Headline from the NYT:

Poll Finds Obama Candidacy Isn’t Closing Divide on Race

Now, let's actually look at the numbers...

According to their polls, 31% of white people have a favorable opinion of Barack Obama.

...but only 35% of white people have a favorable opinion of John McCain.

Overall, 62% of whites either have a favorable impression of Barack Obama or don't know enough.

...and only 70% of white people feel that way about McCain.

I don't know about you, but these numbers don't really show me a big divide on race.  So, basically, 37% of white people don't like Obama, while 28% of white people don't like McCain.  Hmm... I wouldn't exactly call that a huge racial bias against Obama--9%  Really?  Big whoop.

There is a big racial divide in this election, though... but its not what you think.

57% of blacks don't have a favorable impression of John McCain.  In fact, only 5% do, and the rest are undecided.  So, blacks dislike John McCain by almost a 2:1 margin over whites not liking McCain.  Over six times as many, by percentage, whites like Obama as blacks like McCain.

So who's really the racially divisive one?  Seems to me it's John McCain.

"Telling alumni what tools to use, and how to use them is old school, and they won't care one way or the other that we have certain information on our web sites...We must let alumni build their own online activities, using a framework we provide for the purpose of enabling that process."

- Andrew Shaindlin - Alumni Futures

There's often a bit of anti-VC sentiment among the entrepreneurial community.  You hear how VCs just want to smash you down, force you out, control your company.

So when the news was officially confirmed that Twitter bought Summize, I got to thinking about Tweetscan.

Tweetscan came out with their Twitter search earlier than Summize--who changed their product model.   However, it was Summize that went out and took some funding ($750k) from Betaworks. 

Tweetscan seems to have remained a one man show--built by David Sterry, who remarked recently that "Running a search engine is a very hardware intensive task and it's a challenge to keep it fast while providing the results people want."  Tweetscan seemed more like a really interesting side project than an attempt at company building.  Maybe David wasn't looking for anything more.  That's fine.  It was a great project, but clearly now that Summize IS Twitter Search, it will likely become the default.  By the looks of the traffic, it already had:

Not only was Summize able to build a team, but they got some really thoughtful, well connected investors on board.  Their investors and advisors helped them with the decision to focus on Twitter search--which was a reapplication of their technology away from generalized web sentiment.  Of course, not to mention the fact that John Borthwick says specifically:

"The deal started with a conversation with Fred Wilson about how conversational search can evolve into navigation, about how important navigation becomes for UGC as you go mainstream — it concluded with the deal that was announced this morning. Betaworks is now a twitter shareholder, and excited to be one."

So, when your investor is having this kind of smart conversation with an investor in one of your likely acquirers, you're at a HUGE advantage.  This isn't someone pitching your company to get flipped--this was some pretty high level thinking (and outside the valley thinking, I might add).

So while you're protecting all your equity from those big bad investors, ask yourself the question of who's having these types of conversations with key decision makers and thinkers about your company.  "Who's a lot more experienced than I am that thinks intelligently about my company's strategy--and cares about it?"  

THAT's the kind of investor that makes the rest of your equity worth multiples of what it is the moment they take their 20-30%.

On July 29th, Ignite comes to NYC.  What's Ignite?  It's 16 5-minute presentations that geeks will love, plus a soldering competition.

RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming.

I'll be speaking there, but I'm even more psyched about the other speakers.  Check these out:

* Tom Igoe - Physical Computing's Greatest Hits (or Misses)

* Tony Bacigalupo - NYC's Startup Scene: Where are the geeks?

* Jessica Bruder - How to be an Undercover Hooker (reprising her talk on taking an NYPD course)

* Karen McGrane - From Typing to Swiping: Interaction Design has come a long way!

* Rose White - Weird and wonderful knitting -- graffiti and science and art combined!

* Audacia Ray - Porn as a front runner in technology innovations

* Charlie O'Donnell - Shaving your head: When to start, how to maintain, and to BIC or not to BIC?

* Charles Forman - How to date celebrichauns with founder fetish

* Natalie Jeremijenko - A bomb shelter for the climate crisis

* Pat Allan - So you're a kick-arse coder...

* Joel Johnson - Indie Games: At Least They're Free!

Details:

The first Ignite NYC is going to happen 7/29 at M1-5. We are going to feature 16 speakers. Each speaker will get 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of five-minutes. Ignite is free and open to the public -- you're on your own for drinks. We're also going to be joined by Ignite co-creator, Bre Pettis. Bre is going to lead us in a creative soldering contest. RSVP at Upcoming or Facebook to let us know you are coming. The night will begin with:

7:00PM - Doors Open

7:30PM - NYC Soldering Championship:

With solder irons blazing, and the power of molten metal at their finger tips, New York City's electricity enthusiasts and hardware hackers will connect components to complete circuits for the glory of being the fastest soldering gun in NYC.

On stage and under hot lights, contestants will complete an electronics kit in the shortest time possible while still maintaining the integrity of the circuit. Who will be New York City's soldering champion? You'll need to be there to find out!

To solder you'll have to pre-register, but anyone can come enjoy the opening contest. After the contest, there will be:

8:00PM - Ignite Talks

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

A week ago, I asked readers to comment on how they found a post that I had put up on Twitter, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon etc., and to repost where they may.  I wanted to see how many people I could nudge into action and what types of actions they chose.

One of the most interesting results was the fact that most of the people who did anything to participate were people that already knew me.  And, that, above all, should be the most useful piece of information here.  If you want someone to do something for you--spread content, interact, etc., relationships count.

That's why I'm so surprised how many entrepreneurs hole themselves up in a dark room when creating a company.  Sure, putting in the blood, sweat and tears in the wee hours of the morning is important to get things done, but disengaging from your life is completely counterproductive.  How are you ever going to get a core set of initial users if most of the people in your life haven't heard from you in nine months?

In terms of how people found out about the post, it was pretty split between Twitter and their RSS reader--and that also accounted for the vast majority of inbound.  Reblogs or retweets counted for only a handful of inbound, which also isn't surprising, because if my closest contacts are reblogging my stuff, there's a good chance their audiences are following me as well, and there's very high overlap.

Still, not that many people came or participated.  Allen Stern wrote, "you should use your good content instead".  Funny enough, two other posts that day proved Allen right.  While this post was sort an experiment that answered a question for me, two other posts combined to get 10x its traffic in a three day time period.

Between July 7th and 9th, over 3,100 people visited my post about why Paul Graham is wrong about NYC.  The post was over a month old, but somehow it made the front page of Hacker News.

In addition, my note about Twitter buying Summize, one of the first public stories about it, generated about 3x the traffic that my experiment did.

So, the moral of the story according to this very unscientific experiment?

• Build great relationships with people.
• Good content even trumps breaking news.
• "Insider", high quality sites like Hacker News can generate boatloads of traffic for a relevant post--maybe even more so than generalist sites can.
• Make sure you're RSS enabled, Twitter enabled, but don't expect traffic just because you are--these are just mediums.

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

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us: