A VC

As Long As We Are Rethinking Yahoo's Board

Carl Icahn has suggested a new slate of directors for Yahoo! as part of his proxy fight with the company. The International Herald Tribune has a list of the current ten directors and Icahn's proposed slate. The morning Icahn's slate was announced I was a bit irritated by the whole thing and expressed my irritation on twitter. David Dalka replied with the obvious question - If Icahn's slate is no good, who would you propose?

So I've been thinking about this for the past several days. First I think the current board must take some responsibility for where Yahoo! finds itself now. It probably is time for a little housecleaning. But Icahn's slate doesn't include many people with real internet business experience and only one or two with any idea of where the internet is headed. But the biggest problem with Icahn and his slate is that it's all a game to get control of the company and sell it to Microsoft, a transaction that neither company apparently wants to do anymore. An even more cynical view is that Icahn and his slate just want to be bought off with greenmail of some sort.

I have been saying since the start of this whole Yahoo/Microsoft thing that what Yahoo! needs is to get smaller, leaner, and more focused. And I think they should partner in some way with Google to increase the monetization of their search without giving up on their own search platform entirely. I like some of the moves they are making to open up the entire Yahoo platform and let others build applications, services, and companies on top of it.

So with that proviso, here's my suggested slate of directors. None of these people have any idea I am going to mention them in this post and I suspect few, if any, would agree to serve if asked.

Roy Bostock, Chairman - Because I think he's doing a good job right now and he seems to be a strong leader of the board.

Jerry Yang, CEO - I am not sure Jerry should be CEO long term, but I think he's got the company moving in the right direction. And as a founder, he should be on the board regardless if he remains CEO.

Bill Gross - Instead of putting someone like Mark Cuban who sold his company for billions to Yahoo! and then turns around and participates in a hostile action against them, I would put Gross on because he also sold a company, Overture, to Yahoo! and because he invented paid search and he always has great ideas for new business models.

Marc Andreessen - Apparently Marc is joining the Facebook board. It's too bad Yahoo! didn't ask him to join their board. When you talk about opening up a platform and allowing people to build social apps on it, Marc is doing just that. If Marc won't do it, then someone like Dave Winer would be a good choice for similar reasons.

Mike Moritz - Because he's the best Internet investor ever and because the stock is about the same price it was when he left the board in the middle of 2003.

Tim O'Reilly - Because Tim is one of best thinkers about where the web and technology is headed and because if Yahoo! truly wants to be open, Tim can help them think about how to do it right.

Nancy Peretsman - Because Nancy is one of the sharpest media bankers and she knows the Internet and the players like the back of her hand. And because Yahoo! is going to be in play for a while even if this Icahn thing goes away and they need someone like Nancy on the board.

Yochai Benkler - Because Yahoo! is a network at its core and nobody has thought more deeply about the role of networks in society and the economy than Yochai.

Mike Walrath - Because Right Media's is one of the most interesting acquisitions that Yahoo! has made in recent years and because Yahoo! can use Right Media to build the dominant exchange for display advertising, a market position in display that could rival what Google has created in keyword.

Another entrepreneur who has recently sold their company to Yahoo! - Someone like Joshua Schachter or Stewart Butterfield or Caterina Fake or Eric Marcoullier or Al Warms or Satish Dharmaraj. Because entrepreneurs are often closest to the pulse of where things are heading. And because Yahoo! needs to do a better job leveraging the acquisitions they make and these people know what Yahoo! is doing right and what it is doing wrong with its acquisitions.

So that's my slate. The fact is that other than Ray and Jerry, it would be hard, if not impossible, to get most of these people interested in doing this. Public boards are hard work and fraught with liability. Imagine if you were on Yahoo!'s board right now. Ugh. But regardless of what happens, if Yahoo! stays independent, they should start churning their board and this list would be a good place to start the search.

Feel free to leave suggestions or entire slates in the comments or post your own slate and leave a link in the comments. I will add all links to other slates to the end of this post.

If You Are Looking For Something More Entrepreneurial

Adam Lashinsky wrote a post this past week titled "Where Does Google Go Next" in which he outlined the exodus of many well known Google engineers and business execs. Here is the line that kind of sums it up for me.

But the Ooyala founders say what they lack in institutional backing they make up for in speed and the ability to communicate with one another by turning around in their chairs and talking. Google was like that too, about eight years and 18,000 employees ago.

I can't think of a company that I am more impressed with than Google, but they are coming to grips with the fact that "startup energy" can't be faked. There's nothing quite like going from five people to fifty or a hundred.

We have a couple dozen companies going from five to fifty and we are looking for great software engineers, killer bus dev talent, and experienced internet sales people. So if you are at Google (either here in NYC or in the Bay area) or any other large internet company and are looking for something more entrepreneurial send me an email or an @message on twitter and I'll tell you what we've got. My email address is linked to on the lower left sidebar of this blog and here's my twitter account.

Appeasement

It looks like appeasement is going to be a big discussion this fall in the presidential elections. We saw President Bush start off the conversation yesterday in Israel. It's clear that the republicans have a strategy with regard to Obama and it is to make the case that he's a classic liberal, weak on foreign policy, and a friend of our enemies.

The word appeasement is loaded with meaning and it harkens back to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's strategy of trying to make peace with Hitler which culminated in the Munich Agreement of 1938 where part of Czechoslovakia was handed over to Nazi Germany in a failed attempt to buy peace with Germany. Of course that strategy failed and it took an all out assault on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (and Imperial Japan) to rid the world of that evil last century.

I hope we can have a real debate about appeasement that is not colored by the wounds of the last century. It is certainly true that those who don't pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it. But it is also true that there is more than one way to fight a war against those who would like to see our country and our way of life destroyed.

We can, as our current administration has done, take the fight right to the terrorist threat, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and possibly Iran. We can try to use our military might to, as GWB says, "fight them on their soil so we don't have to fight them on our soil." I think our success with this strategy is questionable. It seems to me that we have probably energized our enemies more than anything else with our war in Iraq and our words and body language.

In the meantime, there is something really important going on all over the world. I've touched upon it recently in my post about Geographic Balancing, where I wrote:

The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the middle east, are quickly attaining economic purchasing power parity with the United States and Western Europe.

The twin forces of technology and freedom are making this world a more balanced place. There is so much we can do to fuel these positive changes.  A hungry mob is an angry mob. But a rising standard of living is the greatest peace pipe of them all.

Of course we need to have a strong military and I believe that the USA has that today and will continue to have that for some time to come. We must be able to defend our borders and are interests around the world. The first Iraq war was a sensible war. The second was not.

But the single most important thing we can do in the war against terrorism is to show the young, alienated youth of the muslim world that there is a better way. That they can make their homes, communities, and countries better by engaging in the modern world and taking advantage of the great equalizer that technology and freedom represents.

And that is what Obama is saying when he talks about engaging the world and our enemies in a dialog. Think back to the school yard in middle school. There was the tough talking kid who would throw a punch at you if you looked at him the wrong way. And there was the cool kid who had his head on straight and got everyone going in the right direction. I want our country to be the latter and we've been the former for the past eight years.

As Teddy Roosevelt said, "speak softly and carry a big stick". That's my kind of appeasement.

More True Today Than 2 1/2 Years Ago When I Wrote This

In the fall of 2006, Business 2.0 asked me to write a short post about how blogging can build your business. It ran in the December 2006 issue in a story called "How To Succeed In 2007".

Alex Hammer sent me a copy of that article this week and it was on my desk this morning. I re-read it and thought I should share it with all of you.  So here it is:

Blogging has become a critical piece of my business. I am an early-stage investor in Internet-delivered services and the co-founder of a venture firm. At first I really didn't know what to write about. So I wrote about things I was passionate about: work, family, music, politics, New York City. I still post about all of those things, but today my blog, called A VC, is mostly about my work and music. I started writing at least one post every day and have done that ever since. When I go on vacation, I write a bunch of posts in advance and then autopost them on a regular schedule. I've found that having something new on the blog every day is the single most important thing to building an audience.

I also like to use a sensational headline. Many people read blogs in aggregators, which generally show only the headline. So you have to give people a reason to click through. Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading it should be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what is happening in the technology, Internet, and VC markets.

And it works. About 50,000 people come to my blog every month. The site brings in about $30,000 a year now in ad revenue, and I donate it all to charity. Most important, I'm getting to know entrepreneurs of all kinds - in India, Australia, England, China, and Silicon Valley. They read my blog, correct me when I'm wrong, pound the table when they agree with me. I get to know them, and they get to know me. When it comes time for them to raise money, they know who to ask. And for me, the blog acts as an amplifier and a filter. I see many more opportunities, but they are also way more relevant. It makes me a better investor.

From Twittergram to SwitchABit

I love posting photos to my twitterstream. I do it all the time. The first service I used to do this is called twittergram and it was a proof of concept built by Dave Winer. I posted about it last fall and explained how I had set it up. Twittergram uses Flickr as it's photo upload/hosting service and then pulls the photos (filtered by tag if you'd like) into your twitter stream as a link. It works well.

More recently, I started using twitpic which I like a tad better because it has full comment integration with twitter. If you comment on my twitpic, it's posted as an @reply in twitter. That is a nice touch.

I've also been playing with a service called SwitchABit which does a lot more than route photos into twitter. It's a broad platform for routing all kinds of things around the net (including photos from flickr to twitter). SwitchABit is being built by some friends and they've let me play around with it. It's not yet available to the public.

But recently Dave Winer joined the SwitchABit project and he has ported twittergram to SwitchABit. I just went and tested out the new twittergram and it worked like a charm. Nicely done Dave.

I think I'll be using these two services (twittergram and twitpic) interchangeably. I'll use twittergram/switchabit when I want the photo in Flickr which I consider my primary online photo gallery. I'll use twitpic when I just want to send a fun photo into my twitterstream but don't really want it in Flickr.

Which points out the issues and the opportunity with something like SwitchABit. A "bit router" is a very cool concept but to make it really useful, the team will need to understand a lot about why people put their digital content in various places.  For example, I don't really want all of my twitter posts going to Facebook, my blog's twitter badge, and Tumblr. But I'd like some of them to go there. I don't want all my photos I send to twitter to go to Flickr, but I want some of them to go there. I don't want all my tumblr posts to go to this blog, but I'd love some of them to go there.

Dealing with that complexity in a simple way is not going to be easy. As Joshua Schachter taught me a few years back, the hardest technology problems involve reducing complexity, not increasing it.

Looking Forward

So much of the news in the tech world this morning is about old news, Yahoo!, CNET, Plaxo. I suggest you ignore all of that and focus on what went on last night in San Jose at the annual Churchill Club Dinner. Some of the smartest minds in the venture capital business got up on stage and talked about the future. I have admired Vinod Khosla, Roger McNamee, Steve Jurvetson, Joe Schoendorf, and Josh Kopelman for years. These are people who spend their day looking forward, never backward.

Although I am on the west coast right now, I was not there. But fortunately, Tech Trader Daily has a long blog post with the key takeaways from the evening. Here are some of my favorites.

Vinod Knosla:  The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer. With built in projector. Authentication. Credit cards on SIM cards. ID cards, passports, drivers licenses. Any information you need.

Jurvetson says the trends are already playing out, other than the projector piece, particularly in Europe, where cell phones are 8% of credit card payments

Josh Kopelman: The rise of the “implicit” Internet. Today your permanent record exists; you create a trail of data exhaust, digital bread crumbs. Implicit data that exists in silence. Movie rentals, restaurant reservations, books purchased, Web sites visited, etc. All of this data existed in silence. No easy way until now to benefit from the data; but the silos are coming down.

“Privacy is a red herring,” Khosla says.

Roger McNamee - You can not make a great consumer product with unbundled operating system. [this one is interesting to me. i believe open source software like Android is going to prove him wrong]

From Joe Schoendorf: Water tech will replace global warming as a global priority.

Jurvetson: Evolution trumps design... Evolutionary algorithms are a powerful alternative to traditional design, blossoming first in neural networks and now in microbial engineering. Near-term trend: year or two, components of microbial engineering products will involve some form of evolution. Design for evolution.  Most of the panel seem to have no idea what Jurvetson was talking about, really. [i can't say I do either, but I think Steve's on to something big here]

Most of the talk was about mobile and technology as an answer to the looming problems of the world. The former is obvious, that's the next big thing. The latter is gratifying since I believe markets and the flow of capital to fund important innovation is the best way to solve the world's problems.

Disqus and Seesmic Pair Up For Video Comments

First, let me say that I am not sure about the utility of video comments. I've seen them and even viewed them on Techcrunch and I think they slow down and break up the conversation more than they contribute to it. But I also firmly believe in trying everything at least once before making up my mind.

So with that proviso behind me, the news this morning is that Disqus, the comment system I use on this blog and the company that my firm, Union Square Ventures, has invested in, has teamed up with Seesmic to offer video comments. They are live on this blog and also on Scripting News where I left a comment just now.

So here we go.

Please let me know what you think in the comments and if you have the time and inclination to leave a video comment please do that. I'll do all my replies to this post in video.

UPDATE: I take back my promise to leave only video comments to this post. I think this discussion is a good one and I'll be running around all day in meetings here in Palo Alto and I'll want to do the email reply thing.

ITP Spring Show

NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) has been pumping out amazing people into the NYC tech scene (and the worldwide tech scene) for almost 20 years now. I think ITP is one of the things that makes NY's tech/web community what it is. It's a combination of art/design/technology/media and it's a special place that turns out special people who do special things.

Every spring they do a "spring show" that gives each student an opportunity to present their work to the public. It last for two days and is open to the public from 5pm to 9pm. Last night was the first night and tonight is the last night. It's at 721 Broadway at Broadway and Waverly.

I try to go every year because it's such an awesome experience that fills me with pride and optimism. Pride because I am proud to belong to such a great technology scene that combines art and technology in such incredible ways. And optimism because these projects are going to be the basis for companies in the coming years.

John Geraci's FoundCity at the 2005 ITP Spring Show blew me away and I played with it for weeks. That work certainly led in part to Geraci's and Steven Johnson's Outside.in, which is a USV portfolio companiy.

I am pretty sure that a number of our other portfolio companies have roots at ITP, it's gotten to the point that ITP has pretty much infected all of NY's tech companies. And that's a good thing.

Not only are the students at ITP terrific, so is the faculty, including our friend Clay Shirky who was there last night in a suite and tie. Never seen that look from Clay before!

I took Josh with me last night for two reasons. First I knew he'd love it and he did. And second, his computer programming teacher Pravin was there showing off his work. Here's a cool shot of his art study on the words Mumbai and Bombay created with a 3D printer.

Here are some more photos of Pravin's magic with the 3D printer.

Make Magazine had a photgrapher there last night and he's got all of his photos up on Flickr now. If you can't make it to the show, spend a few minutes browsing these photos. I suspect you'll be enchanted and amazed as we all were last night.

Is Friend Connect Google's Answer To MyBlogLog?

Longtime readers know how much value this blog has gotten out of mybloglog (now owned by Yahoo!).

I've had the mybloglog faceroll widget on this blog for several years and there are 2,613 members in the AVC community on mybloglog. You can see the faceroll widget on the left siedbar just a little bit below the fold.

Today, Google has announced a service called Friend Connect. I spent a bit of time looking at Friend Connect this morning and this screen shot was the one I found most interesting.

I'll have to play around with Friend Connect and understand how it fits between mybloglog and ning and other things that it reminds me of. At first blush, I am not entirely sure what I'd use it for. Suggestions?

iPhone vs Blackberry - Survey Sample Size of One

My daughter Emily was passed down the iPhone I bought when it first came out. It didn't work for me so I gave it to her. That phone developed a small crack in the screen last fall but she kept using it. The crack got worse, propagated, and yesterday she dropped it again.

Now it's shattered, it's brains have been battered, splattered all over manhattan. Sorry about that, just couldn't resist a little Stones lyrics fun.

So I asked her if she wanted another iPhone. Surprisingly, the answer was no.

She wants the new crimson red Blackberry Curve.

Fortunately, it looks like I can get an unlocked one on eBay for between $100 and $200.

I wonder what this says? I realize it's a sample size of one, but I've heard that a bunch of her friends have also given up their iPhones in search of a better texting device which seems to be the one feature they value most.

Call Your Mother

Happy Mothers Day to all moms out there, particularly my wife the superhero known as Gotham Gal and my mom who reads this blog religiously so I know she'll read this post.

Tom Friedman has an oped piece in the Times today titled Call Your Mother. It's about his mom who passed away this past year at the age of 89. He ends it with the following line:

So on this Mother’s Day, if you take one thing away from this column, take this: Call your mother.

I sure wish I could call mine.

After reading that how could you not call your mom? I'll be making my call this morning once I am sure she's up.

The photo that anchors this post was taken by my oldest daughter Jessica who contributed it and two other of her works for a charity art show called Art Action that is running this weekend at 7 Mercer Street here in NYC. We visited the show yesterday.

I wanted to buy something to contribute to the causes that the show is supporting and decided to purchase the photo that anchors this post for my mom as a mother's day gift. It's called Lava Rock and it reminds me of my mom. Happy mother's day mom.

Three Reasons To Use Disqus

First, I'd like to be perfectly clear that our firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Disqus. So I am clearly biased about what I am about to say. Second, I'd like to point out that the reason we made the investment is largely based on my experience as a Disqus user for the past 10 months and the result it has had on my blog/community. Sometimes seeing is believing and it certainly was in this case.

So, with that disclosure out of the way, here are three reasons I think every blogger, certainly every serious blogger, should consider switching to Disqus.

1) Threaded discussions - When you want to leave a comment that is actually a reply to someone else's comment, you click on the reply link and the comment/reply is indented right under the original comment. On any comment thread/discussion with a lot of action, this is absolutely necessary to make sense of the discussion. I am shocked that a popular blog like Techcrunch doesn't have this feature in its comments. Certainly it's possible for commenters to use an @sign to signify a comment that is actually a reply, but threaded discussion is so much better.

2a) Email Replies - Disqus emails every comment to the blogger. If the blogger wants to reply to the comment, he/she simply replies to the email and it is posted as a reply (with the indent described above). This feature, which I requested the day I met/saw Disqus for the first time, is the single best thing about Disqus and has transformed my blog comments because I can now participate in them in real time throughout the day as the conversation develops. This is a BIG DEAL.

2b) Email Replies for Commenters - It works the same way for commenters. If you leave a comment in Disqus and have given Disqus your email address, you will get an email when anyone replies to your comment. You can reply to that just like the blogger can. This is also a big deal and leads to much more active commenting and replying - ie discussion.

3) Shared profiles. As more and more blogs add Disqus (over 10,000 at this point), the profiles that commenters create in Disqus are shared across blogs. This is an important network effect that benefits the blogger and his/her community. For example, if you have a blog that is read by a similar audience as my blog, and you add Disqus to your blog, most of my commenters will already be recognized by Disqus the first time they show up in your comments. They don't need to set up a new profile. They''ll have the same avatar/icon and identity.

There are literally a dozen more reasons why Disqus is great (this guy lists 25 of them), and maybe you all will add them in the comments, but these are the big three.

Since I converted from TypePad comments to Disqus last August, the number of comments I regularly get have gone up by a factor of at least five and maybe ten. It seems that each week I have a post that gets over 100 comments (not this past week though). That never used to happen. And the discussions in the comments have improved dramatically.

If you want to give Disqus a try, go here.

Update: Here's a fourth reason, courtesy of flipbrad. There's a greasmonkey script that brings disqus comments and commenting right into Google Reader. You can get it here.

Geographic Balancing

I am fond of saying that what happened in the US in the second half of the 20th century will take place in much of the rest of the world in the first half of the 21st century. The end result will be vastly more geographic balance of wealth and prosperity than we had at the beginning of this millennium.

Today, in a NY Times article on Toyota (TM)'s annual profit guidance to wall street, I came across this comment by Toyota's President Katsuaki Watanabe:

“Our profit structure has become more geographically balanced, with growing contributions from resource-rich countries and emerging countries”

The Times goes on to say:

Toyota, now in a dead heat with G.M. to be the world’s largest car company, said most of its recent profit growth had come in new markets like Brazil, China and Russia. It said the growth helped offset sluggish sales in the United States, traditionally Toyota’s largest and most profitable market, and other mature economies like Europe and Japan.

This is consistent with comments I heard at the hedge fund event I attended on wednesday. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the middle east, are quickly attaining economic purchasing power parity with the United States and Western Europe.

I may have to amend the statement I started this post off with. It looks like it may not take 50 years for the balancing to occur. It's likely to happen in the first 25 years of this century.

Twittering A Hedge Fund Event

I went to an event yesterday that featured a number of people active in the hedge fund industry and the financial markets. Here is the series of twitters I sent during that event.

  Headed to the semi annual meeting of a hedge fund of funds. Expect to get some insights and will twitter them

  Observation: great hedge fund managers have come out of goldman, tiger, and michael price's firm

  Has the financial system crisis run its course? Most likely yes if banks and the fed keep doing what they are doing

  Has housing in the US bottomed? Maybe not, but the bottom is nearing. Watch for change in expectations, not prices

  What about the US economy? A tale of two cities. Not like past recessions.

  Inflation? Watch out, its here and more is on its way driven by massive global liquidity of capital

  Regional banks: look for a wave of regional bank failures. Fed won't bail them out

  To clarify that string of tweets and what follows: these are opinions I am hearing at a hedge fund event

Systemic risk is largely gone from the markets but economy risk remains. Market knows how to price the latter but not the former

  @tweetipFH oil (and food) prices are creating big problems in parts of the economy

Hedge fund manager singing the praises of aapl. He's right of course. But his framework is based on the world as it exists right now

  Had to leave the hedge fund event. I hope you enjoyed the twitters

Neil Young on Stage at Java One

I am going to get every one of his "dumps"

Triangulating For Insight

I am a huge fan of triangulating. I don't think anyone or anything can give you the insight you need to truly understand things. Whether it's visiting comscore, compete, alexa, hitwise, and quantcast to get a more complete picture of a web service's usage, or reading a conservative oped page and a liberal oped page to get a broader view of a political issue, or reading a wide array of tech blogs to make sense of the microsoft/yahoo breakup, triangulating is the best way I know to break the logjam in my mind and get to insight.

I've been subconsciously triangulating three posts for the past couple weeks;

1) Jeff Nolan's rant on incrementalism and the new thing:

As I survey the landscape of consumer and business focused software and service providers I am struck by how much incrementalism there is at the moment.

2) Tim O'Reilly's keynote at Web 2.0:

At the end he recites a poem called The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke which contains this line

When we win it's with small things

3) Dave Winer's post on a decentralized Twitter in which he states:

I always work in bootstrapping mode, addressing the first big issue, solving the problem, then advancing to the next one. It's why so many of the ideas I've worked on have become popular modes of communication. Big-bang approaches always fail. I've spent decades arguing with people who want to reinvent the world in one stroke. They always try anyway and always fail. Bootstrapping is the only way that works.

Jeff is right, the web/tech world is full of incrementalism right now and that's why I am so bullish on  the sector and our portfolio which is stock full of incrementalism.

Tim makes a passionate argument for "tackling big hard problems" in his keynote. But Dave is correct in his assertion that the best way to do that is one step at a time.

Think about the way Linux was built and continues to be built. One step at a time. Each one looks trivial. Taken together it's awesome. Same with wikipedia. Or a social net like Facebook. Or the web itself.

We're rapdily reaching the adulthood of the web in a sense. The business architecture of the net now mirrors it's technical architecture. Massively distributed nodes that collectively create immense value, but if any one fails, nobody notices. Of course, it's not entirely true. If Google went down, or even S3, we'd be unhappy campers. But DNA of the web was set a long time ago and there's no fighting it. It's a sustainable network built on the principles of massive redundancy and no central choke point.

And because of that, at least on the web, if you want to tackle hard problems you are going to need to do it collectively and in bite sizes. We are not in an incremental phase. We are in an incremental system.

A Blast From The Past Quiz

Brad Feld posted a picture of him and a friend at MIT when he was 19 on his blog last week along with a quiz question. The minute I saw that photo, I thought "I should post the picture of us from Harvard Square in 1996." So here it is:

So here's the quiz. Name all six people in this photo. Hint: Five are active VCs and one is a retired VC.

The one rule is that nobody in the photo can participate in the quiz.

Extra credit - who is on the cover of Business Week in the magazine stand we are all standing next to?

The CBS Digital Radio Network

Yesterday I attended a launch event that really impressed me. As I watched it, I sent this twitter message:

          Watching a killer presentation on the cbs digital radio network. These guys have nailed it

I got a bunch of replies asking for more, but I've been offline for most of the past 24 hours and couldn't get around to posting about it.

Paid Content has a post on the event that does a good job of "play by play". But it really doesn't capture what went down.

Ad Age did a slightly better job with their coverage, but also missed the big point.

And that point is this. CBS has launched a single flash player that showcases all of their terrestrial stations' internet streams, all of their internet radio streams (like the new WNEW), all of AOL's internet stations (which CBS now operates for AOL), and best of all allows the listener to create their own custom radio stations that are also available on the player.

And that flash player can be launched whenever you visit a CBS radio station's website, whenever you play an AOL radio station, and whenever you play a custom station you or your friends create using the new CBS digital radio network.

Think about this. They have rolled out the entire spectrum of what radio might be on one single player. You want to listen to WFAN? You can do it on the player. You want to listen to AOL's indie rock stream? You can do it on the player. You want to create and listen your own station? You can do that on the player. I suspect it won't be long before you can listen to any last.fm stream on that player too.

And here's what really got me. When all of this audio content is being delivered in a single network, CBS can move you around the network when it makes sense. If you are listening to the AOL indie rock stream and Wilco is playing in the WXRT studio, the CBS digital radio network can alert you in the AOL stream and give you one click access to the Wilco live performance.

As my friend David Goodman explained, when the next Eliot Spitzer moment happens, you can go from the wonderful WNEW stream to 1010 WINS to get the news and then go back, all in a single state of the art flash player.

As I said in my twitter, these guys have nailed it.

What is this? [o:p][/o:p][/span]

I have no idea what those strings of HTML code do or mean (and I substituted [ for <), but they messed up my feed for the past couple days.

They got into my feed because I cut and pasted some text from microsoft entourage.

When I decided to figure out what was wrong with my feed, the clue was "did you edit your posts in MS Word?"

I learned a long time ago not to do that.

Now I know to avoid all Microsoft software when it comes to publishing on the web.

Distributed Polling

The poll I did yesterday on Yahoo!'s closing price has been taken almost 2,200 times in about a day. How did it get so many takers? By being distributed on many blogs at the same time. The poll has a share tab with embed code and I asked my readers to embed it on their blogs. And I left comments on some of the most popular blogs suggesting they do so. As of this morning here's the list of blogs that picked up the poll code and reposted it.

http://blog.hubdub.com/2008/05/05/what-price-will-yahoo-close-at-on-monday-may-5th/

http://gigaom.com/ http://gigaom.com/2008/05/03/microsoft-yahoo-bid-over/ http://hexia.net/frettavefur/technology http://laurent.pierssens.com/2008/05/04/microsoft-walks-how-low-will-yahoo-close-tomorrow/

http://mp.blogs.com/

http://seekingalpha.com/article/75643-where-will-yahoo-close-today

http://www.alleyinsider.com/ http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/play_the_where_will_yahoo_s_stock_go_now_game_yhoo_ http://www.collierclan.net/mark/index.php/2008/05/04/yhoo-stock-price-poll/ http://www.contentmatters.info/

http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2008/05/microsoft-ends.html http://www.stoweboyd.com/message http://davemartin.blogspot.com/2008/05/if-all-else-fails-immortality-can.html http://www.buzzya.com/2008/05/04/microsoft-to-yahoo-take-a-hike/ http://mojo-ramblings.blogspot.com/2008/05/microsoft-and-yahoo.html http://amaappendagy.blogspot.com/2008/05/spliced-feed-for-social-media_04.html

http://technology.nuovoportale.com/microsoft-to-yahoo-take-a-hike/ http://swik.net/Technology-News/GigaOm/Microsoft+to+Yahoo:+Take+a+Hike!/b4tv2 http://nobosh.com/s/play-the-where-will-yahoos-stock-go-now-game-yhoo/57824/ http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/fredwilson/newwith/me/?eid=1209917398_17_48186561 http://aware11.com/play-the-where-will-yahoos-stock-go-now-game-yhoo/

I love this concept. We can work together to figure stuff out. Instead of each of us hosting a small poll on our blogs, we can collaborate on one large one. As for whether the poll was accurate, too soon to know. The wisdom of the crowd was around $22/share this morning before the market open. So I lobbed in a limit order before the market opened at $22 for the day. As of now, that order has not been filled.

We'll see if the stock gets to my $26 prediction. As of now, it's approaching $25. So much for the wisdom of crowds I guess.