Wasn't this guy in Men In Black?, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Even if he wasn't, I'm still pretty sure he's not from around here.

The Stocktwits guys are now using a plugin to autolink your stock terms to their site.

They're not the only ones trying to make your web experience smarter, as per Fred:

"Adaptive Blue recognizes pages about things (books, music, film, stocks, wine, people, etc). Outside.in recognizes posts and articles about places (neighborhoods, schools, parks, etc). And Zemanta recognizes concepts in blog posts and recommends content to add to your post."

But what about when you want these services talking to each other?  Why aren't Outside.in placelinks in Zemanta and Adaptive Blue?  How can we get Path 101 links to information about careers into Adoptive Blue, so anytime someone mentions an industry, we can give you some information on it?  I'm sure ESPN would like to be the player data plugin, and hopefully there's someone out there building the data plugin for political candidates.  Does everyone have to build their own plugin? 

What about open libraries for this?  A standard format whereby anyone who wants to add a database to one of these semantic tools can easily do so, without having to strike up an extensive business development relationship.

Seems to me like Adoptive Blue should become an open platform where anyone can add their taxonomies in.  This is the difference between crawling the open web and maintaining a curated list a la Yahoo 1996--otherwise you have people's ability to keep up with the explosion in content become the bottleneck.

Have you ever felt like you never realized how much you were capable of, because, simple as it may seem, no one told you along the way? Despite the fact that I went to a magnet school, I never strived to be a leader in high school or to discover the unique imprint I could leave on the world, mostly because I just didn't realize that I could be on the same level as the high achievers.

And yet, somehow we assume the US is going to retain a leadership position in the world over the decades to come, even though we really don't spend much effort at all on leadership training.

Sure, we have lots of leadership problems. The top of every class get special awards, plaques, and wind up on lists, but how many of those students are actually getting the leadership tools they need to impact cities, states, countries, even the whole world?

What's worse, how many are being told they can?

What passes for student leadership these days is often pretty lame. Lead a club that had been on campus for generations. Get elected to the student council and run a new program. This will put you in the top 10% of your school in terms of leadership, but that's a pretty low bar, since we all know most students don't try too hard to be leaders.

The difference between that and being one of the top 30 under 30 years of age in your profession is huge, and most people don't know how to teach or motivate for that. In fact, I'm not sure they even try, because much of that level of achievement involves reaching across institutions and changing the way things are done, something most schools aren't even good at themselves.

Imagine, for a moment, what the top 30 people in your profession under 30 years of age are probably doing. Or the 25 under 25. Maybe your industry actually has that list . Maybe you need to create it. Identifying standout performances could help motivate yourself and others by identifying just how high the bar really is.

Many people don't strive for leadership because they don't want the pressure and responsibility that leadership comes with. What they fail to realize is that it's actually much easier to be a leader than being the low person on the totem pole. Leadership brings with it the flexibiliity to do more on your own terms, and the support of others who follow you who can help lighten the load because they believe in your vision.

So if you're a college student or in your 20's, think about what you need to do to be recognized as one of the top people in your field at such a young age--part of a 30 under 30. If you don't know what that would entail, go ask anyone and everyone that you know who is involved in the industry what it would take.

Publish the answers, strive the the goal, make an impact, because who really wants to ride in the back seat for this lifetime?

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

...at least the Giants won, too. Plus, I was due for a shave anyway.

2008-11-21_0057, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

See... even Google knows...

I've said this before, but I'll be honest:  I never wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Well, I never wanted to be an entrepreneur when I knew what being an entrepreneur was.   Back when I was like 10, I wanted to have my own car company.  I used to draw cars and I'd make annual reports on our computer using Harvard Graphics.  I called it Impulse.  I liked naming the models. 

When I started working in private equity, it didn't seem nearly as appealing.  It seemed like a huge pain in the ass for not a lot of reward--on average.   Sure, I had done entrepreneurial things in college, like start a business newspaper, but I was never any good at delegating and so while I enjoyed my experience, it was kind of all for naught.  The paper died when I graduated, after two years.

What I didn't realize then, and what I'm realizing now, is how much I enjoy the challenge.

People ask me if I stress--if I stress about the fact that I know the very day we run out of cash.  Do I stress when investors turn us down or when we need to make difficult product decisions?  Do I stress when something on the site doesn't work as its supposed to?  Do I stress over the hours I put in?

Not in the least.

In fact, it's fantastic.  The challenge of it all has been enormously rewarding.  So as I sit here getting ready for a big investor meeting... a  "go/no go" final meeting... one where I'll be giving a pitch that could be worth nine more months of life for the company, for my partner, for my employees, for our investor's capital...  I'm really loving it. 

This is way better than the day that I was interning at a big company and I left for the afternoon after lunch and no one noticed that I was gone.

I live for this.

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

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.