So I was just thinking to myself that I'd love a way to make web pages available offline for airplane and other types of offline reading.

Then I remembered Universal Document Converter.  I'm sure there's some free, open source thing I missed, but a while back I had to convert something to a TIF file or something random like that, because it turns out the copy of Powerpoint I had wasn't exactly kosher.  So I wound up paying for the Universal Document Converter and it's been a really easy way to print documents automatically to PDF.  I don't own a printer and try not to keep any paper files, so this has been a great way for me to organize my digital documents storage.

So I just realized I can easily print web pages to PDF and keep them for later.  There's a bunch of stuff I'd like to read on my plane ride back to NYC and now I have a bunch of PDFs in a folder.  Nice!

Still, it would be cool if something could run in the background pulling in my del.icio.us links that are tagged PDF and automatically do this for me.

I blog and I twitter.  It might seem to some like I'm sharing everything and totally out there, but I'm not.  For example, you don't know who I'm dating.  That's mostly to protect the innocent, but also because it doesn't involve you.  Plus, I believe, unlike some people, that certain personal things don't need to be shared, lest we all appear like train wrecks to the world.  We all know that there are many moments in our private lives that are momentarily or multi-momentarily train-wrecky that don't impact our ability to just get stuff done.

However, everyone's line is different, and so is how we manage ourselves between those lines.  Take Facebook, for example.  I think it's bizarre that people I only know professionally want to be Facebook friends with me.  I deny them not for any other reason than it makes my own experience of Facebook noisy.  Just because we met at a business development meeting doesn't mean I need to see the photos you uploaded of your kids, or when you add a Little Green Patch. 

What this means is that I don't wield the same size sphere of influence as someone like Jason Calacanis, but you know what?  I don't want to.  To me, there's something to be said for authenticity.  I may have 950 LinkedIn contacts, but I actually know them.  And my Facebook friends?  They're actually friends, for the most part.  Yet, I'm still, in my opinion, able to maintain a very extensive and very fruitful online presence. 

Certainly people have different approaches and that's what I'd like to explore at my SXSW talk with Alana Taylor.  Alana is an NYU student who is a great social networker, but in my opinion, also stays on the right side of the authenticity balance.  I'm sure she'll have a lot to say as a college student about her professional world colliding with her personal digital spaces.

So if you'd like to join us in exploring "Blurry Networks: Friends, Contacts, Followers and Professional Me", please vote for our panel.  Thanks!

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

[SABYA] I WANT SOME WIDGET           2:09 PM
[SABYA] ARE YOU THERE

ceonyc                                                2:09 PM
What kind of widget?

myplugoo                                             2:09 PM
[SABYA] FLASH CONTET

ceonyc                                                 2:10 PM
Ok... I get you flash widget.   How much you pay?

myplugoo                                               2:10 PM
[INFO] Visitor [SABYA] has left the conversation.

Its been at least a week since I've taken the subway to work. I'm leaving for SF tonight and so I'm wheeling a small piece of luggage around with me. Tonight I'll be participating in the logistics olympics, trying to play a softball playoff game at 6:30, leave by 7:40 from 148th/Riverside and be at JFK for a 9:10 flight. As long as there are no major hiccups, I should be fine--especially for August. Hopefully we put enough runs up early that I can leave 10 minutes early.

Today will be research day at work... I need to put together a clear and consice picture of what's going on in the recruiting market, what's needed, and why we're it. The nice thing is that, because it's such a lucrative market, and that it cuts across enterprises as well as consumers, it's very well covered by some really smart folks.

I thought those two people, the dirty blonde and the tan guy with the goatee, were together when they walked into the car. I guess not. Still, they're standing next to each other, hands on the overhead bar, facing out towards the window. Maybe I should introduce them to each other.

People are so oddly shaped. I'm staring down at my phone typing this and I'm noticing what is obviously my grandfather's ribcage passed on through heredity. I'm sort of barrel chested. I don't know where to go with that. I'm just sayin'.

Glen Frey just randomly came up on my iPod. This always makes me think of the Mets '86 Championship video.

What company makes all these orange and red cellephane veggie bags that all the Asians who get off at Canal St carry? Whoever it is, they have a total monopoly.

The guy next to me is reading a comic book.

This seemed like a short ride.

The woman next to me is listening to a Podcast of WNYC "On the Media". I agree with @tismoi. Very few people look happy in this car.

Kilsy just came on....hard to miss. I knew it right away. They need to make more music or tour more or do anything... very good stuff.

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

A friend of mine's dad runs a large landscaping business with over one hundred employees.  While the business has been in the family since 1939, when he took it over in the early 70's, he really took it to the next level.  That often happens when the reigns of a business finally pass on to the next generation.

Anyway, what we're doing at Path 101 doesn't even hold a tea candle (yet!) to what he's accomplished.  This is a real business that sells real stuff with revenues, EBITDA, 100+ employees, trucks, etc!  It would be easy for someone with so much success to dismiss a small angel funded web startup in Alpha, but instead, he took a lot of interest  in what we were up to.  He even brought me up to a neighbor as another guy running a business who knows what it's like to work hardest for yourself.  I really appreciated getting that kind of respect towards our humble beginnings--especially from a friend's parent who might naturally be prone to a more unbalanced power dynamic.  Instead, it felt like two entrepreneurs shooting the breeze and it was pretty cool.

And yesterday, I got a nice note from Marc Cenedella checking in to see how things were going with Path 101 and an invite to come chat about the recruiting market and startup stuff.  I'm sure I'll learn a lot more than I can contribute to the conversation, but similar to my friend's dad, he asked some questions in our exchange about what the sweet spot is for when in a person's life Path 101 is useful. 

I really appreciate when successful folks like this can take a second to think about somebody else's business--but more so than that to take it seriously despite the vast distance between our respective progress.  It's a stark contrast to a recent situation where someone told me how they'd do things completely differently and never really acknowledged the progress we had made or my vision for the company.

At the end of the day, I just don't sweat situations like that.  You can't impress everyone and not everyone is going to care what you're up to.  You've got limited time and resources in a startup, and you just need to work with the people who believe in you and not worry about everyone else.  I guess relationships are kind of like that, too.  Some people are going to accept you and be excited to be with you.  If you spend more time building strong relationships with these people, and less with those who aren't interested, your life will turn out just fine.

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

Yesterday, I had an amazing call with a guy with thirty years experience in the recruiting market.  For years, he had a vision of a service doing exactly the kind of things we plan to do with Path 101--not necessarily on the helping people figure out what they want to do side, but on the data-centric, getting to know candidates better side.  We saw completely eye to eye on how badly this market needs to do more than figure out eighty different ways to smash a resume and a job post together, or mindlessly connect people without adding intelligence to the process.  What he also believed in, which we do strongly, was that it needed to be a service people opt-in to--something that provides value to the user every step of the way, encouraging them to participate more and submit more information about themselves. 

What was amazing was that this guy went the distance in terms of describing the power of the vision--referring to it as "one of those four or five big stories..."--while at the same time, he realized that we needed to take small steps to get there, but that directionally we were in the right place.  At one point, the grokking was so intense, we had to pull back and say, "Hey, we need to pull back and let this sink in... let's talk next week." 

While I absolutely believe Path 101 can be one of those companies, there's never been a purpose to describe it as such to anyone like that, particularly investors.  In fact, going through the fundraising process actually forces you into quite the opposite mode of thinking.  Your grand vision starts slowly dying a death by a thousand cuts.  They start nitpicking on features they dislike, or question how long it will take before you drive revenues, or they want to know how are you going to get people to come to the site.  (Which is the most ridiculous question of all time, because every single company has the same answer--SEO, social media tools, PR, or some kind of partnership...and maybe some traffic purchasing... what other traffic is there?  Doesn't everyone say the same thing?)   

Eventually, you find yourself thinking smaller--that if you can't find anyone to believe your big world-changing vision, you try to convince people of small things--how you just want to get to the next product step, how you can pull down some low hanging fruit revenue, etc.  God forbid you should look out further than your next financing in your plan--well don't bother because who's going to believe you, right?

Meanwhile, I was at a panel discussion with four VC's and some of them were talking about "Web 2.0" deals and how they need to do extra diligence on the mindset of the entrepreneur because they need to make sure they're in it to build a big company and don't want the quick flip.  Well, how many game changing companies out there had a clear path to the world changing vision at the point of their angel round? 

Perhaps the reason why so many Web 2.0 companies are small ideas and quick flips is because we've never had so much transparency into the VC mindset as we have now, and what entrepreneurs are hearing isn't "Think big", but "What can you show me now?"  Well, big takes time, and small can be built on Ruby-on-Rails this weekend... and don't expect small to resist a $30 million sale to a media company.   Thus far, no new potential investor has flat out asked me how Path 101 changes the world, and only one has even come close to turning the conversation into how big this gets. 

del.icio.us, for example, was a company where lots of people scratched their heads and said, "Bookmarking?  I don't get it," while at the same time, others, like those of us at Union Square Ventures, thought that people-powered search and discovery was a potential game changer and maybe even a Google-killer.

The key is finding that one person who believes in that vision like you do--even if you haven't previously been #2 at Paypal or built Skype or whatever.  It's hard to do that as part of this process.  I told this guy yesterday that while I totally believed in this vision, as CEO, I also had to deal with the harsh reality that the well runs dry in January, and so no one's changing any worlds without some more cash.  Walking in the door and saying, "I know we're in Alpha and rolling out our product at the moment, but here's how this changes the world", unfortunately, isn't usually the path to solving that immediate need.

I wonder if your expected value increases if you grab your pick ax and go find that one person who believes in the big vision, versus thinking small and incremental and showing what you can do tomorrow so someone will fund you today.  Companies would certainly behave very differently depending on what kind of feedback they get from their supporters, and so I wonder how much the early exit/flip Web 2.0 small idea mentality is a product not of entrepreneurs but of the investment community itself.

UPDATE:

Of course, I really don't want to just come off like I'm complaining.  If you know me, you know I always look for actionable next steps anytime I see an issue.  For me, what this whole experience has me doing is thinking about ways I can better convey the vision and end goal to the folks who need to see what that first step on the path looks like.   Sometimes, though, its just nice to get unbridled support on the vision rather than just spend 99% of your time defending the product plan.

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

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

I wish I knew who all these people were.

I wish I knew whether the girl standing in front of me reading Marie Claire with the trail of stars tattooed on her ankle was with anyone when she got it.

What about the tall geeky couple to my right? Are they actually a couple? Where did they meet?

The guy with the Handsome Boy Clothing Co tshirt...is that a bible pamphlet he's holding? Where'd he get it? Does he have one for each day?

The woman conked out with her mouth open... Does she fall asleep everyday? Did she go out late last night? Maybe yesterday was her birthday.

Lots of tats around... All are little stories.

How about nametags with links to our web profiles?

I'm sorry, but even besides obvious reasons I just find women so much more interesting to look at. I find guys to be pretty boring.

Ruoska sings Narua in my ear, in Finnish. No silver bullet for mortgages, UK warned says the peach flavored Financial Times. I can see my feet. The FT has spit out an insert. A guy in a Decepticons tshirt swoops in quickly to pick it up. His hipster bag says Black Paw.

Everything just came up Charlie today.

I had a great call with a smart investor who turns out to know one of my angels through the BYU alumni network.

I used by super amazing powers of interweb stalking to track down a Fordham grad who is an investor at a private equity firm--through his son who turns out to have had my old job at GM.  Only put two and two together because of autocomplete on Thunderbird--it matched the last names.

I got the most amazing e-mail from a new old friend--someone I'd gone years without seeing and have recently reconnected with.

My Fordham softball team won and made the playoffs in a do or pretty much die situation in the last game of the season.  I drove in three and had an outfield assist as we won 9-7.

I spoke at Ignite and apparently did pretty well...  

Funny, because when I was speaking, I noticed that the crowd actually seemed to be listening.  I thought maybe everyone had left, but the attention was confirmed by Eric and Adam.

And then I biked home and it was a beautiful night.   Everything's coming up Charlie!

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

I've been playing on a few softball teams with ZogSports over the past three years, but this fall I barely got on a team.  Because only a few NYC softball fields have lights, and the three on 52nd/11th are going to be under construction, the Zog fall league had to be extremely small.  Spots for teams sold out in just an hour or two, and I didn't get my Fordham team in under the wire.  Luckily, I managed to squeeze in another team, but still, lots of people got shut out.

Field space is at a premium in NYC... frankly, every kind of space is at a premium, but places to play are few and far between, so when there is a spot, making sure there's as much access as possible should be a priority.  That should include making all fields--soccer, softball, etc, available at night, including the ones in Central Park--particularly the Heckscher fields, which are right by the Columbus Circle entrance.

It shouldn't be a cost issue.  Most of these leagues are corporate sponsored, and so you've got an audience of people who are more than willing to pay for access--especially if it meant not having to hike up to 138th/Riverside or 145th and Lennox to play a night game.

More games also adds to the local economy--it keeps people staying in the city longer, and certainly makes them more likely to go with their team out to a local bar... and for those that don't overindulge at bars, getting out to a sports game for a couple more months into the fall (and earlier in the spring) keeps them healthy and more active. 

What will it take to get more fields lit up at night? 

Let them play!  Let them play!

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

When there's an 800 pound gorilla in your space, trying to steal bananas isn't exactly the smartest approach.  You figure out what he's not eating, and you start nibbling.  Before you know it, you're eating just as much as he is and wouldn't you know it, one bad banana crop and he's toast. 

So when I hear that someone wants to build a better search engine than Google, while I don't think it's impossible, I question along what lines they're trying to do it.  Can you really do it by indexing more pages than Google?  I find that hard to believe, because an infrastructure arms race with Google seems like a bad idea--no matter how efficiently you think you can manage your crawling costs.

Smarter algorithms?  Maybe, but isn't algorithm quality a function of sheer brain power of your search team?  Again, this isn't where I want to take Google on head to head.

No, where I think you can beat Google, or at least make some headway on them, is with people.

At the end of the day, computer interpretation of human behavior and desires is what drives Google.  You could attempt building a bigger or faster computer, but no one computer is really going to be able to interpret people better than, well, people.

That's why del.icio.us had so much potential.  Google could never figure out what was funny or interesting, but del.icio.us could. 

To me, it's also the reason why Firefox gained so much ground against Internet Explorer.  It wasn't that smarter people work on Firefox--it's that more people worked on only the things they cared about, solving problems for themselves.  The best ideas floated to the top and became part of the codebase.  Things got addressed that weren't a priority for the IE team, but that more engaged users had keen insight into the value of.  The more you directly involve people--at scale, which isn't easy--into the process, the better your product is, because your product is made for people.

So, right now, Cuil and a number of other startups have teams of a handful of people who are supposed to know better than all the Google people what users want out of their search and how to search better.  Why not, instead, open up the process to something more open source--more Firefox-like?

Here's what a more collaborative approach to building a better search engine might look like:

Backend:

Outsource just the basic crawl to Amazon, because they've probably got the best shot at competing cost effectively, but enable outsiders a chance to add elements to the crawl.  So, if you have a way of categorizing pages, like Cuil says they do, add that ability to the Amazon powered crawl, and your special taxonomy and tags will be available for anyone to access, work on and improve. 

Let others use your infrastructure to target specific pages with a different type of crawl and contribute to the results.  In other words, let Indeed and others run their crawlers on your infrastructure, so that the barrier to create new attempts at search isn't set artificially high.  This will make a lot more sense when we talk about Plugins.

Plugins

There are lots of different types of search that Google just doesn't do well, like jobs and events.  This has given rise to some opportunities in the vertical search market   Let's take that Indeed example.  Right now, Indeed searches jobs much better than Google does, so why not enable Indeed, Simply Hired or anyone else crawling jobs to outline what represent job keywords and searches, and automatically provide results for them.  You could even randomly rotate which job search engine plugin powers your job search and let them duke it out for highest clickthrough rates, or allow the user to set a default. 

Basically, a "plugin" would be a hosted version of the third party crawler that gets sent queries based on their structure, keywords, etc., and gets to send back all the results they can, as well as gets the opportunity to advertise against them.   So, in our "open source" search engine, when I type in "marketing jobs, new york, NY", instead of getting a page of links to search engines for their marketing jobs queries--i.e. an "extra click"--I'd actually get jobs as my results, and Indeed powered job ads.

The same could go for movies.  How many times do you type a movie name into Google, knowing full well that IMDB is going to be the first result?  Why not allow IMDB to be the movie plugin?  They could directly provide structured results for all the actor and movie queries and be allowed to advertise against them.  This way, you eliminate the Google middle man when all you were really trying to do was reach IMDB in the first place.  All you'd need are some standardized display templates for results, which could also allow some interface flexibility for different types of queries, like videos or location searches on local maps.

People could build other types of plugins, like one that would automatically display RSS results when blogs came up high in your ranking.  I get Google results for "Charlie O'Donnell's blog"...  let Newsgator build that plugin and power it with all of the clickthrough data on what my interesting most recent posts were.

The system of sending queries to the right search tool would be a kind of AdWords platform, but a level up the chain.  Instead of a marketplace for advertising next to one kind of search result, you'd have a marketplace of search results, each coming with their own ads in tow (or using a default ad platform that anyone could use.)  You could attempt to "buy" certain keywords to put your search results next to them, but you'd have to get good clickthrough performance to keep appearing.

Personalization

You'd definitely allow users to add their own scripts and plugins, as well as have them contribute other types of data.  Let me pump in my blog, my del.icio.us tags, twitter feed, etc. in an effort to teach the search engine all about what I like.  Let me remove results, follow my clicks... learn about me (and my friends) as I go along.

The company that should really get into this is Yahoo!  They couldn't out-Google Google on search or monetization, so they should just crack open the whole thing and let the community and other companies have a shot at it.  They could be the default ad network for searches that weren't powered by plugins...   and they could strike deals with plugin providers to take a smaller cut than Google would have had on ad clickthoughs. 

If not, I still think it would make for a pretty viable community project.  Hell, maybe Mozilla should be the one to work on it, or are they getting paid too much by Google for Firefox default search to rock the boat there?