Long Tail Debate

Lee Gomes of The Wall Street Journal takes on Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail thesis here.

 Anderson responds here.

Fun.

BLOGS, BLOGS, BLOGS!

Just wrapping up a hectic but really fun week:

NYC Monday, Boston Tuesday, San Fran Wednesday-Thursday, LA Friday and Friday night (spent with my brother for his birthday), LAX NOW and for the next 5 hours (yes, flight delay courtesy of United) then at long last home tonight.

Sitting here looking back on my week, what stands out is how much time I spent working on something BLOG related.

The week started with Matt and Toni from Automattic coming out and updating my partnership.  Everyone was excited by the pretty incredible progress the guys have made since we initially invested not that long ago.  As always, Matt and Bob Metcalfe had fun together (Matt gave Bob a blogging tutorial).

We also had an Automattic board meeting Wednesday — more talk about BLOGS.  It is becoming clear that the first generation of blogs hosted by WordPress.com (which was only launched in December) are starting to hit a maturity level resulting in a substantial readership, lots of inbound links, and very good search performance.  The result is that the overall audience for WordPress.com and the blogs across its network is growing dramatically. Cool!

I also met with four different new companies over the course of the week.  It certainly wasn’t by design, but looking back on it I now realize that each of these companies is, in one way or another, a blog-related opportunity.

Finally, I wrapped up the week at the Santa Monica offices of World Championship Sports Network. The WCSN gang is getting ready for our live broadcast of the US Swimming Nationals.  As part of our outreach effort the guys are putting the word out on — you guessed it — the most important swimming blogs, some of which have pretty serious audiences.

My overall observation here is that blogging is in the early stages of transitioning from what was generally amateur personal interest blogging with little quality content (there were of course exceptions but in the grand scheme of things not that many) to what is now a more broadly embraced vehicle for creating and disseminating genuinely meaningful and valuable content.

We are still in the very early stages here, but my sense is that blogging is on its way to becoming an important and effective way to either enhance or in some instances to build substantial online properties.

Should be fun to watch this unfold…

VCMike #4 Fastest Growing WordPress Blog!

Just discovered this posted here.

Thank you readers!

Sumo Sitings In NYC

The zany Heavy.com guys are up to it again.

In case you haven’t been to their site, the Heavy mascot is a sumo wrestler.

Today they have 3 sumo wrestlers parading around NYC, in full in sumo thongs.

I knew nothing about this, but by midmorning I had a handful of emails telling me that Heavy’s sumo guys were on The Today Show. Hunh?

Evidently the sumos were also kicked out of Conde Naste’s offices.

Gawker has more on this, and even some awards for people who catch the sumo’s on film. If you’re in NYC get out there and find ‘em.

“Why You Tube is About to Die”

Yesterday I was visiting with the Allen & Company guys, who told me that the reports of all the media giants fawning over YouTube CEO Chad Hurley at their Sun Valley event were in fact accurate.  The video sharing boy wonder was the star of the show, which was populated by industry titans the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Meg Whitman, etc…

Not surprisingly, Valleywag has weighed in with a contrary and boldly critical angle, professing to explain “Why YouTube is About to Die.” 

Curious to know if any of you are persuaded by Valleywag’s argument?

Heavy.com 8th Fastest Growing Website

Great momentum for our portfolio company Heavy.com.

According to ComScore’s June Internet traffic report, Heavy was the 8th fastest growing website, with a traffic increase of more than 30% over May.

The kind of news an investor loves to get!

VC Best Practices

Paul Kedrosky wrote a good piece in the Venture Capital Journal about VC Best Practices.

In today’s VCJ, Dan Primack publishes a response, which I thought had a simple but insightful observation:

“What all the VCs who have been successful over an extended period have in common is a good gut and some Teflon coating that keeps them from getting jaded. They maintain the capacity to fall in love with new deals, people or technology — even after having had their heart broken a time or two.”

Metcalfe’s Law Wrong??

My partner Bob Metcalfe is not going to like this very much, but there is a recent post out there by some IEEE types suggesting the value of a communications network is not proportional to the square of the number of its users, but rather is best represented by the equation n log(n) (where n is the number of users on the network). 

Heck, even if is a tad off, how many of us can say we had a law named after us?

WordCamp

Slow posting week as I am on vacation this week.

But I wanted to put out there that there is going to be a WordPress confab — “WordCamp” (in the model of Bar Camp) — August 5, somewhere around San Francisco.

Am going to try to make it. Hope to see some of you there.

“FW: Those Born 1930-1979″

(From an email that is circling around these days which I thought was pretty good and worth a reprint here)

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we
rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

 

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and

NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank Kool-Aid made with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because .

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day.

And we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down

the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms……
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays,
made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

 

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.

They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever! The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned

HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL