A VC - Latest Comments in Blog Stars

Re: Blog Stars

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 06:30:54 -0000

Erin McKean gave a nice, brief overview of the significance of words at web2summit:

http://english.net.in/a-3-m...

People may not die, but language will decimate brands. Did anyone do the math? Weather.com is about 10% of the value of NBC.

The thing about decentralization is that you might believe there are about 37^63 domain names per TLD (incidentally, that pretty much exactly 1 Googol ;) ). But if 1 sheet of paper can hold about 2K of text think about the possibilities! Or how about as a bit map! Sheets of paper can contain an ENORMOUSLY wide variety of content -- dwarfing the DNS.... But what actually happened? Language prevailed. Only an idiot would title a textbook about economics "For the Birds". People who want to sell information about economics label the content "Economics".

Brand names (like Google, Microsoft, NYTimes and HuffingtonPost) are meaningless -- they will be decimated. Twitter, Yahoo, OMG, etc. will prevail.

Several years ago, I asked whether .COM web addresses are Russian. That may sound a little strange, but at the time news organizations said that allofmp3.COM was a Russian company. This makes no sense -- .COM addresses fall under the jurisdiction of the United States (see also comments about governance made by Tim Berners-Lee the other day: http://organizers.at/the-we... ). I feel it is appropriate for commercial enterprises to use the commercial TLD to advertise the products + services using .COM domains. But in many cases, the age-old maxim "if you register a domain, make sure it's a .COM domain" is becoming more laughable day by day -- as a rough estimate, perhaps 99% of .COM domains will also be decimated in the coming years.

Re: Blog Stars

fredwilson — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:18:52 -0000

I agree but I hope nobody gets killed this time

Re: Blog Stars

kidmercury — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:38:41 -0000

i agree with the similarity with the american revolution. the web is enabling a decentralized takeover, a guerrilla takeover. this is i think a major difference in how businesses will emerge and compete in the digital world.

Re: Blog Stars

fredwilson — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:17:16 -0000

I fixed that. It was hung up for moderation because of the abundance of links.

Re: Blog Stars

fredwilson — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:05:14 -0000

I pay attention to what our companies are doing every day, many times per day. And I have access to the CEO's ear. That's why I am comfortable being a long term investor in VC

Not so much in public stocks

Re: Blog Stars

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:55:22 -0000

I've posted a reply to this @ http://investments.vc/commu... (it's got a couple links in it, so it doesn't pass disq.us's spam filter)

:) nmw

Re: Blog Stars

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:47:46 -0000

Right -- and so the "referee" will hopefully understand the "rules" of the game. AFAIK, this is something that digg and facebook pay a lot of attention to, but many other websites quite often overlook.

As time goes on and the Wisdom of the Language [ http://past.blog.com/gaggle... ] expands beyond sites like twitter.com, hotels.com, weather.com, etc., the rules of web language may very well "dictate" that the directory of venture capitalists is found @ http://directory.vc (and note that Wittgenstein's interpretation of language/meaning is why I put dictate in quotes; also, it's precisely for this reason that Google is very set on pushing their chrome service... i.e., as I said to Vint Cerf several years ago: there is no easy way to discern whether people willfully choose to click on "the blue e" or whether they are being LED to do so [see also http://www.circleid.com/pos... ]).

Ultimately, Wittgenstein was spot on when he pointed out that the "correct" use of language is simply "the way people speak" -- so meaning (and/or grammatical rules) emerge/s from the community of users, not from a centralized authority. The reason why one-size fits-all search engines return amazon.com when people type in "amazon" is because that is what the users expect. If users typed in "orange" and a search engine gave them apple, then they would call it a crappy engine and stop using it.

This unraveling -- the movement away from a centralized authority -- has an eerie similarity to the way the Protestant Reformation and the American + French Revolutions worked -- except that the princes and kings of the web may not be treated quite as brutally as their counterparts in Europe were treated centuries ago (Immanuel Kant's short article "Was ist Aufklärung?" [What is Enlightenment?] is very, um, enlightening in this regard ;). With a literate + enlightened user base it's quite likely that the current tidewater aristocracy of the web will just be dropped like hotbots or maybe simply forgotten like distant friendsters.

Re: Blog Stars

kidmercury — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:26:22 -0000

yes i agree. i think content and advertising will blend so that they cannot be differentiated. product placement in games and movies is my favorite example of this trend. that is why i think many blog stars will end up having social games in their community, and that gaming in general will be the model that finances blog stars and the media revolution we are in the midst of.

Re: Blog Stars

Dave Pinsen — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:27:32 -0000

I see what you mean now, but I think it's worth making a distinction between trading and investing. Trading stocks does demand constant attention. But investing, not necessarily. What's that quote by Buffett -- if he's really comfortable with a company, he wouldn't mind if its stock stopped trading for ten years? I guess there's a similarity between that and your day job, in that you don't see quotes on your portfolio companies every day, and yet you are still comfortable owning pieces of them.

Re: Blog Stars

jamesblake33 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:05:55 -0000

Yeah, good post!

Re: Blog Stars

chartsandcoffee — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:04:50 -0000

Fred, I enjoyed learning about the folks on your list so much that I decided to spend the entire day tracking down more interesting people. My list is more from a biographical perspective. People you would be interested in having a beer with is one way to put it.

http://chartsandcoffee.blog...

Re: Blog Stars

kidmercury — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:31:49 -0000

no worries boss i will make sure sartorialist accepts fredbucks so you will still get your piece

Re: Blog Stars

ShanaC — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:52:32 -0000

If that's the case then I rue the day it all falls apart. Rabbi-ing is not a growth industry. If anything, it's falling apart because of social media. People tend to follow what they find out on the internet- it's extremely hard to become a taste maker. It's mostly a mishmosh of opinions (which is how group blogs became popular in the first place....)

Re: Blog Stars

ShanaC — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:48:43 -0000

I love that blog in my girly-girl time (shhhh)

Re: Blog Stars

Name — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:39:01 -0000

* (I meant:) one BIG yellow-pages directory

Re: Blog Stars

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:28:52 -0000

yes, that way of putting words intoastringthatwasn'treallyaword worked for a while, so avc could be interpreted as "a vc". That is no longer effective -- something I predicted years ago, but which still will continue to become more and more ineffective as time goes on.

If I were to go out on a limb, I would say that the entire financial industry will soon be found under .VC

;D nmw

Re: Blog Stars

fredwilson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:20:38 -0000

That will be expensive :)

Re: Blog Stars

Norbert Mayer-Wittmann — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:10:30 -0000

Thanks, that makes it clearer. :)

I think the problem I have with such a model is that I don't believe in online advertising. I owe a lot of this insight to Neil Budde, who wrote an article about this right around the time he left WSJ online. Basically, there's no difference between advertising and all the other content on the web (I'm being more extreme than he was). In it's purest form, web content is 100% information -- and that's it. Now the tricky part is how to make information marketplaces (see e.g. http://past.blog.com/2009/0... -- a lot of what the "barkeeper" does in your [and Fred's] example is what the "market conductor" does in "Get Out of the Box" ... I tried to explicate this a little more in http://past.blog.com/2009/0... and http://past.blog.com/2009/0... but TBH I'm not sure my writing in those 2 is as clear as I wish it could be :S).

But "read us interruptus" will not work online -- never did, never will... -- it's just too easy and will be surgically removed in a matter of seconds (milliseconds?). So irrelevant junk won't go over well online -- it will have to try to find an audience in traditional media (perhaps outdoor). In this vein, I have also been much inspired by a piece Esther Dyson wrote at least a decade ago (I'm sure everyone here has read it or at least knows what her general approach is).

To summarize: IMHO, advertising doesn't really exist as a separate entity on the web. The web is like one be yellow-pages directory. Sure, there are people who still use Google, and lots of advertisers spend their money trying to reach THAT audience (but if someone is trying to target me, then they'll have moved on, because I've already done so -- and not just from Google.COM, but also from YouTube.COM ... ;). If you want to find ME, I'm the one who's seen all the Bibles and have moved on to newer things BEYOND the bible... (see also Clay Shirky's article, which I referenced in "Get Out of the Box" ;)

Re: Blog Stars

mthomas1818 — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:42:04 -0000

I was just thinking about this as I read one of Mish's latest columns titled "Where the Hell is the Outrage?" I am not that familiar with some of the others on the list, but I have been a daily reader of Mish's blog for several years now and he has taught me so much and helped me save a ton of money and learn to invest my money more wisely. He recently wrote a column about gold, which I know continues to be one of his favorite asset classes, because it does well during periods of high govt intervention in the economy and economic uncertainty. And I also saw someone in the comments on Mish's site recommend some of the articles at http://www.goldalert.com/gold_news.php, which discuss the relationship between the gold price, gold mining companies, and the value of the dollar given the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve. The article that I thought was most useful to read there is titled "Gold Price Up, Dollar Down - Does it Really Matter?" This is just one example of why I think the community that Mish has been is very strong and will only get stronger over time.

Re: Blog Stars

Mark Essel — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:23:29 -0000

Great stuff, power to the people. Open, transparent, portable, that's the way folks want media to be. Just scanned over a great ebook on this topic from Marc Canter, "how to build an open mesh" http://blog.broadbandmechan...

Very cool looking stuff and the greatest thing is, I started reading it because I couldn't figure out why I had a 280mbyte pdf file in my dropbox.

Re: Blog Stars

Mark Essel — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:29:00 -0000

Re: Blog Stars

kidmercury — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:56:47 -0000

i think the issue of where the community forms is critical. if the community forms outside of you, you lose access to critical social analytics and customer profile information. or perhaps i should say i find it critical if you have a profit/business orientation.

i think there will be lots of types of communities, although in general i think the larger a community gets, the more the opportunity will be in fan-to-fan interactions, rather than star-to-fan interactions.

Re: Blog Stars

kidmercury — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:51:51 -0000

yes! that is a great example of a blog star. the economic potential is out of this world, in my opinion. it would be even bigger, i think, if they used a different platform instead of blogger. sartorialisters should be able to engage each other, which could lead to transactions amongst them, and the possibility for the sartorialist to get a piece of those transactions. perhaps in the future you'll be able to hang out and go shopping with fred's wife and daughters at thesartorialist!

Re: Blog Stars

kidmercury — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:42:01 -0000

i think there will need to be a daily component of sorts. paul graham doesn't write essays daily, but hacker news delivers news daily. that is sort of why think blog stars are natural news destinations -- the star is just the person you're reading the news with, the person who is an expert on the subject and can add their unique commentary, and can attract other cool people to do the same.

communities crossing boundaries serves as the ultimate reminder that the community is the top dog up in this piece. not the blog star, not the technology, but the will of the people. that is why i really believe open systems are destined to prevail, because the community will ultimately demand the ability to cross boundaries, and open technologies facilitate this.

Re: Blog Stars

kidmercury — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:34:13 -0000

hi norbert,

sure, here's what i mean:

1. the term "destination" will get murkier as the web evolves, but for now, i basically mean whoever is executing the commercial transaction and gaining access to corresponding customer information. amazon.com is a destination. craigslist is a destination, although it could be a much, much, much better one.

2. i think bloggers will be able to serve as destinations, because they will be able to acquire the trust needed to intermediate transactions.

3. so then how to create the destination that enables a commercial transaction? fred recently referred to his blog as a club or bar of sorts where everyone knows your name. that's true, but right now the problem is that no one is doing the work needed to run the bar. so really, it is not like we are hanging out at a bar, but more like some dude's basement. i'm going to propose a solution to solve this problem by building fred a club.

4. so how can we best build fred this club? well we need a way to execute commercial transactions. advertising and ecommerce, that finances things. then you need social stuff, as that is basically what a club is. so maybe a way where we can all tweet with each other, share our own videos, start our own discussion forums, etc.

5. so how can we best build this club? that is debatable. very debatable. but i think one thing that a lot of people who believe in "open" stuff will believe in is to leverage other people's APIs. for instance rather than building your own ad network, most people will just plug the ad network code into their blog to deliver ads. likewise, i think you will plug in your twitter solution, your own forum solution, etc.

6. so to me, that is sort of what the game boils down to. are you plugging into someone else's destination, or are you a destination? in reality i think companies will increasingly need to be both, or at least understanding both sides and their role in it. as you noted the concept of ownership gets murky in this world, which is why i think we will see networks emerge that have their own rules.

a person who i think has a somewhat similar view is marc andreessen. he's prominent web technology guy, perhaps you are familiar with him. when i tell my technology views to people i often say "hey marc andreessen is working on something similar" so as to lend legitimacy to my views. lol.

anyway, he previously blogged about platforms and really broke things down, but he took those blog posts down. (clearly, he ain't a blog star.) he also founded the company ning.com, which i sort of interpret as an attempt to mass create niche destinations, which i think is a mega, mega, mega opportunity. and he recently has made some investments in bloggers and blog publishing.

that's just my perspective, of course i am extremely biased as i am running a business from this perspective.