makes us out to be.  (I hope I'm wrong, and maybe Meetup is proof of that.) Even on the web, most people spend most of their time with applications just meant for them.  Even e-mail isn't a way for most people to find new communities, its something that enriches their own small circle.

If peer production is all about depending on people's explicit interest in belonging to a community, I don't think its going to work.

In fact, I think the really successful "peer" efforts, like del.icio.us, wikipedia, last.fm, and flickr, hell, you can even through in Amazon's "people like me" engine" only work because they understand that people don't really care enough about communities to join them. 

• I don't have to care that there are hundreds of thousands of other people using del.icio.us.  It works for just me... its a better place to store my links. 
• If I see a wikipedia article, I don't care who wrote it, and if its wrong, I'll just fix it.  I don't need to be an editor or talk to other wikipedia editors. 
• last.fm shows a user what they're listening to and makes recommendations.  Frankly, if the recommendations were good, I think people wouldn't care of a person powered them or a computer did.
• Flickr being such a cool community was largely an accident.  I didn't join it because I wanted to be able to interact with all the other people who go to LVHRD parties and take photos... I just needed a place to store my photos and be able to blog and share them.

Now, of course I'm being extreme here.  Being single and in my 20's, I'm probably more interested in community than the average person, and meeting new people is still very important to me, but this seems to decline as people get married, have kids, buy houses, etc.

Depending on people to choose community over just caring about their own little world is a very tough proposition.   Now, if you help me to augment the communities I'm already in, that's helpful, but that's not quite the same thing.

So I'm going to change Matt's statement and offer a new thesis:

"A big part of peer production is that most people fundamentally want the benefits of community, but are not willing to invest much, if any, social capital to get it.  Successful peer production involves leveraging communities and providing value without the explicit intention of the individuals to contribute to a collective."

That's how mesh networks are going to work, for example... because its built into the phone/wifipoint/laptop/whatever...   and the default is on, not because I'm going to download something because I want to help fight the telco's and help my community get free wifi.

Right now, I have never been so bullish on the technology industry in my whole life.

Why?

Because, today, at 11:48AM, my dad, for the first time in his life, used call waiting... and successfully, too! 

Truly a landmark moment in the technology revolution.

Yesterday was Howard Stern's first day on Sirius, and it looks like the huge bet that Mel Karmizan made on the shock jock might have actually paid off.  With more than 2 million new subscribers at $12 a month, Stern has created a Sirius windfall.

Could any other personality have accomplished that?  Oprah might have had a similar effect, but it would be unlikely that she would ever leave TV for radio, although I do think a lot of her audience only listens to her show anyway, while cleaning, cooking, watching kids, etc.  Whatever the case, the amount of content that people find so indespensible that they are willing to pay for it after having received it for free is pretty small. 

As powerful as these content franchises are, they are as equally fragile.  Martha Stewart's company nearly went under, and remember how popular Michael Jackson once was?  OJ Simpson anyone?

Personality differentiates content, making it more valuable, but also more risky.  What would happen if Stern got caught in some kind of sex abuse trouble?  Sirius stock would sink like a stone, and Karmazin would go from genius to fool.

Still, I think we're going to find a lot more celebrity convergence as we go forward.  When the music publishers have trouble selling you CDs, they'll try to start selling you Gwen Stefani's iTunes Playlist of the Week.  How about Qwentin Tarantino's bittorrent of a movie you've never heard of of the week?  Emeril recipes and ingredients on Fresh Direct?

You want to work in a growth business?  Be a Celebrity 2.0 agent and specialize in using celeb pull to get people on new technologies.  At the same time you would be assuring celebs that their place in the ubiquitous wifi cloud in the sky is just as secure as their star on the walk of fame.  So, Scarlett Johansson, if you want to start blogging, let me know.  I'm your guy.

Amen, sister...

Link: ::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: Maryam, there are plenty more reasons to date geeks....

Is this the Chinese Delicious?   I had some referrer traffic from here and it looks like you tag and comment pages on it.

Or, it could be vertical search for fish.

My manderin is a bit rusty.

Link: 网络书签首页_免费的网络书签、网络收藏夹服务 - YouNote.com.

Unfortunately, I had to close my buddy list about a week or so ago, because I was getting too many spam IMs.  It was particularly annoying, because I forward my IMs to my phone when I go idle.  So now, only people who are already on my buddy list can IM me.  Everyone else sees me as offline.

I don't want it set up that way, but I'm also tired of these "There are 424 singles looking for sex in your area right now" messages and I certainly don't want them on my phone.

First off, I'm sure there are more than that...  that's probably an undercount.

Secondly, the screenames that these messages come from are obviously fake.  They come from lvrgirl32144153153 or sxybtch1341431251.  These are not screennames that real humans have.

Whatever the signup process is for instant messager accounts is at AOL (could be Yahoo!, too... I was using Trillian), its not blocking spammers well at all.  If some product manager over there wants to shed some light on this, I'd love to hear what they're doing to fix this, so I can open up my IMs to the world of real humans again. 

Otherwise, if you'd like to chat, just put your screenames on the footer of your e-mails and I'm happy to add you.

Easy.    I deleted 2800 of them.  Silly blogosphere.  What did you think I was going to say?

Want more detail?

I've blogged before about the stupidity of inbox limits, but most people face them so a lot of people are nearing the need to declare e-mail bankruptcy.   (That's what happens when you just delete your whole inbox and start over.)  I was almost one of those people, until I got serious about cleaning up my inbox over the holiday break.

A lot of people use Getting Things Done and I don't know if my little system corresponds to it at all, but this is what worked for me using Outlook.

1. Download Google Desktop. Next to Firefox, his is probably my most indispensable desktop app and that goes above IM and a feedreader.  I never have to worry about accidentally deleting an e-mail or losing it, because its all indexed and cached. 
2. Attachments.  Attachments are the devil.  Sort your inbox by size and pull them out of e-mails.  Put them in a place that gets indexed.  If you save them in your inbox because you feel like you need them at home, either save them to your desktop or use Foldershare to sync between home and work.
3. Sort by person. This is the easiest way to delete large quantities of unwanted mail, including daily newsletters, evites, blog comment notifications, etc.   It was really easy to go through the list and pull out things I didn't need, like back and forth threads with our IT guy about the computer slowness I experienced back in April.  There were also threads with entrepreneurs on deals we had passed on that I got rid off...  I knew that if I really needed to get those back, they were all indexed with Google Desktop.
4. Cover your butt stuff.  When you're done eliminating all of the obvious trash, take the obvious archive stuff and make a rule out of it.  For us, its portfolio companies and for your firm, it might be clients.  Create a rule that says that anytime e-mail comes from your contacts at a company, it gets copied to an offline folder with the name of that company or client.  Run that for all your previous mails and enable it for mail going forward.  This separates communication from storage.  So, if an entreprenuer sends me quarterly financials, I know I can grab the attachment and delete the e-mail, b/c there's always an archived copy offline tucked neatly in a folder labeled with that company name.  This is good in case you get sued.  :)
5. Now we're onto categories.  I've created categories for my mail that is labeled with numbers that organizes the order that things appear in my inbox because that's the way I have my inbox sorted.  So, I have a category called "3 - Action Item" which appears above "2 - Deals to log" and that appears above "1 - Waiting to hear back".   Whatever you name your categories, design them in such a way that they are self deleting.  In other words, the "2- Deals to log" category contains e-mails that shouldn't really sit for more than 24 hours.  They need to be logged, the relevant info needs to be categorized in our database, and then they need to get deleted.   Here are my categories:
• 3 - Action Items  - Stuff that needs to get done... its what I look to first when I come in and try to mentally organize my day.  This is also where I keep my personal to dos.  I created a rule that says if I e-mail myself, it gets categorized as an action item.
• 2 - Waiting - Means I've e-mailed someone that I really want a response back from soon.
• 2 - Deals - These deals need to be logged.
• 1 - USV Conversation - See below
• 0 - Networking - These are e-mails I'm keeping for one week just to hold onto them long enough to put them into my "keep in touch" process.  They are from people that I don't need to get back to, but probably want to stay in touch with in the future.  I'll turn them into calendar reminders depending on how often I want to ping them.  This can be done once a week.
• 0 - Save - These are e-mails that have important info in them that need to be kept on our file server, not in my inbox. Since I set Google Desktop to  crawl our file server as well, I know I won't lose the info here, but regardless, its best filed somewhere else.  This includes new wire instructions from LPs (there's a file for that) IDs and Passwords  to data services (file for that, too), and important stuff from lawyers.
6. Colleague conversations. Brad, Fred, and to some extent Kerri and I e-mail each other in Reply Alls all day.   This is almost more like a chat room than it is e-mail, and so it needs to be separated.  So, I created a rule that categorizes any e-mail from any one of them as "1 - USV Conversation".  This is mostly a staging area, because what goes on there is mostly either deals to log or things for me to do.

And that's it...     I think the main thing is thinking of every e-mail as an e-mail that requires me to do something or a kind of e-mail that should get automatically saved by the system somewhere else because its from a client, colleague, etc.  This is most of my mail and with Google Desktop, I can even afford to make a mistake.

That's working for me so far...     if anyone else has any good tips, let me know.  One problem I found is that I can't use categories on my Win Mobile 5 version of Outlook, so I can only sort and organize when I'm at the laptop.

Lots of money went into, was made, (and lost) around network management tools.  Now, if the web is the platform, what should the network management tools look like around the interconnects, like APIs?   This question was posed to me over IM and I'd be interested in hearing feedback.

[15:14] <Nobody>: here's a stupid question... have you heard of any companies that specialize in api tools... i mean... we have tons of tools for rss... but where are all of the api companies?
[15:16] Ceo21: Well, what exactly do you want to do with an API?   Do you want something that sits between you and the API telling you what it does, manipulating it for you, kind of like Dreamweaver for HTML?
[15:16] *** Auto-response from <Nobody>: here, coding. 
[15:18] <Nobody>: well i mean... most companies have an api that allows another user to leverage their system (im thinking mashups on this one).... but they are all non commercial APIs... where is the company that will specialize in outsourced APIs... it isnt a company's main focus... why doesn't somoene create a reporting/payment gateway, and allow companies to build into it, to help them monetize their systems (or even a google appliance type of deal, where you plug in a server on your rack and it starts working)?
[15:19] Ceo21: API middleware
[15:19] Ceo21: or rather
[15:20] Ceo21: API management tools
[15:20] <Nobody>: exactly, it isn't a main product or anything, but it is something that can open up their system if they let people get creative with it
[15:20] Ceo21: Are APIs written similarly enough that you could have a one size fits all tool that works with a basic set of management tools?
[15:22] <Nobody>: I think so
[15:23] Ceo21: Perhaps I should go on a fishing trip and blog this...  do you mind if I post this w/o your sn?
[15:23] <Nobody>: I don't think a company would want to be bothered with billing customers for their APIs as well; seems like another distraction.
[15:23] Ceo21: We'll see if anyone comes up with ideas or leads...
[15:25] <Nobody>: I haven't seen anything similar, i've been looking for the past month or so, i may have to see what goes on at mashup camp
[15:25] Ceo21: Mind if I post it?
[15:27] <Nobody>: Not at all...

Now that I think of this, its a little bit like the Feedburner of APIs.  What would be the challenges here?  Anyone thinking about anything similar?

Update:  re:Plaxo:  A lot of my contacts have updated their info via Plaxo, including several people who had moved offices, changed phone numbers, etc.  I never would have found this out otherwise.  Two people got annoyed by it, and four people complimented my attempt at humor.  Some just ignored it.  Apoligies to anyone who was inconvenienced by the mailing, but it really helped me out a lot.  Here's the rest of the post:

I probably have one of the highest success rates out there when it comes to getting people to connect to me on LinkedIn.

I do pretty well on Plaxo, too.

The secret?

Humor people.

Both services have some pretty bland stock invitations and very few people ever take the time to change them.  That's why they annoy people and people call them spam. 

But, I really find them useful, so instead, I set out to try and give people a free laugh in exchange for filling out the little form or agreeing to be a contact. 

Here's my LinkedIn invite:

I'm using LinkedIn to keep in touch with my professional network. Because you're a PERSON, I'm going to take two seconds to write a mildly creative and entertaining invitation, even though you know what this whole thing is about and any text is probably unnecessary.

So link to me, and then I'll troll your network for opportunities, contacts, dates, etc... all the while getting your permission at every step. Pretty soon, your network will realize that I'm a far more interesting person than you are, and one by one, they'll probably unlink you. You'll wind up alone in a bar somewhere, and probably wind up in a fight.  Several haymakers and a black eye later, you'll wonder where all your friends went and you'll only have yourself, Reid Hoffman, Sequoia and Greylock to blame. :)

Of course, I'm joking...

Obviously, you can't blame the VC's.

- Charlie

And here's my Plaxo invite that I just sent out:

Subject: How Plaxo is like one of those college kids getting you to sign a Greenpeace petition on the street

<Your name>,

Some people think Plaxo is spam.  Just like one of those Greenpeace kids, it usually comes at an inopportune time and its mildly annoying.

However, that doesn't mean Greenpeace isn't a good cause.  In the same way, joining a network that solves your contact info and address book problems once and for all isn't such a bad thing either, even if its methods are slightly annoying.

So, once a year, I'll use Plaxo to ask for updates.  Its selfish.  I want you to type it in because I don't want to do it myself.  Can you blame me?

If you are already on Plaxo, this won't affect you, because I'll always have your latest info and you won't need to do anything.  If you're not, you'll have to do the following decide whether or not I'm the kind of guy you want to have your info.  Then, you'll have to manually type out your info when you have a free moment, which is probably never, or politely ignore this e-mail at the risk that it hits your inbox limit.  Isn't it easier just to join?

I'll put my Plaxo and LinkedIn acceptance rates against anyone with these babies. 

"They're gold, Jerry!   Gold!"

Link: Jeremy Hermanns dot org � Alaska Flight #536 - Rapid De-Pressurization and Panic at 30K Feet.

Check out  these cool new features in Indeed.

You can save any job (without setting up an account... another reason cookies are good!) and write notes on it, as well as tag it.

Check out the screenshot below:

Riffrolls on music and  linkrolls on kittens
Bright Flickr badges and warm wool on AdSense
Amazon book lists tied up with strings
These are the things of our blog sidebar bling

Vimeo ponies and current IM status
Mail me and Skype me and Word of Blog, too
Indeed jobs flying with the moon on their wings
These are the things of our blog sidebar bling

Well, you know, just a little something for the kids...    but there's a point here.

We've become very accustumed to thinking of "distribution" of web services as little sidebar widgets.  And the results are kind of underwhelming, to be honest.

People don't go to my page to actually consume any of these services.  Its more for me to display things that I'm interested in, almost like little pieces of flair.

That concept falls far short of the potential of the remix world we're building.  Too small.

And then we have APIs, too.  Nice if you're a programmer, but for the rest of us, too geeky.

But what if I could paste some code right in the middle of my page and get a fullblown service right here on my blog.

Or, what about a dating blog for single parents?  Wouldn't they be interested in a fully functioning rendition of Match or whatever services are out there that is limited to single parent listings?  So it would look entirely like Match and have all the same features, but be skinned under my banner.

I was thinking about local portals the other day and how complicated it would be to set something up, but what if I could just pull down some HTML and start pasting together services.  I could have a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn site that lists Bay Ridge personals, all the Bay Ridge MySpacers, Bay Ridge City Search results, Meetups in Bay Ridge, Bay Ridge jobs from Indeed, a full explorable rendition of Flickr just from people in the Bay Ridge Zip Code... etc, etc.

Someone else could do the same thing for some other locality, or even for something besides location.  Goth personals, Goth meetups, Goth jobs?, Goth reblogs.

The key is that it should all be completely self serve.  I shouldn't have to strike a business deal with Nerve.com to want to feature Brooklyn personals on my blog... it should just be completely self serve.  All I'd need to do is to create the banner, do my own marketing, etc... and boom, I've got my own instant portal.

Right now, you need to use stuff like Drupal to create a site, use APIs, etc... its not something the average person can do.

And Squidoo has mods, but the mods are mostly text links via on RSS.... no fully interactive services.

If you have any kind of a consumer facing service, I think its to your benefit to allow consumers to pull down and promote a limited version of your site tailored to their vertical.  Let your users aggregate enough long tail stuff to appeal to a market segment you'll never reach on your main site.  So, instead of making me pick out and paste all the individual Amazon books on Brooklyn, let me skin a version of Amazon with Brooklyn books only that I can use right here on my site.... a pasteable bookstore.

That's remixing and that's true distribution.

Time is money.
Events take place in time.
Broker/control events (i.e. time) and you're going to make a lot of money.

Only in the last week or so have I figured out what a juggernaut Gmail is for making Google a lot of money in the event space, but not without some help.

Matching an event to an audience is about finding a relevent event and a relevent audience.  Destinations like CitySearch have trouble finding either.  Not all the events are listed there, and they don't get the traffic they want.  That was Events 1.0.

Then you've got Events 1.5...   EVDb and Upcoming.org.  These sites allow you to share more with friends... they're more focused around user generated content, but they're still centralized depositories.  They lack the distribution of production.  You can create your own event rolls, but you don't really take advantage of the distributed event listing going on around the web... just the distributed communication.  Its one way and everyone's got to go to them to post for this to work.

Events 2.0 is vertical search.  Its Zvents and BusyTonight... coming at each other from opposite coasts.  They don't need to build a community to get their service going.  Vertical search works, to a greater or lesser degree, on day one.  If you've got an event, they'll find it (at least that's the promise anyway), no matter where you are.  All of the eventrolls, community features, events your friends are going to, etc. would naturally come after that.  (Events 2.1?)

But, this still doesn't quite do it.  I've got to sit down and search for events everytime I want to do something.  That's not quite discovery.  Its still search.  Its not the kind of serendipitious discovery I get from del.icio.us RSS feeds of random good stuff bubbled up from the community, like the tag combo of Mustang and cars.

So, how to solve the discovery issue?  Well, it just so happens that Google is sitting on a mountain of a lot of personal data on all of its Gmail users.  Now all they need to do is to use it as fuel for GCal, buy or make a vertical search tool, and they'll have the greatest calendar ever produced on the web--one that fills itself!!

They've already convinced Gmail users of how benign it is to let a computer search their e-mail to produce relevent ads in exchange for a killer service.  I'd bet a lot of those users would use a slick calendar app if, with one click, it filled itself with potential events for you based on all of your historical e-mail content. 

The missing link is the events themselves.  I hope Google doesn't buy EVDb, but goes all out and buys a vertical search tool--one that comprehensively indexes the web for every last event.

There's no reason why GCal shouldn't let me know when all of the next Mets related events are (hell, put the whole damned schedule on my calendar).  Kayaking?  It should see how many times I mention downtown boathouse in my e-mail, figure out what that is (b/c its the first thing that comes up in google, of course), go to our homepage and put all of our classes and schedule up there as well.  Same with concerts of bands I talk about.   That's Events 3.0.

On top of that, when it asks, "This looks like something you're into, are you going/interested?" and I click yes, it should notify (if I set it to) all of my other Gmail friends.  It shouldn't e-mail them, but it should have a "4 people you know are thinking of going to this" status area, and let the user click through to see who those people are (if they opt in to make themselves viewable.)

Something like this would make people who don't even use calendars start to use them.  It would also open up a whole new type of ad category:  Sponsored event listings.  It would allow advertisers to reach me with events on nights I'm not doing anything else... either to get me out of the house or to keep me in, since TV advertisers would probably pay to reach me on nights I appear to be free regularly.

The calendar, powered by e-mail, will prove to be a powerful attention broker, and right now I think Google has the best e-mail, the technology to search it, and the ability to buy or build the events. 

Events 3.0, here we come.  So long lonely Saturday nights.

I just handed over about an inch and a half of my screen to Google by downloading the new version of Google Desktop.  I really like it a lot.  Its not perfect, but its pretty useful.  It sits in a sidebar on the right side of my screen and has "panels" that you can swipe in and out, like RSS feeds, News, Weather, etc.  Its very fast, too... feels Ajax-y.

Here's what I like:

Fast E-mail - I've been asking for a fast frontend for Outlook at this is a great start.  Outlook is so heavy and slothlike on my computer.  This takes my incoming mail, displays it in a panel, and gives me a one click, full text preview.  For me, anything fast in e-mail is nice.  Its even going to index and display my Gmail.

RSS (Webclips) - I'm going to add the 10 feeds that I want to read immediately plus my del.icio.us/for tag so I can get the stuff I want to see right on my desktop.  This way, I can relegate FeedDemon to just once or twice a day use.

ToDo - Very simple to-do list sitting on my desktop...simple is good when you're trying to get stuff done.

Needs Improvement:

Outlook integration - The sidebar is display only for e-mail...  doesn't let me actually do anything.  Even when I remove an e-mail from the display, it doesn't actually delete it in Outlook. It would be nice if I could delete and move to folders from the sidebar.  Same with todo's.  In fact, this is a problem I have with a lot of the web-based GTD applications.   I use Good Software to tie my Treo to our exchange server, so Outlook is where all of my PIM info lives.  If something can't pull from that or put stuff into it, it isn't any good to me.  I wonder how many professionals have that problem. 

Inexplicably missing:

Calandering!! I'd install a panel that had my day's events immediately, but there wasn't a single tool on the sidebar that allowed me to do anything with calandering.  This is probably because Google is developing a calendar for sure.  Why build something that improves your Outlook functionality when you're going to kill Outlook in a few months anyway?  Still, would have been nice to see my cal on the sidebar.

So how far across the desktop do people think Google is trying to go and how successful will they be?  While those of us more web savvy may start downloading sidebars, toolbars, clients, etc. the average person might not?  Or will they?  Can Google essentially build an operating system on top of Windows and somehow overtake it?

Perhaps we should start worrying when Google buys Writely.

I've been thinking about this post from Blogspotting about whether or not the blind can use iPods.  Blogs are hard enough for them to read because of all these ridiculous columns and screwy formatting, but I figured that podcasts would really be the killer medium for the visual impared once iTunes included podcast support.

Turns out its anything but.  iTunes is nearly impossible to navigate if you're blind and, as I can attest to from listening to the iPod on my bike, the menus are really difficult if you're not looking at the screen.  I haven't spent the time to make a lot of playlists, so I generally just shuffle and skip past songs I don't like.  God forbid I accidently hit Menu, I'm totally lost and can't get back unless I stop the bike, pull over, and do it visually.  (BTW... I bought a helmet and use it all the time now.)

The sad thing is, since the iPod is programmable (you can even put Linux on it), it would take Apple all of about a week to develop an app that talks its way through the menus with basic text to voice.  No new hardware, just a software upgrade. 

So, how about it Apple?  Steve Jobs, are you listening?  How about an iPod software upgrade for the visually impaired?

Link: Bokardo � Blog Archive � Learning More about Structured Blogging.

the “Del.icio.us Lesson”. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a personal level first. And I wonder, how will Google Base fare in light of this? What personal value are people getting out of it? Is it enough to make the service successful?

Fabrice Grinda is a a successful entreprenuer who has spent a lot of time in New York City.  He wrote a good post yesterday on approaching VCs with consumer facing services.  Seriously, where else but on blogs can Joe Entreprenuer get tips like this?

He writes,

"It seemed to me all you had to do was write an amazing business plan, send it to a VC, organize a management presentation, do a brilliant job and all your problems were going to be solved."

Obviously, he's figured out its a little more complicated than that.  His suggestion is that entreprenuers take the time to get something up and running before they start raising a lot of money for their idea:

"If you wait until you have a functioning product and a proof of concept – even on a small scale – you will have proven that you can execute and that your go to market strategy has some merit and you will then find VCs to be much more responsive..."

This is largely true and the interesting word he used was "proof."  He talks about the difference between different types of risk, and that "VCs are willing to accept idea risk much more than execution risk," but I think there's something else going on with that relationship.  If you can build something that people use, in other words, get past execution risk, you have also, in a sense, addressed your idea risk.  After all, when's the last time a lot of people started using a product that was a fundamentally bad idea?  Particularly with web services, executing on a launch allows the consumers to judge which are the best ideas, rather than letting a VC make the call before the consumers have spoken.  Sure, consumer surveys might be helpful, but getting actual consumers to use a product is much more meaningful.

He also gives some good tips on how to approach a VC once you've got your service up to a useable status:

"Sending a VC a 50 page business plan and hoping to get a reply is not a realistic approach."

Well, you might get a reply, but he's right in that simpler is better, at least up front.  The same way you should have a two minute elevator pitch, you should probably have a document that someone could read in two minutes as well.

"E-mailing it to businessplans@vc_name.com is unlikely to work as that e-mail address is flooded with thousands of ideas and projects and your presentation is likely to get lost in the clutter...   The best way to approach a VC is through someone they know and to organize a brief voice conversation. "

Well, hopefully that's not the case.  Losing business plans would definitely be an issue.  However, I think the real key here is that getting recommendations from people you know go a long way to addressing another key risks VCs worry about: management risk.  A vote of confidence from a trusted source goes a long way.

Read the rest of Fabrice's post for a few more tips on how to get off the ground here.