• Ride the City: safe bike routes made easy
  (tags: bikes maps nyc biking)

Fred's post on the USV blog...

And Then There Were Five | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

And Eric's response on his own blog...

Changing jobs, not focus

There’s no WalMart in my neighborhood, but there is a Limewire, so that’s where I’ll be shopping.

Idiots.

I talked to quite a few folks about the events of Internet Week and a couple of people brought up the fact that they really weren’t sure who they should be out there meeting. 

I’m not particularly plotting about how I network.  I just try to meet cool, interesting folks and get to know them well.  If I have one good thought provoking conversation with someone passionate about what they do at an event, I consider the whole thing a success.

But if you’re focused on “who to know”, then I think it’s easy to mistake buzz for influence or knowledge.  I think too many up and coming people in the tech scene worry about the “in” crowd or folks that appear on the outside to generate a lot of buzz in the community.  Focusing on them, however, is an easy way to take your eye off the ball and not focus on the things you need to do for your career or your business that make a real impact.

Influence is not measured by blog links or twitter replies, but on size of deals done, decision making, P&L responsibilities. 

For example, when you go to a tech event, who are you more focused on? The doe-eyed videoblogging distraction or the product manager who runs a successful web service for a major media company.  One of them can share some widsom about how their latest user experience redux boosted conversion and traffic.  The other one… well.. not so much.

TechCrunch is the ultimate example of this.  The LA Times called Mike Arrington a “Kingmaker” and certainly everyone treats him like he is—but can anyone actually point to a single instance where a TechCrunch mention was singlehandedly responsible for anyone getting funded or getting a business deal?  I’m talking about a situation where, if TechCrunch had not annointed a company as worthwhile, the company couldn’t have gotten it on your own.  Who has he made King?

I don’t think any VC or angel worth their salt really cares about what Mike’s opinion about a company is—they do their own work and have too much at stake to blindly outsource judgement.  Good writeup, bad writeup, no writeup…  I think companies are realizing that it still takes a great product and a lot of footwork to acheive success—not just one make or break article.  Much of that is because, for most companies, the TechCrunch audience isn’t even really the target crowd the company should be going after.  If you’re building a B2B service, you’d rather get writen up in an industry mag.  Location based marijuana ratings system?  A High Times mention will go a lot further than a TC review. 

The most knowledgeable and influential people that are relevent to your company are often under the radar.  There are tons of really helpful angel investors out there that never blog, never show up at Meetups, Tweetups, MashMeshing, or what have you.  They need to be sought after.  Ambitious startups need to turn over every rock.  They need to go to the successful people in their space and ask them who’s been the most helpful, whose opinion they respect.  Find out who’s in a VC firm’s friend of the family network—who are the individuals invested in VC firms.  Too many people rely on blog traffic and Twitter buzz to figure out who to contact versus their actual potential clients. 

If you’re a publisher tool and the only thing you have in your biz dev queue is a big tech blog, then you need to get out there and perch yourself at CondeNast, Martha Stewart, Meredith Corp., Scripps, etc.  People from these places should be your on your board—to help you understand the landscape and to get you in front of potential clients, and you’re not going to find them at gatherings of the young digital “elite”—nor can most of the people considered the “elite” make any intros to these folks.  Contrary to popular belief, the Director of Business Development for the company you think should by you isn’t trolling the blogs for deals—they’re taking inbound phonecalls and setting up real life meetings with companies more aggressive and ambitious than you.

So before you worry about whether you’re in with the right talking head, take a step back and reexamine who you really need to be out there talking to.  Chances are, it’s not the same people everyone else thinks they need to be talking to.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

• Pork Mango Picadillo Recipe | Simply Recipes
  (tags: food recipies)

I don’t mean to offend anyone with this post.  I read it over several times.  I don’t think it’s so bad, but, you never know. 

That’s the existence of the white guy.  You go along thinking that everything you do is pretty much acceptable, because most of the time you’re surrounded by other equally insensitive white guys, until everything blows up in your face and you realize you’ve offended everyone and you’re just privileged scum.

Sensitivity training for you! 

You no blog, one year!

I’ll just say ahead of time that I’m sorry…  or not sorry… whatever I’m supposed to be as someone who is well intentioned, but ill-advised.

I don't think I'm any more racially biased than I am about any other natural bias that I'm probably not conscious of. I may be biased against lefties...I'm not aware of it, but its certainly possible.

Then again, I don't really have any black friends. Is that bad? Am I supposed to? If so, how many?

You know, I mentored an Indian finance student and 99% of her friends were Indian.

I said she could just call me “Token”.

Oh, wait...

Indians are white, too...or...I mean.. Caucasian. Is that the same thing?

In the UK, they're called Asian. 

Huh?

How's that one group? So Ghandi and Yao Ming are both Asian?

Really?

At that point, what's the point of doing any grouping whatsoever? Might as well just call all of them "people".

Or am I supposed to be color blind and not notice? We have a black guy on our dodgeball team, but he never shows. Maybe he doesn't like us because we're white. Are we unconsciously making him feel uncomfortable because he's black... or is it more because he's just slowfooted? Perhaps it's the latter. Are we allowed to be biased against the slow footed?

He was born that way probably--slow footed, I mean. 

I don’t know if he was born black.  That might have been a lifestyle choice.  I didn’t want to pry.

We don't have any Asians. They're not white, either, I guess—even though I’m darker than just about all of them.

I was always confused how they got counted as a "minority" anyway.  I mean, sure, there’s less of them around, but there are less of everyone when compared to some other group, if you think about it—except “people”.  There’s never more people than in the “people” group.

There's a program for getting finance students from minority groups into banks and they included Asians. Given all the cultural stereotypes that exist in the world, does the Asian guy who went to NYU Stern need an extra boost over the Italian from Bensonhurst?  Who’s more likely to convince Goldman Sachs they'd be the harder working quantitative investment banking analyst? Hey, I don't mean to offend anyone or perpetuate any stereotypes further, I'm just saying...

Besides, is "hardworking and really smart" the worst stereotype to have in the world? I don't think that's so bad.

I'll trade you the "privileged and lazy" white American stereotype for smart and hardworking any day.

I've never dated an Asian or Black girl either..not for lack of trying, though. Perhaps bald white guys don't have cross cultural curb appeal. I don't know. I tried really hard to date this Asian girl that looked like Tia Carrere in high school, but her parents wouldn't allow her to date. 

Well, that was what she told me anyway.  I guess sometimes cultural stereotypes are sometimes convenient date excuses as well.

Asian women sometimes get offended if one of the reasons that you want to date them is the fact that they’re Asian—no Asian fetishes, please!  Well, what if you actually like their culture and happen to find their look attractive?  Is that bad?  Some people love tall blondes, but you’ll never hear a Swede say, “No Scandinavian fetishes!”

No Italian fetishes, please!  I’m not interested in any girl that wants me because of my darker complexion, fuzziness, ability to cook, or thickheadedness.  Hmm… what’s left, then?

Barack Obama's impending presidency has caused a lot of white people...and frankly a lot of people in general to think about the nature of race in this country.

Frankly, us dumb white guys are a little confused about what we're supposed to be thinking about it.

We don't want to offend anyone, get sued, or get our asses kicked...so just tell us what're supposed to think and do.

Are we supposed to acknowledge the fact that he's Black (or partly) and celebrate the breaking of historical barriers?  Or, are we in a new era where we're past all that grouping and we are, in fact, all just people?

Like I said...I don't care either way. I just don't want to get in trouble or lose my radio advertisers.

That’s just cool…  

When asked for a comment on the fist bump, 71 year old John McCain said, “I don’t condone domestic violence…  and when did we start allowing women to expoxe their arms in public?” 

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Now that we know who the Democratic nominee will be, it's time to go to work...

Obama for America is looking for exceptionally talented web developers who want to play a key role in a historic political campaign and help elect Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. (Interested in a security expert position?)

This six-month opportunity will allow you to:

• Create software tools which will enable an unprecedented nationwide voter contact and mobilization effort
• Help build and run the largest online, grassroots fundraising operation in the history of American politics
• Introduce cutting-edge social networking and online organizing to the democratic process by empowering everyday people to participate on My.BarackObama

You must have:

• At least 5 years of professional web development experience
• A deep understanding of LAMP development processes and best practices
• Experience building complex applications using PHP and MySQL
• Advanced or expert CSS, Javascript, and AJAX skills
• An abiding desire to put your technical wizardry to work for democracy and for our country

Special consideration given to candidates who have:

• Experience scaling large LAMP applications
• Posses deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimization
• Strong practical knowledge of web application security
• Created highly usable user interface/experience for complex web applications
• Worked in a fast‐paced web development environment and have proven their ability to write outstanding code under tight deadlines

Successful candidates will join the development team in Boston, MA. Candidates should be willing to commit to work through the election in November. This is a salaried position. Housing assistance may be available for those not located in the Boston area.

Click here to apply!

When I was a sophomore in college, poking (not literally) around AOL, chatting until the wee hours of the morning was a pasttime. In 1998, you could logon to the AOL software and search member profiles for "Fordham" or "Brooklyn" to find people (girls) to IM with live. New people on tap--it's a concept that has largely disappeared from the typical social web experience today. Now and then, I get a random Skyper from Italy, but young US users don't really use Skype for IM.  Now it's about your friends (and maybe people who read your blog.)

In fact, one noticable change about Facebook in the last few months is the disappearance of "Network" pages. These were pages meant to aggregate all the activity of users in a particular network, be it geographic, corporate or a school. For the most part, they focused

on people you didn't know--random wall posts from strangers, events that were public but not really meant for you, and browsing of people in your city or school but outside your friend group.

This was counter to the experience Facebook clearly wanted you to have--one about your friends and the information they wanted to share with you. So, despite the fact that the site "opened up" to high schools, then to the general public, the experience actually got less open as these network pages disappeared. Even mass friending is generated by your email account, guaranteeing that you're unlikely to get a friend request from someone you don't know, unless you're Scoble or Calacanis.

What this means is that the social signal to noise is still pretty high.  If you think about all the content you see on Facebook, the vast majority of it is content directly tied to people you know.  That's why the events platform is so successful.  Finding relevent events on the web has been a challenge for quite a while, and now, having that filter of being shown events that my friends are going to is as good a recommender as any.  I find more new events though Facebook than I ever did using any other tool.  Evite has much of this same data, but they really blew it by not showing me things my friends are going to. 

Applications have gotten less and less spammy, too, and will be even less disruptive after the next UI iteration.

When you keep your connections to your actual friend group, the pictures, events, notes and updates are all highly likely to be relevent to you.  That's why its so hard to unseat Facebook at moment. Not only are all my friends there, but they're presented to me without much disruption.

Not only that, but that's also why mainstream users don't care about data lock-in. If all my friends are in one place, than what do I care if I can't move them? I don't want to. Imagine if Facebook was a bar and all your friends were there at a party. You wouldn't say, "Hey, all my friends are here... How do we get them out?"

That is, unless it felt crowded, which Facebook's reliance on activity vs. presence ensures it won't. At any given time, most of your friends,  just aren't doing anything, which is fine.

The interesting thing to me, though, is where all the strangers went and whether anyone mainstream really cares. There are video services like PalTalk that are based around random chat rooms, or servicesthat can introduce you to people along specific shared interest lines like last.fm, Flickr, MyBlogLog, but is seems clear that the web has gone the way of Meetup Scott's favorite shirt: "Fuck you, I don't need more friends."

Was it always the case that we preferred our own friends to new folks, and we just didn't have the critical mass of friends online before? Now, it's odd if someone my age or younger isn't on Facebook.

Fred wrote the other day that he think the web is going the way of everyone publishing to the world. I think he's almost right. He should have written "everyone publishing to whoever they want, which includes everyone, if they choose." I'm not sure whether that means people will choose everyone or not.

It's possible we'll wind up in two camps. There are tons of people who go out of their way to make Facebook profiles, MySpace photos, etc. private, and ohers who live out loud. The social implications of the divide are interesting, although I don't necessarily agree with Tom that its a class thing. There are just as many show-off inner city teens on MySpace as their are rich guys who want to publish their health records.

You might say those teens don't know any better, but I think we may get to a world where we just throw up our hands and say, "What was the fuss about anyway? So now you know. Big deal."

more cat pictures

more cat pictures

You know, there comes a point where we have to stop calling David a "wunderkind" and just refer to him as a really smart, thoughful guy who knows what the eff he's talking about.  I think I'll just shorten that to calling him "David Karp."   Does Anyone Still Read TechCrunch? | David's Log

"After giving some thought to the future of TechCrunch, I think it might be a necessary evil. It’s managed to capture a huge amount of the negative voices in the development community. Unless they’re leaking info, their stories have no real impact on anyone’s business. And so far as I can tell, the development community, at least the brilliant folks I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with, pay no attention to TC (especially on the East Coast). Meanwhile, anytime I catch their awful writing, or feel suicidal and start reading TC comments, I’ll have to remind myself that if these poisonous people weren’t holed up at TechCrunch, I might actually have to interact with them :[ So I think I’m grateful Arrington has charged himself with being the dev community’s douche magnet."

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

So Haterington is basically admitting that he wants to single out the Twitter team to rile them up.  What is that supposed to accomplish...  besides increased traffic to TechCrunch?

from Hey Twitter I Have A Few Questions Too

"Twitter continues to be annoyingly and constructively responsive to criticism. They respond to this post here, saying “We’re working on a better architecture.” Kind of takes the air out of the balloon when you can’t get them riled up."

I think it's pretty interesting to compare Kara Swisher's focus on the ongoing coverage of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook--companies where billions of dollars are at stake, the future of search and the ad market, and the whole tech landscape, with Mike's continuing shoulder chip and insistance on picking on one small startup company (and a guy who doesn't even work there anymore) whose extreme popularity is causing them to face some tough technical challenges. 

The unfortunate thing is that it's causing a non-story to bubble up to the top of TechMeme.  I wish we could bury stories there, because a petty Haterington vendetta is not news as far as I'm concerned.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

• Lessons on recommendation systems
  (tags: recommendations data)
• TechCrunch Stats W.1 – Why Mike Arrington is popular - The StatBot - Fun stats. Visualizations. Leaderboards.
  This bodes well for Disqus... the more you comment on your own site, the more engaging and popular it can be.
  (tags: comments stats data)

I've had two conversations with people in the last 24 hours who told me that they were trying to get over exes.  The process has captured their focus and is preventing them from seriously considering getting to know new people.

I think the idea of getting over someone is terrible and that we need to stop putting so much pressure on people to "move on".  Let's be realistic.  Unless the person you loved changes or you change, you're always going to love or at least be a little in love with them--and that's not a bad thing.  I just think most people aren't confident enough to be ok with the fact that the person they're with still has feelings for someone else.

But why wouldn't you?  That's totally natural.  If you were with someone for a long time, loving that person is always going to be part of who you are, and to be honest, if someone meets you and says, "Hey, I can't deal with you until you totally forget that person," then they're in a sense trying to deny part of what makes you who you are.  Hell, there's a part of me that still loves my high school girlfriend from like a dozen years ago--but it's not really active love.  It's just the kind of nostalgic fond memory of a time long since passed--a love for the innocence of the time.  The reality is that I haven't spoken to her in years and I have no idea what she's like now... but as far as that person that I knew in that moment in time, that feeling will certainly never go away.  It's part of who I am--I'm just not losing any sleep over it.

Of course, it's different if you're still actively trying to win back someone or get back together--but once you realize that's not happening, I'd be completely ok getting to know someone who has recently got out of a relationship.   Ending relationships cause a lot of introspection and self evaluation.  "Who am I?"  "What was I doing?"  "What do I really want?"   These are all questions that the end of a relationship brings that I want whoever I'm dating to be asking themselves in a pretty serious way.

If anything, actually, I'd rather be with someone who recently proved the capacity and willingness to love someone and commit to them versus someone who's last attempt at vulnerability is a long distant memory. 

What I'm saying is, don't be embarrassed over emotions in turmoil, or feel like it makes you some kind of relationship leper.  You are who you are at any given time, and if a new person doesn't accept that, just forget them.  We ALL have baggage.  Baggage helps us travel.  We take it with us to prepare ourselves for our trips, to hold on to valuable keepsakes that meant something to us.  You'd be crazy not to take baggage with you on a trip.  You shouldn't let it way you down, though, but don't pretend you don't have or need it either.   

I may pack light, but I have baggage, too.  Some of it is old and some of it is new, but I have no interest in anyone who can't deal with its existence.

From Wikipedia

"Manhattanhenge (sometimes referred to as Manhattan Solstice) is a semi-annual occurrence in which the setting sun aligns with the east-west streets of Manhattan's main street grid. The term is derived from Stonehenge, at which the sun aligns with the stones on the solstices. It was coined in 2002 by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History. It applies to those streets that follow the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 which laid out a grid offset 28.9 degrees from true east-west."

My friend Ashley is a painter.

I helped her out recently and she transformed one of my favorite photos into a painting to thank me.  The photo is of kayaks stacked up in Riverside Park after the Downtown Boathouse Harrison Street Regatta.

Check out how cool this is...

.