The Internet Archives - Page 17 of 25

Why I like to blog

Posted on July 24, 2008

While reading Fred Wilson’s blog today about Live Blogging, he ended his post with this comment:

Blogging has a reputation as an ego centric activity for people who want to be heard. And that is certainly true and a big motivation for many people who do it. But blogging can be valuable in many other ways.

I often get in conversations with people as to why i blog. To many it’s viewed as pure a vanity project. I’ve found that putting my ideas and thoughts down for others to read is a great way to stimulate conversation and “talk” with friends but to do so by;

allowing them to jump in at their leisure. After they see the movie or read the book that i’ve written about or if they finally get a moment when they’re bored at work.
not requiring them to participate. They can read and process but unlike email they don’t have to respond unless they want to. I’ve noticed that many of my friends will read my blog, never comment but will bring it up with me weeks or months later. I love this. We’re talking but in a turn-based way. I’m just always making the first move
making the conversation to be public – anyone can join.

I love it for these reasons. I don’t really care how many people read it or if anyone at all reads. Sometimes i like to just get my thoughts down on paper so they’re organized and stated and i can forget them.

Why do you blog? What do you like about it?

The Coach of Silicon Valley

Posted on July 15, 2008March 27, 2010

On the plane this past weekend, i read a great article about a guy named Bill Campbell who is known in Silicon Valley as “coach.” He’s a former football coach at Columbia who is non-technical but has a knack for handling personalities and managing companies and employees. He’s on the board of Apple and Intuit, sits in on every Google board meeting, and can frequently be found around the valley drinking bud light and yelling at people (in a good way).

One interesting thing about the article is how he evaluates talent. He believes that startups often hire “early stage” people without thinking about whether they will succeed as the company grows. Instead, he believes they should hire major players who know how to scale up. Once hired, the review system should measure these 4 areas:

On the job performance – the typical quantitative goals
Peer group relationships
Management / leadership and how well you develop the people around you
Innovation and best practices

I thought these were interesting, especially having peer group relationships being part of a review. I think that’s smart as these interactions do impact your performance immensely. If you can’t get along with your co-workers, it’s hard to be productive, or manage or lead.

Twitter the most pure social network

Posted on June 27, 2008

Some social network thoughts…..

I’ve been using Twitter more and more lately and i have to say that i’m really enjoying it. I love the simplicity and ease of use. The fact that they limit the characters, is only text and is just a list of your friends thoughts makes it always interesting. Of course, Facebook used to be like that for me too. I’m not sure if it will ever catch on for the masses. The fact that only a subsection of my friends use it makes it more useful for me so i don’t get too many updates. I’m not sure if it’s fun enough for everyone just yet. I do think the mobile aspect of it could tip it over the edge. I wasn’t that into Twitter until i started doing it on my iPhone and then it became a must-have app. I still don’t see much difference between the AIM away-message, the facebook status message and Twitter other than the mobile/cell-ness of Twitter and the simplicity.

More and more i think facebook will develop into a utility instead of a place of expression. I think it will be like the yellow pages – where is a tool people use to look up people, find out about friends of friends and find phone numbers, emails, etc. It’s a social address and people directory. It’s a tool

MySpace continues to be about self-expression and i think that’s a good differentiator as they could never beat facebook at their game. However, i do believe self-expression can be done even better. Something like Uber or Virb or something could be better – if it had more of Tumblr-type experience int it. We did some focus groups the other day and everyone used both Facebook and MySpace. They liked Myspace b/c it really represented them – it was a good badge but they hated the sketchiness about it. “Too many old weird guys” they said. They had facebook b/c everyone had it and it was easy to connect but it didn’t seem like it was fun to them. It was interesting.

What are your thoughts

YouTube getting its ass kicked by Hulu?

Posted on June 18, 2008

I read an interesting post by Cuban called “Hulu is kicking Youtube’s Ass” where he argues that YouTube’s business model is broken and that Hulu has the only sustainable model going forward. He argues that because Hulu has rights to sell ads on their videos they are doing a much better job in revenue per video and revenue per user. Hulu is gaining momentum. Cuban argues that they might already have more monetizaable users and traffic and that by next year it will have more revenue than YouTube.

These are fighting words but it does lead to a bigger question of whether you can monetize users and self-expresssion. Web 2.0 is all about user created content but if that content is only that and not something that can be monetized – then do you have a big business? Facebook and MySpace have taken shots lately of not being able to monetize their huge traffic.

Almost as if YouTube heard the conversation, they announced today that they are removing the 10 minute limit on their videos for Partners. I could see them getting more into Hulu’s business as time goes on and licenseing more and more content to distribute and sell ads around.

Nathan Myhrvold – Pretty Badass

Posted on June 8, 2008September 2, 2014

I just watched this video about Nathan who is quite an incredible guy who spends 18 minutes describing what he does. It’s a lot of very scientific stuff like:

Archeology – digitizing Easter Island statues and the pyramids
Inventing new nuclear reactors – which are more efficient and better than the current designs
Inventing meta-reactors which are really real invisibility cloaks
Bio-medical research – is studying the eyes
Building radio-telescopes and funding the SETI project. If you want the movie Contact, he describes that all the characters are based on real-life folks. He’s the creepy rich guy
Cooking – took a sabatical from Microsoft to study cooking in France and occasionally works at a Seattle restaurant
BBQ – he won the world championship BBQ prize
Paleontology – he’s discovered a T-Rex in a badlands

It’s just a video about him and how he loves to do a million things. As he says, the talk is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” But that’s how he operates. One thing that stands out is that he seems to be one of the bigger badasses alive. I’m happy that people like them are out there and trying to discover the past mysteries of the world and invent new ones. Pretty interesting stuff…

Phoenix is rising

Posted on May 26, 2008

My favorite band of the past few years, Phoenix, is coming out with a new album and have posted the first track on Facebook of all places. Go check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Phoenix/19227674432

Boomers and Gen X battle

Posted on May 22, 2008

Last week a reporter (Robert Lanham, author of “The Hipster Handbook”) published “Generation Slap… a call to arms against Millennials.” He describes Generation Me as “naive, self-important, and perpetually plugged in.” It didn’t take long for 22-year-old Gawker writer Alex Pareene to step in and defend his generation. His essay:

Their moment is over. Finally. They got more than they deserved, considering that Millennials outnumber them by nearly 50 million. There are more of us Millennials than there were Baby Boomers! We threaten to overshadow everything Generation X fought so hard for. Like Adam Sandler movies and extreme sports.

“They think updating a spreadsheet while simultaneously posting to a Twitter account about the latest gossip on perezhilton.com is an essential corporate skill,” Lanham insists. “And, like Kevin, they’re always doing stupid shit, but rarely getting called on it.” To the contrary, Millennials are the first generation whose every dumb mistake is archived forever on computer networks. We’re the first Googleable generation! (Just ask Kevin Colvin, who, unless he changes his name, will have to carry around this minor indiscretion forever.)

Gen Y’s permanent records are instantly accessible by anyone and everyone with a MacBook. Or a smart phone. Maybe it’s healthier that way. I certainly don’t love the culture of microblogging every 40-ounce consumed, but I’ll entertain the controversial opinion that it’s not the end of the world. It may, in fact, make Millennials less screwed up about navigating social spheres. You won’t find us wringing our hands about the dissolving borders between public and private life. We’ve never differentiated between the two. Yes, we overshare. But we also don’t drop our monocles every time someone updates their Facebook relationship status.

As you know i’m coming off reading Generation Me (last post) and love pondering the differences between the generations

Youtube is incredible

Posted on May 21, 2008

The beauty of Youtube is the simplicity. Because it’s so open-ended, you get an amazingly broad amount of submissions. They don’t niche it they just say “submit” Here are 2 great examples of just pure gems that have no other outlet. The first is a 14 year old in China who is just a RIDICULOUS guitar player. The second is a video of a 14 year old who has put together his own little song using some clever video editing tricks. Neither of these would be found without YouTube. I love it

And i’m not the only one. 43 million views! That’s some serious traffic.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=QjA5faZF1A8]

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=mHwV2JuwZls]

Where's Yahoo's RSS Reader?

Posted on May 9, 2008

Isn’t Yahoo! supposed to compete with Google and other consumer properties? I mean, even AOL has an RSS reader (here). People are using RSS readers more and more and Google’s making it social. I now get feeds shared to me every day and they’re usually the most interesting ones. For instance the image below was from a post that was shared to me by Julian and i also think it does a good job representing Yahoo’s efforts in the Reader space. MyYahoo is so 90’s, get with the program Y!

Loo.me

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Category: The Internet