Got this note from my high school's listserv of alumni in business...

"I am seeking information about entry into financial analysts programs and other areas of the finance market.  I am a recent college graduate and would appreciate any insight on how to get my resume to the right people.  Thank you for your time."

Here's my response:

     I think the best way to get the information and help you are looking for is to start with what you know and what you've done.  "information about entry into financial analysts programs and other areas of the finance market." is a book's worth (or several books worth) of information.  I think most professionals are more willing to help those who show ambition in some way... who give as much as they ask for.

     So, perhaps something along the lines of, "I graduated from X and took part in x activity in college, where I developed in interest in X part of the finance market.  I was reading X the other day and it said that there were going to be more opportunities in X part of the market versus X.  I would like to know if this is a generally accepted view of the market and would be very excited to speak with a professional about this who works in that area."

   So what does this approach accomplish?

1)  It shows you've been doing your homework and have a track record of taking an active interest in the subject.  Otherwise, you will give people the impression (which I'm sure is incorrect) that you haven't done anything in finance before and you're just realizing that you're graduating college in a month and need a job.  Obviously your interest in finance stems from somewhere... tell people about that in a way that reflects your own unique perspective and ambition.
2)  It doesn't mention anything about jobs.  Not every contact will be good for a job and not everyone wants to be made to feel like their time is only worthwhile if they can get you a job.  You should be focused on building relationships with people who know you and are impressed with you.  Jobs will flow from that whether or not you ever ask one one explicitly.
3) It leaves open the possibility that someone might respond to this even if they can't offer you a job, but they might be able to give you some useful insight.
4) It encourages more people to participate with less.  Instead of asking for one person to write a novel, the more you ask specific questions about certain areas, the more people you'll get to respond with "Yeah, that makes sense b/c X... check out this other resource for more information."

So I've been e-mailing with a Jesuit scholastic (someone who is studying to become a priest) about some family values issues and I wanted to blog my response to something he said about beliefs and how I arrive at them:

"Going to be tough to chat via phone...    have a very busy schedule over the next few days.  Plus, admittedly, I'm a writer.  I kind of hate the phone and do my best thinging when I can sit, go back to something, think about it...  I find the phone to be unecessarily syncronous when my brain doesn't work that way.

Plus, this is the way the Paul did it, right?  :)   He would have made a great blogger.

I'm sure we'll run into different definitions of the word faith, but here's one from the Catholic Encyclopedia that seems that you would go on that I have a lot of trouble with.

"...faith must necessarily result in a body of dogmatic beliefs....Objectively, it stands for the sum of truths revealed by God in Scripture and tradition and which the Church presents to us in a brief form in her creeds..."

"That such Divine faith is necessary, follows from the fact of Divine revelation. For revelation means that the Supreme Truth has spoken to man and revealed to him truths which are not in themselves evident to the human mind. We must, then, either reject revelation altogether, or accept it by faith; that is, we must submit our intellect to truths which we cannot understand, but which come to us on Divine authority."

The problem I have, where this breaks down for me and where it breaks down for a lot of Catholics, or people in general, is that once you get to the point where religion needs to be explained to you by someone with a lot more schooling that you, you don't trust it... because you know that no one is infallable and we are all subject to our own biases.  Religion has been used to exploit people, as an excuse to start wars (not talking about today), and as an instrument of fear.  (You should see V for Vendetta, btw...)  Individual faith doesn't have those negative charactoristics, or at least not to the same extent.  If I base my faith on what I believe in my heart and my innate sense of right and wrong, while it is no doubt subject to my own biases, I also don't get the sense that I am using religion to justify an end.  Whereas, when you have Divine Revelation explained to you by others that seems to contradict what's in your heart, people get a little suspicious.

So, you could tell me that there is Divine revelation that dictates what family means, but I say that, to me, family is love and support and I see the best kind of love and support in a multitude of different arrangements and architectures.  I believe that...   it is my own personal faith that it is acceptable to God.  Scholars and experts could point out otherwise, but then again, some Church scholars thought the world was flat at one point, too, and that notions of a round world were contrary to scripture.  Such is the result when imperfect people try and interpret the Divine."

New Chelsea Boathouse, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This is up on 27th...wonder if they'll have it done by summer.

Its all clear to me now.

All the recent news about the dangers of MySpace?

Its all arch-conservative propoganda spread by the very company that owns it, News Corp.

Who better positioned to own a web property popular among kids than the very same media company that the most conservative parents get their news from?

Now every parent in America is telling their kids not to go on MySpace because its dangerous and full of sex.

Thanks mom... what was that site again?  My... Space...  dot... com.  Ok, got it.  I'll never go on it.  Never ever.   ;)

Clearly, the man has children.

Someone just sent me this:

On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in
the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

There's an article in the WSJ today on how web ads are being placed next to "racy" or "inappropriate" content.

Racy?  Inappropriate?  On the internet???  Nooooo...

"Last month, Verizon Communications Inc. was surprised to find one of its Internet ads on a MySpace.com page with photos of scantily clad women."

"Scantily clad women", or as most cellphone companies refer to them, "paying customers who pay for Sean Paul ringtones." 

You know, that's funny... now that I think of it, I went to buy a ringtone the other day, and it asked me if I had sexy pictures of myself on the internet.   Since all my pictures are sexy, I clicked yes.  I got this bizzare message saying, "Sorry, we only sell ringtones to the Amish." 

Now I know its from this advertiser backlash against the sexy.

"Walt Disney Co. was unaware that its ad was next to an article about male sexual performance on About.com."

That's terrible, because there's no way that article was being read by 45 year old dads who have ever purchased Disney DVDs for their kids.

"Jobs Web site Monster.com didn't realize its spot was on a site that appeared to be offering unauthorized downloads of copyrighted music and videos."

Ok, I'll give you that one.  Illegal sites are another thing.  Just thank God sexy isn't illegal!

Here's another:

"...and the Christian Children's Fund ad ended up next to an article about a sexual position in the sex section of About.com, which is owned by New York Times Co."

So, here's a question...   What if that ad wound up generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for their cause?  Would they still have yanked it?

Good thing we'll never have to answer that question because people who read about sex never ever donate to charity, those heathens!  :\

Look, if its something illegal, like child porn, or illegal music, that's one thing, but not advertising next to MySpace's user generated content??  To me, that's kind of a slap in the face.  If a girl wants to show her thong on MySpace and Verizon doesn't want to advertise next to it, that's like Verizon saying, "We'd like you to buy our phones, but we don't want anyone who wants to see your slammin' booty to buy them." 

Frankly, I think MySpacers should boycott Verizon.  I wouldn't buy a product from any company that's embarrassed to be associated with my slammin' booty. 

Sweet...

The Mets win, and Xavier Nady chips in 4 hits to provide me with some great false hope about my fantasy baseball season, and then I get a great link from Oberkirch:

Ballbug! Memeorandum for baseball!

Cool!

So its Opening Day and the Daily News has a blogger liveblogging the rainy start to the season.

In honor of the season's start, I've updated my SitePal message with a message about the Mets' Kaz Matsui.

BTW...  Tonight is also opening night for my ZogSports softball team.  We're now called "Waiting for Turiansky" in honor of Eric Turiansky, who signed up to play with us last year, but never showed.  Before every game, he'd send us a message saying, "No, seriously, I'm really going to play this time!  Can't wait to meet all of you!"

Eric Turiansky.  Games: 0.   At-bats: 0.  Humor: Priceless.

Link: Micro Persuasion: Technorati Adds MySpace Blogs.

It was only a matter of time before someone went in there and started crawling around.  I'd love to see someone build some cool cross social network searching...

Final Four and Cupcakes, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This is why its good to watch sports with girls...

Here's more fodder for Jeff Jarvis:

Fabrice pointed out Phanfare's new video support feature and I'm sold.   It took me about 10 minutes of use to decide I was going to become a paying customer and that this is where I'm going to store all my videos from now on.

Basically, you drop your videos into a downloaded client, and then phanfare uploads them in the backround, and then after another little while, converts them to Flash on the fly.  Its so mildlessly simple.  I can then play them on my blog... and they come out so much nicer than YouTube, that butchers my video quality.

I'm going to get all my videos up there as soon as I can.  The only issue is that it does not have Mpeg-4 support fully worked out yet, but I've been promised that its coming in the next few weeks.

I don't care if it takes an hour to get them all setup, because, that hour isn't spent waiting around, crashing, etc...  I just drag and drop and poof, they show up on the web.  In fact, the client works so well as a file management tool, which preview images of my videos, that there's really no reason to keep any of my videos on my computer.  The $6.95 is a no brainer!!

Can't wait until Mpeg-4 support is done...  so I can just go straight from my flash memory card to dragging and dropping, to the web in Flash.   

Thanks Phanfare, you just saved me like 8 steps and a lot of headache.

The interesting thing is that Phanfare isn't built to create an entertainment site, like YouTube.  Its not about having the most popular video... its about a better way to store your own videos.  I've said before that I think this is a much bigger market, especially once people start converting their old VHS tapes to digital via a Media Center PC. 

Its not often there's anything work related on our "reply all" e-mail chatter that is bloggable, but I'm pretty sure this is ok.

So Fred was responding to a comment someone left on his post about Second Life.

>>  From: Fred Wilson
>>  Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:48 PM
>>  To: Charles O'Donnell; Brad Burnham
>>  Subject: Fw: [A VC] Greg Deocampo submitted a comment to 'Avatars'
>>
>>  Mindblowing stuff
>>
>>  Hard to tell if this goes mainstream

_____________

> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 1:52 pm, Charles O'Donnell wrote:
>>  Second Life is like NASA to me.
>>
>>  Not everyone will go into space anytime in the near future, but we
>> all  know what Velcro is.
>>
>>  The key is seeing where the Velcro is there and not winding up with 
>> astronaut ice cream.

_________________

> From: Fred Wilson
> Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 2:49 PM
> To: Charles O'Donnell; Brad Burnham
> Subject: Re: [A VC] Greg Deocampo submitted a comment to 'Avatars'
>
> What about tang?
_____________________

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 3:13 pm, Charles O'Donnell wrote:
> I thought about Tang, but I don't know if Tang was really successful
> or not.
>
> I was going for two extremes...
_______________________

I drank it religiously for several years in the late 60s/early 70s

Then I realized that it sucked

Fred

_________________

In case you're curious, there's a Wikipedia entry on Tang.

SANY0057, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Darren Herman is like 3 years younger than me and 8 startups ahead of me. He's an active member of nextNY and he and his colleague Christina (who is quite familiar with all of Darren's dietary requirements should you ever try to schedule lunch with him) got me into a little office poll about favorite cookies. Christina is a fan of the black and white cookie, so they sent some over today. Sweet!! Thanks guys!

nextNY: Building the digital community, one bag of cookies at a time.

Look to the cookie!

Anyone who feels like "There's too much going on...." should come to NYC.  Think of is like the Momma Bear.  We're not too big, not too small...  not too hot, not too cold...   we're just right.  It doesn't feel like a bubble in NYC, but it also feels like there's a lot going on. 

Caterina writes:

"There's too much going on. Every night there's a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it's Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It's a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who's talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain't the Chief Party Officer."

BusinessWeek says the founders of the Facebook are asking $2 Billion.

Now, my first reaction was "UFR", which is a term I've used a few times here before, so you should get to know it.  (First word utterly, last word ridiculous).

But that's what I thought about MySpace at $580 million.  Now, I kind of think MySpace might be a bargain.

Here's one way you could look at it.  If Facebook really does have the 90% penetration in the college market I've heard, and it is the "go to" place for communicating with friends on the web, then perhaps you could evaluate it like a sum of the potential parts.

What would you pay for the dominent college version of Monster, Evite, Typepad, Match.com, etc, etc. [name your service here]?

Facebook has the potential to be all those things.

HOWEVER, it faces the Craigslist issue.  If it becomes all those things or becomes full of ads, will it still be the Facebook?  That's just like when people say that Craiglist is leaving money on the table.  It might be, but it also wouldn't be Craigslist if it did charge for everything and felt too commercial. 

Secondly, they've got a major mobile challenge ahead of them.  I've talked to a lot of people doing mobile content and the question is always, "But will you be able to get Facebook on there" as if that's really hot content that will make your mobile service.

But frankly, a really kick ass mobile service (maybe Rave?) could be the Facebook killer.  If someone could tell me when my classes where, when my friends were at the bar, and help me poke/wink/nudge people via mobile that I see in the cafeteria, I think that would be the college category killer.

So, I'm not going to say that someone couldn't make a $2 billion dollar investment worth it, but its not a slam dunk by a long shot.

First off, there are four new all-fruit flavors at Jamba.  I had the grape one...  it was grapetacular.  Even better was that *finally* they have a loyalty card program...  so I only need three more all-fruit smoothies to get the next one free.

But the most important thing is that my favorite Jamba employee Carmen is back at the Jamba Juice on 5th and 22nd.  I think she's probably everyone's favorite, because when I started talking to her, some lady on line said, "See, everybody missed you!"

Why was she gone?

She had a baby!  Congrats Carmen!

Got this question by e-mail...

Does the sustainability of the edge outweigh the opportunity in the mainstream audience? (e.g. IMO there is an enormous opportunity for AJAX desktops—especially if the web is the platform, but the existing ones don’t currently have a sustainable model; Edgeio has a very sustainable model-- decentralization, but I’m not sure there is a lot of opportunity seeing that they are cutting out the majority of internet users). The bigger payout is clearly with the mainstream audience (MySpace, search, etc), but there have been far more exits and successful businesses on the edge. Ideally there should be an equal emphasis on both—but which is more important?

My answer:

I disagree with your assertion that there has been far more success on the edge...    Just look at the big companies... they're the things that everyone uses...  Google, AOL, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.. etc...     I don't really consider Writely flipping to Google a [huge] success.

I think we're looking at edge/mainstream the wrong way...

its about influencers and non-influencers...  and those groups happen to correspond to edge/mainstream.

So, if you're building a startup, if all users have equal value, then its all about cost and ease of acquisition.  Acquiring me means acquiring 5% of my friends and 2% of their friends and so on and so forth... getting you closer and closer to mainstream, b/c I'm an influencer. You acquire me by finding me where I am... and I tend to live more on the edge than I do in the middle.... which means I'm actually easier to find b/c I'm more flexible in my habits, more willing to try new things, and appreciate that you've found me on the edge and you're trying to make my life more efficient.

Acquiring my dad means acquiring my dad and probably nobody else, because he's not an influencer, and that's if you acquire him because he's in the mainstream in his service usage, and not really looking to change.

The problem is that there's many more of my dad then there are of me... and every incremental customer, while easier to lock in b/c of network effects, may naturally be harder to acquire because they're closer to the mainstream and less of an early adopter.

Its like cell phones.  When everyone has them, you'd think it would be that much easier to acquire the next customer, but now you have to wonder... if someone still doesn't have a cellphone, perhaps they're that much more resistant to change than the next person.

Blogging... same way..   I can't imagine not blogging now that I'm jacked into the community now by doing it... but how do you then get anyone who isn't blogging now to start blogging... its certainly a lot harder than it was to get everyone who has been blogging already up and running. You'd think there be more network effects or momentum there, but there's also more friction the more you get towards the mainstream.