I took these videos at Sessions...    Castpost has had some server issues over the last week, but I'm happy to link to them here anyway.

We've got the Intro, Bruce Spector talking about how some of the big names in the web space got started as social endeavors, Dick Costolo talking about user contributions, Yochai Benkler, Umair from Bubble Generation, Jeff Jarvis and Tim O'Reilly.

I've gotten some negative feedback about my eHub post, which I made a few edits to.

Just wanted to make a few things clear:

1. I don't speak for  my firm on my personal blog, especially now that we have our own.  Keeping with that, I took out the paragraph about how my rant relates to the way we do business.  Should be more careful about that.
2. The only thing I said personally about Emily was, "Emily Chang is a slick designer and an even savvier businesswoman."   I believe that, and last time I checked, that's a compliment.
3. Basically, what I was trying to say was that its really easy to look at this resource like its an "auto-fill for a deal log", which it isn't.   I was trying to comment on how there are so many little web tools out there that its a lot to keep up with.
4. I never said eHub was a bad tools resource.  Its a great tools resource in fact.
5. Anyone who reads my blog regularly (which I'm not sure that my critics do) knows I can have an abrasive and sometimes obnoxious style, and sometimes I use that to emphasize a point.

So, I apoligize if I offended anyone.  That was not my intention.

You're all welcome to unsubscribe from my blog, of course, and to rant about my obnoxious behavior when you do.  In fact, I'd be happy to link to it.  :)

Of course, I say that in jest.  I hope you don't unsubscribe, but I encourage anti-Charlie ranting.  I love feedback, of any kind.

Perhaps karma got me back with the ankle injury.  "What goes around..."

Sandy goes to the hospital, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Zog softball boo boo.

Sometimes, when you act a bit crazy, it sollicits an interesting response from people:

"I think the web-based features that are appearing all over the place will be the home pages of this new era -- many will be abandoned by their developers and left to die a slow death once the developers realize that they don't have many long-term users. And others will be cultivated and slowly grow into businesses. In that respect, I think Ning is the new GeoCities."  - Scott Moody

I remember watching that stock guru/nutcase Jim Cramer announce that he was "off Fedwatch"  a few years ago.

People were so overfocused on trying to figure out what the Fed was going to do that they stopped paying attention to some very basic attributes of the companies they were trying to invest in. 

So this morning, I was going through my feeds and checking out the latest Web 2.0 tools and innovations on Emily Chang's eHub.  You know eHub... 

Its a "...constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing..."   

...and Mesothelioma.

Ok, maybe not... but it might as well. 

"Web 2.0" is the hottest discussion topic in tech right now, and if there ever was a site that was striking while the iron was hot, this is it.   I'll bet you every single tech VC that has figured out how to use RSS (many probably still haven't, which is fine) is subscribed...   mostly in paranoid fear that they might miss "the next big thing".

But I looked at it today, like I did everyday, and yet again, I couldn't find anything that not only solved a problem for me, but solved a problem for thousands or millions of people in a way that anyone who didn't know what Ruby, RSS, or open source was would adopt.  Correction:  I found a lot of neat tools.... some great tools.   I didn't find a lot of businesses and I've been looking at it like I should be, which isn't what its for.

Well, I'm tired of it. 

I'm tired of signing up for calandering and todo applications. 

And "Fuck you, I have enough friends!"

I'm also tired of knowing through the Crime stats/Pedometer/Blogmap mashup how close the blogger nearest to me needs to walk to get mugged.

That's not a useful service nor is it a business.... in the same way that blogging isn't supposed to go be bookworthy.  (Well, except maybe Tom's thing... but that's a whole other story.)

eHub itself is a great example.  Emily Chang is a slick designer and an even savvier businesswoman.  She's latched on to a hot topic with a resource that plays into exactly what the crowds are clamoring for, and her business is going to take off because of it.  But, she's not evaluating or discerning...  Addition:  ...   and that's fine, but I think a lot of the Web 2.0 naysayers are looking at collections like this and acting like this represents a list of what Web 2.0 has to show for its best business ideas.

Think of it this way.  If all of these little tools bought Google keywords that said, "Discover the greatest ajax apps right here", would you click on it?  No, you probably wouldn't take it seriously.   So, if eHub isn't doing any screening, then what's the difference? 

eHub is promotion, not scripture. 

With a lot of blogging, there's a huge amount of content now available created by people who aren't in the business of creating content.  They're trying to promote some other service, or are simply promoting their industry in general.  Some of them even actively engage in discussions meant to lead to best practices, enlightenment, etc. 

In the same way, there are now thousands of little lightweight web services out there created by people who aren't in the business of building businesses.  They are programmers experimenting in their free time.  Maybe they're trying to promote their services.  Maybe they just needed to solve a problem that only they had, without much concern as to whether or not anyone esle had it.  These apps serve a lot of different purposes for a lot of different people, but that doesn't make them all businesses.  Bubbles happen when we don't see the difference and we start funding (and overfunding) the projects.

And the line is certainly blurry, don't get me wrong.  The difference between now and ten years ago is that what someone can build today, on their own, for free, is a million times better than the "real" applications people were building back then.  Plus, they come to market faster with a greater buzz.  A lot of them seem very real.  But some of them are just pixel copycats.

EDIT:  So, I'm done deluding myself that I could just relay on resource lists like this as an easy way to find the beginnings of great businesses.  eHub is a great resource for tools, but not an auto-fill for a deal log.

I'm off eHubwatch!!

[16:25] lightbox5: believe me, there are no end of things you will go to the mattresses on
[16:25] lightbox5: clothes will, in the end, not be one of them
[16:25] Ceo21: See.. that's the problem
[16:26] Ceo21: at the end of the day
[16:26] Ceo21: I want to go to the mattress...
[16:26] Ceo21: literally
[16:26] lightbox5: right
[16:26] lightbox5: so wear the shirt

Talk about transparancy...

Now you get to watch all our little domestic issues play out in real time, because Adrianna is blogging.

She wrote this because we have this issue about her trying to buy clothes for me.  I'm sure there are a lot of cavemen in my court.  I just don't really care too much about clothing.  I just want to be comfortable.  I hate the idea of buying brand for brand's sake or following what's "in".  She says she just thinks I'd look better in certain things. 

"I'm just a caveman.  Your world of pastels and flat front pants frightens and confuses me."

In the meantime, she helped me with some of the apartment stuff and will continue to do so... so its not like I'm totally closed minded, right?  Anyone agree?

Should I let her dress me for success or draw a line in the sand that my no-style style is personal and shouldn't be messed with?

This is where me and the guys are today, along with a whole bunch of other smart people.

A certain someone has convinced me that I need some more outside input into my fashion choices... perhaps a bit more flexibility.

She made a convincing argument.

So, I'm opening up the selection process to all of you, starting with my winter coat.  I will buy and wear a winter coat solely selected by my blog audience.

Here's the deal:

1. To submit a coat for group voting, tag it in del.icio.us with the "coatidol" tag.  (No quotes, obviously.)  Only coats tagged in del.icio.us qualify, so if you want to be a part of this, learn how to use del.icio.us by clicking here.
2. Submissions will end in one week on Tuesday, October 25th at 5PM.
3. At that point, we will do a two day vote ending on Thursday, October 27th at 5PM.  Every coat and its picture will be displayed for voting and voting will be anonymous.
4. No coat over $350 will be considered.
5. Remember, this is a winter coat...  so ideally it would keep me warm.
6. You're free to select any colors, but I think its obvious what colors I like.  (See my living room, my car, my blog)
7. The community will police itself.  Tagged coats will appear at del.icio.us/tag/coatidol as soon as people start tagging.  If you see a coat that's an obvious attempt at getting me to wear something stupid, just tag it coatidolsucks.  No coat tagged coatidolsucks by anyone will be considered.

Oh, I forgot to mention...  whoever tags the winning coat gets lunch on me. 

The first coat has been tagged by the dark side:

Link: del.icio.us/tag/coatidol.

Years ago, Adobe came up with a brilliant business model for PDF documents that more services should be taking advantage of today:

"The reader is free, but you pay to format the file if you're a publisher."

We're spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to aggregate, join, standardize, etc., but no one is just working on coming out with a really good "reader", particularly on the social networking side.

All of the social networks out there are branded and closed, yet their does exist a syntax for social networking called FOAF.  Can you imagine if every single place you got a PDF from gave you a new reader?  But that's what's going on in the social networking space.  LinkedIn, Friendster, etc. should allow you to "publish" your groups by adding/inviting users, adding data, pictures, etc...   but when it comes time to "reading", they should allow you to publish to an open standard.  That's what would tie in all the people who don't want to be on them, and I think the best place for a "reader" is in your e-mail.   

The social networks are going to have to learn at some point that they need to open up to truly create value.  This is especially the case for groups.  Institutions like Fordham, NYSSA, would pay gladly pay to "publish" the group functionality if there was a universally accepted reader.  So, someway, you've got to be able to read your connections universally, and add them to other networks.  So, Fordham could publish my alumni connections, NYSSA could publish its database, and I could just catch and connect them all with a freely distributed viewer.  Maybe I'll use the Friendster viewer, or the LinkedIn viewer... as long as they all read, who cares?  Those services could still do all the advertising they need, compete on "extra services", etc. but on top of infinately more valuable interoperable networks of people.

What would this all look like?  Not sure, but right now, the social networks are treating everyone like a publisher, connecting to each other without context, and trying to figure out how to monetize everyone--yet not making access universal.  They've got it all backwards.  The entities to reach I'm relevently connected to, like my school, should be given better tools to connect to their constituenties in an open, universally readable way.  RSS feeds should publish something similar...   creating "socially open feeds" (reading lists) that can connect you to the people you share subscriptions with.

So next steps?  Get the networks to publish their FOAF (if it does what I think it does) and someone should develop a really slick Ajaxed out FOAF reader that you can combine, remix, and add networks, too. 

Someone bailed on me, so now I'm scrambling.   

I need a good stenographer this Thursday to record a 35 person discussion group on 21st bet 10th and 11th in NYC.

Basically, each participant will have a name card in front of them and all have an opportunity to contribute to the discussion.  We will try to avoid anyone speaking over each other.

The topic is related to technology, but the jargon will be minimal, because it will be more about how people use technology and what business opportunities there are around user-centric tech. 

They have to be really responsible, show up on time, look professional, etc.  There will be a one hour lunchbreak at the session and they must have all their own equipment.

Please contact me right away either by e-mail:  charlie.odonnell@gmail.com

You could have almost guessed this given my new arrival this weekend, no?

My dad really loved Steve McQueen and that's how I found Bullitt.  It was the Saturday afternoon movie on Channel 5 or something and he was watching it.  Steve McQueen was a very different action hero than I was used to.  Growing up on Sly and Ahhnold, and even catching a bit of Dirty Harry, you think of every action here as a bit larger than life.

Steve McQueen in Bullitt was just a regular guy doing a job.... and he played that perfectly. 

I would have liked to see him last longer than he did... he was stricken with lung cancer and died at 50.  What kind of roles would he have taken? 

Bullitt also has a great cast.  Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Duvall.

Oh... and there's a little car chase in it, too.  :)

By conventional standards, it isn't really much of  a car chase...   but this is really the first real movie car chase.   The Mustang vs. the Charger.  It was so much more realistic than the chases we see now.  They used live sound, and McQueen did a lot of his own driving--screwing up a few times in the process--all caught on film.  And the chase was McQueen's idea in the first place.

The interesting thing was that it also touched off another auto icon.  Had they not used the Charger in the movie, it would have never influenced the use of the Charger as the  "General Lee" in the Dukes of Hazzard. 

Yesterday was the last day of the Downtown Boathouse kayaking season.  The season always ends with a whimper...  it was cold and windy, although we did get a handful of public kayakers.

Yesterday was different, though.  It was also the last day of the Pier 26 Downtown Boathouse.  The Hudson River Part Trust is knocking it down to make way for a new pier--one that will last much longer than the one we have now.  Eventually, we'll probably make it back down to Pier 26, but for now, we've moved up to Pier 96 and we'll probably be doing some kind of a program at Pier 40.  Stay tuned for next season's details. 

The boathouse we have is very special.  Its old and we couldn't identify a lot of the rusted out parts that we tried to sell at our "yard sale" a couple of years ago.  But, it has charactor.  It has taken a little something from every volunteer and public kayaker that has set foot in there for the past nine or ten years or so.  Its been my second home for the past couple of yeras during the summer and I've had the best time there.  I've met so many great people there--people that are tied together by two simple ideas:  They like doing new and different things and they enjoy getting to meet other people.  There's no standard boathouse demographic.  There's nothing about free kayaking that draws in a majority of affluent white men the way something like, um... blogging does.  In fact, by numbers, I think we have a majority of female kayakers.  Here are just a few of the pictures I've taken in and around the boathouse.  If anyone has anymore, feel free to load them into flickr and tag them "dtbh".

Its here.

It arrived Friday.

Its a fantastic to drive...  it definitely has a Mustang "feel".   The front end is a monster and you definitely feel like you've got to corral the 300 horsies in front of you.   I put the top down as soon as I could... even drove around Friday night with it down.  (With the heat on full blast for Adrianna, mind you.)

Weekend car highlights:

I pull up to a light on Flatbush Avenue and two guys in a delivery truck pull up next to me, peering over at my car.  I've got the top down.  One guy beeps the horn and goes, "Yo, dat shit is tight."   

That's good, right?  :)

Then, last night after softball, I went to go get my car and a little kid about nine had his jacket on the trunk.  I said to his group, "Hey, who's jacket is this, I don't want to drive away with it."  He goes, "Hey man, this your car?  This is a cool car, man."     Stay in school kid.  Stay in school.

And the best part is, the chicks love it:

If you haven't noticed, yet, the car is also why I have that new little widget on my sidebar.  Peer produced reporting for gas prices...   Web 2.0 is going to save me some money at the pump.

Link: Mashable* � Blog Archive � Discussion: The Google of Social Networks? - Internet Entrepreneur Pete Cashmore on Web 2.0 and the Future of the Internet.

Pete is asking what the "Google of Social Networking" will look like. I wrote a comment on his post:

The power of Google was that it didn't require an actual human being to connect up a page.  No one had to submit their page, add it to a list, etc.

With social networks, there's never going to be a one stop shop.  I use LinkedIn for something, and Friendster for something else, but I can't get on the Facebook.   The real power lies in connecting the LinkedIn people to the Friendster people to the myspace people.

I have a social network.  I e-mail, IM, link tags /for on del.icio.us, Skype, etc. etc. etc...   but nothing ties all the people I contact togethere in a displayable fashion... nor does anything tie me to their friends, etc.  Frankly, nothing even ties in the people to themseves... my computer doesn't know the difference between Fred Wilson the Skyper versus an e-mail to Fred Wilson versus the guy I'm tagging links for. 

Someone needs to do what Google did to the internet, and what Indeed is doing to jobs.

I made a change to something I wrote on my political post the other day, because the post inspired some offline communication and made me realize that I what I wrote and what I thought didn't exactly match.

That happens a lot, not just in political debates, but in focus groups, usability studies, religious discussions.

Often times, when someone argues a point or descibes how they feel about something, its the first time they've actually tried to articulate verbally that particular angle or view.  What happens is that they struggle with the vocabulary they want to use to describe a thought or an emotion, and using the wrong words can confuse, anger, etc.

People don't often know how to say what they feel.  That's why I like writing, and speaking of writing, I'd encourage you to check that post out.  At the moment, not by design, the comments are a bit of a conservative "love-in", but that's because no one has posted any dissenting views yet.  What can I do about that?

I participate in a listserv for my high school's alumni.  Today, someone asked for some career advice and I replied with a note.

Not long after I got this e-mail.

Its so unbelievably obnoxious...   I love every word of it!

"hey, thanks for helping tim out, the dude needs it... i keep forgetting to mention that your blog layout is bizarrely out of sync with your apparent tech-savvy.  that thing looks like an aol member homepage circa 1997.  when i look at something like that i kind of expect the writer to be either barely computer-literate or barely
literate period, which makes for some weird cognitive dissonance given your breezy and confident blogspeak.  maybe you know this already but don't have the time/money to get it fixed.  it might be worth putting just a little time into.  one really important thing is making it more readable--the content just doesn't have enough space."

And you know what?  He's totally right.  My blog layout is for suck.

Here's my issue:    I need/want all this playspace on the side for blogrolls, tags, counters, etc.  Now, Pete gives about half of Mashable to playspace and his stuff is readable.

Is it the black?   Can there be no readability with these colors?  Am I destined to succumb to Ajaxian whitespace?

I think I can still get away with black and perhaps the fix is simpler than that.  I have a feeling that if someone could just play around with the actual posting column, break the grey up into rounded ajax looking boxes (one for each post), and fix my titles and footers, it would go a long way.

I don't have the time to do that at all.  If anyone wants to play with my template, I'll e-mail it to them and give them a shot at it, or they can just view the source.  I'm debating whether I care enough about it to pay someone to do it.  Maybe I'll take them out to lunch for their trouble.

Remember to get tix, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I gotta go to that!

Did you know Union Square Ventures has a website?

Seriously!  Its not just Fred's blog and my blog.

But websites suck, right?  Stale.  Canned.  Hardly worth visiting.

Not anymore!  I'm pleased to say that *I think* we're the first venture capital firm to turn our website into a blog.  And you know what the best part is?  Brad's written his first blog post on it and he'll finally be sharing his wisdom with the Blogosphere.  (Fred and I asked him in our weekly meeting yesterday if he was done with his post.  He said, "Almost" and we both immediately jumped on it and said, "That means its done!")

So please, go check it out.