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:

  Entering last night's games, we were a tie ahead of the team behind us for the last and final spot in our division for the playoffs.  We played at 6:30, which made it difficult for most of our team to show up, so we had to start off shorthanded, playing 5 on 6.  Backs against the wall, Dodge This! came out firing, wiping the floor with our first opponent despite being short, 14-5.  We wound up taking 3 our of the 4 games in our match, and the only way we could have missed the playoffs was if the team behind us went 4-0.  Well, we nearly did miss, since they went 3-1 in the late came, which we got word of this morning.  We play next Sunday night 3/13 at 7:50 at Martin Luther King on 65th and Amsterdam against Dodgy McShady, who we beat twice last night pretty handily and Get Outta Dodge.  If we win we might face the obnoxious purple team, Balls of Furry.  D-O-D... G-E...  Dodge This!!!  woooooooooo

1. You can drive down the block looking for a spot at 50 miles an hour, because the location of every fire hydrant and driveway in a 20 square block radius is hardwired into your brain.
2. You act like little nicks and dents in your bumper don't bother you, but they secretly tear at your soul.
3. You can hear the difference between the sound of a car door closing in an empty car versus one with people in it...from three blocks away.
4. Your car has an alarm, but you have no idea what it sounds like, because you are never parked on your own street.
5. You believe there are too many fire hydrants in your neighborhood, and you would gladly trade off the chance of getting out of your house alive in a fire for a few extra spots.
6. Empty parking spaces look suspicious to you, especially if you've been driving around for less than ten minutes.  You approach them with caution.
7. You tell out of town guests to stop at your house or apartment first, so you can come down and drive around with them looking for a spot.  After the third time they slow down for a hydrant, you reach across, open their door, push them out of the moving car, and take over.  You are parked 4 minutes and 3 miles later.
8. You look for jobs with hours that fit your alternate side of the street parking schedule.
9. You are not Jewish, but you know all the holidays.
10. You could park an Impala in a thimble if you really needed to.

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.

Link: CNN.com - Texas House�to cheerleaders: Don't shake it - May 5, 2005.

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) -- Texas lawmakers sent a message to the state's high school cheerleaders Wednesday: no more booty-shaking at the game.

U.F.R.   (First word utterly, last word ridiculous.)  Isn't this something that, um... the PARENTS should be monitoring?  If its such a big issue, why don't the parents talk with the coach?  Why doesn't the school talk to the coach?  The idea that elected politicians are censoring cheerleader dance routines in 2005 is just plain sad.  If I lived in Texas now, I'd throw myself in front of a bus.  Then, I'd move.

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: AFB's Blog Home.

Last week, the NYT published an article where a restaurant owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, interviews a blind man for a cooking position.  Now, I don't know if you've ever had any interaction with many blind people, but with the right tools around them, they can accomplish some pretty amazing stuff.  At GM Asset Management, there's a Canadian bond trader that is blind.  (Can you imagine all those quotes wizzing by on braille!  Amazing!) 

Anyway, so it seemed like this applicant had some trouble in these surroundings...  The article rips the guy apart with stuff like "His eyes wandered around in their sockets like tropical fish in the aquarium of a cheap hotel lobby..."?

I mean...   how do people get away with stuff like that?  The whole piece is basically making fun of this visually impaired job applicant.  How do you run a customer facing business with that kind of attitude?  I don't think would stand for an article like that if the owner was making fun of the applicant's race or even if the applicant was in a wheelchair.  How would Gabrielle feel if we made fun of a smaller female chef who couldn't carry a heavy item?

The article is here.

Gabrielle's restaurant is called Prune.  You know what's really ironic?  I checked out some reviews and I found these two:

From Dine.com...   "Prune Restaurant & Bar... opened it's doors to the discriminatingly hip east village crowd one year ago."   Yes...  definitely discriminating.

From Gayot.com...   "Prune may not be the most appealing name for a restaurant (it’s for the owner’s childhood nickname, not the fruit), but once inside any prejudice disappears."    Obviously hasn't been there lately...

If anyone knows Gabrielle Hamilton, I'd say they should urge her to write a public apology.

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?

Big news!  I put a bid on a co-op on Monday night that got accepted on Tuesday, and now we're going to contract on it!  This will be my first real estate purchase.  Its very exciting.  What's also exciting is that I got a good enough deal that a car also fits into my budge.  Mustang GT Convertable here we come!  So, apologies to Rubel for getting up and walking out during his blog conference panel, but I was getting the news of my bid's acceptence right then and there.  Six months ago, I thought I was going to stay with GM, go up with them to Connecticut, and go to Stanford in the fall.  Now, I'm working at Union Square Ventures, and moving to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.   Just goes to show you how much plans can change.  I guess its what keeps you on your toes.
Its kind of strange to imagine that I'm moving back close to home.  I grew up in Bensonhurst, which is right next to Bay Ridge.  Basically, its part of my home turf.  I played baseball in Bay Ridge, and I'm moving not too far away from Gino's.  My parents are excited because now they have someone to watch their new dog once they get it.  (Yes, they realized they couldn't live without a dog anymore after having Puba for almost 15 years.)  Check out my Google Map of where I'll be, assuming all the legal stuff works out and the co-op board approves me.  (How could they not like me?  Should I show them my blog so they can get to know me?)   Details to come on the housewarming party...

Link: NY1: NY 1 To Go.

In a definite sign of progress, mediators who met separately with the transit union and the MTA all morning, announced Thursday that both sides have agreed to resume talks while the union takes steps to return members to work, thereby ending the strike.

Representatives from the union and the MTA unexpectedly returned to the Midtown Grand Hyatt early Thursday morning, where they met separately with mediators from the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).

No formal negotiations have been scheduled, but mediator Richard Curreri said the executive board of the TWU is expected to vote on the issue of sending members back to work as talks resume.

This is quite concerning...   I just went and ordered "The Seat".

Link: Serious Riders, Your Bicycle Seat May Affect Your Love Life - New York Times.

A raft of new studies suggest that cyclists, particularly men, should be careful which bicycle seats they choose.

The studies add to earlier evidence that traditional bicycle saddles, the kind with a narrow rear and pointy nose, play a role in sexual impotence.

Do you ever bump into anyone on the street and have to go through that ackward moment where you're not sure whether or not your relationship is actually worthy of a stop?

Yesterday, I walked by somebody I went to Fordham with going in the opposite direction, and neither of us skipped a beat...  kept walking as we said hello and how are you.

This morning, I ran into another Ram in front of the gym, but this time both of us were on our bikes.  Not only did we both stop, but we both got off our bikes and chatted for a minute.

At least both times we were on the same wavelength.

No one wants to be caught on the short end of the stick of that, where you stop and its obvious the other person was going to keep going.

Its like a card game, where showing your hand can mean a lot of social awkwardness.

Anyway... so now I might have a biking buddy if this strike continues.  HM, if you want to bike back to Brooklyn later, drop me an e-mail.

I've joked around with people about how the best way to get on the del.icio.us popular list is to come up with a top ten list...

...which means the ultimate del.icio.us popular item would be a Top 10 list of top ten lists.

Makes sense, no?

So, if anyone of you know of any great top ten lists, no matter what they're about, tag them in del.icio.us with for:ceonyc and I'll try to compile a list.

Not everyone I've recommended this movie to or watched it with likes it.  Its a bit slow and a bit long.  However, its just like Ice Storm in that its got a great cast and yet few people have ever heard of it.  It stars Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Steve Martin, Mary McDonnell, Mary-Louise Parker and Alfre Woodard.  So you're going to see a lot of Kevin Kline on this list--he just plays these great introspective characters trying to be stand up guys.  I like that.  I feel like all his characters could be Jesuit educated--men for others but also tortured by questions over what exactly that means. 

There's also this great scene where Kline explains why he's trying to get to know Danny Glover--because Glover saves his life and he can't help but wonder why people get placed in each other's path at certain key moments.  I do the same thing.  I don't let chance encounters pass me by and I wonder about the reasons behind them.  Maybe I try to make something out of nothing, which Glover seems to think Kline is doing, but I just think its wildly interesting why random people seem to have these disproportionately large impacts on your life sometimes. 

So, if you want good dialog and a nice story acted solidly by really good actors, this is worth checking out.  If you need action to keep you awake, you'll just have to wait to see Batman Begins this June 15th.

Ok, so I've been vocal about siding with the MTA and the city... and so have the millions of the rest of us who are stranded, inconvenienced, etc...  but I'm going to take a step back for a second.

Let's suppose, for a moment, that the current deal the transit worker's union is getting is a bad deal, and bad precident for labor in this city in general.  Perhaps that's true.

Contrast that with this Op/Ed from USA Today:

 

"Pity the New Yorker who commutes from Queens to Manhattan to work in a hotel for $25,000 a year, with no health care or retirement benefits. She couldn't ride to work Tuesday because the city's transit workers went on strike.

 

The bus drivers who get her there make an average of $63,000. They are balking at a proposed 3% pay raise. What's more, they, along with other transit workers, are indignant at a proposal that they begin making a contribution (of 1% of wages) toward their health costs. And they beat back a plan to make future workers wait until age 62, rather than 55, to get full pensions.

 

If this sounds as if it's a militant union leveraging its ability to wreak havoc, it is. New York transit workers receive better pay and benefits than most of their riders do."

That sums up a lot of what I'm hearing from the public. 

But maybe we're not getting the whole story, and that's my point.

If there is another side to this, the transit workers, and whoever runs their PR, has done an awful job of getting the word out.  I went to their website, and they had a few stories about workers with cancer getting docked for sickleave, etc...  but these stories aren't getting out there.

When cops, fireman, and teachers have labor issues, there are a lot of people who naturally side with them, because we see cops getting killed, fireman going into fires, and we care about the education of our youth.

But transit workers?  We associate them with our commute, which is a drag.  We don't really seperate the MTA from the workers.  We just know that when our trains are late, rerouted, etc., that we just hate the whole idea of a commute.  So, when a strike causes massive delays, millions of dollars in lost revenue, let's just say that some PR work is needed to get the public on your side.  So, if there are convincing stories to tell about the union's side, they're definitely not getting out there. 

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.

So all these people were clogging up my bike route this morning, including Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.  What does a Borough President do anyway?