2007 In Retrospect - Top 3 Themes

Three top themes punctuated my 2007:

3. Scandinavia: My father's family came from Sweden, my mother's from the Shetland Islands, but despite having traveled extensively throughout my life, I had never been to Scandinavia. In 2007 I spent a lot of time in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, check, check, and check.

2. Job-Switching/Career Progress: I switched jobs twice in 2007. I gained a lot of professional confidence, and really expanded my network through this process. I can really appreciate the foundation and springboard that my friends and mentors at Judysbook provided me.

1. Breaking up: My girlfriend and I broke up in September after five or so years together that span my entire post-college lifetime. These are some of the most formative years in a person's life, and I can't imagine muddling through with anyone else. Thanks for all the amazing & uncommon experiences, generosity, and support.

Greatest Viral Video Ad - Speedbandits

Ad Of The Day: Facebook, Scrabulous, Trickery

Trickery is one of the foundational pillars of Internet advertising, particularly of the pay per click variety. I've been seeing a lot of ads on Facebook recently that try to mimic native Facebook features, like a notification, but are in fact pay per click ads. This is, of course, old hat, Adsense optimizers have been attempting to make Adsense look like website nav links for donkey's years. This ad might have fooled me, and I give them an 'A' for effort, but fortunately a little typo tipped me off, and I didn't click through.

Churn Is Bad

Andrew Chen has a) a good post up about why churn is good to measure and bad to have, and b) a link to a great resource: a list of the most-trafficked websites as measured by Quantcast. This is a more detailed list than is available for free anywhere else.

Words I Live By

Bonus prize for anyone who can name the source - this is gospel:

You can laugh you can cry
You can live you can die
Spend your days asking why
But you can't ignore my techno

Be all that you can be
Just as long as you are free
You were blind and now you see
That was just my techno

Why I Love Startups

Because I am convinced it's the fastest way to get me here:



Pitbull! Terrier!

Evaluate Business Ideas - Evhead

This wins for best startup blog post in just about forever. Congratulations, Evan - you win a blist t-shirt.

1. Tractability
2. Obviousness
3. Deepness
4. Wideness
5. Discoverability
6. Monetizability

will it fly? how to evaluate a new product idea

Go read it right now!

Web Office Convergence

Over the blist blog, which is becoming the home of my more insightful blogging, I'm talking about the New York Times article from this past weekend pitting Google against Microsoft on web office strategy. Don Dodge and Henry Blodget are two of the other authorities on subject that I point at in my post:

Goog Vs Msft, Nyt, Henry Blodget, Don Dodge

Tuxedo - Every Once In A While

What is a Facebook App User Worth?

Tim Oren has collected some actual market data from the Stanford Facebook App class:

"Apparently a few of the teams have been given purchase offers (reputedly in the eight cent per user range)"

What is anything worth? What someone is willing to pay, of course. That's how markets get made.

Why Arent DBAs Obsolete?

Kevin just told a great big, grand story about blist - this is what we're all about - please go and Digg this story!

The Sheer Power Of A Friendly URL

The equation goes something like this: Mattishness + Search String in URL ~ Fox or Reuters with a lot of garbage in their URLs

Tim Ferriss - Meet Graham Greene

Tim Ferris makes a lot of sense, even if he is a bit of a huckster, runs some kind of a borderline 'nutraceutical' business, and pads the page views on his website by auto-refreshing every minute or so.

Graham Greene was famous for making his friends feel inadequate through his ruthlessly precise and efficient work habits:

"His friend Michael Meyer observed him at work during a trip to Tahiti in 1959, when he was writing “A Burnt-Out Case”:

He wrote in longhand with a fine pen in a very small, almost illegible script, for two hours each day; no more, no less. In those two hours he would write seven to nine hundred words, the equivalent of two to three printed pages. . . . At 9 a.m. he would stop. This was when I got up, and as I walked along the verandah to the shower room he would look up and say, somewhat complacently I felt: “Nine hundred words this morning,” or, even worse, “Finished my work for the day”—a depressing remark with which to be greeted when I hadn’t yet begun and the thermometer was climbing towards ninety."

-Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker, 2004.

I love work efficiency!

Delay - Via SFJ

Sasha Frere-Jones pointed me at Delay through his New Yorker blog

I'm pretty in to the tracks on his Myspace page - they remind me of Dead Ringer vintage RJD2 - particularly Rise N Brass - which is incredibly high praise in my book!

On Being Yourself - Cocteau

Last night, at a little bistro, I became engrossed in one of those deep, this-is-the-kind-of-person-I-am and this-is-what-I'm-all-about conversations with my best friend for several hours while we ignored our small check waiting to be paid.

Good times & What are friends for!

Coincidentally, this afternoon I came across a fabulous quote from Jean Cocteau buried deeply inside a lengthy examination of Joyce Carol Oates in the current New York Review of Books. So, without further adieu:

"What the public criticizes you for, cultivate: It is you."
- Jean Cocteau

Love it!

Thomas Friedman Redeems Himself

I've never been much of a Thomas Friedman fan, too often he's just riding his facile, corporate-speaking-engagement-friendly flat world horse, but this piece is super funny - and even much better because it encourages Americans to put themselves in the shoes of Iranians:

Intercepting Iran’s Take on America

Well done, Tom! Huzzah!

Invention Vs. Refinement Over At blist

Kevin let me loose on the blist blog this morning - so, clearly, I recommend heading over there and reading my post:

Web Office 2007 - Refinement Vs. Invention

By the way, the invention in the diagram above is:

SALUTING DEVICE
JAMES C. BOYLE
patented march 10, 1896

blist - The Reference

Mark Hendrickson at Techcrunch referenced blist yesterday in his profile of web-page creator, Doodlekit. I love this - it means that, for a few people, in a preliminary way, we are really becoming a reference product and company. Thanks, Mark!

"As the WYSIWYG market develops, I’d like to see companies like Doodlekit leverage easy database creation/management tools like upcoming Blist. Then, a wider range of people will be able to collect, manage, and publish their organizational data online without needing to rely on web developers."

Doesn't that look like a blist t-shirt? Want one? Convince me :)