When I shaved off my facial hair, TONS of people came out and told me how much better they thought I looked without it and how they never really liked it in the first place.

Why the hell didn't they say anything before?

I had facial hair in some form of another for like four years!!

Maybe I wasn't listening? 

Oh well, what's done is done.  Its obvious.  My layout is for suck.  Message received loud and clear.

I will change it.  Black background: gone.

So, now I need more ideas, more feedback.

I REALLY don't want to have the generic Typepad page look.  I want something different.  It doesn't even have to be that good, frankly, just different.

How about this:

I have been beaten.  Suggestions welcome.  This took me like three minutes to do in paint.  If anyone takes the time to do a little rendering, I'll post it.

One thing I'm going to miss about being at Union Square Ventures is being a part of the conversations that inspire blog posts on Fred's blog.  Fred, Ben and Caterina are talking today about something we were talking about at Union Square Ventures for months... the idea that you could, and maybe should, do business development without ever talking to an actual business development person. 

We were trying to help get Indeed to be featured on an online social network, and then we noticed Dice.com's functional ads with a job search box on Fred's blog.  The social network came back and told us pretty much what Caterina says she told QOOP... use existing inroads to build a path into our service.  In Flickr's case, it was an API, and in our case, they said to run a functional ad powered by the information available in their member database.   

Feedburner accomplished something similar with Typepad.  Instead of doing a distribution deal from a position of weakness on day one, they built their product so that it provided something really useful to the users, RSS stats and ads, that worked with Typepad's feeds.  By the time Typepad agreed to integrate their service, I'd say the bulk of the power Typepad users were already using Feedburner.  Porting my Typepad feed users over was kind of an afterthought.  It became a need to do deal requested by the community which was alreasy using Feedburner.  There was no guesswork as to whether or not it would be worth it.

There are a few key driving forces behind the fact that any of this is possible:

• Interoperability: APIs are making "integration" a matter of plug and play versus recoding anything.
• "Open" for business: Even Facebook is opening up...    Its one thing to create an API from a technical point of view.  Its another to realize that your service can become much more robust and it is in your capitalistic interest to open up to others creating services around you.   I mean, where would MySpace be without the Free MySpace Layout Nation?
• Word of mouth:  Discovery and viral marketing from the ground up is now a legitimate distribution strategy.  I mean, I don't remember seeing any ads or press releases about Pandora.  Even my non-techy friends found it somehow and just said, "Wow this is fuckin' cool...  Hey, did you see this?"   Sure a good biz dev deal can get faster distribution (unless it takes 3 months to do the deal, of course...) but I dunno...  Web 2.0 moves pretty fast.

So what exactly is the place of business development on the web?

Well, I'll give you the other side of it. 

• API's really only go so far...  and they're designed that way, lest you suck the service out of a service.  Certain levels of integration, by design, require negotiated business relationships.  Its nice, however, when you can only focus on the business relationships that are pulled to the table by actual usage.
• Not all the doors are open.  Google's placement and integration into Firefox or XM's appearence on AIM Triton require a few lines of code and hardwiring.  Not every site is open, either.  I'd love to get avatars into every social network out there, but not all of them are as open as MySpace.  I think they'll all become more and more open, but its going to be a long time before I can put my guy in a suit on my LinkedIn profile.  (Come on Reid, how cool would that be?!)
• Content.  Usergen content is easy to mashup, but unfortunately, if I want to use the Goverator's "I'll be back" as my avatar's away message when I'm on vacation, I'm sure I'm probably supposed to pay someone.  Involve licensed content in new and creative implementations, and you're bound to need a bucket of lawyers, some softball bats, and some very crafy and patient biz dev people to get it moving.

MORE:

Someone just asked me if I do any business development in my current role at Oddcast.  I have to admit, part of me wants to say, "Yes, I develop business by trying to be a great product manager."  That wouldn't be the whole truth, though, because there are particular relationships where advanced integration with a cool partner would go a long way to creating significant value for users.  Still, right now I'm basically head down helping to create and if I do this right, consumer distribution will be a function of user value.

Track this meme and add to it:

http://del.icio.us/tag/bizdev2.0

If I met you at a cocktail party and you turned to me and said, "How do I get someone more important than you to listen to me and to pass on what I'm saying," I think I'd prety much walk away right there.

So when Nick Carr rants about how difficult it is to get "A-listers" to link to him and calls its "open and democratic and egalitarian" nature "an innocent fraud", I'm sort of offended... on behalf of all the onesie and twosie readers of really small blogs and all the bloggers with little or no traffic who keep writing. 

When I teach blogging at Fordham's MBA program, I always stress that its not about getting traffic, but its about making sure you're available to be discovered.  Take this blog about custom labeling.  You think he really cares about links from "A-listers"?  He just wants to be known to the
custom labeling community...  his community.   What's great about blogs is that your community will define itself, because discovery is so easy.  Stake a claim on Technorati, tag your posts, and make sure you ping the right servers and the right people will find you.  So, if Peter only has 15 subscribers for his label blog, its probably the right 15 people and I'm sure engaging in a dialogue with them is worth it.

You don't have to influence everyone... and sometimes just influencing one or two people in a meaningful way can change your life, your business, your career, etc.  That, to me, is what blogging is all about.

I like MikeCrunch's take on this as well...  that its all about the power of the community.  Its not about your blog or my blog, but if word of mouth gets passed around that cocktail party, and we're all talking about it, that's very powerful.

I also think that blogging, if you really want it to have an effect, on you or others, needs to be a lifestyle.  I don't mean that you have to post everyday... but, for example... I'm very forthright about the fact that I blog.  Its on my outgoing e-mails as a footer link.  I know so many people who hide their blogs, but one of the most rewarding things is when someone who just happened to get an e-mail from me, six months later, sees me in person and says, "Hey, what you wrote the other day really made me think...   that you're completely wrong."

Can't win 'em all...   

IAC just bought a majority stake in Connected Ventures, which owns Vimeo, College Humor, Busted Tees, and most importantly, BigShocker.

While I hope that all of these sites continue to grow and develop, I hope IAC lets Zack, Jakob, Josh and Ricky loose on some of their other properties, too, because then these really becomes a fantastic deal.  All of these big media companies are buying up these cool social sites, but until the DNA of these sites gets spliced with the rest of the company, they'll just be purely financial acquisitions, which would miss a big opportunities.

Way to go!  Another NYC startup company hits it big.

nextNY is holding its first ever Pitch Camp.

Here are the details...  (As of this morning, there are 11 spots left... you must RSVP on the site.)

Pitch Camp – An opportunity to hone your message and delivery for pitches to investors, customers and partners.

August 16th, 7-9 PM

Columbia Business School
Room 330 in Uris Hall [map ]
3022 Broadway
New York, NY 10027

Format:
Hour 1 – 6 teams get 2-3 minutes for an elevator pitch. Feedback is provided by the judges, and teams then give another pitch based on feedback.

Hour 2 – 1 team presents a full 20 min investor pitch (10 min presentation and 10 min Q&A). After this, we spend 40 minutes breaking down the pitch and Q&A session in depth with the coaches. While individual parts might be repeated to emphasize a point, the entire pitch will not be delivered again at the end.

Pitch Coaches:
1.  Jay Rand
2.  Alan Kelley
3.  Ken Berger
4.  Kush Wadhwa
5.  David Rose

I'm now the top ranked Charlie O'Donnell on Google, surpassing the Wheel of Fortune announcer.  That's gotta hurt.

40 years on nationally syndicated television and he gets outranked by some punk VC blogger. 

You know he's probably Googled himself and seen this, too.  It was a long run, Charlie, but it had to end sometime.  Sorry, buddy.

New York City snowfall tally as of this morning...   13 inches.  Dorean came by to play in the snow around 11 last night and we threw snow at each other like eight year olds and then went over to Carl Shulz Park.

Her dad built an igloo on 86th Street with his snowblower, and of course, I had to get in it.  The snow wasn't piled to high yet, as you can tell from my car, which we wrote on.  I think it continued through the night, though, and this is how things looked outside my window this morning.

____________________________________________________________________

I've posted about this before, but its come up again.  Last Election Day, I tried to doublecheck my polling place by e-mailing the NYC.gov website.  They finally got back to me in late January.

Well, today, they replied again, for good measure I suppose...

"SORRY FOR THE DELAY, YOUR POLL SITE IS:PS 290, LOCATED AT 311 E 82 ST."

And they want us to believe they'll figure out electronic voting without a hitch?

This would be funny if it wasn't true.   On Election Day, as I was walking out of my house, I wanted to doublecheck my polling place.  I was pretty sure I knew where it was, but it was my first time voting in my home district (no more trekking back to Brooklyn.)  Anyway, the NYC voting website had an e-mail address for location inquiries, so I e-mailed them.  Today, on January 26th, I finally received a response...

Waiting for friends across from MSG, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

..with Jamba in hand.

I'm still not exactly sure what Userplane does, but I know every page that MySpace loads seems to call a userplane server.  Seems to be a pretty integral part of the system, which makes AOL's acquisition really interesting.

I hope their social networking know-how can provide a nice boost to AIMpages.  I remember back when doing your AOL profile was the 1998 version of MySpace and still feel like anything powered by AIM has the potential to be a great social network.  Adding folks who have been doing it for five years can only be a good thing for Team Yellow Guy.

Or at least, that's what I'm worried about with the Mets.  We've been on cruise control all year, and will probably cruise right into the World Series (although if Maddux keeps that coccoon in his poll, maybe there will be a formidable NL competitor).   But if we show up the way we showed up last night, we're going to get our asses mailed back to us in little Etsy knit pouches.

This Nady trade really blew...   You mean we couldn't have gotten a Roberto Hernandez quality reliever for a smaller bat than Nady?  Or some minor leaguers?  Now with Floyd hurt, we're talking dealing for Sean Green and his salary.   Is he that much more of an improvement than Nady?  Nady certainly came a lot cheaper and had more upside.  I thought Xavier Nady might have turned out to be this team's Kevin MacReynolds...  not a huge bat, but a solid and consitant one.  Oh well...   so much for that.

I remember reading John Dvorak in my dad's copies of PC Magazine... or was it PC Monthly...   PC somethingerother.   We got our first computer back when I was in the third grade... in 1987.  It was an IBM PS/2.

And now, he has managed to become the Web 2.0 version of Encino Man...   analyzing web services using the same guidelines that helped me, my dad, and our 20MB harddrive out almost 20 years ago.

First he rips on tagging, and now he's here to explain to us how YouTube became popular.   So let's just run down some of his points:

"Google video, in fact, looks a lot like YouTube, but never achieved this growth despite getting a big head start."

Really?  Hmm... I seem to remember YouTube being around for most of 2005.  Google Video, however, not so much.  It was actually YouTube who had the head start.  Also, is it me, or does Google Video look nothing like YouTube.  Yes, it has sortable videos, but... Where are my friends?  What about my own profile page? 

"What's not so apparent, unless you actually have tried to use the various video sharing sites, is that nobody -- and I mean nobody -- made it easy until YouTube."

Actually, Vimeo made it pretty easy to share video long before YouTube did.  They had about a 6-9 month head start actually.  He continues on the ease-of use bandwagon:

"It's amazing that the YouTube formula for success is simply ease-of-use and convenience. A shocker, huh?"

"I'm hoping that the founders of YouTube Chad Hurley and Steve Chen realize that they may be subtle geniuses insofar as ease-of-use is concerned."

That would make sense if YouTube's userbase was my dad, who needs a really clean and simple UI to get the most out of web services.  But, this is the MySpace generation.  These are the kids who grew up teaching their dads (or moms, of course) how to work the VCR...  when they were eight.  They are net native and ease of use has never stopped them from using MySpace.  Is MySpace easy to use?  Its a UI disaster, but it doesn't matter, because there's joy and satisfaction in getting into the guts of your page and making it work...  and why do they want to make it work?

Because its social!  And I can do what I want with it.

Social and flexible is the reason why MySpace works.  It doesn't have to look pretty... it just has to do what I want and help me connect to others. 

From early on, YouTube focused on getting users to take their videos off of the YouTube site and pass them around, encoded in Flash.  YouTube jumped in the Flash bandwagon early...that was key.  Embed codes were prominently displayed and when each video stopped, you were prompted with opportunities to share.  It was all about the viral features.  Sure, it had to work, but viral/social/portable trumps easy UI in this day and age. 

In the same way, Photobucket has rocketed to the top of the photosharing market in a similar fashion.  Flickr could do anything Photobucket did, but embed codes are a few clicks away whereas on Photobucket, they're right smack under every photo everywhere you see them.    That's very social.  Is Photobucket easy to use?  Umm.. actually... not really.  Its UI isn't as simple, as, let's say, Ofoto or Snapfish, but this generation does not want easy UI... they don't care.  They click everywhere until they find what they want. 

YouTube videos have at times been slow, choppy, etc. but when you give people what they want and tie them together in a social network, it often takes long to shake them for reasons of performance.   

So, the next time Marketwatch or a big tech magazine wants to write an article about why YouTube works... perhaps they should just ask a 15 year old.

I just heard that Ed Wahesh will now be running Fordham's peer education/support programs out of Student Activities.  I graduated with Ed in 2001.  He was always very dedicated to the school and I'm glad to see him back at FU after a hiatus at Scranton.  Welcome back to the big show, Ed.

I woke up like it was Christmas Day, excitedly springing out of bed to see what kind of journalistic present Kitchen Claus had left for me to open online.  While there's no picture online (maybe they didn't come out well... I haven't seen the print addition yet...) the article is a very high level overview of blogs as a career tool... and I think that writing it must have tipped the author off that this whole topic is quite difficult to squeeze into a single column.  There are literally hundreds of things that need to be explored on this issue, such as the problems that were highlighted when people start blogging about their jobs, to the potential for people to start treating blogs like an online professional journal for self promotion as I have discussed before.  The bottom line is that there will be a career blog book the same way the B&N career section is filled with "Best Sites for Job Hunters" and "Using the Internet to Find a Job" books.  The question is: Will someone let me be the first one to write it?

Here's the article.

My thanks to Patricia Kitchen for giving me the opportunity to share some of my experience with Newsday readers.

As a side note, it was very cool to be quoted in the same article as Typepad's mom, Mena Trott.

So Mike Oliver posted on my post on MeVertising, and made a good comment on it, so now I'm reposting something from his repost... 

"A brand is now only as influential as its consumers."

Brilliant.

I finished 3rd out of 80+ kayaks that competed in our annual race yesterday.  Here are some pics.  I also have video of the presentation, too:

Not having my own kayak, I had to secure one of the DTBH deck boats early in the morning.

This is after already finished... I paddled back a little to make sure the rest of the kayakers were safe by the pier.  Looks like some of them went under.

When we were done, we had a BBQ up by 72nd street, which meant we all had to park somewhere. 

Curbed, the NYC real estate, etc blog posted an ethical question about some renter who wanted to get away with not paying his broker fee to a careless real estate agent.  Responses were requested and I submitted mine on the side of ethics and just treating people well overall.  It got posted.. wooo!   So, if you're a real estate agent, now you know I'm an ethical guy and the kind of guy you want to send listings of apartments for sale with reasonable maintainence south of 59th Street around 400k.  One bedrooms only, please.

Link: Curbed: The Curbed Ethicist (Part I): Pay The Guy Already.

Real estate brokers provide little else besides the knowledge of an open apartment, which he did here. Sure, he very haphazardly involved himself in the process, and you could probably get away with not paying him, but its not as if he didn’t do his job. You wouldn’t have known about the listing if he didn’t post it, and in my mind, he deserves payment for that... Trust me, screw people over and it will come back to haunt you. What you should do is pay him the fee, but explain to him that you didn’t have to and point out to him the err of his ways. Maybe he’s new and he’ll be so indebted, that in a few years when you move, he’ll find you a sweet deal.

Un-f-ing believable.

Link: Real Lawyers :: Have Blogs : Lawyer blogs stream the best CLE to lawyers.

Lawyers are blogging about the article!  Its always worthwhile to make nice with lawyers... those are people you don't want on your bad side.  :)    Kevin the blogging lawyer echoes the growing awareness that blogs are quickly becoming an indespensible career tool.  (I found this by searching for my name in Technorati.)