Or something like that...

Sean Johnson is taking the "next" concept out to the Windy City and starting nextChigago.

The nextVirus... spreading across America.  :)

Seriously, though, its an open source brand, just like BarCamp.  In fact, a lot of us here at nextNY think of our group has kind of like BarCamp on a listserv that actually includes going to bars and meeting regularly.  So if you'd like to get some young people in tech together in your area, here's what I had in mind as the principals of nextNY when I set the ball rolling.  Keep in mind none of these principals have ever been approved or officialy endorsed by anyone.

1. No membership or membership criteria.  While I've tried to have the group clump around young people in tech, there's no official criteria.  All we keep doing is talking it up by using terms like "up and coming" (not young... I try to avoid age terms) and running the kind of events where my peer group would show, like Startup 101 for new entreprenuers or bar outings of lots of other "up and comers".

I just added a list of the most recent comments on the sidebar...   maybe that will encourage the chatter.  Here's the code for MT/Typepad:  (Thanks Elise)

<div class="module">
<h2 class="module-header">Recently Commented On</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<ul class="module-list">
<MTComments lastn="10" sort_order="descend">
<li class="module-list-item">
<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$> on <MTCommentEntry>
<a href="<MTEntryPermalink>#c<$MTCommentID$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>

From Eric...

"Computers, and especially games, may also play into this generational shift in attitude. My generation was among the first to really have games around our entire lives. What does that have to do with anything? Unlike children of previous generations, who were presented with unyielding eternal institutions like school and family and even Little League, games gave my generation a chance to create our own worlds, our own institutions. Life was just another realm in which we could play with the rules. 

I wonder whether this sort of game playing and this sort of experimentation with institutions from an early age is what contributed to the massive rise of entrepreneurship we have seen over the past decade or so. Instead of being locked into a world where institutions were king and where the goal was to be a company man, my generation realized that institutions could be brought into being, that starting a new company was like starting a new game. (Okay, the massive drop in capital costs to start a company also contributed, but I’m trying to make a point here)."

Brad and I have been chatting about link density and depth.

I don't know exactly what I want to say about this, but there's an interesting progression in here somewhere.

Craigslist.org, or at least the home page, has high link density.  Almost everything on that page is clickable.

However, it doesn't have great depth.   You click on New York, now you get all the New York catagories.  You click on Missed Connections and then you get listings.  Click on a listing, and that's it.  Dead end.  No more clicking, save for going backwards via the top menu.

Del.icio.us does one better with half its listings.  There's just as much link density on each page as the Craigslist frontpage, but here, half the links bring you to equally dense pages.  Clicking on a tag or a screename will get you yet another Del.icio.us page full of links.  So, as long as you stay on those links, you could go around and around forever.

Even better is IMDB...  lots of links, and every movie has a list of clickable people, each of which brings you to a person with their own set of movies.  And, each of those movies has more people.  Person, movie, person movie.

What more degrees of freedom?  Try Baseball Reference.  Everything, and I mean everything, is clickable.  Years, teams, players, awards, etc.  You can go from David Wright's page to the '94 Mets to Richard Hildago to the 1997 National League page to Andres Gallarraga to Ted Kluscewski to voting on the 1950 MVP award, and so on and so on... colleges, towns, days of debut of final games, birth death... circles and cirlcles and every page is as dense as the last one, and every page infinately deep.

I like the idea of pages where everything is clickable but each click takes you to a new page of clicks...  and we were wondering whether or not that only works with certain kinds of content.  Can you do it with news?  I mean, certainly, news pages could get more link dense and deep... since right now it seems like the most you ever get are like 3 or 4 related articles and like two keywords.  Recipies would be a great one.  Strawberry cheesecake?  Click strawberries and strawberry martinis, too...  and other drinks, or drinks that go with other food... round and round.  What else? 

I just got a MySpace friend request from Status Q Billiards.

Status Q isn't a person, of course... its a pool hall in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

And you know, I pass it all the time, but I really don't hangout that much by my apartment, so I haven't gone in there in ages...   

... but someone over there was smart enough to notice that I had "pool" as a hobby in my profile... or maybe they were just adding people in the local area and they asked to be my friend.

No matter what kind of business you are, setting up shop in MySpace is brilliant.  I'm happy to be friends with Status Q and now it makes me want to go in there...  especially now that I can see who else might be playing there by checking all of the other people who are friends with Status Q.  They've turned marketing into community building.

Leave it to a little pool hall in Brooklyn to understand Web 2.0 guerilla marketing better than most big corporations.

Ignition just funded SecondSpace.  I like the guys over there so I'm curious what the company is up to, but they're being very secretive.

The website says this:

"We have the opportunity to build a groundbreaking new online service that helps consumers get the most from their free time."

Its from a group of people who "have impressive track records building global online brands and services such as Internet Explorer, VeriSign, Microsoft FrontPage, Classmates.com, Quicken Loans and others..."

So what is it?

MySpace for grown-ups?

A porn site?

A great new ajax web calendar?

Submit your guess and I'll buy the best guess (As voted by the audience in a couple of days) an Original size Jamba Juice of any flavor.

My guess is that it will be a site you stare into and get hypnotized into thinking you actually had a great time on the site, but what you really did was randomly click AdSense ads for seven hours.

Someone gave Joshua a zebra plant with some lucky Chinese coins in it.  As del.icio.us flourished, so did the plant.

When he left for CA, he left the plant with USV and it continued to grow.

That is, until we gave him back his lucky coins...  I really only wanted the plant and the lucky coins were meant for him.

I think its too late to ask for the coins back...

Does living in a borderless world mean that you increasingly need international specialization or that having "cross-border" expertise matters less and less?

So Henry Owens made his major league debut the other night.   Threw gas.  Anyone up for keeping this guy in the bullpen a little while?

Pelfrey goes tonight.   This guy is a real stud.  Dare I say Gooden-esque?   I'm sure he'll probably get clobbered or something tonight, but that's ok.  I'm sure he'll have a long career here and I'm looking forward to seeing how he does.  Hopefully, if nothing else, it means the end of Lima Time. 

Lima Time really sucks.

BTW.... Jose Reyes?  Didn't you watch Jeff Kent growing up?  Baseball 101.  Don't slide into first base.  You always get their faster running through it.  The only reason you slide anywhere else is to avoid a tag and because you can't overrun other bases.  Lifestyles of the young and not so bright. 

Critical mass of broadband penetration+inexpensive digital cameras+social video site+ripped off TV content=

Crazy DELICIOUS!

Remember that SNL Narnia video?

Try the reduxes...

I'm sorry, but this is UFR.  (Utterly...  Ridiculous).  Friendster just won the patent on social networking.

The idea of interacting with people you know and with people they know is called networking and it has been around long before the internet.  The idea that it is patentable is a farce.

Frankly, if Friendster, who lost the social network battle by being slow, closed, and failing to provide user value, actually goes after anyone or takes a dollar from anyone in licensing after getting awarded this patent, that's like winning the World Series on a balk.

Technically, yes, you're allowed to, but if I was managing a team that won the World Series on a balk, I'd turn around and say, "No thanks, we decline the balk.  We're not winning that way.  Either we actually drive that guy in from third on some sort of actual bat to ball contact or we'll go home, thanks."

On October 14, 2004, I sat in DTUT working on my Stanford MBA application, trying to figure out where all this was going....   

"In the last day or so, I've found clarity of vision. ...Its the best and biggest thing I have the potential to do right now, and I shouldn't be shooting for anything less than that. I don't want to look back on my life over the next few years and think I left anything on the table. Let's see how far this can go. I want to let it ride.

This is going to be big.  I can feel it."

That's how my blog got named, and we've come a long way since my eventual rejection from Stanford.  :)  On July 17th, after seventeen of the most eye-opening months of my professional life, I will be leaving Union Square Ventures to join Oddcast in the newly created position of Director of Consumer Products.

I imagine, given my obsession with my avatar, that hardly comes as a surprise to most of you... but here's the extended version.

My time here at Union Square Ventures has been nothing short of amazing.  In less than two years, I went from being an investment analyst at a pension fund to helping a venture-backed digital media company with their burgeoning consumer effort.  That would not have been possible had it not been for the opportunity that everyone here at USV afforded me...   from the front row seat that Brad and Fred made sure I had for all of our meetings, investment discussions, and interaction with entrepreneurs, to Kerri's patience for having to sit next to me day in and day out in "reception".

Brad and Fred have been great mentors.  I knew this was going to be a great fund when I evaluated them for GM back in 2004, but I really didn't understand how far ahead of the pack they were until after I got here.  Right around the time that I got here was when they were talking to Joshua from del.icio.us...   I totally didn't get it.  Bookmarks?  Tagging?  Not many VCs would have understood it at such an early stage either.  I got it soon enough, though.  These guys were ahead of the curve by a year and I definitely benefited from the insight the market gave them credit for.  Union Square Ventures developed a great brand in a short period of time, and that granted me access to a deep and knowledgeable network of people. 

Think of working at USV like MBA 2.0.  Lots of networking.  Lots of "case studies".  We met a ton of companies and in each and every single one of those meetings, there was something to be learned... some new way of thinking...  or an inspiration for a thought experiment of our own.  It was the most educational birds eye view of Everything 2.0 that I could have had....  and so to all of the entrepreneurs I was lucky enough to meet with while I was here, thank you for your time, your passion, and your attempts to reshape and improve the world.

The only difficult thing was that, when you're an analyst, you don't really live and die by your own sword.  You contribute to decisions, but it is difficult to have direct impact on your company.  Plus, any company that interacts with us here can tell you that we're a passionate group of users that love to play product manager with a whiteboard once in a while to generate ideas.  Sometimes, in that process, you meet a company whose product and its potential you can't shake out of your head--one where you feel like you have some unique insight or talent that could be the missing piece of a great puzzle.  When we met with Adi, Oren, and Gil from Oddcast, I felt that from the start.  I wrote about why we were excited about Oddcast as an investment on the USV blog.  But here, on my blog, I'll tell you why I am personally excited about this opportunity...  as a company and just in terms of my own personal opportunity.

If there's anything that we've learned over the past two years or so on the web, is that if you give people a fun and flexible way to express themselves and connect to other people, great things happen.  The most interesting new voice in media is us, and we are a growing part of our own digital experience.  In Oddcast, I see a company with a platform that enables self expression in a unique way and one that has some key components--mobile and voice--that have the potential to create an exponential amount of social interaction and value to the end user. 

This is going to be a fun challenge and a tremendous opportunity for me.  I get to work together with a great team to figure out how users want to express themselves digitally and what those expressions will look like.  The Oddcast platform is a great base to build on and it is going to enable what is potentially a very creative and unique business model--one that I'm confident brands and advertisers are going to be very interested in.

So all I can say is stay tuned, because I'm jumping in the game here, coming a big step closer to fulfilling the nomenclature of this blog...

People spend a lot of time on paying attention to social networks, but I don't think enough time is spent on social features.  A social feature is one that brings another person into your digital experience... whether its "send to a friend" or commenting or subscribing to a friend's photos.  It actually needs to be a feature, though, and not just "add friends" w/o any context of why you would be adding these friends.

Social has become a bit of a Web 2.0 buzzword, so I was thinking today about some of the concrete value propositions that building in social features represents.

Good post on Superman and the American Way from Jarvis.

I haven't done one of these in a while, but I think I came up with a good one on the train.

Why isn't anyone doing free VOIP-based, ad supported wakeup callsand meeting reminders?

It seems so easy...  Create a little plugin in Outlook or even easier, cc an e-mail address for the wakeup service and let it call you using a VOIP backend, but with a relevent advertisement as part of the message.  You could generate very targeted ads depending on the time, keywords in the event, location, or even letting the carrier tip you off on your geolocation on the call. 

"Its 6AM... time to wake up for your 9AM Meeting with Jim.   For a quick pick me up, drop by the Jamba Juice on 22nd and 5th for a Bright Eyed and Blueberry.  Tell them we sent you and receive 10% off!"

Just the wakeup calls alone could generate lots of ads from Jamba, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, 7Eleven, etc.  Throw in 1-800 Flowers and FTD for Birthdays, Anniversaries, etc.

Plus, the neat thing is that you could private label it for anyone with a quick paste of some HTML.  Conferences could use it, too.

Knowing where someone is or needs to be, the context of what they'll be doing, and being able to reach them at an appropriate time with an opt-in call should make for great ad potential.  Its probably not too hard to setup either.

Feel free to take this plan and build a company.  Its all yours.

Ok, here's something from the, "I don't know nearly enough about my representatives" catagory...

Hilary Clinton doesn't support gay marriage.  Really?  I had no idea. 

So, wait...   if 52% of the people (to 38%) of the people in your state are supportive of it, and you're the elected representative, then who exactly are you representing?

I'm a fan of the domino effect... letting the states decide who they want to issue licenses to (since they are, in fact, state licenses)...   but its going to be really hard when the supportive states have politicians with their own agenda propping up the domino. 

On one hand, she attacks the anti-gay marriage amendment, chastizing Republicans...   and on the other she has said in the press that marriage is "between a man and a woman."

In other news, her 2008 Presidential Campaign slogan just got annouced.

Hilary Clinton: I'm for whatever will get me elected.... which means trying to present myself so deeping entrenched in the center that I don't actually stand for anything.

A lot of good that did John Kerry...

In 2008, I hope we have a choice between Mike Bloomberg/John McCain and Al Gore/Barack Obama.   I actually think only one of these four, Gore, will make it onto any ticket, but still, with a choice like that, you'd have to feel pretty good about your vote, no matter which way it came out.

I like Scott Adam's ability to make us all realize how self-important we all are.

Today he covered flag burning.

Now, I'm not a fan of flag burning the same way I'm not a fan of tearing up Pope photos or defacating on Yankee jerseys.  (oh... wait... about that last one... that's probably ok)    But I'd never want to go so far as to make it illegal. 

I love his reasoning:

"For me, a flag that I’m NOT allowed to burn is a symbol that the government is too intrusive in my life. And it’s an insult to anyone who died to defend freedom. But that’s just me. You might prefer your symbols of freedom to have as many restrictions as possible.

It seems to me that the great thing about the flag is that it symbolizes something inherently indestructible: the concept of freedom. You can burn the flag as many times as you want and the concept of freedom is not only still there – it’s stronger. I like that about my flag. I would go so far as to say it’s my flag’s best feature."

The American Flag: Growing stronger with every match.  You can't burn freedom, punks.