Venture Geek

Andrew Parker of Union Square Ventures recently invited guest writers to submit to his blog in an experiment he’s conducting on community blogging. Looks like not many people took him up on it, but never one to turn down experimentation, I gave it a shot and today discovered that he’d put up my post.

For those not inclined to click through, my basic point was that guest blogging doesn’t necessarily make any sense because blogs are an interesting phenomenon precisely because they are personal and primary — that is, they are generally about the first-person experiences of specific people who have real personality and real perspective, in stark contrast to much of what we are fed by the MSM.

I had my first experience with producing a podcast this week as part of my Fellowship at UC Berkeley. The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation there was interested in trying out some of the new media methods, and podcasting was an obvious place to go.

The first episode is an interview with Prashant Shah, Principal at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. The interview was done on the spur of the moment with very unsophisticated equipment, but I think the whole thing turned out to be not too shabby for a first shot.

You can find the direct link to the MP3 on the Lester Center blog (also part of the new media experimentation), or subscribe to the podcast feed.

For those interested in the mechanics of it all and my first impressions of podcasting production, read on…

The recording was made using an iSight camera as the mic and GarageBand to record and mix on my PowerBook. We talked in a conference room. In the future I’ll try to talk in a smaller room, as I don’t have the audio equipment to overcome the acoustic challenges of sitting in such a big room with a single mic between us. I also wish I’d asked Prashant to sit a little closer to the mic.

The recording itself sounds far from professional, but in this age of peer production I don’t think that matters much — it’s definitely good enough to get the point, and if we’d been in a small room I think it would have sounded even better. I have learned that it’s a lot harder than you might thing to actually find a “quiet place” to record voices — even doing the little voice intro had to be done a few times because of random background noises in my house getting picked up. I suspect if I had a better microphone and had any clue what I was doing when it comes to audio mixing it wouldn’t have been as much of an issue.

GarageBand is a pretty nice program when it comes to mixing together tracks — and it was very easy, especially after my experience in iMovie, to whip together a little intro music and deal with fade-ins, fade-outs, etc. My giant complaint about GarageBand, and I’m not alone judging by some Google searching, is that it can’t export directly to MP3. That’s just a load of crap — I’m surprised that Apple would have been so blinded by their love for AAC that they would push GarageBand as the best way to make a podcast and then make you jump through hoops just to get your files in the format that everyone on earth is using (and the same goes for music!). The basic option is to import the song into iTunes, then convert it to MP3 (then dig around in your music folder looking for the MP3 it created) — and there doesn’t seem to be a way to specificy on a per-convert basis what kind of MP3 compression you want to use. I have mine set very high for ripping CDs, so I had to go in and change it to much lower resolution or the file was going to be too big.

In terms of publishing, I just used Feedburner, which has the very nice feature of “SmartCast”, which automagically detects when you have links to rich media files in an RSS feed and turns that into a podcast feed with enclosures (and optionally all the iTunes add-in info). Given that I don’t have great access to the web resources at Berkeley I struggled a little on that end, but that’s not really relevant to anyone else.

I did find that WordPress.com is considerably less flexible than installed WordPress software. I’m not terribly surprised, but I was a little shocked to find out that when you click on “Categories” in a WordPress.com feed you are actually clicking through to a global tag-based search for all WordPress.com blogs, not just the posts in your blog with that category (for that, you need to follow the links in the Categories sidebar widget, which took me longer than I care to admit to figure out since I had turned off the Categories sidebar widget). You also can’t upload MP3 files to a WordPress.com blog apparently, which is a bummer. I’m a huge fan of the WordPress software this blog is running on, so I hope WordPress.com will iron out some of those kinds of issues (though, in fairness, they likely don’t think of those things as ‘issues’, merely features). I still think I’ll suggest WordPress.com when people ask me what blogging service they should use (people who couldn’t install their own WordPress or have interest in buying a hosting account that does that), but I’ll have more caveats than I used to.

My final comment is that podcasting can be time-consuming to get started if you want things like intro music and don’t have a ready-made way to store your files and serve up your feeds (if I’d hosted it on a WordPress installation of my own it would have been much simpler, for instance), but now that I have the basic template down, I think I could crank them out quite easily.

Any tips from experienced podcasters out there?

Over wo years ago Brandon Purcell posted a blog entry about converting iTunes M4P files to MP3 files (something anyone who wants to play those files somewhere other than iTunes or an iPod needs to do). Two years later the comments to that post keep coming, and since everyone on the thread gets an email every time a comment is posted, it has become a running conversation about the ins-and-outs of dealing with Apple’s DRM, an impromptu listserv of sorts dedicated to the aftermath of a single blog post. Now, don’t get me wrong, it has been valuable to hear about the various technical approaches to solving the problem of exercising fair use by violating the DMCA, but every time I get another message I can’t believe that 2 years later people are still commenting. In recent weeks the conversation has come full circle, with new people joining in (probably found it through Google searches, I suspect) chiming in with old suggestions (and often with bad advice — such is the nature of a blog comment thread that has been going on for two years — people don’t tend to read through the whole thing before commenting again). Based on his home page, Brandon seems to have stopped blogging altogether in April, but that one post lives on (and on and on and on).

My friend Pete (co-founder of the new sports social media site Yardbarker) pointed me to an article about the NCAA’s take on student athlete blogging. This quote from the article will give you a flavor:

…a few dirty words won’t land a school in trouble with the NCAA. Unfortunately for compliance officials…the Internet offers plenty of other avenues for potential violations. And college sports’ governing body doesn’t seem interested in relaxing its rules to accommodate the technology boom…Meanwhile, more electronic methods to run afoul of the NCAA are being invented every day. Unfortunately,…the grown-ups in charge are typically among the last to know.
(my emphasis added)

While some of what’s happening here is a simple case of gray areas in the rules of the NCAA — like the rules governing the types of overtures a school can make towards athletes — a lot of this, from my perspective, boils down to top-down institutions realizing the new nature of bottom-up media and basically freaking out about it. For instance, suddenly the plausible deniability about underage drinking on college sports teams is tougher and tougher to pull off when kids are posting pictures of themselves and others doing keg stands (one of the examples from the article). Student athletes being recruited to these schools are interacting directly with the student bodies at those schools and sharing what that experience is like in a very public way. Old people have been freaked out by the culture of young people for a very long time — certainly in the modern era back to the dawn of Rock’n'Roll (hard to remember that a mere generation ago it was downright unacceptable for Elvis to shake his hips on television).

I’m helping a friend of mine put together an academic article on peer publishing as an emergent social movement — the basic premise being that the advent of peer publishing has dramatic impacts on the way people relate to the media (more on this in a future post). This article about the NCAA is, in many ways, right at the heart of that premise. What used to be tightly controlled now is not tightly controlled. What used to be unexposed is now exposed. I love it when people claim that MySpace and Facebook are the cause of teenage “problems” — the lifestyle of teens is now right out in the open for anyone to see (assuming they have the ability to do a search on the Internet for what their own kids are doing — a skill that, based on recent media reports, I should not assume parents have), and that scares the shit out of many adults. It does mean that kids growing up today will need to learn new ways to be media savvy. No longer is media literacy just about understanding how commercial mainstream media is trying to manipulate you — today you must learn how the broader communities interact with each other and what the implications of disclosure may be in and outside your immediate community. The first MySpace generation will continue to generate stories about the long-term consequences of full disclosure of socially (in the “adult world”) unsavory parts of their lives. But, before long that same generation will be making the hiring decisions — do you think they will still care that they can Google someone and find pictures of them having too much fun? I suppose time will tell.

So, I think Union Square Venture’s attempt to find a new employee by doing the job search on their blog is fascinating. I’m surprised by the lack of the meta-discussion about the implications of it. There have been a couple posts, mostly about the risks associated with posting your name on a public forum where you current boss could see it. But, I suppose that’s part of the point for them — if you aren’t someone who feels like they can let it all hang out on webland, you aren’t the kind of person they are looking for.

But, there’s another angle to me posting about that — and forgive me now for doing a bit of blogging about blogging, as I know that lots of people out there hate that (and if you do, this is a good time to stop reading this post). When I started this blog I did so mostly just because I believe in the power of peer publishing, but having such a “public” face certainly has implications for one’s career and reputation. Blogs, of course, tend to cluster — that is, most blogs you read tend to be part of a community of blogs — or a number of different communities of blogs in some cases. One obvious manifestation of that is the blogroll — something I haven’t bothered to have, as I’m not sure the world needs another random list of blogs (I have found other people, though, who think it’s actually rude to not have a blogroll!). Another manifestation are the people who comment and link to your blog — even on blogs about purely personal topics I tend to find the same small group of people doing the bulk of the commenting and that forms a de facto community of sorts. In professional cirlces I tend to find a few blogs at the “center” with many others on the “branches” — you know it’s the center based on how many people are reading/commenting/linking. This blog is not the center of anything by that criteria.

Given the title of the blog and the subject matter thus far, I suppose I’m making a statement about being part of the VC/entrepreneurship community — and, indeed, that is where my professional interests have been and will continue to be. In that light, it’s almost silly to post about the Union Square Ventures ploy to find a new employee because everyone in that community probably already knows about that — Union Square Ventures is firmly in the “center” of their blog community based on the readers/links/comments they get. But, given how new this blog is most of people reading it are still just people who happen to know me, and many of you have little interest, or at least little exposure, to that world.

I’d be curious, though — how many of you already knew about what Union Square Ventures was doing?

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia asks folks to blog about his new vision for changing political campaigns. And to the handful of folks who read this fledgling blog, I’m happy to oblige. Personally, I think this kind of thinking is, at best, ahead of its time. Don’t get me wrong here — I am a big believer in the power of peer publishing to change the very nature of our collective media experience (and, thus, our entire culture and society), but I think the notion that “The candidates who will win elections in the future will be the candidates who build genuinely participative campaigns by generating and expanding genuine communities of engaged citizens” underestimates the continued power of “mass” media methods to sway the electorate. I want what Jimmy says to be true, and in many ways the organization of the Christian Right in this country proves his point, but maybe I’m just cynical. Maybe it’s my midwestern roots — when I go back there I realize just how much of a bubble we live in here in the Bay Area (and coastal urban areas generally) when it comes to technology adoption (let alone political leanings). Having just graduated from UC Berkeley business school, where despite the fact that most of the student body considers itself reasonably tech-savvy and certainly tech-interested, I suspect more than half the class couldn’t even tell you what a wiki is, let alone how it can be used as part of a new paradigm of political campaigning. So, I wish Jimmy and his crew all the best, and I will continue to do my small part to spread the gospel of peer publishing and media empowerment, but until the MySpace/YouTube generation starts making the decisions in the halls of power, we might have another few cycles to go with big-money, image-based politics. I hope I’m wrong.

I have spent a fair amount of time in the last year or so hanging out on YouTube, IFILM, Google Video and the host of other video sharing sites that have also recently emerged. I have also done some amateur video of my own with iMovie (a very fun thing to do — and something I used to think I would never have interest in). So, it’s safe to say I’m a fan of the new wave of amateur video — and let me be honest here: I’m a TV junkie. I manage to limit the amount of time I spend actually watching TV/online video, but I could, left to my own devices, flip channels (or whatever the online equivalent of channels are — more on that some other time, perhaps) all day long.

But, I don’t find video a particularly good format for non-entertainment information. In other words, unless it’s something that is making me laugh or cry or some other explicitly leisurely emotion I don’t generally find myself making the time to watch. The latest example was a video of Kara Nortman talking about, of all things, the online video space. Now, this is a topic that I’m very interested in, and hearing from an experienced venture investor on the space is definitely right up my alley. But, sitting through a video of her talking about it is ever so tedious. First of all, you need to be in a place where having sound on is OK — in many work places that’s often not acceptable (or, in my case, catching up on various blogs and such while my wife is watching TV next to me). Sure, I could wear headphones, but when I’m doing that I generally have music on (and I’d have to stop the music to watch the video). More importantly, you can’t really skim video — I read far too many blogs to actually read every word of every article. Skimming is a must to gain cursory knowledge of lots of things and decide which few things are worth taking the time to digest fully. It might even help if there were any easy way to just plain play the video faster — people talking is a laborious way to pass along information, and only works when the speaker is very engaging in my experience (and this from someone who loves a good lecture over reading for picking something up — but, the in-person aspect of that also matters). There’s also the problem that videos like the one above tend to be very disparate — in other words, although it’s technically possible to have, for instance, an RSS feed of videos, few people serving up video of this nature are using feeds — instead they want you to click into the site (partially for the ad impressions and partially out of technical limits/vision).

I don’t have the same opinion of audio. For instance, I’m a huge fan of Doug Kaye’s fantastic service IT Conversations, but I listen to that in the car on my iPod (watching video while driving is still a no-no — but, for how long?).

Anyone found video to be a good way to get non-entertainment information? If so, where are you finding it and when are you watching it?

I was lurking on Joi Ito’s IRC channel for a while this morning, when Kevin Marks posted a link to We Feel Fine.

In addition to satisfying anyone’s inner voyeur, the site provides an interesting user experience, showing a dataset in various visualization/interactivity models. What’s more, it has it’s own API (does that automatically make it “Web 2.0″? [smirk]).

A little story on ZDNet’s Between the Lines caught my eye because as someone starting a new blog I can’t help but think a bit how what I write here will in many cases be the first (and perhaps only) impression of me that readers have (perhaps it’s just delusions of grandeur that anyone I don’t know will actually read this blog, but that’s a topic for a different time). As usual, when a topic of this nature is covered in blog/press format the interesting details and nuances are lost, but you can always dive into the publications on Judith’s (the woman the post is about) page.

Robert Young’s piece about the evolution of advertising on MySpace and other social networks made me cringe. Judging by the comments on the post many others had a similar reaction, though the tone seems to be more about the business feasibility than the social implications. In short, Young suggests that MySpace could act as a “talent agency” to identify users who are brand-friendly, and then use those folks as, in essence, spokesmodels for micro-demographics of their friends.

In the same session I read the thread on Slashdot about Craigslist, where the varied reasons a company might “turn down” huge profits was discussed. The common theme here is when business models and what the people using a service want come into some kind of tension.

In general, advertising models always exhibit this tension, of course. Even in an age of context-sensitive advertising, where the relevance is certainly much better than the broadcast-style interruption model, the ads are still the thing used to pay the bills, (I’m reminded of Comedy Central’s web site, where the annoying Flash ads are literally wrapped in a box that says “Payin’ The Bills” as if it’s “us” (you and Comedy Central) vs. the advertisers.

But, back to Young’s suggestion of having kids vie to be noticed by an advertising executive on-high in order to become a shill to their buddies. On the face of it, I tend to agree with those who think that leaving aside the cultural critique, the business model just isn’t sound, since the whole point of building of the model is to build “trust” between advertisers and audiences (the origin of Young’s idea is that advertisers are scared to have their ads placed on parts of the site, like profiles, that can’t be controlled for content that they would find objectionable to be associated with). Knowing that your friend was trying to get noticed and is now trying to entice you to buy something in order to be rewarded is hardly a way to build trust. I certainly hope that most people would just plain not subscribe to such blatant commercial exploitation of their friends, but I suppose that history has shown people will do strange things for their 15 minutes (or 15 clicks, if you will). I can’t claim to any longer have a finger on the pulse of the youth, but from I’ve seen on the amateur video sites and other centers of peer publishing, they would find some way to appropriate such crass commercialism to their own ends.

I’ll add yet another voice to the blog world linking to Don’t Cross the Debt Bitch.

At the end of last month I moved to the South Bay to be closer to my wife’s work (a professor at SJSU). Moving, needless to say, is a bitch — and very time consuming. As a result, I hadn’t read the couple dozen or so blogs I try to follow for a couple weeks, and now that I’m trying to catch up, I realize just how time-consuming it can be to follow the discussion that is the blogosphere, let alone try to engage in that discussion.

Once upon a time I didn’t even use RSS — I just had a list of bookmarks of blogs I visited regularly. I tried a few different RSS readers over the last few years, but these days I just use the built-in RSS support in Safari. At first, I wasn’t into it, but when I worked at Apple last summer I forced myself to try using it for a couple weeks, and now I’m hooked. In fact, I’m so hooked that it has become the primary reason I continue to use Safari as my primary browser, despite the fact that it continually lets me down by being either a) not compatible with the latest Ajaxy goodness (more on why that’s a damn shame in a future post), or b) damn slow. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Safari is quite a good browser (especially when you add in Saft), but I tend to have lots of windows/tabs open, and after a while it just plain bogs down (to be fair, I have found that Firefox and its derivatives aren’t much better on that front). I am hopeful that Flock, with it’s fairly decent built-in RSS reader will be my salvation, but it lacks some basic features in the latest beta (like having folders in the shortcut bar that contain various RSS feeds, or even having sub-folders at all in bookmark collections).

Anyway, the point of this post was that there are too many good bloggers. And, to make matters worse, good bloggers tend to link to other good bloggers, so during a session of catching up on a long list of blogs, I inevitably find several new blogs worth reading (thus, the large number of windows and tabs open at once), making my list of blogs to follow even longer. In the last 3 years I have had to go through a total reset on my blog feed list twice — once the list becomes too long I found it was better to just start from scratch, and the blogs really worthwhile to me come back to the list eventually. I stopped reading political blogs entirely, as they were taking up too much time and only served to agitate me (regardless of the political affiliation). I also jettisoned the notion that I would follow blogs on topics only tangentially interesting to me (though, I do continue to read a few blogs about ColdFusion, even though I rarely write code these days). Most of the blogs I read fall into one of three categories — first are friends. Despite the incredible, perpetual time-crunch of my current lifestyle, I always find time to read the blog posts of my friends, most of which are truly personal blogs, about things like kids, travels, and random life experiences. These are the kinds of blogs that people mock when they write about blogs — “who cares about picture’s of this dude’s cat?”; Answer: I do. For all the wonders of blogs I read by interesting business executives, academics, lawyers, venture capitalists, entrepreneursl, and other professional types, it’s the blogs of my friends, many of whom live far away, that really give me faith in the staying power of the personal publishing revolution. The other blogs I read tend to be either VCs or someone involved in some way with the dizzying array of interesting things happening in the world of Internet-based applications.

Anyway, given that there are too many great bloggers out there, I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide why this rambling post has managed to take up your time thus far….

This is the first post on this blog, though for me it feels simply like a continuation of my past blogging effort. That blog has been dead since I started business school, and it suffered from not staying “on topic” — mostly because it was never clear what exactly the topic was in the first place. My plan is to keep this one a bit more focused, but we’ll see. Given that very few people will even know this blog exists for the foreseeable future, a word on why I bother…

I remember when I first found the Internet. It was 1994. Sure, I had been sending email and doing research through telnet for over a year by then, but it was in (and here I will date myself) late 1994 that I decided, along with my classmate, Ben Archibald, to do an independent project about the Internet during the “January term” of 1995. At the time we came to the Internet from a social science perspective. We were interested in the cultural phenomenon of a new medium. The Internet was a new paradigm in media that we wanted to write about, as good social scientists do. But, we quickly learned that writing about the Internet would be missing the point.

Put yourself back in January 1995. The very notion that you could sell things on the web was quite a new idea — in fact, it was still controversial with a non-trivial percentage of people that constituted the “Internet community” — a term that barely has meaning today. The mainstream media was certainly abuzz about the Internet, but plenty of the stories were about whether or not it was here to stay.

Back then, Internet culture meant things like John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace — lofty stuff, to be sure, but I was fully bought in. Really, I still am. So, for me, blogging is not really a new phenomenon at all — merely a formalized set of conventions for what the Internet was supposed to be all about all along. For that matter, most of the Web 2.0 hype fits that same mold — bottom-up, distributed, open, peer-production — these are all concepts that made the Internet great even before HTTP.

So, whether anyone but a handful of my friends reads this blog isn’t terribly important as long as someone is getting something out of it. That’s the beauty of living way out here on the long tail.

As an aside, I was struck after I wrote this how similar it is to how I started my last blog nearly two years ago.