Shanti’s Dispatches

Jeff Nolan points to this interesting take on VC:

So I‚Äôm in the meeting: we‚Äôre discussing the state of our market and I get asked the question: Why enter this market now? Why not wait until there are 4 or 5 competitors and a couple of major analysts covering your market? The preamble by the questioner was along the lines of ‚Äúwe agree with your market premise ‚Äì that what you‚Äôre doing is where the market will go ‚Äì and we agree that you‚Äôre first in the market ‚Äì and we love the team‚Äù. My answer is well ‚Äì it‚Äôs ‚Äúventure‚Äù capital isn‚Äôt it? I mean ‚Äì it‚Äôs not ‚Äúeverything‚Äôs assured‚Äù capital is it? This is our profession is it not? You‚Äôre the venture investor and I‚Äôm the risk-taking entrepreneur. We form a symbiotic relationship that in the best circumstances rewards our risk taking. I mean this isn’t Government Bonds Capital right?

(via venture chronicles)

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in NYC, talks about online cannibalization.

A few of his examples of how the online world does not cannibalize the offline world:

1 - The South Beach Diet. The book was doing ok. Then the publishers cut a deal with Waterfront Media where Waterfront paid for the rights to create subscription based online newsletters with diet tips. Waterfront then went into the paid search market and bought a huge amount of keywords around the south beach diet theme and drove a ton of traffic to the South Beach Diet website where they sold these online newsletter subscriptions. Guess what happened? Sales of the book took off. It turns out that all this online advertising, which the publisher was not paying for and in fact got paid for, were having a huge crossover effect on the sales of the book itself. The Wall Street Journal did a very good piece on this story several years ago. I am not going to take the time to go back and find it, but I assume if you are a subscriber, its in the archives.

2 - Seth Godin’s Books - Seth regularly puts his books in pdf form on the web for free months before his publisher releases them in print. Sounds crazy, right? Wrong. The viral spreading of the pdf version of the book creates buzz, word of mouth, and thought leadership for Seth’s book. When he releases them in print, they go to the top of the charts for business books. Read Seth’s books and blog for details on how this works.

Read more

No exit for VCs who invested in Malware Co’s:

Our moles chime in yet again to tell us that VCs who invested in spyware/adware/malware companies are starting to feel some pain. A case-in-point is NYC-based Hotbar which raised $11M in 2000 on a $50M valuation from Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown and CE Unterberg Tobin. Hotbar is apparently now going through a round of layoffs and management changes.

Corante article on why Google is faltering on RSS.

If you don’t know why it’s hilarious, read the comments.

(via waxy.org)

LiveJournal geographical usage data as a percent of population

Some of the Stats:

STATES LJ Accts Population percent of population with LJ account
Mass. 276009 6175000 4.47%
Michigan 381845 9863000 3.87%
Florida 508773 15111000 3.37%

Unfortunately, my college days are over.

But iVentster definitely brings back memories of the good life.

You know, doin rails off a chemistry textbook. Takin hits from the hooka in a sketchy frat house. Random dudes barfing in your jacuzi. You know, the usual.

They’ve even got a blog.

Wonderin’ what VC Fred Wilson was thinking when he made an investment in del.icio.us?

You can read his thoughts on del.icio.us here:

del.icio.us is a really interesting web service that lets anyone who uses it “tag the internet”.

Most people, me included, go there for the first time, look at del.icio.us, and then shake their heads and say “I don’t get it”.

But for those who come back and actually use it, the experience is very different.

del.icio.us becomes a critical tool for them to manage their web experiences.

That’s what happened to me. That’s what happened to Brad. That’s what happened to Charlie.

So we figured we ought to pay some attention to del.icio.us.

What we learned when we dug into it is that “tagging” is a relatively new, but increasingly important, phenomenon on the web.

Simply put, tagging is the exercise of associating words, any words you want to use, with URLs. That’s all it is - a series of words and URLs. The words are the tags. But when lots of people start tagging with a similar tool and similar words, and the tags are shared, some very interesting things result.

I like to send people to the del.icio.us tag page to see what that result is.

This was also the first time I’ve seen the del.icio.us tag page. Neat-o.

Jeff Nolan over at Venture Chronicles is experiencing some FeedBurner reliability (updating) issues.

I had this problem a week or so ago, and, quite frankly, the experience is maddening.

Especially if you are using Bloglines, and have tons of subscribers through Bloglines. You’re dealing with two third-parties, both trying to talk to each other (update your feed, etc). When it doesn’t work… well, you’re just plain SOL.

This is something FeedBurner should really bust their asses on coming up here, especially with that hefty $5 mil in the bank. I’m rootin’ for em.

Apparently some people seem to think it’ll be okay for spammers to spam tag sites, as long as they say, “Hey there, just submitting a friendly penis pill advertisement into your Ajax tag stream. Oh yeah, did I mention I’m a spammer!”

Threadwatch has the scoop here:

Steve Rubel is busy jumping up and down for all he’s worth on the next moronic blogger buzzword, tagvertising, heaven give me strength, it was all i could do to hold onto my dinner reading that. Inadvertently though, he’s giving a good lesson in where the next boom for web spam may erupt…

What he’s talking about, if you have the stomach to wade through almost the complete dictionary of dumbarsed buzzwords and read his article, is using sites like del.icio.us, Technorati and Flickr to spread ideas, and gain eyeballs.

If you’ve reached this point, and have no idea of what im talking about, read this first: Tags & Folksonomies - What are they, and why should you care?

Link: Tagging Sites to get Spammed, Hard

There’s a little kerfuffle in the comments in that piece over the naming of folksonomy, tagvertising, etc.

I personally dislike “folksonomy” - tagvertising sounds pretty cheesy as well, and, obviously, has a different meaning altogether. Tagsonomy still sounds a lil too geeky also. Does every new technology (*cough* podcasting) have to usher in a new geeky name? How bout just “social tagging.”

Update: Charles Coxhead of feedrollpro offers his take on this.

Susan mernit says:

43 Things’ Erik Benson’s given new life to his book site, All Consuming, and turned it into a 43 Things for books. Recreated with flickr-like tags (think of the book title as the object) from registered users, the site (still) offers RSS feeds against members, book titles, tag topics, etc.

Link: All Consuming v2.0