Seth Levine's VC Adventure

Do you 'get' new media?

I had the chance last week to speak to a group of non-profit executive directors from about 80 local Denver/Boulder/Longmont non-profit agencies as part of a session sponsored by the United Way on “Getting the Word Out – a Mass Communication Seminar”.  I sat on a panel with a bunch of local newspaper editors which consisted of an hour of the editors talking about the best way to fax or e-mail them stories so they’d get their attention followed by 15 minutes of me saying that instead of all of that, their organizations could actually be their own media, that there was larger conversation going on across a much broader community which they could/should tap into, and that perhaps rather than pitching stories to newspapers they should think of the newspapers as added distribution for the stories they’ve already created.  

Don’t get me wrong – I think print media is great and I enjoy reading (on-line, of course) many of the local papers in my area.  But the power of new media is that it takes away the control that traditional media has on the flow of news (not to mention the determination of what is news-worthy) and puts it into the hands of the masses.  And while a story in the local paper may reach one set of constituents, a well organized (but not very costly) web site (or even just an organization blog that doubles as its web site) can get multiple messages out to multiple constituents (i.e., flickr photos of a recent fundraiser; a MySpace page to recruit college-age volunteers, dynamic web site or blog for posting updates, responding to national stories, etc.). My message was really that there’s a whole lot going on out there that non-profits (or any organization) can tap into to raise the profile of their group or cause and ultimately spread their word more broadly.

The key take-away for me, however, was not all the great things that organizations can do to broaden the reach of their message or influence the media related to their work, but rather how foreign this all was to this group of relatively tech savvy execs.  Most had some kind of web-site, although the vast majority didn’t update the content on the site even monthly; and while more than half had heard of blogging (and other forms of new media), almost none had any experience either reading, commenting on or contributing. For me this was a fundamental disconnect and good to keep in mind for future conversations. I sometimes take for granted that this world in which I spend so much time has gone mainstream, but the reality is that it hasn’t yet. I was thinking of all these great Web2.0-ie things they could do to broaden their web presence, engage their constituents in conversation and generally spread the good word; they were thinking “what’s blogging again?” 

Slow and steady wins the race….

Blogging stats

Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, has another of his series on the evolution of the blogosphere up on his site.  Most interesting to mere were the results on the dominant languages of blogging.

Here are his key takeaways (quoted directly):

- Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.

- Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.

- Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.

- About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.

- About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.

- There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.

- The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.

- Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.

TypePad and Feedburner integration

Finally!  FeedBurner and TypePad are now integrated.  Before yesterday, if you had a TypePad blog (like mine) and burned your feed through FeedBurner you were only taking partial advantage of FeedBurner's services (TypePad generates a number of feeds in different formats, and up to now, FeedBurner only captured one of these feeds).  Not only will this give you a better view of your subscriber base and their behavior on your blog, but it will also allow TypePad bloggers to take full advantage of FeedBurners's advertising and feed management services.

You can read the FeedBurner announcement here and the SixApart announcement here (along with instructions on how to get your TypePad account fully integrated).

Syndicate NYC Thoughts

Here are a couple of high level thoughts on the Syndicate Conference held a few weeks ago in New York (ok – I’m weeks late getting this up, but the next Syndicate conference isn’t for another 6 months, so from that perspective I’m early!).

First – Here’s the conference website
Next – Here’s IDG’s marketing spin post conference (which does highlight some of the announcements that came out of the week)
Finally – Here’s the conference blog site

My quick 3 take-away’s were as follows:

- there was a lot of traditional media there (Hearst, USA Today, etc.) – early adopters but mainstream nonetheless

- there were a number of large companies poking around (for example both FedEx and UPS where there)

- very few VC’s showed up; I only saw the group from my panel presentation. not sure if this was due to location (NYC) or lack of start-ups (although there were several there, some of whom were venture backed already, some of whom were not), but interesting to note.

Its just technology - comments

Andy had a good comment to my "its just technology" post, which I've been meaning to pull up to the front page.  Here it is:

I think this is a wider issue. I believe that most, if not all, early stage high tech companies suffer from the "what it is" versus "what it does" disease when selling their products.  Only the early adopter prospect who "gets it" will respond to this sales approach.  Many prospects that should be great targets may get excited about the hot technology but won't understand how it benefits them or solves any problem they care about.  They will relegate the offering to "nice to have" and won't buy - often after pulling the salesperson through a several months-long sales cycle.  I think this failure to move from product-centric to customer-business-problem-centric underlies the problem getting sales traction that a lot of new companies have - even though they are selling great technology.  So, it's a survival issue not only for new technologies but for the companies that develop them.

Syndicate - NYC

I'll be at Syndicate NY next week.  They're actually giving me a speaking role (scary, I know - something about the future of Syndication . . .).  Drop me a line of you're going to be there too.

parlez-vous blog?

Dave Sifry from Technorati put up another in his ‘state of the blogosphere’ series. This one has some pretty interesting data on the language of the blogosphere. Being a narrow-minded American I naturally assumed that English was the dominant language of the blogosphere (it certainly was by far the dominant language of the early Internet). It’s not. Not even by a longshot. English doesn’t have anything close to a plurality in the blogosphere. It’s not even the most common language of blogging (Japanese is). Hmm.

Back on the wagon

Wow. Has it really been a month since I posted? Lots of excuses about being busy and traveling a lot, but I’ve done that before and not stopped blogging. Not sure what happened – sorry about that (for those of you that noticed, that is).

One interesting observation about my unplanned hiatus: When I’m actively blogging, I often find myself viewing the world through the “blog lens”. Those of you that are bloggers will get this right away – what I’m referring to is the tendency to start looking at everything in terms of whether it would make a good blog post or not. Kind of a funny way to look at the world, but it happens when you blog a lot – probably a combination of looking for new content and more generally a rewiring of your brain to think about all things in the context of how you’d describe it to someone else. The halflife of thinking this way was probably about a 4 days. By week 2 of not blogging, I had kicked the habit - clearly reinforcing my not blogging. A good reason to not go more than a week without posting. . .

Lifescience blogging

Despite being in pretty much separate areas of technology investing, I continue crossing paths with Adam Rubenstein in a way that reminds me how small the Denver/Boulder business community really is. Adam is involved in a number of local bio related initiatives - MycoLogics, High Country Ventures and the Fitzsimons BioBusiness Incubator to name a few.

We recently had an e-mail exchange on how he might encourage more thought leaders and venture capitalists from the bio-sciences to participate in the blogosphere and I suggested that he consider using his own blog as a platform and invite VCs and business leaders to write guest posts. You can imagine my surprise today when I saw that he actually took my advice and started a guest blogger series. The first entry in the series is by Harry Ross from Aweida Venture Partners. Harry is a well respected life sciences investor and always an interesting guy to talk with. You can check out his post here. Take a look at Adam’s full blog here.

etcetera

I’ve put up a back page on my blog where I can play around with new stuff -- called etcetera. There’s a permanent link to it just below the ‘e-mail me’ on the top of the left nav bar.

I’m just starting to put some things up (tag cloud, a swicki and my del.icio.us cloud). If you bump into stuff that looks fun, send me a note about it. I’ll put up some reminder posts as I populate the page with new ideas.

Tops of 2005

My friend Daniel (sorry no link - he's not a blogger) pointed me to the BlogPulse 2005 Year in Review.  I particularly enjoyed the Top Wikipedia References (especially #5 - nice to see that Wikipedia made its own list).

Enjoy.

A del.icio.us day

Yahoo buying del.icio.us makes total sense. I have to admit that around the time Union Square invested in the company I didn’t really get it – I hadn’t understood the power of a user generated hierarchy. A few months ago I got a clue about it – late to the party, but at least there.

Congrats to Fred, Brad and to the del.icio.us team – nice work!

The ultimate RSS reader

When I asked ealier this year how you view your news I didn't exactly have this in mind, but now that I know it exists I can't imagine any better way to stay informed.

Yes - those are your RSS feeds being printed out on toliet paper.  See the engadget link here.

Thanks to Ross for sending this over.

Feed for Thought

They guys at FeedBurner (note: Mobius portfolio company) have put up a great post entitled Feed for Thought: How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued and consumed.  The article is a great read - very thoughtful about where RSS has come from and where its going. 

I was going to highlight a few points they made here, but the entire piece is a highlight and pulling stuff out won't do it justice.  Click over and read it.

My first internet date

I’m going on my first internet date tomorrow. Well – it’s actually not technically a date. For starters, I’m married and on top of that, neither of us is gay. Still, we’re meeting for coffee after many months of e-mailing, reading each others blogs and one or two times talking on the phone.

I say this all in jest, but I’m actually pretty stoked to finally meet Ben Casnocha in person. I’ve talked about him on my blog before (here), and am a big fan. 

I’ll let y’all know how it goes.

Tagging

As you could probably tell from my last post, I’m getting more onto the tagging bandwagon (I haven’t posted about this, but have in the past expressed skepticism privately to a number of you in off-line exchanges). 

In case you missed it, NPR did a nice piece on tagging this evening. Here’s a link to the story. Props to del.icio.us and flickr who were both featured prominently.

Why Microsoft needs RSS

Everyone knows that Microsoft announced at this year’s Gnomedex their support for RSS in their Longhorn (now Vista) release. A quick search on Google or Technorati comes up with plenty of people who have already weighed in on the subject (I particularly like Nick Bradbury’s post here). Most of the talk, however has been around how RSS integrates into IE (see the IE blog post on RSS integration here) and the associated ease with which IE users will be able to subscribe to feeds, create feeds and some of the ways they are extending RSS to handle lists and a common data store, etc. The rest has been centered around Microsoft’s RSS effort for developers to enable them to more easily pull feeds from applications. All great stuff, but that’s not at all why I’m excited about Microsoft embracing RSS and since no one else was writing about it I thought I’d throw my 2c into the ring.

Love it or hate it, the Microsoft Office suite is a critical part of most businesses (with apologies to Star Office . . . ). Unfortunately their organizational/search/storage/retrieval paradigm is all wrong. While trying to ease users into the computer age, Microsoft has unfortunately created programs that attempt to mimic how people use and store information in the off-line world (i.e., in logical hierarchies, folders, etc) – which limited the power of the new computing medium. This is true both within applications and between them; in our file folder hierarchies and in how we store mail; in how we save bookmarks to the admin of an LDAP directory. Anyone who has ever tried to search in Outlook for a contact for whom you had only limited information or for a file that you misplaced understands the limitation of this system – it works great for structured data, but not so great for unstructured data (i.e., if you know you’re looking for Joe Smith in your contacts you’re fine; if you remember meeting someone name Joe who was an investment banker and who you met sometime in the summer of 2003 you’re screwed). The current system is fine for storing basic information, but lacks the database like ability to assign attributes and then search on those attributes (there are some limited ways to do this both in outlook, in contacts and for files – i.e., you can create different categories of contacts or add certain information to file properties but neither is very powerful and neither is meaningfully searchable).

Enter the Internet age and people have discovered the power of unstructured data. Google built an entire service around it in the form of Gmail (lots of storage is great, but their real innovation was the elimination of folders in favor of fast and easy search and what essentially amounts to the ‘tagging’ of conversations). Both Google and Microsoft recognize it in their efforts in desktop search. And companies like del.icio.us and social text really really get it in allowing us to control how we label and categorize information. Perhaps I’m stretching some or perhaps being a bit too hopeful, but I believe RSS can bring Office into the 21^st century. Imagine being able to tag a contact or a file with various attributes that you can later quickly and easily search on. Imagine being able to subscribe to a shared document folder to know when someone in a workgroup updates a file (enabling shared folders to function almost as a wiki). Imagine being able to stop placing files in work folders altogether but rather tagging then with the pertinent information which will enable you to much more easily find them later (and remember what they were for).

Great stuff – I hope MSFT is listening . . .

Dogs on blogging

From the New Yorker . . .

RSS - Hot or Not?

A recent Nielson/NetRatings poll (story here) showed a huge gap between the have’s and the have-not’s. Specifically they asked respondents about their usage of RSS and found that 66% either hadn’t heard of RSS or didn’t know what it was used for and that only 11% of web log readers used RSS to monitor blogs (less than 6% of users overall use RSS according to a Pew Research study from January).

There are definitely some implications for those (increasing number) of us who are investing in and trying to grow RSS related businesses (and we’re clearly still in the early stage of the adoption curve for RSS enabled technologies – see Bill Burnham’s great post on the subject here)

That is not what I want to talk about here, however. What I want to talk about is something much more basic about how we are looking at the emerging industry that is building around RSS. I want to talk about “42”

Those of you who grew up in the 70’s an 80’s (or who saw the recent movie) might recognize 42 as the much anticipated answer to the ultimate question in Douglass Adams’ classic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Not exactly what the universe was expecting and most of the 4 part Hitchhiker’s trilogy then chronicles the search for THE ULTIMATE QUESTION. The point being that sometimes the answer we get is because we didn’t understand the question.

I worry about this with RSS. RSS is a technology - not an industry, not a service, not an application. It’s a (somewhat) standardized format for shipping around XML content. Not particularly interesting by itself – it becomes much more interesting when you lawyer something on top of it (access to your favorite blog or podcast; information about your upcoming trip to Aruba; updates on the top accounts you are working on in your SFA or CRM system, etc.). Techno-geeks understand what you mean when you say things like “what’s your RSS strategy” and “how are you implementing RSS” – just like they understand that SMTP underpins e-mail or that SOAP is what facilitates communication for apps using web services. Everyone uses e-mail – very few people know what SMTP is. Most people make use of .NET or web services enabled applications – I’d guess that most have never heard of SOAP outside of the bathroom.  Both are important technologies, but for the most part behind the scenes. 

We need to raise the level of conversation (and action) around RSS.  We can turn “RSS” from a description of an enabling technology into the common name for accessing information through feeds in a central repository (in the same way that successful companies turn their names into verbs), but we need to focus on what RSS does (and building stuff on top of the technology), not just on the technology itself. I’m not at all surprised when I read stats like the one above – we’re still in the early stages of building an industry around a new technology; still early in the hype curve; still figuring out the potential.

As the saying goes: “It’s not the technology . .  it’s what you do with it that counts.”

Josh King and the corporate development perspective

Here’s today’s shocker – VC’s don’t have all the answers.  Those of you who are not VC’s have known this all along, but for people on the inside it’s a slow process of realization (I think I’m on about step 8).

Seriously, though, as much as its amusing to poke fun at VCs (and our increasing propsnsity to blog), I do really like to see new non-VC folks throw their hats in the ring to talk about the world of operating growing businesses.  Because of my background, I’m especially fond of reading what people in the corporate development world have to say (which is in part why I encouraged Daniel to write a guest post for my M&A series). 

Josh King is doing just that and I’d like to officially welcome him to the blogosphere. And with a blog named “corporate tool” we know he’ll bring some humility to his writing <g>.  Welcome Josh!

We still have a long way to go

I’m leaving for a week’s vacation tomorrow (see my vacation curve post – I’m past the inflection point again) and I’m not planning on checking my e-mail regularly.  To keep down on e-mail clutter, my secretary is going to monitor my mail and delete or move things out of my inbox that are not important or that don’t have immediacy.  To make sure the right stuff stays and goes, I’m making a list of things that I would like her to keep and things that she can move or throw out.  This process has highlighted for me how many things I get delivered to my inbox that should be sent via RSS – all the updates, tech dailies, vc weeklies, investment banking research reports, etc.  My list of things to discard is shockingly long.  All of this is really unnecessary – everything in that group should really be delivered via RSS (I already subscribe to a long list of update or keyword search type feeds through RSS, but the ones on this list are not available in that format yet), which would allow me to be in better control (the Outlook filtering functions aren’t very reliable) and not have to bug someone else with my e-mail clutter.

Next vacation I hope not to have to do any of this. . . .

Toys

Here’s some stuff I’ve been playing with that I’ve been meaning to post about:

First is MyBlogLog, which tracks links people follow from my blog site.  It also tells me how many page views were served from my site. Since I serve full feeds this doesn’t capture all of my link traffic (I miss everything that isn’t clicked directly from the site itself), but I get enough direct site hits to extrapolate these data to my subscriber base. If you want you can also put up a chicklet on your site that shows your most popular links.  It’s easy to set up (you have to embed a small amount of code on your site) and intuitive to use.  Some more flexible reporting and perhaps different UI for reports would be helpful, but I’m sure Eric is working on those.  If you blog and you care about user stats (what am I saying - all bloggers care about their user stats!) this is a great tool to have.

I’ve written a few posts (here and here and here) that reference better ways to view information. While the UI of TagCloud is pretty lacking its still a HUGE step in the direction I’m talking about.  You can point a bunch of blogs to this tool and it will pick out the overlapping words.  Yah – this needs a NLP engine to really be useful and pull out full concepts rather than single words.  Still it’s a great idea. Now they just need to make it look more like this. (thanks to Walker for pointing me to this site)

Last is Smartfeed which unfortunately I can’t play with directly because I’m lame (of course you already know that) and have an old, monochromatic, can hold phone numbers and play some stupid ‘snake’ game but not much else, phone.  I met Kevin Cawley who wrote it, however (he lives in Boulder and he let me play with it on his phone).  It’s an interface for downloading podcasts onto Windows Mobile Edition powered cell phones. I’m starting to get more on the podcasting bandwagon (at least for some things – by the way, Newsgator released a podcasting client that rocks and that I’m now using as my main podcatcher) and as soon as I upgrade my phone I’m all over it.
 
Any other cool stuff out there?

Gnomdex Redux - As if you where there

Sorry – meant to have this one up a little more proximate to the actual event . . .

You go to Gnomdex? Me neither.  I was bummed I missed it, so I spent some time rummaging around on Google and Technorati looking for some links.  Here’s a few that I found that, while they don’t replace the experience of attending in person, at least give you a little bit of the flavor.

Here’s the conference site. - http://gnomedex.com/

Here’s the conference update site (scroll down and track the action) - http://gnomedex.com/updates/

Here’s the conference blog roll (links to attendees who blog) - http://www.gnomedex.com/updates/2005-04.phtml

Here’s some photos put up by “laughing squid” - here and here.

Of course the big announcement at Gnomdex was Microsoft’s broad support in Longhorn for RSS. Nick Bradbury had a great review here.

I’ll see you there next year. <g>

Wouldn't it be great . . .

Wouldn't it be great if you could subscribe to the comments of certain blogs (or better yet, to certain posts) in your reader?  I'm going to add it to my wish list (we're actively working through these sorts of ideas at both Newsgator and Feedburner).

I must have reached some kind of critical mass in my readership where I'm actually getting a reasonable number of comments and trackbacks to my posts.  It got me to look at the comments to some of the other blogs that I read (I rarely visit sites directly - rather I read them in Newsgator).  Turns out that there are great comments out there that I'm completely missing.  The solution for the moment is to click through on posts that I particularly like or think will be well commented to and see what's posted, but wouldn't it be great to be able to subscribe to these and read them directly in your reader.  In an ideal world you could subscribe to comments for only those posts that you care to see feedback on.  Yup - that would be pretty cool . . .

Podcasting on the rise

I wrote a post last month on my way back from some meetings at Feedburner about some trends in the RSS world.  In it I noted that Podcasting was on the rise and promised to link to more details once Feedburner posted them.  They did that today  - you can check out their report here.  Clearly podcasting is taking off.  To quote from the report:

It took us [FB] nine weeks to manage our first thousand podcasts, and we added our most recent thousand podcasts in under a month. As you can see, the rate of growth changes in bursts. We added about 800 podcasts per month initially, then 1000 a month, and now we're adding about 1400 a month

Podcasting is an interesting phenomenon.  I'm not sure I completely get it in its current incarnation (I listen to a few podcasts, but its frankly hard to find the time to fit them in).  Stepping back. however, I think the technology makes a lot of sense - just an easier way of storing, shipping around and retrieving audio and video files.  I can think of plenty of scenarios where this would fit into a corporate infrastructure (i.e., training, compliance, etc.).  I'm sure that's all coming . . .

 

The state of the feed world

I’ve had Feedburner on the mind recently (my last post was on the company as well).  I’m on my way back from our first post investment board meeting in Chicago as I type this and I had a chance to spend yesterday afternoon playing around with their system (read: see how many hits and how many subscribers are being served to various sites that have burned their feed). 

Lots of interesting data there.  Feedburner is preparing a post on this, so I won’t steal their thunder, but I will share three data points that struck me:  First, the number of subscribers to the largest feeds is pretty amazing - the top sites have literally hundreds of thousands of subscribers.  Second, the growth of podcasts is pretty amazing – there were no podcasts in the top 15 a few months ago; now there are several.  Finally, there are now few porn blogs that are starting to climb the list (I guess that was to be expected, although I was hoping the feed world would stay a little more pure than that).  Interestingly based on their hits vs. subscriber ratios, it appears that these sites are having their content scraped a lot vs. actually having subscribers to their feeds.

I’ll post a link to the Feedburner post when it goes up – it will be full of interesting data on the growth and popularity of feeds.

Feedburner clarified

David Jackson, who is the author of The Internet Stock Blog (as well as a series of other blogs on investing and technology), was kind enough to add me to his recommended VC blog list. As part of our exchange about this I noticed that he hadn’t ‘burned’ his feeds through Feedburner (which is a Mobius backed company). I asked him why he hadn't done this and he replied with some really good questions about their service.  I thought I would reprint them here, along with my responses with the idea that if David, as a sophisticated blogger, had these questions other people probably do as well.

David writes:
I've resisted using Feedburner, because:
1. It's not clear to me how to migrate my current RSS feeds to them (without asking everyone to re-subscribe)
2. The company's web site gives very little information about the service
3. I'm nervous entrusting my RSS feed to a company that might try to monetize it in future in ways I don't want
4. I expect that Google's RSS ads will end up providing fairly rich stats about the RSS feeds anyway

Here’s my response (actually in two e-mails, which I’ve combined here):
1. If you have control over the http directives on your site you can burn your feed without any change to your subscribers. See this post from the Feedburner forum http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=3.
2. I totally agree - their site pretty much sucks. I expect this will take some time to change, but they're starting to hire up (they were 5 guys when we made our investment - we're up to 10 and growing).
3. I get the concern, but can tell you that they absolutely won't do anything to your feed that you don't request. Here's Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo's post on the financing that talks about their business model - http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2?m=68. They are going to make money by managing feeds, by offering premium statistics and by taking a cut of ads in feeds (but ads will only be inserted in feeds that sign up for them).
4. Google stats I think will only provide you stats on the ads themselves, not the feeds. FB's total stats pro package provides pretty in depth info on what people are reading and where they are coming from (you can trial this package on their site). Also with Google ads you have to have edit the source template, which is a pain (and something not everyone is able to do) and also means that you have to insert feeds into all of your posts (given the way most readers work, FB generally only inserts feeds in a portion of feeds to keep the content to ad ratio reasonable).

Don’t know if I convinced David to move over to Feedburner or not, but he knows I’ll keep on him . . .

Look for announcements soon from Feedburner on some very large feeds now using their service.

UPDATE: I received a trackback ping from Dadu Mimram writing on Strategic Board Blg - a great perspective from a Feedburner user and much more eloquent than my original post.  See Dadu's post here.

Why blog?

Paul Kedrosky writes on his blog:

Here is a puzzler: Why are there so many venture capital blogs? It is hard not to notice that there a host of such things out there, from Brad Feld's to Fred Wilson's, and everyone in between. Here are five possible hypotheses:

1. Professional service firms are highly branded by individual, so it makes sense to get out there and present yourself as a way of attracting deal flow.

2. There are just as many legal/financial/other blogs, but those people aren't as good at getting media attention.

3. Venture capitalists don't have enough to do.

4. Having a blog as a technology VC is a way of demonstrating your technical competencies.

5. Having a blog is a way to lay out your thought process about markets and technologies, thus demonstrating your added value as a putative investee board member.

Let me add my 2c: 1 and 5 are generally on target – ultimately VC investing is about the people involved and the partner (or principal) you work with is more meaningful than the firm as a whole. 3 is off base – Brad is one of the busiest guys I know. My sense is that Fred is extremely busy as well and the two together are some of the most prolific VC bloggers around. I’m definitely not lacking for things to work on and as a result tend to write my blogs while traveling or in the evening. Perhaps 4 is a motivator to some VCs, but really – how hard is it to set up a blog anyway? I can’t imagine anyone really feels that blogging adds much in the way of technical credibility. I have no clue on 2.

That said, here are some other possible reasons – at least from this VC blogger:

6. Writing things down requires more/better thought. The thought that goes into a post requires some time and attention. It’s easy to start to develop a “thesis” about something – to use a VC cliché that I’m not very fond of – but much harder to really understand something to the point of being able to organize your thoughts into a blog post. 

7. Playing with the technology is interesting/helpful. This is different from 4 – I’m not talking about trying to prove to anyone that you are a technologist (I’m not one). I’m talking about getting your hands dirty and seeing what’s out there to get a better lay of the land (Mobius is an investor in Technorati, Newsgator and Feedburner, for example, so its directly relevant to my work).

8. Good VCs benefit from better educated entrepreneurs. Too much of venture capital seems like a black hole to many entrepreneurs. Perhaps this drives better deals for VCs, but ultimately an uneven playing field doesn’t really benefit anyone. Writing about how to give better VC pitches or what term sheet terms actually mean is a way of shedding light into the vortex and demystifying venture capital. Clearly, education is a theme across many of the VC blogs out there.

9. Creating a name. This is totally personal and perhaps only applicable to me, but it’s an important part of why I blog, so its worth mentioning. I imagine this is more true for the small number of non-partner VC bloggers like myself, but let’s face it – the VC world has a hierarchy and I’m trying to climb my way up it. Blogging is a way to give myself a voice that can perhaps be heard beyond my firm (The Wall St. Journal isn’t exactly beating down my door for quotes at the moment). I imagine this is a motivator for partner VC bloggers as well (although I don’t know that they would admit it as readily)

I’ve been meaning to post on this topic (might as well be transparent about what I’m trying to get out of this experience). Thanks Paul for the push to finally get this down on paper.

Also see Jeff Clavier's response to Paul's question here.

Your on-line world

Remember The Brain?  It was a cool technology for people to map out linkages in their universe. Companies could use it to map out enterprise relationships; individuals could use it to keep track of who knew whom in their universe (a precursor to the social networking concept); they even had some search capabilities that allowed you to view your search results in terms of how they mapped to each other (they call this the WebBrain).  Interesting stuff.

In my continuing search for better ways to represent data (see my original post on the subject here), I also came across MyDensity (thanks for Brady Bohrmann for pointing it out to me).  Its powerful stuff – basically a way to visually map out linkages for any site.  Try it on your blog (or anyone else’s for that matter) – it’s fascinating to see the mini-universe that is your on-line life).  This technology alone doesn’t solve the data representation problem that I’ve been writing and thinking about a lot lately but its another piece of the puzzle. 

Somewhere in all these data is the secret sauce I’m looking for.  Please write if you have ideas or thoughts to share.

UPDATED FROM THE ORIGINAL POST FOR A MISSING LING

Making the RSS world a more user friendly place

I’ve been thinking about the ways that I interface with feeds that I read. Specifically, how I parse through information, how I figure out what I want to read and subscribe to and how I’d like view different types of information.

I see a couple of problems with the proliferation of information brought upon by the explosion of RSS. Specifically, with so much noise, how does one cut through all the chatter to focus on what you really want to hear? The issue is not just how do I figure out what blogs or news feeds to subscribe to (that’s actually pretty easy) – it’s the broader question of how do I manage those feeds; how do I capture information on topics I care about that are published in feeds I don’t care about; and how can I organize my information capture so I spend more time reading what I want to read vs. figuring out what I want to read.

I’ve read the attention.xml spec (and a bunch of related posts on the topic). I’ve played around with del.icio.us and read Fred’s post on why it’s cool (I’m still working on understanding that). I’ve set up keyword searches in Technorati. I’ve sort of played around with tagging in Technorati. None is getting me there (yet).

This is a real problem in the RSS world. With the number of blogs and feeds proliferating (Technorati says they now track almost 9m weblogs and over 1bn links; and that doesn’t even include all of the feeds from newspapers, magazines, on-line news, etc) there’s a lot of info to parse through. This is just too much information to get through and technology is behind the curve on figuring out how to help us deal with this volume.

Without jumping into the debate on things like attention.xml, tagging, etc and assuming that this broader solution will eventually get figured out (lots has already been said on the subject and frankly my opinions are biased – in both directions - based on my firm’s investments in Technorati, Newsgator and Feedburner) here are a few things that I’d like to see changed/developed RIGHT NOW to make my RSS life easier:

- Data formatting: I wrote a post about this recently. I’d like to have some ability to view large amounts of data (i.e., what a lot of people are writing) in an easily digestible format. Sometimes you don’t want to read specific feeds – just know what a group of people are talking about.

- Subject level subscriptions part 1: Why can’t I subscribe to just some subject areas of certain blogs? Some of the blogs I read have 50% or higher waste – topics I don’t really care about. I should be able to subscribe to specific topics only.

- Subject level subscriptions part II: Ditto the above concept, but for key-word searches. I’d like to be able to point a filter at only certain feeds – say InfoWorld – and return only their stories from only their feeds that I’m interested in.

- Subject level subscriptions part III: Why can’t publishers get better at this? I love Slate, for instance; but I hate the fact that I need to subscribe to their entire site to get their feed (as opposed to certain authors or even just specific sections of their site) – I shouldn’t need to parse through 100 Slate posts a day to get the 3 subjects I care about.

- Feed Sharing: This one seems like it should be simple. My version of attention.xml is called Brad Feld. He has the capacity to sort through more information than I can and he sends me stuff that’s interesting. That works well for me and, importantly, it cuts down on the feeds I need to read, but the process should 1) be simpler and 2) be broader. Brad (or anyone else) should be able to easily set up a ‘favorites’ list that I can subscribe to. When Brad is reading something in his RSS reader that he likes he should be able to hit a button and publish that post (not the whole feed – just the single post) to a “Feld Favorites” feed which I can subscribe to.

Sounds easy enough. Lets get on it.

Ma

Burn me!

I complained a while back about how much the feed stats in TypePad suck.  I then proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it, I guess figuring that site stats were something that would be high on their priority list and they would somehow figure it out.  Well, they haven't so I have a request to make.

The basic problem I have with the TypePad stats is that they don't provide me good data on who is subscribed to my feed.  About a week into writing this blog I started using FeedBurner - which has much better information about who is reading my posts.  The problem is that  my FeedBurner stats only capture people who subscribed after that first week - and I know that a bunch of people subscribed in the first few days after I put up my first post (a result of some shameless self promotion I did). 

A few people suggested after my last post  on the subject that I simply ask people to re-subscribe to the feed using my new FeedBurner URL.  I put that off for a few months, but I think its time.  My request is simple - would you check the source URL for your subscription to this feed.  I would appreciate it if you could make sure it is:

                                            http://feeds.feedburner.com/VC_Adventure

Thanks.

How do you view your news?

As an investor in an RSS aggregator (Newsgator - far and away the best of the reader platforms out there; although I suppose I'm biased) I pay attention to how people use syndication services and how they use, manage, manipulate and read their news and blog feeds. I’ve played around with some of the different technologies in the space – most of which are variations of the same theme (very effective for reading individual posts, not as effective for sorting through large amounts of information).

Today Adam Rentschler sent me links (here and here) to a couple of sites that use RSS feeds (and a Google-like measure of what certain news sources are reporting on) to create a visual map of the news and events that are being reported on/talked about. The technology behind this was created by the Hive Group.

To borrow from Adam’s note to me “creative data representation is cool stuff”

True, but what would be even cooler would be the ability to create custom data representations. What if you could pick the source data for the honeycombs (The Hive Group’s term for their way of representing information)? Have one for your favorite news sources. Another for blogs. Better yet, one for the hundreds of blogs that you want to read but never have the chance to. How about a map of all the speech in the blogsphere (Dave S? Howard K?). It’d be a fast and effective way to see what people are talking about.

Yup – that really would be cool . . .

A small step?

This is a totally vain story, but I’ve been asked about this a few times, so I’ll repeat it here – plus it goes to the heart of why I blog which is something I realized in looking over some of my posts that I haven't been writing much about. (This reminds me that still haven’t finished my post on ‘is blogging about vanity?’ yet – not sure what’s keeping me from doing that . . .).

Over the past couple of months I’ve been asked how I might measure my success as a blogger. I’m blogging for two primary reasons:
        1) I want to make a name for myself. I’m a young VC who wants to stay in the venture capital world and have an impact – with my ideas; with the companies I fund; with the causes I support. I’m also located in Colorado and as such am somewhat isolated from VC ground zero, the Bay Area. Getting my voice out there supports my efforts to connect with other VCs and entrepreneurs and, I hope, will make me both a better venture capitalist as well as a better known venture capitalist (both of which I hope will allow me to do this for a long time).
        2) I find it helpful to put my thoughts down on paper. I’ve always enjoyed writing (it’s the liberal arts major in me). It’s like taking a long bike ride – it helps me process and organize my thoughts and forces me to more thoroughly think through the subjects that I post on (see my blog on the difference between starting a blog and finishing a blog here).

With this as background, the answer that I usually give people who ask me about how I’ll know if I’m doing what I intend to by blogging is that I’ll know that its working when I’m introduced to someone I’ve never met before and they say something to the effect of ‘nice to meet you . . . you know, I read your blog.’

Well wouldn’t you know that this exact thing happened to me last week at VC in the Rockies. It was actually pretty cool. No doubt I have a long way to go as a Blogger, but I hope this is a sign that things are moving in the right direction.

The Masses Speak

A couple of days ago the following story hit my inbox from Marketwatch (story below, link here):

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- While you watch the Super Bowl, dozens of online-savvy consumers and Web loggers will be watching the Net to see how the game's TV commercials are playing in Peoria.

 

Intelliseek Inc. of Cincinnati and New Media Strategies of Arlington, Va., have lined up dozens of people to surf Web sites, blogs and message boards to get a fast read on the effectiveness and popularity of marketers' commercials. With TV costing as much as $2.4 million for a 30-second spot, companies want to know whether their money was spent wisely.

 

As people post comments about the ads on the Web, the marketing companies' monitors will report what's being said.

 

"Conversations all over the Internet, from message boards to blogs and beyond, now allow us to get a true pulse in real time," said NMS Chief Executive Pete Snyder in a statement. His firm is doing a similar monitoring process of the entertainment industry and the Oscars contest.

 

"Studio execs and entertainment insiders watch very closely what people are saying online," he added.

 

Besides the companies whose products are being pitched, advertising agencies are also interested in the results. Marketing officers hope they've chosen the right creative teams and campaign strategies.

 

It's important that agencies, even more so than brands, are getting the right kind of buzz," said Snyder, in a comment reported by Media Post.

A couple of things struck me about this article. First – it’s great to see the blogsphere being recognized as a place where the masses gather to talk about current issues. While not exactly old school, this concept isn’t completely new – plenty has been written about blogging around the Democratic and Republican conventions (and around the election more generally). Still – it’s clear that more and more the blog space is being looked to as a microcosm of society as a whole.

Second, it’s also fantastic to see that corporations are paying media companies to monitor speech in the blog-world. Clearly they buy into premise #1 and feel that what bloggers are saying is important to understand and monitor.

While this is all great, what really struck me about this story is how backwards these companies are going about the business of measuring speech in the blogsphere. Am I reading this piece correctly – are these media firms actually hiring a bunch of people to manually search the web during the super bowl to try to figure out what bloggers are saying about the advertisements? Are they passing this off as scientific or statistically valid research?  Do they really think they can ‘get the true pulse’ of what is being said in this way? I’m picturing a bunch of people sitting in a big room in front of computers polling Technorati with random key-word searches trying to figure out what’s being written about sky-diving airplane pilots chasing after a six-pack of Bud.

This reminds me of a story from a company I worked with before I joined Mobius. It was about 1998 and the early days of the automated testing market. A web site operator contacted a company I was working with (it was a testing consulting firm that was a partner of ours) and asked if we would be able to arrange for 30,000 people to hit his web-site at the same time to see if it could handle the load (he actually thought we had thousands of people at the ready to do this). Pretty amusing, but in the context of a time before the wide adoption of testing tools it wasn’t completely out there. These days, most development shops, of course, have a QA group and make use of relatively simple (and inexpensive) off the shelf software for testing their software.

Similarly, the way these media firms are going about measuring blog speech is equally as quaint as the guy who asked the testing firm to coordinate 30,000 people to hit his web-site (and just as clumsy). Technology already exists that can enable wide scale measurement of speech by bloggers (see Umbria Communications for the best example of this – note: we are not investors in the company, although it is Colorado based and I know the CEO, Howard Kaushansky, well). To me, this technology is critical to the overall development of blogging. If the blogsphere is to become relevant as a medium for measuring the thoughts and views of society we have to be able to measure what it is saying en masse. While my blog may be relevant to a small (hopefully growing) segment of the universe (and I hope have some influence on how people think about the topics I post on) the power of my speech is amplified greatly when it is combined with that of others. I don’t mind being one voice among many – I just don’t want to be stuck only as a voice alone. The Internet and the blogsphere by extension is a technology platform – lets make sure we're making use of technology to measure it as well.

I need better user statistics

I just set up FeedBurner on my site to start tracking readers.  I should have done this a long time ago (where long time = 7 days ago when I started my blog).  I’m pretty bummed with the stats that are available on TypePad.  By pretty bummed, I mean that the stats are essentially useless.  They don’t have any information on click-through nor do they tell me either what aggregators are hitting my site (although I can see a little of this in the referrers section, which is pretty much the only part of their statistics that I find useful) and they definitely don’t tell me how many underlying readers there are for my site because they can’t surface information on how many customers each aggregator is pulling for. 

 

I’m going to write a future post on the vanity of blogging, but suffice it to say for the moment that I (and most bloggers that I know) check my stats pretty regularly.  Its not that I’m specifically trying to vie for a large audience (although it’s nice to know that the work I put into my site is being seen by others), but I’m still interested in how many people are reading what I’m putting out there.

 

So FeedBurner will help this problem, but the way its works is to essentially alias my site through their system.  That’s fine, but anyone who has already pulled my site into their aggregator won’t show up in these stats since they aren’t pulling from the aliased site (they don’t exist as far as FeedBurner is concerned).  I could solve this, I suppose, by hosting my own domain, using MovableType (or some other software) instead of Typepad and redirecting all of my site traffic through FeedBurner.  Then again, the reason I’m using Typepad in the first place is so I don’t have to do that.

 

I’m just venting. Brad told me the very first day I started blogging to set up FeedBurner and, as I sometimes do, I basically pushed off his advice until it became very clear that he was completely right and now I blame him for not locking me in my office until I set it up a week ago.  Seriously, though – setting up FeedBurner right away would have allowed me to capture the information I want.  By waiting a week, I basically lost information on several hundred readers that I can’t recapture until I either create my own site or until TypePad improves their stats.

 

So if anyone from SixApart is out there listening – sharpen your statistics and make them into something that’s actually useful for your users.

 

[end of rant]