Shortly after reading an article in the NY Times this morning by Bob Morris titled Global Yawning I received the following email from a reader of this blog:
I’ve noticed that I am skipping your blog posts with increasing frequency. The reason is that the “What a great team! What a great product!” posts about your portfolio companies seem to be an increasing proportion of the total (it may not be true – I haven’t run the numbers – but “perception is reality” anyway). At this point you may write a post that says that Newsgator is a crappy company but all I will see is “Newsgator” and I will move on. As an entrepreneur, I would love to have such a dedicated, high-profile investor-evangelist. However, as a reader I feel that the “advertorial” content is starting to chip away at the foundation of your otherwise excellent blog.
Well said my friend (and thanks for the constructive criticism.) It’s often difficult (at least for me) to walk the “fanboy line.” I always try to say something useful / educational when I’m cheering on my companies, but I’ll always acknowledge that I’m also promoting them.
The juxtaposition to Global Yawning hit me over the head. Morris has an excellent essay with the killer quotes “How much green-standing can we stand? It’s enough hot air to melt Antarctica. In no time, an inconvenient truth has become an obnoxious one.”
I’m a huge environmentalist. I have a conservation easement on all of my land in Colorado. I’m on the board of the Colorado Conservation Trust and am actively involved in helping conserve land. I was “green” well before green was in.
But I’m now lost in noise and can barely read anything about global warming right now without my inner cynic coming out. It baffles me that people fly across the country in private planes to prostelitize about being carbon neutral. Morris points out some new problems with ethanol (more smog than gasoline) and mercury in the newfangled compact fluorescent light bulbs that create a different environmental problem. Magazines increase their difficult to recycle page count with endless articles on how to be more green while advertising products that are most definitely not environmentally friendly.
I haven’t spent the time to separate fact from fiction – nor am I going to – but the dynamic is overwhelming to me. When the noise overwhelms the signal, it’s time to take a giant step backward and look at what is going on.
I’ll keep being a fanboy for things I care about, but I’ll be more conscious about telling a story while I’m doing it.
If you are a blogger, it’s time to consider implementing Lijit for your blog search. Matt Blumberg jumped on board last week and Fred Wilson tossed it up on his blog a few weeks ago.
I’ve enabled all the features. At the top is a search box. Just type in your search terms.
If you don’t want to take up a lot of sidebar space, you can just surface the search box, but I like all the functionality to be front and center.
Next is a tag cloud of most popular searches. Finally, you see the list of My Content. These are all the content sources that I publish on the web:
Now – the neat thing is that you can search my blog, my content (anything I’ve published on any of these services), my network (anything I’ve published and anything anyone in my network has published.)
My network is really special – Lijit is working hard to automatically build these networks. My blogroll is one of the informers of this – look for others coming soon.
Incorporating Lijit into your blog is easy. If you are a Typepad user it’s now in the Typepad Widget directory. If you use a different blogging platform, it’s easy to set up on the Lijit web site.
Once you start playing with Lijit, you’ll discover lots of layers of interesting things. The search stats are superb and remind me of the early days of using FeedBurner and discovering new and exciting feed stat info on a regular basis. The Re-Search feature is pure magic.
If you give Lijit a try and either need help or have feedback, drop me an email.
If you are a NewsGator user, you might know about some of the neat add-on tools that build on the NewsGator Online reader. They were hard to find on the old NewsGator web site – the version released last week makes it a lot easier to find them. They include:
If you are an active reader of RSS and feed and are not using at least Toolbar and Desktop you are missing out. All of these automagically integrate and synchronize with your existing NewsGator Online setup and dramatically enhance the overall feed reading experience. And – as a special bonus – they are free.
Amy and I love art. My mom is an artist and I grew up with art, galleries, collectors, and museums. Amy and I have been collecting since we started dating and I still remember agonizing over our first purchase greater than $1,000.
We are both patrons of the Wellesley Davis Museum. As a result, we get to go on an annual trip somewhere in the country to look at art. This year’s trip was to New York City. I felt like hiding from the world for a couple of days to take a break so I tagged along with Amy and 30 other Wellesley women.
We spent two days wandering around looking at private collections. We saw several amazing ones (think > $100m of art in apartments ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 square feet.) The collections were heavy on abstract expressionism and were deeply influenced by a couple of New York art dealers. Rothko is my favorite abstract expressionist and I got a chance to sit in front of a few beautiful ones and quietly contemplate them.
I was intrigued by the entire experience. The novelty of sitting in someone’s living room looking at a Bacon Pope, a Rothko, a Dubuffet from the 1940’s, a Cy Twombly, or a Clifford Still wore off pretty quickly and I started thinking about how these folks made decisions about what to buy. Each of the collections included a raft of chinese antiquities which appear to be the cultural counterpoint to the abstract expressionists.
After two days of this we needed to escape to Chelsea and look at some contemporary stuff that was more in our league. While I’m struggling to understand why a Francesco Clemente painting goes for $225,000, I found plenty of stuff I could relate to including Leonardo Drew. Plus it was a beautiful day in New York.
The nice folks at PodTech interviewed me and David Cohen about TechStars. In David’s words: “It’s another fantastic way to waste 9 minutes of your life before you get back to working on your startup (or whatever).” Plus there’s a neat Theresa Chong painting in the background.
Metzger Associates is hosting Denver’s Second Annual New Media Summit on May 31st at 5:30pm at the Denver Press Club. Doyle Albee from Metzger is our moderator. I participated in this last year and thought it was loads of fun and very relevant.
This years panel includes me, Phil Weiser (CU Law School / head of Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications program), Veronica Belmont (Associate Editor at CNET.com), and JB Holston (CEO of NewsGator.)
If you are interested in attending, asking us hard questions, and pushing us around, send the nice folks at Metzger an email to register.
I did very well on the math part of the SAT but not as well on the verbal part (I did ok, but I was definitely more MIT than (or is it “then”) Harvard.) Since the phrase “unique” crosses over nicely between the math and verbal sections it belongs in my Pet Peeves universe.
Today I was in a meeting where someone mocked the phrase “very unique.” I smiled since I’ve heard this one so many times. His next statement was “unique means one of a kind – that means something can’t be ‘very’ unique.”
I knew I’d seen an interesting rant on “very unique” on the web somewhere and I was uniquely pleased that Google didn’t fail me. In addition to the “pro very unique” argument, I found some “anti very unique” and “definitive there are no very unique” people.
Don’t forget to get your domains straight.
Maybe there are. But I thought it was a catchy title for a post. There are plenty of dogs, cats, and 400,000 people on Dogster as of today. One of my all time favorite New Yorker cartoons (hanging on the wall of my office) is “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Well – they might.
Registration for the Defrag Conference is open. My friend Eric Norlin (who I’ve still never met in person – I love this cyberspace thing) is doing an amazing job getting the conference up and running. Great sponsors, a blog full of crazy ideas, cool advisors, and a fascinating agenda emerging. What more could you want from a conference?
November 5th and 6th at the Hyatt Regency in Denver, Colorado. Be there or be square.