If you didn't happen to catch the live show, here's my interview yesterday with Sumaya Kazi of Socially Speaking on BlogTalkRadio.  We talked about social media, startups, and even the New York technology scene.

The e-mails are starting to trickle in...

"Help, I lost my job!"

"I've been laid off!"

"Please help my friend find a job!"

We're in difficult, uncertain times, no doubt...   and how many of you feel prepared?  Have you ever even been taught how to job search?

And no, uploading and e-mailing your resume everywhere and just waiting patiently for a resumes doesn't count.  Why?   Because very rarely does anyone get a job like that.

I think most people know that but they just don't know what else to do.  That's why we're running a live event about just that:  How to approach your career and job search in a bad economy.

EVENT: Keeping your career UP in a DOWNTURN: Strategies for a Bad Economy

On Saturday, December 13th, we're assembling some really fantastic sessions with top career experts to help you more effectively job search and shore up your career during a very uncertain time.  We've tried very hard to keep our costs low and so we're able to bring you the full day seminar for less than $100. 

Our event will take place at the New York Seminar and Conference Center at 71 West 23rd Street from 9-5PM and lunch will be provided.   Here's the topic overview:

• Where's the damage and how bad?? Economic reality check and sector focus
• Keeping a cool head...and mind and body: Recessionary Zen
• Last employee standing: Making yourself indispensible to your employer
• When your job is finding a job: A day to day gameplan
• Going to the mattresses: Budgeting and personal finance tips
• Old dogs, new tricks: Reinventing yourself and your career
• Networking 2.0: Using blogs, LinkedIn and other social media to stand
  out and get found

Similar events are charging $75 for sessions on social media alone!  Sign up ASAP, because, given the timeliness of the topic, tickets are going pretty fast. 

Please pass this on to anyone you know that has been laid off or just worried about their career who you know isn't conducting a very efficient job search right now and needs help.

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

I'll be speaking on Blog Talk Radio's Socially Speaking with Sumaya Kazi tomorrow at 4PM ET on the topic of social networking and startups.  Check out the link here.

I'll be talking about how startups can use social media for hiring, funding, feedback, etc. and how we use it at Path 101.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints (a Mormon) about being chaste.  (About her being chaste, obviously...  bit late for me.)  Oh and PS, she doesn't agree with her church's stand on gay marriage and hey, neither do I, so lets cut that comment bait off right away.

I have to be honest, defending people's typical behaviors with regard to sex isn't the easiest thing in the world.  It's especially hard when you're like me and you don't drink.  I'm already in the mindset of not doing things that pretty much everyone does because it's just not something you want for your own life. 

The reality is that most single people's personal lives are either a trainwreck or one in the making, and sex is often a complicating or distracting factor.  It emotionally binds you into situations you'd probably be better off without and it's often misinterpreted.  In fact, I'd venture to say its misinterpreted more often than its presence is interpreted correctly. 

I asked my friend a whole bunch of questions about her feelings and philosophy.  I made the argument about it's ability to bring two people who are in love closer together, and she asked me if you were in love why wouldn't you get married?

And therein lies my achillies heel in this conversation.  I've never had a particularly good answer to that question, because I feel like most people overcomplicate relationships.  I've been in a couple of situations where if the girl would have been up for it, I would have absolutely been married now.  I just feel like nothing could possibly prepare you for a lifetime committment so the best you can do is find someone you care about that you think you can handle the unknown with and make that relationship into what you both want it to be.  The idea that any of that is predictable when the divorce rate is 50% just seems like a lot of insecure indecisiveness to me.  I honestly think that my chances of a happy life with the next person I fall for are just as good as they are with any other person I might fall for... or, moreover, that I have no way of predicting otherwise.

So when I see young Mormon couples get married after just a short period of time, I totally get it.  In fact, I can't help but feeling a bit envious of people who so actively make their lives what they want them to be and work hard at overcoming the difficulties.  It's a lot more admirable than us New Yorkers hemming and hawing about not being able to meet anyone well into our 30's.  Our situation is kind of sad in comparison actually.

It's an interesting thing to be introspective about--and I realized something she described the pain of seperation when relationships don't work out--and how that can be exaserbated by intimacy.  Physical intimacy doesn't create emotion--it reflects it.  On one hand, you could use that as an arugment to support chastity.  On the other hand, since it's not creating any, then it's not really making it more difficult when a relationship doesn't work out either.  And that's, when it comes down to it, what I realize that I fear and what most people want to avoid in the first place--being hurt.  Choosing to be intimate or not with your partner at any given point, in my mind, doesn't increase or decrease the chances of being hurt.  Lack of communication, lack of honesty--these are all things that cause pain--not intimacy.  I don't want to get hurt anymore than the next person, and I don't take on a relationship assuming it will fail.

So, I think, when it comes down to it, focusing on the act is really focusing on the wrong issue.  I found myself feeling like I was making the conversation all about sex, and it's easy to oversimplify it that way.  That's a lesson I had to learn about alcohol early on--that you could very easily throw the baby out with the bathwater (bathtub gin?) and make the whole issue about drinking or not drinking, versus the kind of relationship you want to have with others and yourself.  By choosing to be chaste to the degree that practicing Mormons do, you're really choosing a certain way of relating to other people--one without a certain level of risk, vulnerability...  and it's not necessarily how I want to encounter people--with preconditions, limits, boundries. 

Will I find a relationship that naturally developes its own unique path around intimacy?  Perhaps.  Do I want to be thinking about those limitations on the first date?  That presents a lot of difficulty that can suffocate a relationship from the start. 

This week, NY Tech Meetup organizer and Meetup.com CEO Scott Heiferman outlined a vision  for the future of the group that included a board and community elected organizer.  He talked about the meetup becoming more than what it is.

The idea that the NY Tech Meetup could be more than just a monthly meeting with a few presentations is what led me to create nextNY in the first place.  Rather than go with more structure, we've gone with less.  nextNY has no official organizer and everyone is free to run an event and add to our site--which is in itself a combo of a wiki, blog, job board and other stuff that members just put up themselves.  I think it has become the goto place for a real sense of community in NYC tech.

So that leaves open the question of where the NY Tech Meetup fits.  Should it become more like a professional society?  I don't think so.  We've seen two industry professional organizations develop here--the New York New Media Association (NYNMA) and the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA) and neither proved to be the community unifier that's needed here.  Organic groups have flourished--a testiment to Meetup.com's own philosophy--which makes it somewhat ironic that Scott should look to build more structure on grass roots.

In a city of lots of structure and money, at least on the outside, it seems to me that structure and money isn't often what gets communities moving together--and often times, it can be an impediment.  Not only that, there's no shortage of structure and resources already in place and our biggest challenge is tapping that and making what we have better.

One thing that Scott is right about is that more could be done for the NY tech community.  I'm just not sure that the NY Tech Meetup is the right vehicle for it, but I'm also not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.  You see, a couple of weeks ago, David Rose and I, at a NYC Council hearing, seperately called for the creation of a single position whose role would be to bring together all of the disparate pieces of the NYC innovation community--a community manager if you will.  More than space or money, if NYC is to take avantage of what it already has, it needs a focal point and a conduit for communication.  In a sea of offices, committees, groups, task forces, meetups, unconferences, and incubators, a single human with an email address, phone number, blog, and a Twitter account could accomplish a ton. 

Such a person would go university to university, community group to community group, to all the government offices, VC funds, angels, etc...  and start off with an assessment.  What do we have?  In the process, that person would become a connector.  A person who could put like minded people together two at a time as often as they put 500 people in the same room.

So, its rather fortuitous that one of the largest groups of tech professionals in the city is in the market for a mission statement and an organizer to carry it out.  I think this is the perfect opportunity to put forward a single person whose job it will be to reach out to the various parts of the NYC tech community and inspire them to work together for a common purpose. 

In my opinion, Nate Westheimer is the most appropriate person for that position.

Keep in mind I said appropriate.  He's not the most experienced--there are other folks who have managed larger communities before or who have been involved in the NY scene for 10, 15, or 20 years.  And, he's not a 5 time repeat entrepreneur or successful VC.  

However, I don't think experience is really what's critical here.  Experience, in this case, presents two problems. 

First, experience gives you a view--you form an opinion and perspective as to what the problems and solutions are related to this community.  That's a problem because the person who can bring the community together can't be someone putting forward their own agenda.  Their agenda must be a synthesis of the community's agenda.  They must be an agnostic aggregator. 

The other thing a lot of experience gives you is the perception, and maybe reality, that you already know most of the people you need to know.  The person who would make the best Community Organizer is not the person that everyone already knows--its the person who will strive to expand and diversify their network.  While Nate knows a lot of the up and comer crowd, there are lots of people in "industry" and the academic world as well that don't know him, and I think he knows that.  

What also makes Nate qualified is that his current job as an EIR at RoseTech Ventures should be 100% synergystic with being the NY Tech Meetup Organizer.  The more that Nate reaches out to the tech community, the more he'll learn about different opportunities and the more people will reach out to him for advice, and perhaps financing.  It's also great that he's not working for a VC, so you can be assured that if he does discover investment opportunities in his job, RoseTech and David will likely seek to syndicate the deal like you'd expect an angel to do.  You wouldn't have to worry about RoseTech getting an unfair "first look" at everything because angels don't hoard their deals--they need other angels or funds to get deals done.

The other thing that makes Nate naturally qualified for this job is that it is inherently social and Nate's a very social guy.  To leverage the NY Tech Meetup as a platform for bringing the community together, he'd really have to reach out and participate in the community the way more experienced people who have kids and families generally won't.  I say that having been the junior guy at a VC firm where the partners, at the end of the day, weren't realistically going to spend three or for nights out at various tech events--but that's where community happens--so it was part of my job to participate in that scene.  That means going to the nextNY events, the Media Meshings, hanging out with the NYC Resistor crew, and even travelling--representing NYC out at Web 2.0 Expo in SF and in other places.  Is it possible for someone else with more life responsibilities to take this on?  Sure...  but more often than not, life just puts on you certain logistical limitations that Nate has proven he can work around when he's passionate about something--he just spent nearly a month campaigning for the Obama campaign in Ohio.  It's this kind of on the ground, door to door effort that the NY Tech Meetup needs--more of a servant of the community than a lead. 

Plus, I'm sure he'll have help.  I don't know what the board will look like, but ultimately, I'm sure that folks like myself, Scott, Dawn Barber, etc. will support his efforts along the way.

As to who else might run?

Well, first off, I'm definitely not running.  I have more than enough to do and my priority is Path 101.

The subject of conflicts is important here, and I want to take a second to address that.  There are people here in the city who are making very successful businesses out of creating communities around them.  That includes Mashable, the Hatchery, SobelMedia, BDI and others.  Those are great business models and their efforts are an integral part of the ecology of the tech community.   However, their mission conflicts with the idea of having the NY Tech Meetup be the center of the NY tech community in a way that just running another non for profit meetup doesn't.  They have a direct business incentive to build community around them and so I wouldn't support the candidacy of any owner of those businesses, despite the fact that they are a group of very savvy and sophisticated people who contribute a lot to the community.  I would not support their candidacy or participation on the board.  The board should, however, make room for NYC government folks and venture capital firms.

And, I'll say it, and I'm not trying to be mean...   but Richie Hecker isn't the guy either.  Richie, you mean well, but I think you have a lot to learn about how to contribute to the community rather than distract it by promoting your own efforts.  I don't want to be negative, but I know Richie will probably run and get a bunch of friends to vote for him, so I just want to cut that off before it gets out of hand.  Again, not a bad guy, but not the right guy for the job.

Thanks for reading this whole post.  I know it was long.

There.  I said it.  More often than not, when you "employ" students as unpaid interns, you and the school facilitating this practice by offering credit are giving students the short end of the stick.

Companies say the students are picking up valuable experience, but how many unpaid internships are really worth a damn?  Maybe if they were learning transferable, in high demand/short supply skills, but filing, photocopying, cold calling, getting coffee, answering client gopher requests, and answering phones do not fit into that category.  Those are the things your well paid executive assistant would rather not do and so they get passed off to the free slave...er...student labor.

If you're going to help a student hone their PHP coding skills, then I'd have a different opinion--but funny enough, internships in computer science, where real skills are used and developed, are paid!  It often seems to be the least interesting, most commoditized work that is most often unpaid.

The "getting free experience" argument doesn't hold water. It isn't free for the student when they have to use college credits to justify the fact that they weren't being paid. They're paying thousands of dollars for those college credits. The system that demands that they receive credit if they're working for free, designed to prevent actual slave labor, actually hurts the student. If the experience itself was actually worth it for its own sake, a student would be better off just getting the job on their resume and not having to pay all that money for the credit. In fact, if I were the student, it would be a better economic deal for me to offer to write a check to the company for my own minimum wage salary, because it will probably be cheaper than paying the school for the credit.

The bottom line is that if someone is work of any value to you, you should compensate them for it, even if its just minimum wage. If your organization can't afford the hundred bucks or so a week for 15-20 hours of work because it isn't worth it, then how good is this experience that the student gets?  Plus, if your company can't afford $6 an hour labor, perhaps your business isn't economically viable--and that goes for startups, too.  If it isn't a no-brainer to get that work done for six bucks an hour, I find it hard to believe that work will impress anyone when it's on a resume. 

Companies make out like bandits with this practice. Not only do they get free labor, but they have no incentive to invest in the education of the student. If they don't stick around or don't like the work, who cares? Doesn't cost them anything! Give them an incentive to make sure the student is doing meaningful work.

You know who benefits pretty well from this practice, too? The school! Imagine if for every degree earned with 120 credits, 3 of those credits were earned by completing an internship. That represents a 2.5% reduction in the cost of faculty normally paid to teach them something useful in exchange for those 3 credits. Schools that allow 2 "for credit" internships are cutting their faculty overhead by 5%!

Two of the most common unpaid internships are in private client/high net worth asset management, and marketing/pr. Here are some alternatives for students to getting ripped off at unpaid internships in these fields:

Private client/high net worth asset management:

Lots of folks make a lot of money being entrusted to individuals' savings. Those people bring big trusted networks and financial expertice to the table--two things students completely lack and will lack for quite a while. A great marketing intern could have a big impact on a marketing campaign, but a private client intern isn't going anywhere near portfolios, so they basically get relegated to cold calling and "interacting with clients" (answering phones and being a gopher). Try getting a big investment banking internship with this on your resume.

Instead, open up a fake portfolio on Yahoo! Finance Or Google Finance, or a trading game site like UpDown. If you don't know what stocks to pick, just pick things you either know or that you might be interested in following (food companies, fashion, autos, Apple). Track the hell out of it. Download your daily gains and losses per stock to Excel. Enter the performance for the indexes--the S&P 500, the Dow, etc. Crunch the numbers. Open up a blog on blogspot or similar service with a fun domain name like TickerU or BullMarketMajor or something and write about your portfolio and the market EVERY DAY. Read and comment on the blogs of experienced investors like TraderMike, Howard Lindzon, and Information Arbitrage. Interview your favorite stock bloggers on your blog, even by email. If you do this a whole semester, you will not have wasted paying for the credits to be at a crappy internship. Instead, you could have taken another accounting, financial modeling, stats, or programming class and gained a lot better experience watching and interacting with the market everyday. Plus, you will have put your name out there as an innovative, ambitious self starter, making it much more likely you'll get hired for a better internship.

Marketing/PR:

If you're going to volunteer to market anything, market yourself. Actually you're already an expert on a certain kind of marketing and you may not realize it. Youth marketing, both offline and online (especially on social networks), is a huge lucrative business. Brands and agencies are always looking for people who are up on the latest trends and who have keen insight into what works and what doesn't.

Every single student who has an interest in marketing and public relations should be blogging about how they get approached by marketing campaigns, brands they love, and trends they see.  How about taking a poll at your school to find out what the top brands are and what people's associations with those brands are.  You should use Twitter, too...   You can use it to update your Facebook status messages, but moreover, you can use it to follow the updates of very high level marketing and PR folks. 

If I was hiring someone to help create a digital presence and brand for myself, I'd want to see them be able to do it for themselves first.  Learning how to do that by attending conferences (you can often go free as a student by volunteering), workshops, informational interviews could be a better learning experience than an unpaid internship.

If you're a college student (or anyone else) and you're worried about what you're going to do with your career, you should check out the site my company is working on, Path 101.  Sign up for our e-mail list and we'll keep you posted on what we're doing to help you figure all this career stuff out.

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

"When asked on ABCs This Week where Mr. Obama stood on the issue, Mr. Emanuel seemed to suggest that Mr. Obama, as a last resort, might be open to tapping the rescue fund to help carmakers, calling the auto industry an essential part of our industrial base."

Emanuel Urges Aid for Auto Industry - NYTimes.com

Umm... Yeah, I happened to watch this morning's This Week.   George Stephanopolous pressed Emanuel over and over again to try to get him to say that Obama would use the $700 billion rescue fund for the auto industry.  Emanuel did not say that.  Instead, he clearly stated that there were other funds that had been offered, that there were other resources they could tap and that the gov't would look into options because the auto industry is really important.  However, to write the headline "Emanuel Urges Aid for Auto Industry" and to suggest that that aid is coming out of the rescue fund is totally irresponsible journalism.

20081104_Chicago_IL_ElectionNight1005, originally uploaded by Barack Obama.

Barack lets Michele hold the remote. Clearly, this is a man for a new age.

Howard Stern went off on social networking--bashing and hating--and Gary Vee calls him out on how he's just trying to protect and control.

This is a must-listen.

I get sent an invite to SocialMinder.  The idea is something I've been wanting LinkedIn to do for ages... Let me set how often I want to speak to someone.  So, they grab my LinkedIn contacts, look for them on e-mail and tell me how long since we've spoke--nominating people for me to reach out to.  It even suggests articles for me to send them, based on company name or industry. 

It's neat, but I have a few issues:

One, this has to be on LinkedIn's near term development list.  In fact, they have this feature, to some extent, in their Outlook toolbar.

Two, the algorithm is too simplistic.  It seems to have just gone through people I talked to a bunch and then haven't talk to in a while.  There are probably reasons for that.  Most of the people if found for me left NYC or switched industries (or we broke up). 

Three, I don't like the way the trail is setup.  It gives me ten people to stay in touch with, but if I want to keep up with anyone else, I have to upgrade.  Upgrading means I have to send it to 15 people.  Instead of making my spam my friends, how about just building an AWESOME product and making it easy for me to share with my friends if I think it's any good.

Anyway... nice attempt, but just not enough there there, and they seem more concerned with spreading the word than anything else.

A couple of years ago, Meetup announced that it was going to start charging for its group organizing services. Almost instantly, they lost half their groups. Once the fallout passed, however, something amazing happened: More and more groups started paying. Soon they had more Meetup groups than when the site was free, which actually improved the overall service. Now, when you find a Meetup group, you know that it's at least active enough that someone is paying 18 bucks a month for it.

Having come from a venture capital firm, it turns out that I have a previously undiscovered bias towards cutting edge, sexy business models--which Meetup is not.

I'm a revenue snob.

Google has a sexy business model. People search, others advertise against those searches...very slick. Sermo's business model is ridiculously hot. Doctors come together in a community and pharma and Wall St. pay to watch. That's almost porn-worthy it's so sexy.

So when someone like Zoominfo comes along and charges for access to its people search--you know Zoominfo, that half wrong profile of you that confuses you with that media sales guy from Kalamazoo--I had to admit I turned up my nose...

...until I saw that they were making 15 million in sales. Yes, that's right. Zoominfo is doing 15 million in sales selling $349 annual subscriptions to its database. It's easy to dismiss a company like that, because the data quality is so poor, and if you're a VC trained data snob. If you understood anything about recruiting, which is essentially a lead gen business, you'll realize that a lead doesn't have to be 100% perfect to have some value--especially if the payout is a big recruiting bounty.

It really hit home when I was talking to an investor yesterday about Path 101's Resume Genome Project. I was talking all about how having this rich database of data will enable next gen recommendations and encourage users to contribute more data, and the investor simply asked, "What about searching the 8 million resumes you'll have in your database day one...isn't that a business?"

Yeah, actually, it is. It's not super sexy, and other people could do it, but the market is so fragmented that anyone with some scale of profiles has a business. It's the same in the jobs business. Name a company that only wanted to be and only tried to be a job board that couldn't generate revenues. It's the companies that tried to be some kind of fancy matching thing first, like ItzBig, without solving employers and job seekers immediate problems first, that went under. It's what David Kidder recently referred to at a nextNY event as "getting in the jetstream of revenue"--finding out what people are paying for right now and making that part of your business plan.

So perhaps before you try to be better than your competitor as a startup, you might try being just as good--because just as good can mean revenues and next gen can sometimes mean too early. What you'll likely find is that a focused startup's attempt to be just as good actually results in a much better product that people might even be willing to pay for.

You know who should think about bringing their noses back down to earth? Facebook. Does anyone not think that there could be some kind of premium feature set that a quarter of the population would pay five bucks a month for? I'd pay to see who viewed my profile for sure... or certainly for stats on views....or for no ads and application notifications.

So before you go for the wacky virtual click per social micropayment model, perhaps "I make a product, you buy it" should at least be thought about.

I've been having a Twitter exchange with James Eiden about how you can call an election with such small percentages of the votes in for a state.  I didn't think it's that difficult to figure out how it's done, but apparently, it needs more than 140 characters so here goes:

News organizations triangulate from a number of different sources: primary voting, new voter registrations, previous elections, demographics, and yes, exit polling.  Exit polling, given its unpredictability, I imagine is mostly used as a backup check at this point--to make sure long tail events didn't occur. 

So how do you call a state with 1% in?

Let's take our example state of Jesusland:

Jesusland has 100 voting districts, each representing an equal number of voters.

What are things we know about Jesusland before the election happens?

- Number of registered voters for each party in each district. 

- Primary results from that year.

- Historical records.

We know most people generally vote along party lines, so when you have districts that are heavily Republican or Democrat, you can pretty much count on those folks to go to one side or the other right away.  This is where exit polling comes in.  When you exit poll all of Jesusland's Republican heavy election districts and it seems like there wasn't a major shift against the tide, you can count those votes as in the bag within a margin of error--especially if those same districts turned out in strong numbers for these same candidates in Jesusland's primaries.

That may leave only about a third of the population of Jesusland really in play, making each district about 3.33% of the contested group.  To put the statistical significance of that number in perspective, there are about 180 million potential voters in this whole country.  When national polls are conducted, they're done with less than 10,000 voters and statisticians put them at a 3.5% margin of error.  To get 3.33% of votors responding would be like getting 6 million people nationally to answer a Gallup poll.  So when you see 1% of people reporting and you think it's too early to call, keep in mind that's orders of magnitude more than Gallup usually gets and they're able to get within a few percantage points.  When you get that large of a percent in key districts that are highly contested, you can pretty much call the rest of the race within fair degrees of certainty assuming no major cross-party upheavals.

I mean, it's no different than the whole map of the US, really.  If Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania polls closed at 4 in the afternoon, we'd know who the president was by dinnertime.

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

IMG_2323, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Turns out there's an O'Donnell running for something in my friend's voting district.... O FTW!

I was recently interviewed by Mary Flynn of The Deal and profiled in the magazine as well.  It's going to be awesome press for us, so we're really excited, but I did want to add one thing to the article. 

Andrea Orr wrote:

"Path 101 doesn't operate in Silicon Valley, where even in today's tough funding climate, there's a strong fellowship in the startup community that provides at least some moral support when no financial backing is forthcoming."

Oh Andrea...Why the New York community knock?  Actually, we're glad we don't operate in Silicon Valley!  Instead, we're operating right where every startup should be in a difficult environment--right in the middle of where our existing network is, surrounded by supportive people who know us well.

Just the other day, we had an investor meeting with the New York based folks who have supported us from the beginning and I said to Alex, "Jeez, can you imagine if we didn't have the investors that we did.  How tough would that be to just have some random angels that don't know you very well?" 

If anything, there's a stronger fellowship in the New York community, because we constantly get dinged by mainstream media as a "sad assed backwater" of a tech community.  We feel like we're all in it together--NYC tech against the world!

Need more proof? 

nextNY is almost at 2,000 members!

A new co-working space, New Work City, just opened.

Our NY Tech Meetups are filled to the brim and sellout in minutes.

NY's own Fred Wilson won the Donor's Choose Blogger Challenge, beating out Valley competition from TechCrunch, AllThingsD