Essential - Roller skates should go into the essential budget. re: http://ff.im/4zLrJ #

I’m going - but if you want to do a meetup earlier - I am in seattle. See you there if not. I’ll be the… re: http://ff.im/4yn7y #

Liked “The Dinosaur Cake on Flickr - Photo Sharing!” http://ff.im/-4vceJ #

dang spell checker. re: http://ff.im/4mHfA #

Your life as you understood it has now changed re: http://ff.im/4AwHK #

@e_dythe Vista huh? in reply to e_dythe #

@LPH Grin - thanks, I needed that re: http://ff.im/4FynX #

@bwana - send over a copy - i’ll put it on my web site as well. re: http://ff.im/4EAPF #

Marine Corps Anthem (thanks AFRTS). re: http://ff.im/4Gr29 #

That is exactly why I take the bus downtown . re: http://ff.im/4JoZ9 #

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Probably one of the few useful conventions you go can go to when it comes to mixing and meeting some of the more interesting folks in social media is upcoming in August, with some surprise bonuses along the way.

The best surprise bonus is that the ticket price has been lowered significantly because of the economy; you can pickup tickets to the actual convention for around 200 dollars, while you can wander the floor for 75 dollars and see who all will be showing off their cool new stuff. This is one of the bigger social media events in Seattle that draws a global audience, and is not quite like any other convention you have been to. Seattle 2.0 has some coverage (mostly meet up coverage), and the official web site is right here. The Gnomedex FAQ is right here and filled with great information you can use. You can also see the pictures I took of Gnomedex last year right here. Some of the coverage I did last year of the convention is here, and a video of Chris Pirillo talking about Human Circuitry is right here (via YouTube) when he did an interview for Techwag.

Honestly I had a great time last year and am looking forward to it this year. The guest speakers this year are Phil Plait from Bad Astronomer, Christine Peterson, Michael Manna from the T4 Show, Warren Etheredge from the Warren Report, Bre Bettis and a pile of others to go along with it. This year promises to be just as much fun as last year, although the two day event feels like you have been run through a marathon by the time you are done because there is so much information available to you at the convention. So might be time to check it out and see if this is the convention for you, if you go give a shout out, and let me know if you want to do a quick meetup and say hello.

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In a world of 12,000 dollar startups, is the VC Model that we currently have broken or it just time for a change in when companies will need a huge infusion of cash to keep on growing. There are limits to bootstrapping, and when you have hit those limits, and the company is taking off but needs more money then an Angel or a VC is a good place to ask. But what about companies that are perking along quite nicely, and do not need an infusion of cash, those companies that are growing on a nice steady upwards curve, and can afford everything they need to keep growing?

Techflash and Nathian Kaiser, two awesome people to get to know and both are startups are seriously taking a look at the VC model. Nathan has done well by his web site NPost, and Techflash is also doing fine. Probably the most interesting viewpoint into this is thinking what I would do with my startup and getting VC money. The bottom line is that I don’t need it, and do not necessarily want it either at this point. I also am not looking for angel funds either as I am doing a supportable growth rate. And while I will make bet the bank deals with my company, all of it is managed through a company line of credit that is backed personally. My own startup (still not registered locally at Seattle 2.0 either) has been doing phenomenally well over the last year, and averaging the kind of returns that a VC would love to have, 300 to 400 percent per month depending on what month you look at.

While we started out phenomenally small, the projections are beyond what we thought we should be doing, but then there is the rub, I don’t want or need VC or Angel investing. There are angels and VC’s that would invest in my business, but I don’t need them. The steady growth is going where it needs to go, and doing better than projections. While the VC’s might be looking for huge payouts, M&A or IPO buy outs, the bottom line is that there are companies out there that will not return what a VC or Angel fund needs to get from their investment. As mentioned, as an asset class, maybe it is time for VC’s to rethink their processes. I would rather personally invest in a business and help that business grow rather than do a pool resource like a VC as well. While the percentage wins are low, the first person to come up with a formula to determine winners in the technology field will also be the first investment group that really starts cleaning up.

Maybe one way to check the viability of a company is to check the buzz around it, and what kind of buzz the company is getting. While Techcrunch, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray and others are the leaders of the pack in helping build buzz for a company, there are few that they truly love. They might have vested interest in companies, and those are worth looking at from a funding viewpoint. This does not need to be a winner in the traditional sense, but where are the technology word of mouth leaders right now. They are in friendfeed, they are in their own projects like the crunch pad or Building 43 or Burn URL. These might be worth looking at, but you also have to ask are they worth investing in at the same time.

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Oversharers is a brand new web site started in January 2009 that has been silently collecting a large collection of people who share way too much on line. Given that the real time web is like watching a really bad episode of the Jerry Springer show, Oversharers is a laugh a minute comedy ride presenting information that people just should not have shared.

Oversharers and Tweeting Too Hard are two different web sites but both will leave you laughing for hours because it is hard to believe that people will share what they share online, or that they can be so amazingly self centered. While we can laugh at this the same way we laugh at the Jerry Springer show, there are a couple of important things to know about.

1. Tweeting too Hard and Oversharers while funny also show that people just do not understand that people will find what they say amusing, but that some things are better left unsaid. Sharing too much or being too self centered is an issue with the real time, or any time web.

2. It is stunningly amazing what people will put on the internet without thinking about the bigger ramifications of what they are saying. People will Google you, if they see that you are talking about your period, drug use, or sound too vain, it will be harder to get a job in the future.

While we can talk about being safe on the internet, the advent of sites like tweeting too hard and Oversharers really point to a bigger issue, people are not getting the idea that what they post on line is forever, and that potential mates, employers, and others are going to find this stuff, read it, and make a value call. In the longer run these issues will only grow more apparent and more pervasive if not more dangerous to those who are involved. We can talk about it, we can try to address the issues, but in the longer run, it is going to be the people who are over sharing now that need to stop and think for a moment. What is the longer term damage that they are going to do to their reputations and livelihood, then work out a way to undo the damage that they have done to themselves.

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Honestly, no one could be more surprised than I am about following in Robert Scobles footsteps. Back in August of last year I wrote a quick write up on how Robert got started in Social Media, blogging, and how he parlayed that into a viable career for himself. When Robert got started, blogs were still new technology, now we accept them as a day to day thing we read, visit, or do. Here is how my current career is following in Roberts’s footsteps 10 years after Robert got started with his career.

Robert had Dave Winer and Dori Smith to turn him onto blogs, and they told him that this is the next big thing, and they were right. I had a number of equally excellent people who turned onto blogs in 2005, and soon after I started talking about technology, and how to use it, I was picked up by Toolbox.com as a stringer. After a couple of years of writing at toolbox (and I still write on toolbox) I started my own blog, this one here, techwag, and have been keeping it going since then. Toolbox is my professional portal, they pay me, techwag is my passion, I love being here. You can see the parallels between what Robert was doing on his own blog, and what he was doing for Channel 9 when he was recruited from NEC to Microsoft.

We have both had our share of controversies in the mean time, from Kathy Sierra through to today and Michael Arrington along with the general state of hate messages that we sometimes get on our blogs, in our email, and in the case of Michael, up front and personal. While my controversies have not ended up in death threats (yet), I have been accused of everything under the sun, and even my parentage has been called into question. Thank goodness my Mom reads my blog(s) and she has a wicked sense of humor towards trolls.

We both use our popularity, or audience to evangelize the things we believe in, for me I believe that education has to enable students to be work ready. For Robert it is everything shiny and new, new toys, new people, new processes. We both passionately believe in what we are saying, and we discuss those issues openly. Because we are using our “fame” in a constructive way (most of the time, sometimes we fail to do this and it costs us each time) to promote or support the things we believe in, those messages come through, people listen, and we help people come to decisions about what they want to do, or what they want to buy, or simply (hopefully) inspire them to reach beyond themselves and do something wonderful.

We both have huge support groups, people we know, and we really truly appreciate. We are both open minded enough to listen to new voices. We even tick people off about the same time with our stances (and sometimes Robert and myself are on opposite poles of an issue or on a debate).

While we both use our fame for “good” at least as much as we can when we are simply talking about stuff and not being polarized by the tragedy or blogger outrage of the day we really do parallel each other. While I am just starting on this one, my social media project for the school has in many ways also paralleled Channel 9’s own development under Robert. This is where using the “Robert Method of Success” in some ways has seriously paid off for what I am doing here at work. Sometimes being an evangelist is a good thing, and going back through the public record of Roberts’s career is interesting, that method works quite well today, and right now it is working quite well for me.

While the parallels are spooky at times, in the longer run it will be interesting ot revisit this topic in about four years and see what this parlays into.

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Yahoo 360, one of the odder attempts at social networking is closing its doors on the 13 July 2009. In an email message to people who use the service they state:

Dear Yahoo! 360° customer,

On July 13, 2009, Yahoo! 360° will be closing and your new profile on Yahoo! will become the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most. With only fourteen days remaining, it’s important for you to save any information you’d like to keep, and begin transferring your blog to your new profile. Anything not saved from your Yahoo! 360° account before July 13, 2009, will no longer be accessible. Here are some details to guide you through the transition.

What you need to move to your new profile

Your 360° information will not be automatically transferred to your new profile on Yahoo!. To move your profile photo, nickname, and any personal status messages, you’ll need to first save or download them before July 13, 2009. Once you’ve saved this information, you can later upload it to your new profile. Be sure to head over to your new profile soon so you can make it look just the way you want.

What to do with your blog

Be sure to take your blog with you as part of this transition process. To help, we’ve built a blogging tool for you in your new profile on Yahoo!. We’ve made the move easy; it takes just one click to take your posts with you. If you’d prefer to take your blog to a different website instead, you can download an archive of your posts and transfer them to your new blog space. Click here to read more about your blogging options.

Some content will not be supported in your new profile

Please note that your new profile will not allow mature content. Also, you will not be able to take the following with you to your new profile: your 360° inbox, testimonials, friend categories, local reviews, RSS feeds, tags, or custom theme. If you want to retain any of this material, we strongly recommend that you return to your pages and download it before July 13, 2009.

Your privacy settings are retained

Your privacy is important to us. Both your new profile and your blog contents will be set to “private”. This means unless you change the setting, you will be the only one able to see your profile.

To help you through this transition, we’ve compiled a list of the most frequently asked questions and resources here.

Their support site right here can help you manage the transition over to the new system, the interesting part is that they are going to have you move all your components over like your blog or risk losing them when they shut down the service. With all the consolidation of services across the majors, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, it is interesting to see how the closures are going to influence the material that we make. This is just one more reason why it is probably a good idea to have your own destiny in your hands, own your own domain, own your own systems (well at least as much as you can) and keep your sites maintained on your own. The closure of Yahoo 360 is going to be interesting, and there will probably be outages and issues the closer folks get to the 13th of July 2009.

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The new rage, stop blogging start life streaming is great if you have a life. If you don’t have a life, or you do not want to live on a public stage, then life streaming might not be right for you.

Life streaming is quickly becoming the euphemism for people who are tweeting about their lives today, so thanks for sharing that you had a latte this morning, and that your car was starting rough (you really should get those belts checked on your car), or that your darling snow flake turned over for the first time today, or that you are married to a swimsuit model but are looking because the relationship is just not hitting it right lately. In the mean time, there will be more and more people sharing the small little things in life, that really in the grand scheme of things do not and cannot amount to very much. In my opinion, life streaming is for people with lives that do not change the world.

Interestingly enough, Steve Rubel (who I do like and is worth following/listening to) has posted an interesting life streaming workflow graphic on his web site. The small problem with that is he has capture, but no production. You have to produce something to capture, some of us produce blogs, and some of us produce videos, pictures, and podcasts. Some of us do all of the above at various times of the week, but do I really care if someone is on a photo shoot, no not really. Some of us have complex enough lives that we are at least somewhat interesting to follow, but at some point, you still have to produce content that engages someone. Great to share, great to life stream if your life and thoughts are interesting enough, but without the initial production, life streaming isn’t going to go very far.

What would strike me as interesting though is if life streaming becomes a circular reference to the Jerry Springer show. We all have our ups and downs, and while the Jerry Springer show could be considered the bottom for some of life’s more interesting events, the Jerry Springer show provides entertainment. If you want your life to provide entertainment, then there you go, life streaming all your thoughts, and the incessant inanity of what you do every day might be entertaining for some, but in the longer run, I think we are all going to find out how incredibly boring we all are. “Breaking news: 100’s of people life streaming that they are surfing porn right now! Catch the news on Fox news as we talk about “porn addiction and life streaming, has America finally hit bottom”.

The sad part of life streaming, and if you look at Tweeting Too Hard you get an idea of where I am going here is that some of us are relentlessly self centered, some of us are open minded, some of us are not. Life streaming might be interesting if we lead interesting lives, but if we do not lead interesting lives (and mine really isn’t that interesting) then life streaming is going to be a bore. That is what the more interesting outcome of this is going to be, what happens when we all find out just how incredibly boring we really are. Life streaming might die before it really takes off, or we are going to focus on the drama rather than the brilliant minds around us. If TV media is any indication of where life streaming will go, the next life stream will be brought to you by some corporation somewhere.

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The hardest thing to do is associate a brand name with product, one way of approaching this is to use FriendFeed as a way to help you associate the brand name you are building with the products you are delivering. You can see examples of this littered throughout FriendFeed, and here are some of the more interesting brands currently using FriendFeed as a name/product association system.

Fantagraphics – Fantagraphics is one of the older mainstay comic book publishers that publish comics under two brands, Eros comix and Fantagraphics. They are located in Seattle, and have been delivering underground comics since 1976. In the world of comic book publishers this makes them part of the old school, people who started publishing comics when fanzines were just starting out. While Fantagraphics is well known in comic circles, using FriendFeed to expand their base enables their business to reach more readers, have people comment on their stuff within the confines of FriendFeed, and otherwise help reach a newer younger audience that they need to reach.

Forbidden Planet – a multipurpose bookstore located in London. The bookstore carries a ton of items, but is great for branding their own store within the confines of the products that they deliver. The good part is that they are promoting their own products within the greater hierarchy of product that they sell. This is great when doing product research, their links pop in Google via FriendFeed before their store links do.

Tor Books – Tor is the science fiction publisher today, and while there are others, normally Tor Writers sweep many of the awards, and Tor has been at the forefront of working out how to use social media, free media, and book downloads to help their authors gain more traction and sell more stuff. Tor is one of the best places to follow in how they are using social media to expand their business, and keep their writers in everyone’s mind.

Marvel Comics – One of the original comic book companies, marvel has seen the ups and downs of the comic book industry from a personal viewpoint. Their FriendFeed page is full of comic book goodness, new releases, and information about comic book characters. Sharing information in this way also helps them create buzz around new comics and new graphic novels as they are coming off the presses. What is interesting is that Marvel has a multidimensional approach to what they are feeding into FriendFeed, in that they use Twitter a lot, but they are also linked into their flickr and youtube accounts as well. When they push a picture or a video, their FriendFeed subscribers (of which there are not many) are some of the first to know.

These four companies (and there are many others who are smaller like this one) are using FriendFeed to consolidate their information, using them to strengthen their brands, and provide bleeding edge information to their subscribers. This is just one way that these companies are using FriendFeed to strengthen their market position, some are also using other systems like twitter and facebook, but the consolidation point is FriendFeed, where as their marketing efforts are geared towards providing information rather than selling product. They are using social networking as a way to keep information flowing from multiple sources and letting people decide if they want to pursue the product. Keeping the marketing to an information only exchange and being active in social networking channels, they are sharing rather than overtly selling their products, which is excellent social media marketing.

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Me an my camera - never to be separated - a friend of mine took this picture of me. [pic] http://ff.im/-4hNdZ #

Well said alex, well said. I love desert islands re: http://ff.im/4oxFS #

@louisgray Friendfeed. in reply to louisgray #

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FriendFeed started file sharing yesterday which could be problematic for one of the coolest social networking services on the planet. Risking the ire of RIAA, MPAA, BRIEN, GEMM, and every other copy right protection agency in the world, has FriendFeed taken on too much risk by allowing file sharing?

Imagine the surprise when a number of known copyrighted works by the Beastie Boys, the Beatles, and a pile of other known copyrighted songs ended up in my FriendFeed stream yesterday. While the intentions of file sharing of documents and papers are good, FriendFeed might have opened up a very large problem to their continued survival. Copyright Protection Agencies are very protective of their rights, and they have sued, and will sue, and will continue to sue everyone who for any reason allows anyone to post anything that they think is theirs. With the new file sharing by FriendFeed, the lawsuit potential here is going to be awesome for them, and bad for FriendFeed.

I hate to see a service that I use, love, and interact with become a target for lawsuits that they could have easily avoided by filtering out file extensions and header tags within the file. But after seeing many known copyrighted tracks being shared o the service you have to wonder what they were thinking. It seemed like a good idea at the time will not hold up in court.

While the stance might be unpopular, and no music does not really want to be free if someone thinks they control it, and no data does not really want to be free if someone thinks they control it, the new file sharing process on FriendFeed is akin to jumping the shark. In the longer run, once the lawsuits start (and they will) it will not be pleasant to point the finger and say “we told you so”.

Another big difference between Friendfeed and Twitter is that on Friendfeed, you can make rooms private, so that prying eyes can’t see what goes on inside. This makes the new feature great for sharing music with a large or small group of friends — but don’t uninstall that bit torrent client just yet. You can only upload three MP3s per day to Friendfeed and that limit could change over time, according to what Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor told TechCrunch. Source: Wired

Rapid share had a similar process of only allowing small communities to share information, but once the system was infiltrated, Rapid share got sued, then rapid share got fined 32 million dollars and told to filter user uploads. You know this is coming, and why FriendFeed would put their service in jeopardy is anyone’s best guess. While we all hope this ends well, in the longer run, FriendFeed just painted a huge target on their service, one that the copy right protection groups are going to go after.

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