So Guy Kawasaki, who is "by no means “proven” as a venture capitalist" (by his own admission) has put together a quiz about what it takes to be a VC. 

Guy thinks that , "When you’re young, you should work eighty hours a week to create a product or service that changes the world. You should not sit in board meetings listening to an entrepreneur explaining why she missed her numbers while you read email on a Blackberry and intermittently spew forth gems like, “You should partner with MySpace; I can also introduce you to a few of the losers in our portfolio.”

Furthermore, entrepreneurs should view any young person who opted for venture capital over “real world” experience with contempt."

Well, Guy, I started out on the financing side, first at an insitutional LP where I listened to a lot of VCs and then on the VC side where I listened to a lot of entreprenuers and the VCs I got to work with.  It took me a while at each place before I started contributing my own two cents, and I tried to do it where I felt I had some relevent insight.  Listening, in my opinion, is a skill in short demand and I feel like I learned a lot.  Now I'm taking what I learned to the "real world" on the operational side, but I don't think that any of the entrepreneurs I met looked at me with contempt before I joined Oddcast.  I'm glad they didn't.   

Here's my advice to young people trying to get into the field.  Don't let anyone tell you how to get to Mecca.  There are many ways, and one thing I remembered at my time at GM was that the VCs I met came from lots of different backgrounds.   Some were former entreprenuers. Others were technologists.  A few came from journalism and media... others... sales.   

And, to debunk Guy's quiz, I'll give the example of Mike Moritz.  Moritz is a partner at Sequoia.  You may know the startups he's funded:  Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, eGroups, Agile...   Most people consider him to be somewhat good at his job.

If Mike were to take Guy's quiz, here's what he would score:

Part I: Work Background

What is your background?

• Engineering (add 5 points) 
• Sales (add 5 points)
• Management consulting (subtract 5 points)
• Investment banking (subtract 5 points)
• Accounting (subtract 5 points)
• MBA (subtract 5 points)

Mike would get -5 points here, because he joined Sequoia after reporting for Time Magazine and starting a newsletter and conference business. In other words, he was a media guy.  Then, he made the mistake of getting an MBA.

"The ideal venture capitalist has an engineering or a sales background."  Sorry, Mike.

Part II: First-Hand Experiences

You may have been in the right places, but you also need the right experiences in those places. Specifically, have you gone through these? 

• Been kicked in the groin by a major, long-lasting economic downturn, so that you know how powerless you are. (add 1 point)

Hmm...  since Mike has been part of a successful firm for 20 years, and he invested in Google during the bubble, I'd say this is a no.  His track record seems to have left his groin intact.  No points.

• Worked at a successful startup, so that you can speak first-hand about the ecstasy of entrepreneurship. (add 1 point)

Nope.  No points.

• Worked at a failed startup, so that you understand three things: first, how hard it is to achieve success; second, that the world doesn’t owe you a thing; and third, what it’s like to be fired or laid off. (add 3 points)

No failures, no points.

• Worked at a public company, so that you know what the end goal looks like, warts and all. (add 1 point)

Reporter for Time.  Time was public.  Um....  1 point I guess.

• Held a CEO position, so that you have this fantasy experience out of your system and will not try to run the startup from a board position. (add 2 points)

Was he the CEO of the conference company he co-founded?  Maybe... 2 points.

• Been an angel investor with your own money, so that you understand the fiduciary responsibility of investing other people’s money. (add 2 points)

I don't think he can angel invest while working at a VC, so I'd say no.  No points.

Part III: Necessary Knowledge

Finally, can you answer these questions for entrepreneurs? Because this is the kind of advice that entrepreneurs need. (Don’t worry: many current venture capitalists would fail this part.)

• How do I introduce a product with no budget? (add 2 points)

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt on most of these, b/c he seems pretty smart... never met him (would like to, of course), but I'll assume.  2 points

• How do I determine whether there’s really a market demand for my product? (add 1 point)

1 point.  (Seems like this should get more weight, but ok..whatever...)

• What do I do if customers hate our first product? (add 1 point)

1 point...  [shrugs]

• How do I get Walt Mossberg to return my call? (add 2 points)

This is one of those, "The way to be a successful VC is to be a successful VC before" things...  I imagine Walt would answer Mike's call.  2 pts.

• How do I get to the folks who run Demo? (add 1 point)

See above.  1 point.

• How do I get a plug in TechCrunch? (add 1 point)

I have an issue with this one.  I don't think TechCrunch has made or broken any companies (the products may have broken themselves...  Arrington just calls 'em as he sees 'em).   Plus, I don't really think a VC making a call to Arrington would really influence him... maybe a VC who blogs or anyone who blogs, but otherwise I really think its just create something worthwhile and submit.  0 points.

• How do I get the folks at Fox Interactive to return my call? (add 1 point)

Hmm... if you're investing in a B2B company, I'm not sure how this is relevent.... but, I imagine they'd return Mike's call.  A point, I guess.

• How do I dominate a segment when there are five other companies doing essentially the same thing? (add 2 points)

2 Points... see Google.

• How much time, energy, and money should I spend on patent protection? (add 1 point)

1 Point...  a patent lawyer would know this, too.

• We bet on the wrong architecture for our product; what do I do now? (add 2 points)

Since MM isn't a technical guy, but he probably has connections to lots of great CTO's, I'm going to give him 1 point here.

• What kind of people should I hire: young, old, unproven, proven, cheap, expensive, local, remote? (add 1 point)

As if there was a right answer to this... whatever... 1 point.

• How do I get them to leave their current jobs without throwing a lot of money at them? (add 2 points)

Benefit of the doubt... 2 points.

• How do I tell my best friend that he can’t be chief technical officer just because he was a cofounder? (add 2 points)

2 points.

• How do I get to the buyer at BestBuy to return my call? (add 1 point)

1 point... b/c anyone with a clue will say, "Make a product people demand at the store."

• How do I handle a customer who wants to send back his purchase for a full refund? (add 1 point)

1 point.

• How do I fire people? (add 2 points)

2 points.

• How do I lay people off? (add 2 points)

2 points.

So, on experience, I gave him most of the points, assuming that anyone with a 20 year career in VC should know this stuff.

So, that makes his total...21.

According to the results chart:

24 points or less: Work until you can score higher and keep flying on Southwest Airlines.

:)

Does anyone use anything better than ActiveSync... like... I dunno... something that works?   ActiveSync is being really difficult.  I'm trying to sync a PocketPC-6700 using Windows Mobile 5 to Win XP.... everything is in Outlook...   actually... it's just calendar and contacts.  

So YouTube is going mobile on Verizon phones.  You'll be able to subscribe to videos from YouTube for an extra $15 a month on top of your existing data plans.

So... wait...  Let me see if I have this straight.  Carriers want to resell me what I get on the web for free over and above what I already pay extra to get the web in the first place?  On top of that it's on a smaller screen and bound to be slower.

As it is, most people are already paying $50-100 a month for their phone plans.  Where does that break?  $150?  $200? 

At the point where my phonebill becomes more expensive than insurance on the 'Stang, I will run my phone over with the car and take a video of it.  I will then upload it to YouTube so you can all have it Vcasted to your Verizon phones.

When do the phones break wide open and we have enough WiFi or Wimax or whatever to just walk around with an unlocked VOIP phone and just download freely from the web?

Carriers are making my phone experience about as good as my online experience was with Prodigy...     in 1992.

I just installed an Incircles widget that enables live group chat on my blog.   I found it on TechCrunch and I think it's pretty cool for an alpha.   

Here's what's great about it:

• Easiest install of any widget I've ever used.   I think I picked a color, told it where it was going... then boom, I was done.
• It's built in flash and the embed code is flash, which means it will pretty much work anywhere.
• Slick interface.  It's very easy to message other users and join in.
• Links to popular pages.  I can easily check out other pages where people are chatting with InCircle widgets.

Here's what needs some work:

• Notification and popping out of the page.  I don't want to keep my blog open all day, but I wouldn't mind an extra window that blinks when new people join or new messages are played.  I'd probably even download a little notifier for this.   An html link that opens a new popped out window of the chat I'm on would be great.
• Chat isn't visable until you start chatting yourself.   Outsiders can't see what's going on in the chat or that it's even live until you jump in.  This makes them look dead at first.
• Archiving and user reports.  Not registering made it easy to get started, but that also means I have no backend interface for getting reports, seeing what was discussed, etc. 
  I also can't block certain words or users.  The user thing is hard b/c no one registers to join a chat, so it's hard to ban people, but you could do it with a cookie at least temporarily.
• I'm not cookied with the same identity.   Once I create a screename, it should be mine... so maybe I do want to register...  or make registration optional, but what I get for registering is the ability to own my screename... b/c I don't want anyone else being ceonyc.  That would allow me to be ceonyc in any chat I walked into.
• Feedflare...   Allow me to put something in my RSS feed that says "X number of people chatted on this page in the last hour) that encourages clickthroughs.

All in all, nice work...   I wonder how much traffic a blog needs to have for this to reach a critical mass.

Preface:   I think what Linden Labs has built is amazing...  its an interesting social experiment, an amazing business, an PR phenomenon...   and I give it kudos for making us all think differently about the way the digital world might move forward.   That being said, to anyone that has been involved with Second Life, please don't take this as a knock, but more as a healthy and perhaps, if I'm lucky, conversation provoking dose of skepticism not on the product itself, but on the approach to it by PR folks, marketers, brands, pundits, etc.  EDIT: (Based on comment #1... I'm not making any sort of direct comparison between SL and the avatars that Oddcast makes, because SL is an immersive world...  Oddcast makes talking avatars that live in the web... they're very different animals used for very different purposes.)

The PR buzz around SecondLife is amazing... (Nice job, Lewis PR...)  and I think it's causing a lot of businesses to wonder if they should be participating.    Consider the following list the "grain of salt" you might want to take Second Life with:

1. Second Life is not, and probably will never be, mobile.   From cellphones, to the iPod, portable gaming...   the consumer has clearly voted with their wallet that they want to pick up their digital life and take it with them, getting out from behind the PC and the laptop.  SL, because it needs to be online and it requires powerful and complex 3-D rendering, will not wind up on your cellphones anytime soon.  In a world where I can blog and read blogs, take and send pictures, play games, consume and even download music and videos wherever I am, how appealing is a technology going to be if it forces me to sit home behind my PC?
2. There are no microchunks of a virtual world.  CDs got broken up into tracks.  Movies and TV shows became YouTube clips.  Websites make sure everything has a permalink so that URLs can be tagged and passed along easily.  This is the viral fuel for a short attention span world...  small and bitesized.   SecondLife can't easily be consumed in small bits.  You can't link to an event that already happened, or tag a place, or share it with someone who doesn't have the software.  That also makes it hard to discover things in Second Life when you're not looking for them.  You can't stumble upon it through Google or by browsing social networking profiles.
3. Second Life is a benevolant dictatorship. If you were doing corporate business development in emerging markets, political stability would be a key factor in measuring the attractiveness of a potential new market.  I think, if given the choice, you'd rather invest in a place with a representative government that has proven to support smooth transition of power in the past.  To me, the fact that a very small group of people basically dictates what goes and what doesn't in this market... a group of people that is not beholden to the residents by law, is a political risk. 
4. Second Life is a business.  Linden Labs has taken venture capital investment and those firms are going to look for an "exit" at some point over the next four years or so.  Maybe Linden Labs will be profitable enough to go public.  In that case, the founders could remain at the helm, but they'd still have the pressure to grow revenues which may be at odds with the authenticity of the service.  Contrast that with Craigslist, which makes its team enough money to be comfortable and not feel pressure to do anything that it's users might not like... no quarterly numbers to meet and no pressure to grow the business. 
5.  Diminishing returns for brand participation.  Darren came up with this one and I thought it was very astute.  Right now, you can gain a lot of PR buzz by participating in Second Life... probably enough buzz to justify the investment in development for whatever you build to put in there.  But, how long will that last?  Will you get any buzz for being the 25th retailer in Second Life?   The 50th?  Plus, are you gaining buzz with the right crowd?   If I'm Major League Baseball and American Apparel, I think I'd be doing more in MySpace and Facebook right now because they represent a broader audience.
6. Requires 100% attention.   I think we all agree that attention is finite.  We just don't have the time to do everything we want to do.   With more and more content and services available to us on a regular basis, consumers are looking for things that either coexist well with other things they spend their time on, or save them time.  I'm generally short on anything that requires my full attention and a lot of time.  You can't casually browse Second Life... you're watching it.. it's full screen on your machine... your character needs to walk around to experience more.  It's very different than an IM window you can put away in the background when you're doing other things.
7. Lack of context.   The idea that you can be anyone you want and do anything is really cool... conceptually... but with no guidence, no schedule... no context, users find themselves lost over overwhelmed.  That's what happens with blogging sometimes.  A blog with no theme is difficult to keep up with.  When you're in a 3-D game, you have a goal...  the game has rules.  Hardcore SLers might find this constricting, but the more casual mainstream appreciate knowing what to do from the second the game starts.
8. Digital world with an analog business model.  In Second Life, people make stuff and sell it.  Goods are exchanged for digital items, but because of their digital nature, SL has experienced problems lately with users copying digital items that would otherwise be sold.  The music and movie industry has been fighting this kind of thing for years and still hasn't stamped it out... and that's with big entertainment money behind them.  When you have a world where all of the items are user created, I just can't imagine that the future will offer adequate protection against the free distribution of these items.  DRMing of user created digital goods just seems very counter to the nature of user created works anywhere else on the web.
9. Reach.   No matter how many registered users you have, getting less than 20K simultaneous users online really isn't very much.  By comparison, many of the online MMOGs get more users than this on a regular basis, with World of Warcraft peaking at half a million users online at the same time.   Yes, it's growing, but interestingly, the number of registration is far outpacing the active usage of the site.  A number of sites I found analyizing the usage on the site showed that online/active as a percent of the total is trending down, meaning that more people are coming to check it out, but they're not sticking around.
10. Escapism vs. Reality.   The promise of social networks is that you've got digital self expression going on in unprecidented volume.  That makes them interesting to both users and marketers alike...   because of their ability to connect you with real people based on real and authentic things about themselves.  Throw blogs in that category, too.   Second Life is more of a fantasy.  Even the name says it.  This is not your life... it's your other life.  You cannot be yourself.. .you have to change your name.  It's not me and it's not other really other people, either.  I thought the blog/Web 2.0/Cluetrain revolution was all about authenticity and living online the way I do in real life...  my digital world as a reflection of my real interests and real personality?  So far, that seems a lot more compelling for people than fantasy... otherwise, wouldn't most of the profiles on MySpace be roleplaying profiles... fake people created and maintained by real humans behind them?   If I'm a business, I want to make sure I'm connecting in a sincere way with real people as well.... not sponsoring a fantasy.  That's the way I personally want to live online as well.

So I started using GotVoice, which checks my cellphone voicemail and sends the files to me in an MP3 files.  I love GotVoice because I really find it a pain to dial my voicemail and navigate menus to hear my voicemails.  Actually, I pretty much hate the phone in general.  Converting voicemail to MP3 can be a dangerous tool in the hands of anyone who works for a talking avatar company.  :)

Combine that with this really powerful free audio tool I just found, WavePad, and you have my mom the avatar... live on my blog.  Wavepad is like SoundRecorder on steroids.

Here she is.  Click the play button on the right side of the box to hear her speak.  I'm so going to get in trouble for this.  Love you mom!

Sony has yanked all of the Casino Royale  trailers from YouTube.

Huh?

We're not talking the whole movie here...  we're talking the advertsing trailer.

Aren't they incentivized to get this thing playing in as many places as possible??

I had this playing on my blog and my MySpace profile for months leading up to the opening. 

If you're in charge of movie trailers, no matter how big or small your movie is, and you don't have them uploaded to YouTube, you're an idiot.  That's it.  You're just an idiot. 

Am I the only one that doesn't get "click to call"?

Isn't one of the great promises of the web the fact that I don't have to deal with salespeople, customer service reps, plumbers, etc. over the phone?   When's the last time that was a good experience?

I just want "click to schedule an appointment" or "click to get my question answered promptly".   Click.  Click.   T-o-i-l-e-t... l-e-a-k-i-n-g...   3-4-5-6PM.   Today.  Click.   Why do I need to get on the phone?   Are phone directories that bad?  Plus, with some click to call systems, I click for "random plumber who outbids the other guy for my call".  Is that really the way I want to shop for those services. 

Hmm... who's the guy who paid the most to find me who also now has the highest overhead to pass on to me?

Plus, now I've got to give the interweb my phone number.  I'm sure a lot of people don't trust that either. 

I'm way short click to call as a service...  maybe I'm missing something?

I changed my avatar's look to something a little more...suave and sophisticated.  Click the play button to hear him introduce himself.  :)

Dear Eric and Scott:

     Please do not sell MyBlogLog to Yahoo! or to anyone else at the moment, without taking at least one shot to build this into something bigger.   I don't want to tell anyone else how to live their life and it's easy for me to say this, because no one is offering me millions of dollars for anything, but I think if you sell now, we will have all collectively missed a big opportunity.

     Current social offerings fall way short.  They neither represent how I socialize in real life, nor do they come close to representing my network of connections on the web.  What I love about MyBlogLog is that it forms naturally...  organically...   and it follows me around in most of the places that I spend my time online.   It has connected me with my readers and has so much potential at this early stage.

     I really believe there is little chance at it reaching this potential within the confines of a company that is obviously internally conflicted.

      There are a lot of things in the Web 2.0 world that are features and not companies... that won't ever grow past 50, 000 users.   I believe MyBlogLog is different and I hope you do, too.   I can see a future where every place I visit on the web is socially enabled by MBL and that my network is a true representation of who I share interests with.  I want to go to ESPN and see who the other Bill Simmons readers are...   and see who else is checking out kayaking pages and the nextNY blog.   Most of the people on the web are lurking and MBL shines a light on the audience.  That is valuable to both to the publishers and to the audience.   There are so many ways to go here, it would just be a real shame for it to become a zombY!

Thanks,

Charlie

****

Readers:
If you believe that Web 2.0 companies driven by great ideas have the potential to be more than just misplaced or forgotten cogs in someone else's machine, tag this post, share it, blog about it, link to it, etc...   Send a supportive  message to the creators of the services you love that their community is behind their quest to make a bigger dent in the online world.

Team Etsy:  We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.

Etsy User Community:  Yay!  We love you.

Seriously, what other site could you imagine this happening on?  Check out the comments left on their company blog. 

Here's how it would look if some other sites went down for two days:

MySpace Tom:  We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.

MySpace Users:  Fuck this... we're taking our thong pics to Friendster.

Facebook Mark:  We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.

Facebook Users:  Fuck this... we're taking our drunken pics to Friendster.

Friendster Jonathan:  We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.

Friendster Users:  *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click*  Ah, lunchbreak...    Back to work, *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click* *Click*

YouTube:  We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.

YouTube Users:  Fuck this... now we're going to have to figure out how to use BitTorrent to get our illegally posted television clips.

Pincus:  Fuck it.  We're taking the site down for two days to make it fuckin' better.  Fuck our site and everything else.

Tribe members:  Why does this guy keep cursing at us and what was with the blood on the logo?  Can't we just talk about sushi and Burning Man in peace?

Craig:  We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.

Craiglist Users:  Do you ski?

Linden Labs:  We're taking the site down for two days to make it better.

Second Life Residents:  Run for your virtual lives!  Hide in the American Apparel store!  They're going to unplug us!  Let us live! Let us live! 

Jeff Jarvis:  I'm taking Buzzmachine down for two days because old media sucks and they don't get it.

Buzzmachine readers:  Death to old media!  Death to old media!

NJGuido.com Webmaster:  We're taking NJGuido down for two days to make it better.

Guidos:  You think you're better then us?  Huh?  You think you're fuckin' better than us?

Fred Wilson: I'm taking the site down for two days to make it better.

AVC Readers:  That's fine... we'll just listen to the Arctic Monkeys in the meantime.

Me: I'm taking the site down for two days to make it better.

Thisisgoingtobebig Readers:  Just promise us you won't go back to the gray on black.. that was awful!

The great thing about being a Web 2.0 entpreneur is that you could build something usable and more importantly, noticeable, on your own dime (or a few friends and family dimes) and get it bought by confused old web media companies playing Whac-a-Mole with startups.

 
From what I can tell, Google actually has a vision for their acquisitions: Total digital domination from every angle.  Hey, at least it's a goal, or a loose collection of many goals.  Regardless, when they bought Writely and Jotspot, you could at least say, "Ah... I see, that makes sense.  They're building an office suite."   Or, when they bought Dmarc, you could say, "Ah... they want to dominate radio ads, too."  In fact, that strategy has so much logic, you could even make the connection and ask, "How long before they buy Spotrunner?" 

Try asking yourself who Yahoo! or NewsCorp will buy next... or CondeNast.  Who the hell knows, really?  There are a lot of acquisitive players out there that I think are making bad homes for startups.

What's worse is that, post-acquisition, some very good ideas are showing very little of the inginuity and continuous product development that made them great in the first place.  It's not surprising either.  If you are independent, you're trying to run for the gold, beat out your competitors, win the game.   Within a big company with a little money in the pockets of the founders, it's highly unlikely the push to innovate will continue.  Does anyone think Reddit is going to become any more disruptive or gamechanging at Wired?  Sure, it might be more users, but expect any innovation to slow to a crawl.

And that really sucks for users.  For some of these startups, we only got to see a taste of what they could have been with a little more development.  What ever happened to Konfabulator anyway?  Did the end users really fair much better with that company in the hands of Yahoo! than the would have had they gotten some VC funding and tried to build a bigger company?  The acquisition environment we have now is really killing innovation and cutting companies off at the pass before they have a chance to make a much bigger impact on the web.

Don't get me wrong.  It's hard to turn down these offers...   but I was talking to an entreprenuer the other day who said to me, "Listen, I've never had the check put in front of me, but to be honest, I want to do something bigger.  That's the reason why I got into this in the first place.  I sort of feel like I should go big or go home."  I'd like to think I'd have the same sentiment, especially seeing what seems to happen to these startups after acquisition. 

At what point does anyone start wondering whether or not some of these companies are acquiring just to crush these startups? 

What's your list of companies that are currently private that you hope take a shot at something bigger before getting assimmilated?

The group at nextNY decided that NYC tech could use another voice... or 400 of them... so we started blogging.   Go take a look.  We're going to profile NYC companies, people, cover events, etc...   

This is the second installment of posts I plan to use for the class I'm teaching at Fordham.  It's probably a little remedial for hardcore techies, but it might be the kind of things you send to friends who might not be as tech savvy.   See the prior post at the bottom...

So, you've been surfing the web for 10+ years now.

How many bookmarks or favorites do you have?  5? 10? 50?  So in 10 years you've only seen 25 things on the web worth saving?

What about discovering new things?  Are you one of those people who gets stuff sent to them or are you always the first to find something? 

I want to share a really useful tool I use called del.icio.us.  It has a screwy name because it's actually at the "icio.us" domain...  You can get to it from delicious.com, but that just takes all the novelty out of it.

del.icio.us is a better way to remember, discover, and share URLs.  It may not seem compelling at first, but I guarantee once you use it a few times, particulalry the first time you retrieve or discover a new link, you'll be hooked.

What is it? 

del.icio.us is a way to store your links online.  So, right off the bat, anything you save can be easily retrieved from other computers that you use?  New computer?  Home computer.  No problem.  And no searching through e-mails for links anymore either.  Welcome to 2006. 

All of the del.icio.us links are saved with your own keywords.  No more trying to figure out if the Barry Bonds story goes in the sports folder or the steroids folder.  (If you even have folders for links.)  Just "tag" it (attach keywords) using words that will help you retrieve it later...  Just "jerk" or "jerk, baseball, juice, BALCO, SFGiants, and Bonds."  You'll never lose a link again, because you stored it using any and all of your own words.  I never lose the Central Park softball field finder because I have it tagged "central park, maps, and softball".

By default, links in del.icio.us are public. You might freak out at first, but keep in mind the following...  You don't have to have any personally identifyable information displayed in your account.  If you want to be metsfan06 in del.icio.us, no one will really know who you are.  Also, you can make any of your links private.  In my year and a half of using del.icio.us, I think I've done this twice, and I actually set my name to be viewable in my del.icio.us account.  Look at most of your bookmarks.  Would it matter if any of them were public?  Maybe a handful, but I doubt that's the case for most.

The value of the public default in del.icio.us is that you can discover new links tagged by the community of other users, and there are over a million.  You can check out the most popular links tagged PHP at del.icio.us/popular/php or the most popular things tagged funny at del.icio.us/popular/funny.  Because there are over a million del.icio.us users, most of these tags are pretty deep in their content.  You can also check out combinations (but just a chronology...it doesn't do popular for combos) of tags.   Check out links tagged nyc and food at del.icio.us/tag/food+nyc for a good restaurant recommendation.  There's no rating system on del.icio.us, because, as the founder put it, links only have two settings... "stuff worth saving" and "everything else".  Plus, you can discover other users who have similar interests.  I found a guy who was tagging cool Brooklyn restaurants and places "naveen" at del.icio.us/naveen/hangout.  I didn't even know who he was, but followed what he was tagging hangout.

One last thing and then we'll get to the how.  You can tag links for specific people right at the moment you save it for yourself.  If you find a link you want me to see, just tag it as usual, but also add the tag for:ceonyc.  When I want to tag something for Shaival, our biz dev guy here, its for:sshah06 or for Kristina, our Oddcast intern, its for:kw11.  You have to know your friend's screenname...there's no user search.

Oh, you can also subscribe to any person's links, any tag, any combo, or the popular lists, by RSS.

Here's how to use it:

First off, it's much easier to use it in Firefox, because they've built a really nice little extension.  Plus, you should be using Firefox anyway....less bugs and holes, plus webpages pretty much display the way the auther intended.  IE does screwy things to the web.

1) Register here.

2) Get the firefox extension.

3) Restart your browser.

4) Now you've got these two buttons on your toolbar.  One for tagging pages and one for retreiving your tagged pages. 

5) When you tag a page, use space seperated keywords that make sense to you. For me, I always use a combination of general subject tags and ones that intidcate to me why I tagged them.  So, this post might be tagged "del.icio.us howto web bookmarks favorites fordhamclass".  You can use as many or as few as you like and it doesn't matter if they make sense to anyone else but you.  So, someone looking for better ways to manage bookmarks would find this post through the "bookmarks" tag, but no one would ever care about or look for something tagged "fordhamclass".  That tag is for my purposes.  The neat thing about tagging is that I just did something for myself...tagged a link so I can find later, and others still benefit.

There are lots of other neat features of del.icio.us, like creating linkrolls for your blog or automatic once a day blog posts of all your links from that day.  Take some time to explore it.  I guarantee that if you get into the habit of using it, you'll find it really useful and you'll never forget anything you saw on the web.

Other "Getting into this online stuff posts":

Getting into this online stuff: Part I - Blogging as the Industry Cocktail Party

So we just blogged about our new AI skin on the Oddcast blog.  I'm so impressed, b/c when I just asked him where he lives, he answered and returned the question.

I answered "New York City."

He responded, "Which borough?"

I'm proud to say that Oddcast is hiring local avatars who know their way around NYC!

Soon, you'll be able to buy Coke in Cyworld.

Good for Cyworld, but is it good for Coke?

Now that I'm in the virtual biz, I've been thinking a lot about the promise of virtual goods.

It's certainly a very attractive idea...   put something up there that cost you peanuts to create, get lots of people to buy it, and voila....  99% margains.

But let's think about it for the brand.   Cyworld has 20 million users worldwide.  Let's say that half of these are active users, as oppossed to people like me that check out a lot of stuff and come back to very little.

Also, let's say that they could get 3% conversion rates on the Coke bottle, which even then is very generous, because not all of these people are active users.   

So, that's 300,000 Cokes.  Now, unlike regular Coke, you only need to buy one digital Coke, assuming the technology isn't there for you to drink it and need another.   300,000 virtual Cokes at what?   Fifty cents?   $150,000 in revenue for Coke plus the branding awareness within a closed network.

For a company that made $23 billion in revenue in 2005, I don't really think that's going to move the needle.

What if, instead of trying to sell these things, they paid Cyworld that money at a $10 CPM to put Coke vending machines in Cyworld for free. 

That would be 15,000,000 impressions of Coke among a lot more than 150k users.

Personally, I think Coke would benefit more by spending the money to push (or have users pull for free) their way into these virtual worlds than trying to get into the business of selling virtual goods.  Coke's business is to sell real drinkable soda, not 1's and 0's.   If you're a brand thinking of selling virtual stuff, I think you're going to be sort of underwhelmed with the results compared to the buzz you could generate by freeing up your brands within these virtual spaces and letting them play.

"When I get lonely, and I'm sure I've had enough
She sends her comfort, comin' in from above
Don't need no radio at all
We've got a thing that's called radar love
We’ve got a line in the sky, radar love"

I just installed Newsgator Go! on my Pocket PC-6700 and I love it.  I had been falling behind a bit in my feed consumption and I definitely caught up this morning.   I sync on my walk to the subway, read underground, and sync up again so that the web version knows which posts I've read.  Very easy... very fast.

I do have a couple of feature requests, though:

• When I'm done reading posts in a feed, I can hit "Mark all" with a thumb button, but then I have to it OK in the corner to close out of a feed.  I want a "Mark all and close" or a "next feed" button. 
• I'd like to sort my feeds (and this is Newsgator-wide) by number of unread posts.
• Clipping doesn't really do anything for me.  Its an extra step.  I clip stuff, then I have to go back to the web to either tag it in del.icio.us or blog about it or get rid of it.  I'd love to tag and/or blog about it right from my phone. 

When I was in college, my roommate and I got into a discussion about brushing our teeth before we walked across campus for class, whether we even needed to.

In our stupid male brains, we thought there was some chance, no matter how remote, that someone might want to makeout with us on the way...    I mean, it was highly unlikely, but what if that hot girl in our English class caught up to one of us and just couldn't resist herself from planting one?  Hey, you never know.

But if it ever did happen, wouldn't you want to have the freshest breath possible?  How awful would it be if she pulled back because she tasted garlic from your lunchtime chicken roll.   The small incremental cost of brushing our teeth far outweighed the huge, but infintessimally unlikely, downside of that awkward moment.

That's what I think about when I manage my digital self.  You might think it's sort of unlikely that anyone might want to hire you from your blog, Facebook profile, etc...  but I just encountered a situation the other day where a friend's personal blog actually went a long way to helping her connect with her potential employer, b/c of shared music tastes and just her overall familiarity with technology.

So, if you have an outdated blog, don't manage your LinkedIn bio, or have some "not ready for primetime" stuff on a social network, take a moment to update it.  Hey, you never know.

I had a great brunch with Hannah and Laurent from SubMate on Saturday and it really got me thinking about how people connect online and offline.

At first, when I thought of connecting with people based on my commute, I have to admit, I didn't think it was such a hot idea.

Then, after talking about it with them, I realized that commutes were just an excuse...  a way to do local.   My commute not only defines where I live, within a reasonable arm's length, but it also goes a long way to defining my lifestyle...   an actor from Bay Ridge would have a very different commute than I would.   

On top of that, I started thinking about connections to the group of people who commute with me.  Maybe I wouldn't want to date any of them, but I definitely want to talk local politics with them, because I hate to admit, but I don't know any of the hyperlocal candidates. 

But, I'm not really a very political guy.  So, I'm not likely to join a politically based social network.  I'm like that with a lot of things.   I blog about baseball sometimes, but I don't have a baseball blog... or a kayaking blog...  I have a variety of interests, none of which I feel the need to fully commit to joining a community about. 

That's why I like Last.fm...    I listen to music, and stick the widget on my blog, and now I'm listening to music based on what others with similar tastes like.  I don't feel the need to blog about music or go to shows with these random people.  MyBlogLog is great, too...   people show up to read and now we have a connection. 

MyBlogLog is like today's version of a webring.  Webrings were great...  you read something you liked, you clicked and got another similar blog to read....  very simple. 

I don't think I have a fully formed thought here...   but to me, there's just something missing in all this.   I post about things I sort of care about... and that should connect me in a loose way to others who sort of care about those things or really care about those things....  a web where everyone is a dynamic and loose hub and spoke. 

Here's where I have questions and where things haven't quite settled yet...  here I'm just thinking free form....

Will the web move more towards del.icio.us or MyBlogLog?  People based or subject based.  Am I going to consume based on microniche topics screened socially, or am I could to consume based on people whose microniche topics are of interest to me?  I don't actually think its the same thing.  It makes me think that MyBlogLog should beef up the consume and publish data...  who writes like me... not just who reads me...  Actually there's four categories of web connection I'm interested in:

Who reads me:  MyBlogLog, coComment
Who writes me (reposts, tags, etc): Technorati, del.icio.us, Icerocket, Google Blog search
Who reads like me: Rojo tried this... I wish RSS readers would do more of this...
Who writes like me: Sphere?

And how much does this world have to offer the things I really don't write a lot about, like the Mets, kayaking, and politics...   Is that what social networks are for?

Facebook lets me put my RSS feed on my profile, but not much else.  I guess Gather was more of a publishing social network, but I don't want to publish on there.  I publish right here and consume close by... so connect me.

Ok...   that's it.. .I think I'm done.  I had an idea for this post this morning in the gym and I let it get away from me w/o really coming to much conclusion on anything.

 Scott Karp writes a great blog called Publishing 2.0 and he's talked several times about paying for advertising in a world where lots of content can be created and published for free.  What's the point?  Why bother?  Why not just throw some free ads up and let virality take its course?
It's a great point, but I have a few counters.

In the instance of Wendy's creating a MySpace profile, which anyone can do for free:

"What if Wendy’s won’t pay? Will MySpace have to tear down the page? That would be a great advertiser relations program — policing for unpaid commercial pages and tearing them down."

Actually, that's entirely fair and should be expected.  There are lots of instances of software and APIs that are free for non-commercial usage but paid for a commercial license.  If you are using MySpace to make a buck, doesn't MySpace have a right to take a reasonable piece of that buck?  There would have to be tiers, of course...     My local pool hall shouldn't have to pay much more than the price of a Yellow Pages ad for their profile.

Plus, going paid for commercial, just like Craigslist is doing for NYC commercial real estate, gets rid of a lot of spam. 
What's the value of paying?  Think of MySpace like the RedHat of the ad world.  RedHat packages free Linux with a service guarantee and support.  That's what I think of when I think of Advertising 2.0...  sure, viral videos are free to post, but you want more than just a single number--hits.  You want demographics.  You want to see what other types of videos people are watching.  You need data and there's where the MySpaces and YouTubes should really be ramping up.  Give me a whole reporting package that I can show my boss when I create a commercial MySpace profile that tells me a lot about the users.  What's the #1 band of the people who friend me?  Age?  Race?  You can't do that with a free profile but that's very valuable data.

That's one of the things we're focusing on with our upcoming consumer product.  Anyone can sell a virtual t-shirt direct to consumers or as a sponsored ad buy, but I think the difference is in the data and ongoing relationship you build with the users.  Businesses thrive on consumer data and I think that's going to be a major asset of Advertising 2.0.  If you can put a viral video in front of someone, cool... but what you really need if you are a business is a call to action to convert those folks into customers or at least some useable data.  The platforms have, need, or are definitely working on building out those tools.