Eye of the Tiger, Baby
You know your commute is rough when you need boxing gloves. Also, he's standing way too close to the edge of the platform.
links for 2007-01-04
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Apparently, Bill Tai is a kiteboarder. I can imagine a lot of broken entreprenuers trying to learn the sport to get a meeting.
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She's perfect for me!
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I'm sorry... when did curves go out?
My Perfect Girl
Josh sent me an e-mail today...
Check this girl out - she's perfect for you...
http://www.yourperfectgirl.com/default.html?playlist=161_161_93_51_15_343
Ladies and gentlemen, the search is over.
I knew in all those RSS subs, there had to be someone like this... :)
Make your own at www.yourperfectgirl.com.
Linking into the Wind... the Most Statistically Insignificant Blog Posts of 2006
If you still think that everyone who blogs is a member of the same community, check out Buzzmetrics Top 10 Most Linked To Blog Posts of 2006.
The top post has 800 or so links in, and it is a petition in the LiveJournal community not to change the interface.
800...and then they really drop off from there.
So basically, in a community of 60+ million blogs, according to Technorati, no more than 0.00126% of people linked to the same post at once.
Of course, that doesn't count del.icio.us tags, where sometimes posts get a thousand links or two, but even that's just a drop in the bucket.
Even the most popular blogs overall don't have significant mind or market share when you think about the overall blogging audience, let alone the readership. Engadget and Boing Boing have about 20,000 blogs linking in... or about 0.033% of all blogs.
So, before you think that pitching to the most popular blogs overall is going to make or break your product, get a little perspective. What is the right audience for what you're trying to do? Maybe you're better off pitching to a recipe blog that has 200 really active readers versus a tech blog with a hundred thousand readers who mostly just browse and comment to be seen.
links for 2007-01-03
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Wearable... no more fumbling for wet paper maps or taking my gloves off
Congrats to Jarah Euston and FresnoFamous!
A really fantastic young woman named Jarah Euston just had her site, Fresno Famous, get acquired by the Fresno Bee, a McClatchy publication. I met Jarah back in 2000 when she was interning for a bank when we were both in college here in New York City and ran into Fresno Famous randomly sometime last year. It's a very cool site and I hope it can manage to continue being a community resource now that it's found a home.
The Year Ahead
I don't really know what the new year holds for me... I just know that whatever it is, it is going to be big. :)
Voki will come out, and we'll know whether it is a success or failure by the end of the year. What Voki does will largely determine what I do. Hopefully, a year from now, I'll have the pleasure of leading a team putting out a fun and growing product--one that changes our notions of how we express ourselves and relate to advertisers online. I'll also have three more semesters of teaching under my belt and I'd like to be able to say that I will have made a difference in the lives of those I stand in front of in the classroom.
I also think it is going to be a big year for me personally. I have a feeling that I'll be in a significant relationship by the end of the year. I can't say whether I rediscover or am rediscovered by someone in my past, recent or distant, or whether I'm with someone I don't even know at this moment, but something tells me that all the ways in which I've envisioned growing with and sharing time with another person will come to fruition by the end of the year.
I'll also probably have some kind of surgery within the year... either to yank some wisdom teeth or to repair a knee after softball season. Neither major, but both appear to be coming to a head. I'd bet on the knee over the teeth, b/c my teeth seem to be proving much more resilient.
At this point, I just want to do my best... to be able to look back and say that I gave it my all... that I was the best person I could have been in my job, for my family, my friends, to another person, and to myself.
Here's to the road ahead... thanks for reading...
Playboy Pics
I left my book somewhere... Probably in the office. I've been meaning to read more, and so I just ordered like six or seven books from Amazon. That will take me forever to read. I don't have much of a system for reading. I steal time on the train...when I don't bike in. We're at 59th street now... In Brooklyn. Oh, did I mention I'm on the subway? Well, I guess that's obvious from the picture. Anyone intesting gets off the R and walks across the platform here to catch the express. Unfortunately, there aren't too many interesting people on the R to begin with. I don't live in the kind of gentrified Brooklyn that all the skinny hipsters are "reclaiming" from industry and the working poor. I live in real Brooklyn...where people only come into "the city" for work and then they come back home. Its the land of commuter sneaker secretary moms and dads who work for the phone company. As we pass through Sunset Park you get a more interesting, ethnicly diverse crowd. A lot of headphones. Some crossword puzzles. Less newspapers than I ever remember seeing in high school. I love seeing the Chinese newspapers. They're always so bright and colorful and they always make me think of how impossibly hard it would be for me to start learning Chinese at this point. The man across from me is reading the Mets story I read online this morning. I like his coat. Its greenish and looks very warm. Best of all, it has huge side pockets. He's facing me now, to get off at Pacific. I moved across the car to get away from the door. I used to have a coat in high school that could hold textbooks in the pockets. Why is there a woman in lingerie on every page of the Chinese newspapers? Are the Chinese big lingerie purchasers or are these pictures just a way to get them to buy the paper? Perhaps that's just the custom for people getting interviewed. "Thanks for the interview Mrs. Johnson, I'm sure our readers are going to enjoy reading about your company's new product...now if you'll just strip down to your undies, we can take your picture and be on our way." Interesting.
The woman in front of me now has a little black dufflebag with the Playboy logo in silver on it. Apparently, softcore porn is the theme for this subway ride. We're crossing the Manhatten bridge now. Is the Union Square market open today? I hope so. I'm starving. I had an oatmeal and chocolate cube thingy on Saturday and it was great.
The Playboy woman is asleep. She's clutching a napkin and a plastic water bottle, but that bottle is going to fall any second. Canal Street. Next stop. I'm not holding on to anything. I've been riding the subway since I was a freshman in high school. I figured out early on that you have to stand diagonally so you can shift your weight to counter the train in any direction. There's a youngish girl with a diamond Yankee pendent around her neck. There are two people in front of the door. I need to get out now. Bye everyone.
Island Beach
Alright folks... here's where you contribute content back to me.
Anyone been to Block Island?
Recommendations for restaurants, hotels, inns, things to do, etc?
If anyone wants to send me good stuff, they can e-mail me, or preferably tag things in del.icio.us by using the for:ceonyc tag. Thanks!
Regis Guys (My High School) Break Subway Record
Did you know there was a Guinness record for riding the whole NYC subway system... stopping at all 468 stations? Well, 6 guys from Regis High School in New York City did, and they smashed that record by an hour and a half, doing it in just under 25 hours.
I told my friend about it and she said, "That's such a Regis guy thing to do." If you know any of us, you'd have to agree. :)
Nice work Bill Amarosa, Brooklyn's own Brian Brockmeyer, Stefan Karpinski, Andrew Wier, Jason Laska and Michael Boyle!
Dating Matchmaking
Here at Union Square, all of our deal meetings are pretty conversational. I don't think we've ever fully gotten through a Powerpoint, and if we did its because we skipped past a lot.
But one thing I told a team today was that, if we say a lot, but its not what you wanted to hear, that's actually a good thing.
In other words, if we have a slew of stuff to day about your deal, but we don't sign any checks, if nothing else it means you're playing in the right space--a space that we've talked about a lot and debated internally previously.
I love those meetings because that also means that we'll bring the teams we meet into the debate and often times generate new ideas. The other day we talked about future web endeavors for our firm and whether or not it makes sense for us to throw ideas into the void that we like and see if anyone wants to run with them.
So one came up this morning. Feedback or testing is always appreciated:
Lots of the daily interactions that we have with people involve trust... some more than others, especially on the web. How do you ensure that resumes are legitimate? How can you trust the people you see on Craigslist? Ebay probably wouldn't exist without trust measurement, because you're buying from people all over the world. Another company, Daylo, for example, is aiming to become a marketplace for services, like photography, and services especially depend on trust. Even on LinkedIn, you can give someone a little thumbs up and say that someone is good.
Interestingly enough, the vertical that probably depends the MOST on trust, dating, is the one that addresses it the least. None of the dating sites I've seen have a trust rating for people that may have gone on a date with members. How would you like that? A little thumbs up/thumbs down or comment section.
"Charlie was a nice guy on our date. He's a little bit too goodlooking for me, but he's certainly trustworthy enough to show you a nice time. Thumbs up!"
This list could go on and on and its symptimatic of my earlier Y.A.F.P. posts. We have too many places to live on the net and nothing to tie them together. So, I could be a crook on eBay but have lots of thumbs up thingys on LinkedIn. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Even with blogging, people have asked me how you know a blog is legitimate. People could rate my posts, but where does anyone rate me as a person as a trustworthy person on the web, across all of my disparate profiles?
So, how about a little PeopleTrust badge?
PeopleTrust would be a neat little box I could post on any profile... on craigslist, eBay, Match, etc. and it would show my trustworthiness in a rating. It would be kind of like that trust-E symbol, but instead of for websites, for people. Here are the rules around how it would work:
- It would be a little piece of Javascript or something that only I could generate and no one could steal and pretend to be me with. I'd have to go to the PeopleTrust site to generate the code and tell it where I'm putting it.
- It would be based on algorhythms and it would not only state my rating, but also state the strength of that rating (so if you don't have many ratings, it would show that not a lot of people have rated you yet.) The algorhythym would weigh people's ratings based on their participation in the system and their own hit rate. So, if I spam lots of people with bad ratings, and I'm the only one who seems to hate these people, I don't get weighted highly. Plus, if all I do is knock people, that doesn't count as much either.
- You could tie it into other types of interactions, like AIM warnings and such as well. Would you tie your credit rating into it, too? I mean... do you want to know if you're dating a Match.com deadbeat? You would, right?
- You could look up people's interactions and see why they got one rating vs. another, too. Kind of like a credit report.
What's the business? Not sure, but, if you can figure out a way to get enough people to join, there's value in being the way to trust people on the web no matter where they are. Perhaps businesses like Wackenhut would pay for a PeopleTrust indepth profile. Does it replace other systems like eBay's.... no, I don't think so, because there are different types of trust. So, maybe someone ships their packages on eBay really late, but I might still want to date them and if they're eventually coming through, they're probably not such a bad person. But, certainly eBay could be a dataprovider to a universal system.
A lot of people might feel this is too open and too personal, but I think, at some point, the days where you can do sketchy things on the web and not be liable for it in other parts of your life are over. So, if I stalk several Match dates or screw a dozen eBay buyers, perhaps that should effect my background check for new employment or ability to get an apartment.
I imagine that the only people who would actually use this would be the good guys, but that's enough. In a world of lots of bad guys, if we just had ways to mark the good guys and exclude the bad guys from participating, that might be enough.
Rocky Balboa: There's still some stuff in the basement
When I saw that they were coming out with another Rocky, I was... um... skeptical. Rocky V, to me, should have never been made the same way that Godfather III is dead to me. So, why come back for another one? Especially since Sly is 60!!
Then I saw the trailer... Hmm... wow... actually looked pretty interesting. It totally plays into the aging boxer story, which was somewhat believable since we saw George Foreman do it in real life.
Well, the movie was even better than I could have imagined. If you liked any of the Rocky movies, this is a must-see. If you love America and apple pie, this is a must see. If you go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning, this is a must see.
Even though this isn't a true "reset" like Casino Royale and Batman Begins, the movie accomplishes the same success for a franchise that had jumped the tracks a bit. It is a back to basics plot with a lot of character exploration and development. Oh, and did I mention Adrian was dead? In fact, Rocky's memories of Adrian are so touching that, for a split second, we almost... miss her character. Almost. Nice jobs all around by supporting characters playing Rocky's son, "Little Marie", and Rocky's Trainer.
You can't help but get goosebumps when the Rocky theme plays. The fight scene is probably the most realistic of all the Rocky fights, too, and when it's over, you couldn't have asked for the frachise to end on a better note.... a lot better than fighting that Tommy Morrison in the street.
Once again... the trailer:
links for 2006-12-29
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Three more years until my Carbon invite...
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the Monster.com of passive candidates
Getting into this online stuff: Getting started and keeping up with LinkedIn
LinkedIn. It's social networking for professionals. So, think MySpace and swap out thongs for resumes and there you have it. It has been an indespensible tool for me to find the right person in the right places to connect to, and reach them through a trusted contact that can recommend me.
Like offline networking, it's value is maximized when you keep up with it, b/c connections are a funny thing. You never know when someone is connected to someone that might come in handy.
This is a continuation of other "Getting Into... " posts... see:
Getting into this online stuff: Part I - Blogging as the Industry Cocktail Party
Getting into this online stuff: Part II - A better way to bookmark and favorite links on the web using del.icio.us
Here are our goals: You want to make sure that everyone, or as many people as possible, who are familiar with you and who already use LinkedIn productively, are connected to you. Why? Because when you really need a connection to a certain ad agency, its more likely you'll find it closer when you have 350 contacts than if you have 2.
Plus, you want to make yourself easily findable, so that when people are looking for what you can offer, they can reach you easily and you sound impressive.
So, here goes:
1) Organize and cleanup your contacts first. LinkedIn is most effective when you use it in conjunction with a real online address book and email system. For most, that means Outlook, which can be big and bulky but is also very powerful and has a well integrated email and address book solution. Many students still use their phone for numbers, their AOL, Gmail, or Yahoo! addressbook for emails and Facebook fills in the gaps. Well, grow up. Seriously. Think about how much of an information advantage someone has with a hosted addressbook with names, companies, emails, numbers, and notes all in one place, and who can access that from the web or on their phone.
2) Once you've got that all settled, install the LinkedIn toolbar for Outlook or just export and upload your contacts via *csv file to LinkedIn. This will allow LinkedIn to trudge through your contacts and emails and find out who you know is already on the system. These people are no brainer invites. You know them and you don't need to explain to them the value of joining. If you want to invite newbies, that's your own uphill battle if you choose to climb it.
3) After you upload your contacts, LinkedIn will tell you how many people you know and talk to are already on the system and give you a link to invite them to connect. Create custom invites!! I hate hate hate the stock invite and you should never use it. You want something that reflects who you are and sticks in someone's mind... maybe something that will cause even more
conversation.
For example, here is what I use:
As [insert timely pop culture reference here... spring training, celebrity weddings, etc] happen, , I'm using LinkedIn to keep in touch with my professional networ just in case I don't make the Mets major league roster.. Because you're a PERSON, I'm going to take two seconds to write a mildly creative and entertaining invitation, even though you know what this whole thing is about and any text is probably unnecessary.
So link to me, and then I'll troll your network for opportunities, contacts, dates, etc... all the while getting your permission at every step. Pretty soon, your network will realize that I'm a far more interesting person than you are, and one by one, they'll probably unlink you. You'll wind up alone in a bar somewhere, and probably wind up in a fight. Several haymakers and a black eye later, you'll wonder where all your friends went and you'll only have yourself, Reid Hoffman, Sequoia and Greylock to blame. :)
Of course, I'm joking...
Obviously, you can't blame the VC's.
- Charlie
Is this good for everyone? No way! Why? Because, one, it is a little bit snarky. For me, that's ok, but for a salesperson or a student or just someone who might have to present a slightly more professional face than a t-shirt and jeans product manager, you might want to rethink that, unless you know the person you're inviting can take a joke. Second, there's a lot of inside joking here. Most people don't know who any of the people are that I mentioned... except people in online media and technology. Figure out what works for you. For me, I don't think I've ever had anyone turn me down b/c I only invite people I actually know who already use the system plus I create this funny invite.
Make sure you update this regularly. If you use Firefox, install the LinkedIn plugin. I use it all the time... searching for people's names instead of through the Google searchbox. Redo the e-mail process every few months.
4) Live your profile. Make sure your bio is up to date and well written. Describe not only what you have done, but what you would like to do. Make sure you use keywords that would likely be used in the kind of searches that you want to be found with. Personalize the page by adding a LinkedIn screename for public profiles and stick it at the bottom of your e-mail signature. Use the blog badge. Put it on business cards. You want others that you encounter knowing that you have it.
5) If people don't accept your invite, do not pester them. They'll come around... or maybe they just don't like you, which is their right.
6) Ask for introductions sparingly. Some people join LinkedIn and two minutes after using it, I already have 6 requests to get introduced to people in my network. WHOA, Nelly! Calm down. I try not to ask people for introductions to people for at least a good month after we get connected... and usually after having at least one other non-LinkedIn related conversation. Plus, don't keep asking the same people. If you have 5 connections, all of whom have one contact except for one with 553, don't keep pestering that one person... get more friends.
7) Recommendations... no one ever really uses them, but you can score about a million brownie points... ermm... I mean social capital dollars, with someone by writing them sincerely and where appropriate. Many people don't even know they exist, and then when you randomly write something nice about them, they're floored. Admittedly, I don't do this enough, but the few times I've had, it really made the other person feel great and strengthened our connection.
So, there's LinkedIn 101 in a nutshell. I have 380+ contacts and, in my industry, there usually isn't a department or person I can't find some way to get into. I don't know where else you'd get that kind of penetration through the corporate viel... used wisely, its an indespensible tool.
Is 'Web 2.0' Another Bubble? - Two Web 2.0 Investors Debate (Or did Todd not realize that Spark invested in KickApps and Me.dium?)
Link to Is 'Web 2.0' Another Bubble? - WSJ.com
This is just bizzare, b/c Spark's Todd Dagres is working for a VC firm that invested in a video sharing company and a social "discovery" plugin for Firefox. Not quite sure how he's arguing the bubble side of Web 2.0.