A VC - Latest Comments in My focus group of one

Re: My focus group of one

fredwilson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:45:18 -0000

Right here in the comments, all the time

Re: My focus group of one

kidmercury — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:56:21 -0000

hi iamverytall,

i would view the human filter to a niche smart aggregator as the fact checker. basically production has been crowdsourced/commoditized, value shifting to editor/filter which would leverage fact checking as a competence. with the proliferation of blogs increasing the abundance of direct sources, fact checking should become easier.

IMO, that is.

Re: My focus group of one

iamverytall — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:45:04 -0000

At what point does the newspaper's system of fact checking get duplicated in the new disaggregated value chain?

Re: My focus group of one

pauljacobson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:29:09 -0000

Reading physical newspapers is more of a habit than about news updates

Re: My focus group of one

pauljacobson — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:21:35 -0000

Posting while meditating would probably involve a lot of blank spaces in the body of the post ...

Re: My focus group of one

boikej — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:56:03 -0000

An apt lyric indeed! Funny aside: Big Yellow Taxi has a "paved paradise" lyric that I believe inspired the name for a for another Seattle urban planning initiative in the works, Unpaving Paradise.

http://unpavingparadise.blo...

Here's a link to our own little neighborhood news aggregator "reporting" on the Unpaving Paradise initiative: http://www.capitolhillseatt... (the site is currently down for maintenance.)

Re: My focus group of one

marshal sandler — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:21:21 -0000

Chasse tell dad to do what his old man born in Michigan did buy a Kindle and an inexpensive laptop he can in two weeks become a real news junkie. The News and Free Press in Detroit have not had decent article in five years to them ragging a line is a term used in a Tailor Shop !

Re: My focus group of one

Michael_Josefowicz — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:57:01 -0000

The thing about a "larger" sample is that if most of the people share the same culture. It's about as useful as a sample of one. For example, my bet is that everyone who reads and especially responds to this very good blog, are the kind of people who read and respond to "interesting to them blogs." We always have to remember that is a niche audience.

Half of the people on the planet don't have electricity. Most of the people look at blogs the same way they look at TV. It's sort of one in the background and every once in a while something catches their interest. Then there are the people who respond. Most of the responses are nice enough, but merely "another voice heard from." And then there are the very,.very few people who read carefully, try to consider the discussion and respond as thoughtfully as they can.

It's a niche market. Does it really scale?

Re: My focus group of one

Michael_Josefowicz — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:52:08 -0000

I'm with you on this one. Bloggers control their time and their focus. It's much easier to find, write and opine when you're only responsibility is to yourself, that's a hobby. When your responsibility is to a community of readers that's a job. To do a job you have to get paid.

But, newspeople could do their jobs much faster,better and cheaper if they forgot about the "goitcha" journalism or the heroic reporter - a la Watergate. The requisite reaction quote form official x,y or z is mostly useless. The common wisdom endlessly repeated is a big bore.

So, how about paying very close attention to government hearings and keep all the blablabla on the web on their radar. Then pick out the pieces that the community needs to know. Could probably do almost all of it from a nice quiet place with high speed net access.

keep in mind that one of the few groups that got it right on Iraq was the State Dept Study that had no access to "classified intelligence" and no operatives in the field. So why wouldn't that work in our communities. Just smart people sifting through public information. And getting paid to get it pretty right, most of the time.

Re: My focus group of one

Michael_Josefowicz — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:40:16 -0000

But they are keeping up a new version of the Print version for distribution to "18,000" points in the city..

Re: My focus group of one

marshal sandler — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:58:51 -0000

When I cash my next SS Check i shall drink a Kir and give a toast to Gotham Lady and Mr Wilson ! I added the definition of a Kir , the unsung drink of my youth while living a 29 Rue Jacob in 1957

Kir is a popular French cocktail made with a measure of crème de cassis (blackcurrant liquor) topped up with white wine.

Re: My focus group of one

rick gregory — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:00:41 -0000

hehe... yes, absolutely. I should have known you'd come up with the perfect lyric for this... :)

The probable closing of the PI pointed me to an interesting experiment too. Crosscut (crosscut.com) is an online only site for the Pacific NW that puts reader contributions and aggregation from other sites on a par with paid staff reporting. They're still all about ads though.

Re: My focus group of one

fredwilson — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:39:53 -0000

this could be a big yellow taxi moment:

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got till it's gone

Re: My focus group of one

Daniel Cohen — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:34:28 -0000

Fred - First of all, as a Venture Capitalist, I truly admire your blog. It has inspired me many times, and I think being a VC blogger is a huge part of next generation venture capital. I have my own (http://coheda.typepad.com/ but I can't keep at the pace that you have shown).

Specifically on this post, I actually think the "sample of one" is a huge issue in the VC world. I think many VCs tend to look at their own behaviors and based on that analyze how the market will behave, and then take investment decisions. I think its crucial that we ignore our own sample, as we live a life that is very different than the average consumer.

I have seen VCs say "I will never use this" and then miss out on very good deals. I can think of 2 portfolio companies that are not a fit for me, but are doing great and have a lot of consumer adoption.

Re: My focus group of one

fredwilson — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:26:19 -0000

True

Drudge is the person who showed the way

Re: My focus group of one

fredwilson — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:24:19 -0000

That's my plan

Re: My focus group of one

fredwilson — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:16:14 -0000

Man I hope I have your energy and passion when I am 72 marshal!

Re: My focus group of one

fredwilson — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:11:25 -0000

I am certain that I will write a post called Big Yellow Taxi at some point this weekend

I can feel my brain working on it already

Re: My focus group of one

fredwilson — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:37:29 -0000

So true

But VC investing involves gut instinct

And gut comes from personal experience

So it's tough one

Re: My focus group of one

rick gregory — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:36:21 -0000

First, you don't report. You opine. That's fine and I very much like reading the site, but it's not a substitute for news reporting. For example, in Seattle we're debating a large transportation project... a good reporter will talk to various sources from the governor to urban planners and city officials, then synthesize that into a story. They'll do this over and over. Bloggers almost never do that. They won't have access to the officials and they might not even know who the urban planners are to talk to them.

Second, the blog approach does NOT scale for the reader. One advantage of blogs is that the urban planner in Seattle could offer their opinion directly on a blog...that's great, but it is one piece of a story and I as the reader have to find that. Again, a good reporter will bring together a lot of sources into one place and present the information from them in one article. With online stories, I'd like to see them link out more to things like an urban planning blog too.

So blogs aren't doing reporting for the most part. For the ones that do... what's the aversion to finding a model to actually pay the people who are doing real reporting? We seem to have gotten the idea that we should get value for nothing, not only in this case, but in music, etc. I don't think a direct translation of the subscription/local ads model will work for newspapers, but if we want people to spend time digging into stories vs commenting on them we need to find some way to pay for that.

Edit: ironically, I just got an email from the Seattle PI's email news service (the PI is one of the 2 major papers in Seattle). That paper is being put for sale. If no sale in 60 days it closes or goes web only. I'm not sure how my city benefits from losing a newspaper. Link: http://seattlepi.nwsource.c...

Re: My focus group of one

marshal sandler — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:55:15 -0000

I personally enjoy your content creations also understand that creating content is hard work. With decline in readership by many newspapers ! I would like to see the Old Media buy content like yours and publish it ! I am 72 years old and have not read a newspaper in five years ! I can get more info from the Internet ! Gone are the days when I put on My Bagel Jacket and went out to buy a dozen and a copy of the Sunday New York Times ! I still send my notes on Crain Crest and also use a Quill Pen ! I read a lot and buy my books from Amazon their books reviews are all I need ! My music comes from I tunes ! My intellectual stimulation is all web based ! My wife is also an avid reader she carries the world in her purse a Kindle ,A Book of Crossword puzzles et al ! She has been reading Dave Winers Adventures with Net Books ! We have a G-4 and a Macbook ! I think a Netbook is in her future ! I know the other day she was on Adaptive Blue looking at an Asus on Glue ! Of course I have my own Kindle also ! Onward Upward with VC !

Re: My focus group of one

Matt — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:07:18 -0000

hi man! really nice blog u got here! i just finished watching `people power` episode on discovery's `The True Story of the Internet ` and found more interesting pieces of info about you, this blog, and web 2.0 phenomenon...and i rushed to teh comp to comment on your blog...i really love your work and the ideas you spread here. keep on goin'!

regards,
matt from Romania

Re: My focus group of one

andyswan — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:46:21 -0000

PoHuff is an excellent substitute for the NY Times. I'll leave it at that.

But the real story here is the drudgereport. I don't know anyone that has drudge bookmarked that still gets a physical paper. The guy is genius and a staff of TWO is doing 30 million hits/DAY.

Re: My focus group of one

John McGrath — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:01:39 -0000

Great point. I love HuffPo, but I agree, some of their practices are dubious, unsustainable, or both. In addition to not paying, they've been busted numerous times flat out stealing content. The most egregious example I know of was on election night, when they were hotlinking without permission to the (awesome) NYTimes flash election map.

Re: My focus group of one

John McGrath — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:53:47 -0000

I don't think it's as clear cut as that. At the least, by trying to see things from both sides, it makes it easier to sell ads to people on both sides ;-)