Blogs – Our “Morning Paper”

Breakfast
Originally uploaded by kirsten_pdx.

The first guys I worked for in the venture business, Milton and Bliss, used to sit at their desk and read the Wall Street Journal for 20 minutes over a cup of coffee before starting their day. It was an essential part of their daily routine.

That’s the way it was in my parent’s generation and largely still is in my generation. But it’s changing.

My brother and I were talking last night during the Richard Shindell concert. He mentioned a day last week when I didn’t blog in the morning. Neither did Jackson. And neither did Tony Alva. And neither did his daughter. My brother got to work, turned on his computer, and nothing was there. He felt empty. His morning paper wasn’t there.

I look at my kids and their start pages aren’t Yahoo or Google News. Its their MySpace page. That’s where their world is. It’s no wonder that Google paid MySpace $900 million to be the search provider on MySpace.

Blogs are the endgame for social networking. MySpace is the AOL of blogging. It’s where you go when you don’t know how to do it yourself. But with MySpace starting to rein in what people can do with their pages (for a host of good and bad reasons), they are seeding their own decline. A decline that will take a decade if AOL is a good proxy. In the next ten years, most people who want an online home will have a blog, it will be their online identity and their start page and much more.

I haven’t done it yet, but I should change my start page to my blog. That’s where I go to start my day and end my day. And I am hell bent to configure my blog with enough functionality that it can be my newspaper, my inbox, my tv, my radio, and my social network. It’s pretty damn close already.

That’s where all of this is going. We’ll program our online world and others will too. And we’ll start our day there instead of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. My best is many of you reading this are already there.

Comments (14) | Posted August 10, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Are we not being self obsessive by doing what you have mentioned above?

Aren't we become apathetic with the whole world we live in and the circumstances of people in and around us by not knowing about or by not being interested in it?

Is that a good trait?

Posted by: Balaji | Aug 10, 2006 7:14:44 AM

Bailaj

I think you misinterpreted my post

I am not suggesting we spend our lives gazing at our navels

I am suggesting that our blogs will expand to become our newsreaders, our content aggregation spaces, the place we connect with friends and people like you who I've never met but now am having a discussion with

I think that's a big step forward

Posted by: fred | Aug 10, 2006 7:52:59 AM

fred... very exciting concept but please clarify for me. do you mean to say that when viewing your own blog you'll have "indicators" and/or "feeds" which display up-to-date information pertaining to current events, email, entertainment broadcasting? or would that information be displayed as links? and how do you retain privacy?

do you see that as encouraging interaction with others -- what i view as the value of blogging. or does that redefine blogging as a more personal tool?

Posted by: andy jacobson | Aug 10, 2006 7:54:36 AM

Andy,

Not to talk for Fred, but I think if you look around you'll already see elements of what he talks about on his blog.

Think of a typical morning routine and compare it to what's already possible and what can be possible

Fred now has a music player built right into his blog (Streampad). Instead of turning on the CD player, he simply hits the play button that appears in his sidebar.

Think of his blog roll as sections of the newspaper - he accesses them from his blog, checks them out and returns.

He can have conversations, network with new individuals all through A VC.

Think of a blog as the hub of our digital identity and the place where we aggregate everything that is "us" - content, social, entertainment, etc. It will centre around the blog. It already is, and that's what's exciting.

Posted by: Fraser | Aug 10, 2006 9:14:23 AM

You say "It’s no wonder that Google paid MySpace $900 million to be the search provider on MySpace."

That's not the real question. The real questions are, why the hell didn't google buy myspace when it had the chance? Why did they underestimate its value when myspace was for sale?

Posted by: Michael Weiksner | Aug 10, 2006 9:33:10 AM

Fred,

I had to chuckle when I read this. :-)

"I am not suggesting we spend our lives gazing at our navels"

I do understand now about what you meant. What you mean to say is that you blog page will resonate who you are, give an identity of yourself for others whom you have never met or seen. I definitely think that It is really kool. Thank you.

Posted by: Balaji | Aug 10, 2006 9:38:35 AM

i am here already and I love it.

Obviously, a good music widget and more news, but I agree100 percent

Posted by: howard lindzon | Aug 10, 2006 10:29:19 AM

I start every morning with coffee and Netvibes. It is my routine and has been for at least the last year. My feed count needs a little pruning, but the advent of tabs at netvibes has helped out some. I generally have about ~40 feeds I read every morning, right after lunch, and sometime late in the evening via netvibes. I am not a huge social networker as of right now, but I do find myself hoping around on Last.FM a bunch to see what people are listening too. On some Sunday mornings I do still read the paper, but as of the last 5 years, 12 hour old news is stale. The only thing that interests me in print is opinions post-event.

(Disclaimer: I just realized I dropped Netvibes 3x in this post. I have no connection whatsoever with them, except that I am extremely happy with their site)

Posted by: Cyanbane | Aug 10, 2006 10:48:05 AM

i know, i'm an old fuddy-duddy indulging in hyperbole, but reading all this i can't help think we are enroute to Isaac Asimov's imagined world of Solaria, where technology and communication tools got so terrific that people gradually abandoned true human contact (too inefficient and messy) and eventually lived literally solitary lives, networked to everything but connected to no one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria

Posted by: steve | Aug 10, 2006 11:57:27 AM

Fred, I have not tried this widget, but I stumbled onto a cool "badge" by Yahoo. In the spirit of turning your blog into your homepage & newspaper, you might consider adding stock tickers via http://finance.yahoo.com/badges/

Good luck.

Posted by: Duncan | Aug 10, 2006 4:32:40 PM

Fred, I think you are completely dead on with this line of thinking. It is the decentralized nature of blogs (namely, that you are not tied into any one service or platform) that make them a perfect candidate as the Hub of your online activity and social network. This has crystalized recently with the proliferation of widgets that bloggers can add to their sidebars... in combination with microformats, this can become a powerful thing.

Posted by: Joseph | Aug 10, 2006 4:46:56 PM

Interesting that MySpace are restricting the use of blogs on their site and this might be the beginning of their demise. I have blogged extensively on the business model of social networking sites at www.theequitykicker.com. In summary my view is that you can see how they could make the kind of money that will justify their valuations but there is an awful lot that could still go wrong. And remember Google got some of the other Fox properties in addition to MySpace for its $900m...

Posted by: Nic Brisbourne | Aug 10, 2006 5:45:49 PM

Totally agree that moving forward, everyone’s personal blog will be the dashboard for their digital life.

Posted by: Christian Cadeo | Aug 11, 2006 12:01:43 PM

For the first time in about eight years, I "opted-out" of my annual/online WSJ subscription renewal, expressly for the purpose of "testing" the new world that Fred's post refers to. I wanted to see how badly I would miss it, or if I would "miss out."

It was scary at first to not "have my Journal" every day, but obviously you can re-subscribe at any time, if it's unberable :) I also set up a personal homepage at Netvibes, which I like a lot better than Bloglines, my prior homepage.

Three months later: I'm sampling far more sources of media, but reading far less. I don't miss "my Journal" almost at all, although I may well go back someday.

Posted by: Chris | Aug 14, 2006 2:40:01 PM

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