A VC

comScore Blog Post On The Google Paid Clicks Issue

comScore, a company that I am on the board of, has published a lengthy blog post about the paid click data that drove down GOOG earlier this week. I think its well worth a read for anyone interested in this issue.

Their conclusion is:

While we do not claim that these concerns are unwarranted, we believe a careful analysis of our search data does not lend them direct support. More specifically, the evidence suggests that the softness in Google’s paid click metrics is primarily a result of Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.

Soul Patch

Soul Patch is a blues/rock band out of Boulder Colorado featuring two VCs, Ryan McIntyre and Jason Mendelson, both of Foundry Group.

As many of you know, I am a big fan of the team at Foundry, mostly because they are great investors who I love working with. But now I get to enjoy their music too. That's pretty sweet.

I've been listening to Soul Patch's record, Sooner or Later, a bunch this week. I posted my favorite track, called Big Time, on my tumblog this morning. Give it a listen.

What Would I Change?

Jeff Jarvis asks:

So now the hedge funds pushing New York Times Company management own about as much as the Sulzberger family. I don’t know whether they’ll win their effort to elect directors to the board, but I do think this has reached a critical mass and that the family and management will be forced to make strategic changes. So I’m curious: what would you change? The hedge funds are urging the company to divest some assets and concentrate on the Times, investing in digital. What do you suggest? (And please refrain from the obvious Times-bashing. There’s plenty of opportunity for that in the post below about the McCain scandal. This is about the business of news and media.)

I'd spin off The NY Times (paper and online) into a separate company and bring in new management to run it. I'd liquidate the rest of the assets, possibly including About.com.

I'd make the NY Times all about their audience. Let the people who read the paper have a much larger role in the content that gets published, both online and offline.

The best thing about the NY Times is their readers. The only way they can fix their problems is by leveraging them as the other half of their newsroom.

> I'd like to acknowledge my friend Dave Morgan for helping me frame my thoughts on this.

New Tumblr Homepage

One thing I never liked about the home page of tumblr.com is that I thought it was wasting the attention that the front page of a web service normally gets. Well David and Marco sure fixed that with the launch yesterday of Tumblr Radar, the new tumblr front page. Part digg, part delicious/popular, part flickr's interestingness, and all tumblr. It's awesome. Check it out. (in case you don't know, USV is an investor in tumblr).

Conviction and Discipline

I ran into an old friend last night and we got to talking about the traits of a great investor. He said he thought the number one trait of great investors is discipline. I agreed that was key. But I added that conviction was also critical.

Conviction and discipline are two sides of the same coin. I think you need to start with conviction. When Brad and I started Union Square Ventures back in 2003, we spent six months outlining an investment thesis. We asked ourselves and others a bunch of fundamental questions. Did VC make sense in the new world of IT where commodity infrastructure and open source software made starting web apps and services very cheap? Did intellectual property still play a role in defensibility of technology? What would the architecture of business on the web look like in a world of interconnected web services? We must have written down twenty or thirty questions like this. And we spent months going through them, working out in our minds what was going to work and what was not. And at the end of that process, we wrote an offering memorandum and went out and raised our first fund.

The benefit of that process of building an investment thesis is that when we closed the fund and started investing we had conviction. We knew exactly what we were going to invest in and what we were not going to invest in. We've evolved our investment thesis over the past five years, mostly tightening it up and narrowing it even further to be honest. But the basis tenets of it have not changed much. We've blogged quite a bit about our thesis on the Union Square Ventures weblog and here are a series of posts by Brad on this topic.

But conviction isn't worth anything if you don't pair it with discipline. Once you have a thesis, you need to stick to it. There are all kinds of temptations that come along to invest outside of the core investment thesis. You have to resist them. Discipline is about sticking to what you know and what you believe in totally and completely.

It helps to have partners, not many, but a few, to impose the discipline. I know that at my heart I am a deal doer. I like to make investments. I like to find and work with new companies. Left to my own devices, I could pull the trigger on a new investment every month, maybe even more frequently than that. But my partners remind me all the time that we have to pick our shots carefully. They make sure we run each and every investment opportunity through the lens of our investment thesis and evaluate them in that way.

The result of our conviction about what we want to do and our discipline in doing exactly that and not anything else has resulted in the creation of a portfolio that I am very proud of. We will be announcing several new investments shortly which I am equally proud of. Is this the best portfolio out there? No, of course not. But it is certainly the best portfolio we could construct given our view of the world we are operating in and that's exactly what we want to be doing.

Thinking About GOOG This Morning

On Monday, I bought some more GOOG (and some more AAPL). I explained my rationale for both trades in this twitter post. I went into even more detail on the Google purchase in this covestor post.

I was busy yesterday and not paying attention to techmeme, the stock market, or my portfolio (always a bad idea), and saw this twitter post by Christopher Finke.

          Being glad that I didn't buy GOOG like @fredwilson did.  Down 36 points so far today.

Down 36 day one, ugh. Typical trade for me. The way to make money in the stock market is to sell to me or buy from me. I am not kidding.

So last night, while watching the debate, I spent some time on techmeme making sense of the google news. Turns out comscore, a company I am on the board of, released some numbers on google's paid click growth, or lack thereof. Comscore data shows that the number of paid clicks on google's network was flat december to january. For a company that has been growing like a weed for years, a flat month is never good news.

So am I concerned? DId I just buy a stock that is going to be cut in half in the coming months as someone suggested (I can't remember who or I'd link to them)?

Who knows? The market is going to do what it's going to do. But I stick by my covestor post. I like to think of stocks as proxies for buying companies. If someone was willing to hand you all of Google in return for paying them the next 10 years of it's cash flow, would you do that? I would, for sure. [that's a theoretical exercise of course, not many people can just show up with $150bn]

I did a back of the envelope calculation that says if Google grows its operating cash flow at 15% per year for the next 10 years, then at today's price, you can own the company for the next 10 years of cash flow.

Well what if paid search doesn't grow any more? First, I don't think paid search has suddenly stopped growing. It's growth is slowing for sure, driven by multiple factors. I don't think a slowing economy is one of them because in a tough economy marketers move marketing dollars to high ROI channels like paid search. I do think many keywords have been bid up to a price that it's hard to get an ROI on them. And I do think google is cracking down on click fraud which is showing up in the total number of paid clicks. And that's a very good thing in the long run.

But the bigger story on Google is that it has been a one trick pony for years. Everything that Google does is paid for by its paid search business. In the fourth quarter, Google generated $2.9bn of gross profit (gross margin) and $1.7bn of operating cash flow. That means it spent $1.2bn on operating expenses. I bet that only $200-300mm of those operating expenses had anything to do with paid search. So if that's true, and it's a wild eyed guess, then Google is spending close to a billion dollars a quarter on stuff that is not producing revenue right now.

Do you think that stuff will never produce revenue for Google? Maps and other local services are going to be a huge revenue stream at some point for Google. Same with Google Apps which is slowly but surely becoming a better alternative to Microsoft Office, a franchise that spits out billions of dollars of cash flow to Microsoft right now. I could name a bunch more lines of business at Google that today are total cost centers but will not always be.

It's hard to figure out how to value these opportunities so wall street doesn't. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't. If Google drops in half from today's prices, I'll be buying it all the way down.

Awesome: Hype Machine Scrobbles!

I was making my way through my tumblr dashboard this morning and came across this post from Anthony of the Hype Machine.

I have been waiting and wanting this feature since the day I started using the Hype Machine two years ago. Thanks Anthony and Taylor.

It's quite simple, just go to your settings in the Hype Machine and click on the last.fm tab. You'll get this screen.

Connecting two of my favorite music services makes them both a lot better. Since the hype machine is already connected to twitter, that means that three of my favorite web services are now connected. Awesome.

Obama's Tribal Garb Photo

Sure it's an outrage and whomever did this is a sleazy hack. But I for one am happy we are getting this crap out of the way now

If the dems don't do this to obama, the other side surely will

We need to know how susceptible he is to this stuff, no matter how sleazy it is

If he can win in texas and ohio after taking cheap shots like this, then he's more bulletproof in the fall

So the bottom line for me is its sad and pathetic that people stoop that low but better that it happens now

Event Firehoses On Twitter

On Sunday night, our family sat down to watch the Oscars. Out of the six of us, four had laptops. Jess was doing her spanish homework. Emily was Facebooking and IM'ing. Josh was playing facebook and miniclips games. And I was twittering the Oscars.

I had the following tabs open; IMDB, twitter, and three or four tweetscan tabs. I was following my own twitter stream on twitterific.

I've been using twitter a lot lately to follow events, usually when I am watching them on TV. I've done that for several of the democrat debates. And I did that for the super bowl. But the Oscars were the best event so far. The banter about the various outfits, monologues, and speeches was very entertaining.

I've been thinking that there's a better way to do this going forward and I am hoping someone will build this for me and everyone else who likes to hang out in twitter for these kinds of events.

Tweetscan does a great job of surfacing up interesting conversations about a certain keyword. Here's the tweetscan result for Jon Stewart. Here's the tweetscan result for Oscars. Here's the tweetscan result for Diablo Cody. All of those tweetscan pages are interesting, but not nearly as interesting as they were during the Oscars.

Here's what I want. Give me a twitterific style desktop client that I can type keywords into. For the Oscars, those keywords would be jon stewart, oscars, diablo cody, javier bardem, etc, etc. When I told Andrew this idea yesterday, he suggested that you call these collection of keywords "events" and you let one person build them and many people subscribe to them. Exactly.

Then you sit back and watch the conversation happen. When you want to wade in, you can post or reply. It's as simple as that.

On top of everything else that it is, Twitter is a humongous chat room that you can subscribe to slices of through various interfaces. You can follow a certain group of people. That's the primary use case. You can  track all of the conversations about certain keywords using the twitter track function. And increasingly, you can create other slices. Tweetscan has really opened my eyes to the value of slicing into and out of twitter discussion.

When an event goes down, I don't want to just follow my established group on twitter. I want to follow the event in its entirety. Via a firehose of twitter chatter. That I can participate in when I want. Someone is going to build this. And I am going to love it.

Flattered

Hugh at gapingvoid says that I inspired this cartoon. I am flattered. I love Hugh's work.

Free Is A Great Way To Make Money

That's how I ended a post I wrote almost three years ago, called In Defense Of Free. It's a concept that regular readers of this blog know well. But I still get comments like this one from hyokon:

I am a bit worried about the current craze about 'free'. There is nothing that 'should' be free, but it seems like becoming a requirement.

I replied to Hyokon and suggested reading my post in defense of free. But I've got a better idea. Go read this post by Chris Anderson in this month's Wired.

Chris credits me with the word freemium in the post and he's wrong about that. I suggested we come up with a catchy name but Jarid Lukin delivered the name and try as I might, he never seems to get credit for it.

Other that that little nit, Chris nails the issue of the free business model in his post. Here is the key insight:

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You're probably experiencing it right now. It's the basis of virtually all media.

And before everyone starts crying "advertising overload", Chris goes on to identify a number of non-advertising based free business models.

Bottom line - go read Chris' post. I am happy to have his company working in defense of free.

Thoughts On Choosing Board Members

I am a professional board member. I've been sitting on boards for almost 20 years and I've seen a lot. I've seen some of the best board members in action and have tried to copy them. I've seen some of the worst board members in action and have tried hard to forget them.

Here are some thoughts on choosing board members. This advice is for everyone, but it's of particular use when you are a bigger company, maybe public, and need to fill your board with good people.

• Avoid "big names"  For the most part, they are useless.
• Select people who will attend each and every meeting, who will pay close attention to the business
• Select people who have an affinity for your business, who understand your challenges and your opportunities
• Avoid putting someone you can control on your board. In tough situations they will have a fiduciary duty to do what's right and you won't be able to control them when it matters most to you.
• Don't let conflicts get in the way of selecting the ideal board member. Conflicts will be disclosed and can be managed. Many times the people who will understand your business best are conflicted in some way. There are ways to deal with this problem.
• Make sure to have an experienced accountant/auditor on your board and have them run the audit committee. That is no place for amateurs.
• Make sure to have at least two or three CEOs of comparable companies on your board. Make sure they are on the comp committee. Compensation issues are best handled by people who understand the talent market.
• Select people who have the time to do the job right. Being a board member is a job. It's not a retirement perk. If someone cannot commit to attend each and every meeting and to spend at least several hours a week on your company, they are not the right choice.
• Select people who will get along with each other. The very best boards I am on are friendly social active groups. Serious business doesn't have to be stilted and formal. It can and should be fun.
• Above all else, look for great judgment and ethics.

Hope that helps.

Why I Read Techmeme

I've been critical in the past of techmeme and I still feel that too many people are writing to/for techmeme and that it's getting gamed. But I read techmeme every day, without fail, often two or three times a day. I also follow techmeme firehose on twitter via twitterific and that is a great experience.

There is one thing that Techmeme does that makes it a must read. The related links under the headline.

Take this CNN story yesterday about the Japanese satellite. I saw it but didn't really want to read it. I was curious if it was a big deal or not, but didn't think CNN would tell me that. So I didn't click thru.

Then this morning I saw the following:

If you look at the related links under the main story, you'll see a link that says "Fractals Of Change". That's my friend Tom Evslin's blog. Tom will know whether this is a big deal or not. So I immediately clicked thru and read Tom's thoughts. It's not a big deal.

Seeing the big news headlines of the day is important and I love watching them come through in my twitter feed. But seeing the related links and knowing when someone you trust is talking about an issue is the big deal for me in Techmeme. Others do this as well, but to my mind Gabe does it best and that's why Techmeme is a daily read for me.

There Will Be Blood

Cameron asked for a review of There Will Be Blood with this comment last night. So here it is.

Daniel Day Lewis is one of the top actors working right now. His performance in this movie about the early days of the oil business in the US is fantastic. Paul Dano also delivers an over the top effort as the preacher who torments him.

The acting is the star of this movie. The historical context is interesting. I was fascinated by the way the oil business developed in the early days of the 20th century.

But overall, I really did not enjoy the movie. The story didn't pull me in and I honestly can't say it was entertaining.

Bottom Line - see it if you like great acting but don't see it if you want to be entertained.

The Globalization Of Facebook

Erick Schonfeld generated a lot of discussion in the blogs yesterday with a post talking about facebook fatigue and the flattening of the facebook growth curve in the US.

But the charts in Erick's post tell me that Facebook is a global business now and what's happening in the US is not anywhere near the whole story. Here are some stats I culled from comscore.

Check that out. The percentage of monthly uvs coming from the US dropped from 76% at the start of the year to 35% at the end of the year. The percentage from the three big english speaking countries (US, UK, and Canada) dropped from 96% at the start to 64% at year end. Europe is now 23% of Facebook and Asia is now 14%.

Here is where Facebook's growth is coming from right now.

Slide, Rock You, and Zynga

At the risk of wading into hostile territory, I am going to blog again about facebook stats and the rise of our portfolio company Zynga on the leaderboard. Here is the adanomics leaderboard that shows the leading facebook app companies.

I have no idea what UADA is, but the top three facebook app companies are Slide, Rock You, and Zynga. They and Flixster are the only facebook app companies with more than 1mm daily users. There are some other interesting companies on this list. It will be interesting to see how companies like Chainn, esgut, Blake, Watercooler, and 42 Friends develop over the next 6-12 months. Will they build or sell?

The other issue that this list brings up is the head versus the tail of facebook apps.

I realize that they are overlaps and duplicates, but the top 10 facebook apps generate a total duplicated and overlapping reach of over 13mm daily visits. The next 10 facebook apps generate a total duplicated and overlapping reach of about 3mm daily visits. And it does down from there.

It's a classic power law curve. It's not surprising at all. But it raises some interesting questions for everyone in the facebook ecosystem.

New Smartlink Icons

Some of you may have noticed little music icons next to the links to artists and records in my "three records" post from yesterday. That is if you cleared your cache. Otherwise you might have seen the old smartlink icons.

These are the new smartlink icons from our portfolio company adaptive blue. Alex Iskold, adaptive blue's CEO, explains the new icons in this post.

Here are some examples:

Golden Delicious, the new record from Mike Doughty
YHOO, the stock that I should have bought a month ago
Brad Feld, my friend and co-investor in adaptive blue and a lot of other companies
Vintage Tunina, one of my favorite white wines
Spotted Pig, our favorite local haunt where Gotham Gal and I ate last night
There Will Be Blood, a movie Gotham Gal and I are seeing tonight

I am really excited about this little change because it showcases the power of smartlinks in a way that the old icons did not. All you need to do to generate these smartlinks is put one line of javascript into your blog template. For many of the popular blog platforms, there is a one click install.

After that, when you link out to a movie, a book, a restaurant, a stock, a record, a person, etc, on many of the most popular websites, the link will be decorated with an icon to show what that link is and give you the option of "exploding the link" to find related information without navigating away from the page.

These semantic anchors are going to start showing up all over the web and the web is going to get just a little bit smarter in the process. And that's a big deal.

Three Records I Am Into Right Now

Sorry for the lack of music posts here at AVC. I am going to make it up to you with three for the price of one.

Nada Surf - Lucky - These guys, Matt, Ira, and Daniel, are fantastic individuals who make great music.

Their past three records, including the current one, have been family favorites. After they played a fundraiser gig in our old backyard, Josh listened to The Weight Is A Gift non-stop for months.

The new record is not as edgy as the prior two, with more acoustic guitar and melodies. But they write great songs and this is so listenable.

Whose Authority - Nada Surf - Lucky (thanks Butter Team for the mp3)

Oracular Spectacular - MGMT - Fred Graver turned me on to this band with his year end mix which featured the awesome track called Kids.

I've been listening to them on hype machine since then and finally succumbed and bought the record. To be honest, it's not consistently great, but there are five or six killer songs on it.

Their music is described as "electronic indie dance rock". I guess that's a good description. I call it fun.

Time To Pretend - MGMT - Oracular Spectacular (thanks to Instrumental Analysis for the mp3)

Made In The Dark - Hot Chip - While we are on the subject of electronic music, I have been into the remixes that Hot Chip does for the past year. They are often featured on the Hype Machine. My all time favorite is this remix of the Stone's I'm Free.

I got the new studio album and like the MGMT record, I feel that it's mixed but brilliant in parts. The diversity of style and sound is simply amazing.

I can't find an mp3 on the web right now, so click thru to my tumblog and listen to Touch Too Much, a ween-sounding track that is my current obsession.

My Song Circle

Daryn told me about this cool trick with his tumblr player. You can type in as many tumblr urls as you want (separated by commas) into his script and get a player that plays a whole song circle's playlist. Here's my song circle in action. Enjoy.

warning - the load time is long if you put about ten blogs in it like i did.

Comment Of The Day

We will be seeing a version of this play out in Turkey. It's an interesting market. Piracy has all but killed physical CD sales and, online, people just don't seem to be convinced to pay for music (i am excluding mobile here). So far, online sales have largely been subsidized by FMCG companies as promotions. Now TTNet, the Turkish broadband monopoly, has cut a deal with all turkish labels (turkish market is 90% local music) to offer the entire digital Turkish music catalog through a subscription. Then, they went ahead and included the subscription in their higher-end pricing, and are offering it at a nominal rate to other subscribers (nominal meaning $3-5/mo.) So it is now a utility. Supporting your last paragraph, Fred, I am watching to see how progressive they will get with this. The smart game is building a robust API and let tothers get creative.

posted by Cem Sertoglu to David's Got It Right

Friends

I told the Gotham Gal that I was going to get together with a friend from London next week. She asked me who. I told her his name. She said, “how can he be your friend if I’ve never heard of him?”

Good question. But the truth is that I have friends, hundreds of them, who I haven’t even met. They are people that I’ve met online. Not in chat rooms. Through blogging and other forms of social media.

When I get the opportunity to meet these online friends face to face I try to do it. I have rarely sized someone up incorrectly who I consider a friend online. It’s amazing how you can get to know someone without ever meeting face to face.

My kids think there is something stalkerish about this behavior. I guess that’s because we’ve taught them to be wary of strangers online. But they also see that it’s been a great source of new friendships for me. I hope that as they become adults, they will shed the caution we’ve taught them and embrace the web as a social medium too.

Two years ago, our family was in Phoenix. I blogged it (because Twitter didn’t exist back then). One of my online friends, Howard, left a comment that he had a couple extra tickets to the Suns game that night if Josh and I wanted to go with him and his wife.

I jumped at the opportunity. Josh was excited to see Steve Nash. Emily said, “Dad, Howard is stalking you.” Howard hasn’t completely lived that down yet, but our friendship has morphed from the online world, turned into a business relationship and much more.

That’s just one story. I could tell dozens like that.

I wrote a post not so long ago about the difference between social nets and social media. For me, social nets are a great way to stay connected to your friends but they don't do much for me in the way of meeting new friends. Social media, on the other hand, has been the best way for me to meet new people since college.

It's a lot like college. Back then, we'd sit around, play music, and talk about stuff, maybe play some cards. Social media allows that "talking about stuff" to happen asynchronously as we go about our busy lives in places all over the world. That's how I met my friend in London. Who I am going to meet face to face next week. It's an amazing and wonderful thing.

David's Got It Right

David Hyman's been around online music for about as long as anyone I know. He's the founder and CEO of Mog, the blogging service for music lovers. He has a post about the future of music up on his mog that I completely agree with. Here's the meat of the post in case you don't want to click thru and read the whole thing.

Here's what the labels need to do: drop that penny per track per stream rate to about 10% of what it is today (that's right - 1/10 of a penny per stream). When that happens, the labels are meeting the market and giving away music becomes lucrative; everybody and their brother starts doing it. The labels turn all of online music consumption into a revenue stream - every site with all-you-can-eat, on-demand music. Thousands of sites innovate and create new value around how to discover and consume music. By my estimate, that's a $250 million per year market for online ad spending alone.

Next, ensure that every streaming track links to the opportunity to download the track in mp3 (with Amazon or whomever) and the labels have created the ultimate promotional machine for mp3 purchasing (for the next 10 years, people will still need to download for their portables and their car). Then slap on a tempting upsell: offer users an ad-free, higher-bitrate subscription service for a reasonable fee (say $5 per month). Suddenly the labels have a shot at staying alive.

I'll go one step further and suggest that while they are at it, they agree on an open api standard that allows connected devices (like sonos and squeezebox) in our homes to connect to these services. That's a big opportunity just waiting to happen.

Interesting Business Development Job Opportunity

I've been on the board of Alacra since 1999. It's a company that sells data and services delivered over the Internet to wall street and other large corporations.

They've been building some interesting consumer/SMB facing services and recently launched a very different kind of ad network - the premium content ad network - which I blogged about last month.

Now they are looking for a business development person to help build the network. It's a very interesting job for someone looking to invent a new kind of ad network in the world of stock blogging and financial media. Details are here.

My Head Is In The Cloud This Morning

Last week I posted the following to twitter:

          We've assembled 8 of the top developers we know and are talking about the future of the lamp stack

That was not entirely accurate. We put together an impromptu lunch last week and invited some of the top developers from our portfolio companies located in NYC to attend. We know a lot of great developers who didn't attend the lunch. I wish they could have. Because it was fantastic.

We discussed the lamp stack (and derivatives) that almost every single one of them run their web app on. We discussed the scaling issues that they have all faced. And we discussed what we should be looking for in the future to make those scaling issues easier.

The first post (that I know of) that has resulted from that lunch is Alex Iskold's cloud computing post on Read Write Web. For those of you who don't know Alex, he is the founder and CEO of our portfolio company Adaptive Blue, he's a great developer, and he also writes awesome blog posts at Read Write Web.

I dont' want to summarize Alex' post here because I think it's an excellent discussion of scaling issues that the lamp stack creates and how cloud computing can overcome some of them for some companies.

Alex is a huge fan of relying on others to deal with the scaling issues so his company can focus on the application itself. Last year at our portfolio company offsite, when we were having a similar discussion, he said:

think about it, if you can't trust Amazon to be up, who can you trust?

Of course, the day after our lunch last week, S3 went down for what seemed like the entire morning east coast time. Alex acknowledges that risk in his post and quotes my partner Albert Wenger who once told Alex:

We live in a stochastic world, but people fail to grasp it because all they experience is right now.

Alex argues that it's time for startups to give up the scaling issues to the big guys and let them do what they do best. He says:

Every time we have an outage, like the one that happened on Friday, people sit back and think: How can I possibly rely on these guys? I bet I can just code this up myself and it will be fine! For decades the software industry has been suffering from the 'I can do this better' disease. We keep re-inventing programming languages, we keep on re-writing the APIs, and we keep thinking that we're smarter than the guys who came before us. 99.9% of the time we are wrong. The truth is that we cannot do it better than Amazon. They spent a massive amount of money, talent and most importantly time, trying to solve this problem. To think that this can be replicated by a startup in a matter of months, assembled, be cost effective, and work properly is just absurd. Large-scale computing is an enormously complex problem, that takes even the best and brightest engineers years to get right.

I think Alex is directionally correct. We are going to see more and more companies build and host their web apps on someone else's infrastructure. It's not going to happen overnight because I've never met a more control oriented group than software engineers. But it will happen and in the long run we'll all be better off because of it.

Smart Playlists In iTunes

A month or so ago, I wrote a post called "Why I Don't Like The iPod Touch" in which I described the shortcomings of the current iPod I am using.

I still find this thing annoying to use but one thing has made it vastly better - iTunes Smart Playlists. I've always had an iPod with more space on it than my iTunes library so I've never needed to filter my library.

Ewan left the first comment to that post about the iPod touch and said:

For the space limited Touch, couldn't you create a smart playlist in iTunes (ctrl-alt-n in windows), to say "Date added is in the last 4 weeks" as your options, and that way the iPod touch would always have your newest added tunes on it, even if you don't have time to manually add them? That way running out of space will be less of an issue.

I finally got around to doing just that. And while I was at it, I created a whole bunch more smart playlists and I sync them too.

My iPod Touch is so much more fun now. Thanks Ewan and thanks Apple for smart playlists!

Some More Thoughts On Pro Bloggers

Chartreuse has asked me to retire the word journablogger and I agree that it's an awful name. So I'll just call the bloggers who are making money doing this full time 'professionals' and people like me 'amateurs'. I think that's not exactly right either but at least it puts a nail in the coffin of a bad word none of us want to see used again.

First, I am sorry for singling out Matt Marshall and Erick Schonfeld. I didn't mean to take a shot at either of them and I realize that both of them are among the best at what they do. I was trying to highlight examples of quick posts that I felt didn't really dig deeply into the issues. Further, Erick talked to me when he was doing his post and I felt he either didn't get what I told him or he ignored it. Which of course is his perogative.

Mike Arrington thinks I owe them both a call before I call them out on their posts. That would have been a nice touch, but I think blogging about it is a better thing to do because it's now started a conversation, both in the comments to my post, and on techmeme.

Now the specifics of both Matt and Erick's posts are getting debated. And the points I made in my post are getting debated. We'll all get a lot more out of these three stories in the end and that's a good thing.

Blogging is a discussion and it doesn't matter if you are a problogger or an amateur, you get to participate. That's progress for sure.

Journabloggers Should Do Their Work Too

When I started blogging four and a half years ago, there was a clear delineation between bloggers and journalists. But that's all changed and now we have this new category, the journablogger.

The journablogger has his or her own blog or works in a blog network like paid content, techcrunch, gigaom, alley insider, read write web, mashable, venturebeat, etc, etc. Just look at the top of techmeme's leader board and you'll see them right next to the traditional journalists like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNET, etc.

These journabloggers got their start as bloggers who operated outside of the traditional world of journalism where doing your homework and getting the story straight are requirements for the job. That was good. It allowed them to be quick, get the story out, and fill the blog with opinion.

But in the past week, I've seen two stories where it looked to me that the journablogger could have made the post a lot better with a bit more work.

The top story on techmeme right now is a Venturebeat post about a shopping search service called Like.com. It contains quotes like:

But suddenly, over four months, the company has tapped a robust number of users, and it now expects to earn $10 million in revenue this year.

and

We'€™re killing them, he says, of social search engines (these include ThisNext, for example).

My friend Gordon Gould started and runs ThisNext (I am not an investor), so I figured I'd see if that was true. Here's a comscore chart of traffic for the past year

It's clear that Like.com had a great December but one month does not make a breakout. These two services have been neck and neck for the past year and Alexa still has ThisNext well ahead of Like.com. I think a little work on this story to dig into the claims of the Like.com CEO would have made it a better story.

Similary, this story by Erick at TechCrunch last week about Zynga and Social Gaming Network left me scratching my head. I talked to Erick about that story and he quoted me in it. Erick shared with me the line that the CEO of Social Gaming Network was giving him.  I suggested he go to adanomics and see the truth. Here's the list of top facebook apps companies. Zynga is one of the top five app companies on Facebook and Social Gaming Network is number 33. If you include the acquisition of CLZ (number 30 - three ahead of Social Gaming Network), that Zynga announced last week, Zynga is almost an order of magnitude bigger than Social Gaming Network. But when you read Erick's story, it's like the two companies are neck and neck like Hillary and Obama.

Like.com may end up killing ThisNext and Social Gaming Network could end up being a real competitor to Zynga, but right now I don't think either of those are true statements and a little work by the journabloggers could have surfaced that truth and made both stories better.

Super Delegates Have No Place In A Democracy

I think that we should have called Florida a tie in 2000 and had them vote all over again. Settling a presidency in back rooms, even if the back room is the supreme court, is not good for our democracy. It reinforces the idea that we have a rigged system

And the same is true of the 795 'super delegates' that are up for grabs and who will surely determine who is the democrat nominee for president

I read this quote in today's New York Times:

'The remaining undecided superdelegates ... in many ways (are) the final contest of the nominating battle'

Apparently there are about 300 undecided super delegates. So this comes down to back room deals made with these 300 people?

In the book 'The Bronx Is Burning' there is a story about the runoff between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo for the mayor of New York in 1977. There was a short period of time between the first primary and the runoff. During that period Ed Koch ran around promising whatever he had to give away to get the support of leading elected officials, unions, and other big democrat power bases. Cuomo refused because he felt it would impact his ability to govern. Koch won.

We can all see the same kind of thing going down in the democrat party and I don't have to say who plays Koch and who plays Cuomo. That's obvious

Howard Dean, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, and the DNC need to broker a deal now that forces the superdelegates to vote for the candidate who has the most regular delegates or who won their state or something similar. Otherwise this nomination process will be suspect and the party will be damaged in the fall contest and for years to come.

Song Circles

Sometimes the best things on the internet are not intentional. Over the past several months, I've developed a song circle with a small group of friends on tumblr. They include Rach, Bijan, JoeLaz, Daryn, and Lindsay. I know a few of these people and plan to meet a couple more shortly. But we never planned this song circle. And this is my song circle. Each of them has a different song circle.

I just started posting a song every day on tumblr. You can listen to my songs on this blog on the upper right (check autoplay to make it a playlist).

Then I noticed others were doing the same. I started to follow them in my dashboard. Then I found the filter button in the tumblr dashboard and started filtering for audio. That gives you this:

Now every day I try to listen to the song circles we create. It's not that we share exactly the same tastes in music. But it's close enough. It's like going back to college and hanging out with friends and playing music for each other. It's wonderful.

White Meat Dark Meat

One of the two guys who taught me the venture business was Bliss McCrum. He is the king of the cliche. One of my favorites of his was "they get the white meat and we get the dark meat". You see that all the time in the investment business. When there is something good mixed in with something bad, you always look to split them up.

I thought of Bliss and his cliche this morning when I saw this news from FGIC

Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., a major bond insurer, has notified the New York State Insurance Department that it will request to be split into two companies, according to a person familiar with the matter.

One of the firms would likely retain much of the business of insuring structured finance bonds such as those backed by mortgages, which have come under severe pressure due to the housing market slowdown, according to the person.

The other company would likely retain most of the municipal bond insurance business, which is stronger, the person said.

This certainly seems like a good idea and puts a firewall between the problems in the mortgage business and the muni bond business which has historically had very low default rates and has traditionally been a safe haven.

More Thoughts On Facebook Spam Filtering

I received a few private emails yesterday on my facebook spam filtering post.

And what I took away from all of them is that social networking viral marketing is like email but not identical. Email is in some ways simpler. Either the message gets through or it doesn't.

Viral marketing in a social network is more complicated as there are multiple dials you can play with in a viral marketing program. Facebook implicitly recognizes this in that they have to regulate both notifications in the news feed and invites. Over time there will be more ways to get viral adoption in a social network.

And so the binary decision, let the mail through or not, is not what's going on. Yes, it's all about reputation, but no you can't simply whitelist or blacklist an app based on reputation.

Facebook needs to take a carrot and a stick approach to this problem. They should absolutely punish apps that have bad reputations. But they should also reward apps that have good reputations. Decrease the virality of apps of bad reputation and increase the virality of apps with good reputations.

As I said in my post yesterday, Facebook has been evolving the rules of the game for the past six months and they are getting better and better at this. I expect they'll continue to innovate and I hope that they'll implement some kind of reward system.

Participating In Asset Inflation Can Bite You In The Rear

I really wanted to use another word to end that headline but I am trying hard these days to keep this blog clean.

Anyway, one of the many things I've learned the hard way is that irrational valuations can come back to haunt you. It feels so good when someone says a business you own a big piece of is worth some huge number. But unless you cash out at that price, it's not much more than a tease. And it can come back to hurt you in many ways. The thing you must know about financial markets is they are irrational at times, but they are rational in the end.

Microsoft may have inadvertently set off some serious asset inflation that may now come back to haunt them. As most everyone knows, they paid a $15bn valuation for a small minority investment in Facebook last year that included a business deal to rep a significant amount of Facebook's advertising inventory. Silicon Alley Insider and Kara Swisher report that Facebook's financials look like this.

2007 Revenue:    $150 million
2008 Revenue:     $300-$350 million
2008 EBITDA:      $50 million

So Microsoft valued one of the two leading social networking companies at 50x revenues and 300x EBITDA.

What message do you think that sent to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp? I'll answer my own question. It told Rupert/News Corp that myspace (the other leading social net) was worth north of $15bn. I don't know what myspace's financial numbers are (if you do, please leave them in the comments). But here's a guess.

2007 Revenue:   $500-600 million (considering google pays $300mm/year)
2008 Revenue:   $625-750 million (25% growth)
2008 EBITDA:     $50-100 million

If you apply the Microsoft/Facebook multiples to myspace, you get a business worth between $15bn and $30bn.

Now many think that myspace is not worth as much as Facebook and that Rupert/News Corp is trying to sell it at the high. I am not nearly as down on myspace as most people are right now. They have an audience that is different than Facebook's. They have a very active music thing going on. They are about to launch a third party app platform that every major Facebook app developer is going to be on. That may very well supercharge myspace's growth in 2008 the way Facebook apps drove Facebook's growth in 2007.

I am not saying that myspace is worth between $15bn and $30bn . But I am saying that if you overvalue Facebook, you are also overvaluing myspace. And when the company you want to buy uses a myspace overpay to make itself less interesting to you, then you are the one who gets screwed.

What goes around comes around.

Happy Valentines Day

Happy Valentines Day Everyone. 

My gift to you is my loved tracks on Hype Machine. 

Everyone can use a little love today. 

Facebook Adopts Reputation Based Spam Filtering

I am a big fan of using reputation as the central measure of spam. Reputation means many things to many people, but I am using the word in the context of an aggregated measure of many inputs taken together to establish a message senders' reputation. That's how a company I'm invested in, Return Path, does it. They are the leader in email whitelisting and deliverability. Their premise is simple. Measure every known mail sender's (ip address) reputation based on a slew of inputs, including complaint rates, unsubscribe compliance, e-mail send volume, unknown user volume, security practices, identity stability, etc and create a Sender Score. Once you know a sender's reputation (sender score), you can provide a host of services to mail senders and recipients that help both sides make sure that users get the mail they want and don't get the mail they don't want.

Facebook is mimicking that approach with the viral marketing channels in its Facebook platform. Inside Facebook reported yesterday that Facebook has rolled out a reputation system that dynamically determines how many notifications and invitations a Facebook app can send per user per day. Right now, it's relatively crude and relies upon the following items:

• Your historical invitation acceptance rate
• Whether your application overrides the user’s choice to invite no friends, but instead forces users to invite friends
• Additional undisclosed factors that “reflect the affinity users show for the application as a whole”

Like everything Facebook does, this system will evolve and get better and more sophisticated. But the bottom line is this. If you use best practices, play by the rules, don't upset users, and deliver percieved value, you'll get to send more. If you don't, you'll get to send less.

I think this is a very smart move by Facebook that will result in a better experience for everyone.

Umair On Digital Music

Fundamentally, I'm going to argue that consumers download music, as much to derive extra value from getting something for free, as they do because they want insurance against buying something they didn't want in the first place. File-sharing is as much about risk-sharing as it is about the 'theft' of value. Technological changes have made this possible - but the way the business model of the music industry is at odds with the implicit contract it signs with listeners is what makes it probable.

If you want to read the whole thing, click here.

 

Mashups

I read Joe Nocera's column last weekend about J. K. Rowling's efforts to control everything related to her Harry Potter novels. I understand that she created the characters and the story. And I understand her desire to control everything that is done with that intellectual property. But I wonder if she was inspired by anything she read in the creation of the Harry Potter series. Were any of her characters based on people she knows or things she read? Did she ever read anything about witchcraft or wizardry that got her mind working on what became Harry Potter?

Keith Richards once said that rock and roll was simply white musicians copying black musicians. I believe that almost everything we do in life is inspired by what someone else did before us. And so allowing people to tightly control their artistic works is going to lead to less creativity not more. There have to be limits on how tightly we allow creators to control their intellectual property.

I was at a meeting yesterday and the person we were meeting with started off the meeting showing us this video which has been on YouTube for over a year now.

So this morning I went to find the video so I could show it to my family. And I noticed that the voice seemed to be Will Ferrel's. So I did some more YouTubing and came up with this.

As funny as the Will Ferrel piece is, I think you'll all agree with me that the kid's mashup is way funnier. That kid is part of a generation that grew up in world where most content is digital and mashable. His generation will do amazing things with mashups. I hope our legal environment is structured  appropriately.

Why I Post About Politics On This Blog

I have gradually moved a lot of stuff off of this blog. The personal stuff and photos have largely moved to tumblr. The music posts continue from time to time, but the daily mp3 posts have moved to fredwilson.vc (but are still available via the player on the upper right). I'll still occasionally post about a hyperlocal event and I still post about our trips here (but some of that has moved to tumblr too). And the short bursts have moved to twitter.

The one thing I haven't moved is my political thoughts. When I first started blogging, many people suggested that I shouldn't blog about politics. They told me the comments would be nasty, mean, and hurtful. They were right. But I kept doing it and recently, you'll note that I've been doing it a lot.

There is still the occasional nasty comment (which I'll usually ask to cool it). But by and large the comments are amazing.

Just yesterday, I got to witness a fascinating discussion between my friend and fellow Hillary fan, Tom Watson, and a host of other readers who are Obama supporters on some important issues facing Obama.

To be honest, I don't spend my day reading real clear politics and the NY Times and WSJ opinion pages. I can't keep track of each and every issue that is out there in a political campaign. But I am interested in them and I am particularly interested in what every day people think of them.

I don't know how many comments my political posts have recieved in the past month (I could go count them but I am pressed for time right now). I suspect at least a couple hundred and probably well north of that. These are the thoughts and opinions of smart, educated, and informed people who care enough about politics to wade into the comments and spend time leaving their thoughts.

I am blessed to be able to read all of them every day. It has made me a better citizen, voter, and blogger. Thanks everyone and keep them coming.

We Are Looking For An Analyst

A couple years ago, we put up a blog post on the Union Square Ventures weblog and said that we wanted to hire an analyst. The deal was simple - no phone calls, no resumes, no emails - just a link to your web presence. We hired Andrew as a result of that effort and it was a great fit for everyone.

So we are doing the exact same thing again.

If you think you'd like to work for Union Square Ventures as an analyst (it's a two year rotational gig, not a long term hire), then visit the blog post and leave a comment with a link to your web presence and we'll take a look.

Here's What We Have To Do

If you are thinking about building a web service, take the advice of Seth Godin. This is from his post today on rethinking what an auction can be.

my point is that this is just the beginning of using internet tools to change the world we interact with, as opposed to trying to make it easy to interact with the standard world using the Internet

Marc Andreessen said this about web 2.0 last year:

what we have seen over the last several years is the Web itself coming into its own.

After an initial phase of the Web as a medium, in which lots of people attempted to make the Web look like a newspaper, or a magazine, or a TV channel, we as an industry have recently been collectively developing a much clearer idea of what the Web is really like as a medium in and of itself.

This has led to broad realization of a set of design patterns for how Web services and Web companies often get built and used.

Which is great.

Exactly. But as Seth said, it goes even farther. The web is changing the world we live in. And we have the tools to change it even more. Way more. That's what we have to do.

The Google President

I missed Steve Kroft's interview of Obama last night but caught Couric's interview of Hillary. I like Hillary and feel sorry for her that's she's going to lose this race. But I sense it's over for her. Momentum matters so much in the primaries.

Apparently Obama cloaked himself in the coat of Google in the interview with Kroft. This from Bob Lefsetz:

And although poised, Obama was so young, and so thin! Could this guy really be an effective President? Steve Kroft asked him about his experience.

Barack Obama responded that there are many old, established companies in America, but only one Google, young, rich and successful. And that sealed the deal. I’m an Obama man.

If Obama really wants to be the Google president, he should promise to "do no evil." That would seal the deal for me.

Twitter Stats

The Twitter blog has been much more active lately and that's a good thing. I found out about this cool twitter stats service via this post on the twitter blog. Here's my twitter usage by month. Clearly I keep using it more and more.

Here's another interesting chart of what time of day I generally send twitter updates.

I can't really explain the late night twittering because I promise you that I do sleep between midnight and 5am. I expect those are from our australia trip and possibly some from trips to the west coast.

Umair's Got A Couple Of New Gigs

Many of you know that Umair Haque is one of my favorite bloggers. His Bubblegeneration blog is a must read for me and has been for a long time. He announced this past week that he has two new gigs.

First, he's now blogging at the Harvard Business School blog. Here's his first post on corporate DNA.

And more importantly, he's building the Havas Media Lab, which he describes as:

a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation

Exciting news. I hope he will still keep us all informed and educated at Bubblegeneration. I am not sure what I'd do without my regular dose of Umair.

I'd Like To See A Plan Out Of Yahoo! Instead Of A Rejection Letter

While Yahoo!'s board did not lay out a plan to increase it's stock price (I laid out one on this blog last week), they are apparently going to tell Microsoft that it's current offer is too low. The Wall Street Journal has the story here.

Some people seem to think this is just about getting another $5-$10/share out of Microsoft. And it may well be. The WSJ story mentions that the board may entertain an offer above $40/share.

I am hoping Yahoo! takes another tack. As I said in the post I linked to above, I think they should negotiate a deal to outsource their search to Google, dividend out the Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba shares to that their value isn't lost in the share price, and restructure Yahoo! to focus on the businesses where they have a competitive advantage.

Another thing they could do is offer their search business to Microsoft for a short term deal, like three years. Maybe Microsoft would be willing to pay up for that to keep it out of Google's hands.

This Fortune article seems to indicate that the anti-trust issues surrounding a business deal between Google and Yahoo! are not as large as the anti-trust issues Microsoft would face in it's effort to acquire Yahoo!

I am happy to see Yahoo!'s board taking a strong position with Microsoft, but I think they could take an even stronger one. Dividend out the Yahoo Japan and Alibaba shares to get that value out of the equation. Then put forward a restructuring plan that takes a lot of cost out and focuses on the core businesses that they make real money on. And then put their search business out to bid between Microsoft and Google. That's my suggestion.

MP3 Of The Week

I used to do this all the time, but I've moved most of my mp3 posting to my tumblog at fredwilson.vc

The player on the upper right of this blog has the mp3s I've posted to tumblr in it. So if you want to hear what's going on at fredwilson.vc, just check autoplay and hit the play button.

Anyway, one of my favorite bands, Nada Surf, has a new record out called Lucky.

Here's an acoustic version of one of my favorite tracks, called I Like What You Say:

I Like What You Say - Nada Surf - Lucky

PS - There's a new version of the Yahoo music player and you'll notice that they've simplified and clean things up. Very well done.

The Internet Finally Becomes A Factor In The Primaries

Four years ago, Howard Dean and Joe Trippi showed everyone how powerful the Internet could be as a campaign and fundraising tool. This year, it seemed like it was not as important.

But the news yesterday that Obama's campaign was loaded with cash and Hillary's was strapped showed that in the end, the Internet is the most powerful fundraising vehicle of them all.

The following charts come from a NY Times story this morning.

While this graphic doesn't show how much of this money came directly from the Internet, we all know that no fundraising technique "scales" like Internet fundraising.

Hillary's campaign has used the Internet well but not brilliantly. Obama's campaign has done a better job and his personality and candidacy is much better suited to the medium. And the net result of that is that he sits in a stronger position right now because of it.

Expertise Knows No Bounds

I opened an email this morning that started like this:

I read your blog and believe that you have a firm grasp on web trends - especially for someone on the east coast.

That's as far as I got. I replied with incredulity and moved on.

I am the first to admit that Silicon Valley has the largest concentration of web entrepreneurs, web developers, and web financiers of anywhere in the world. It is mecca when it comes to all things web.

But please do not assume that the rest of the world, including the east coast, has a shortage of people who understand exactly where the web is going and what to do with it.

UPDATE: Just got back to a computer. As I posted in the comments earlier, I found out several hours after I wrote this post that the person who sent me the email is in fact from NYC. Ugh. I'll be eating crow for years. I feel badly. But I still stand by my central point that expertise in web and technology knows no bounds.

UPDATE #2: I am enjoying the comments of my friends on the west coast. There are some good ones in there!

Please Barack - Don't Stop Debating

I read this morning in the NY Times that Barack Obama declined Hillary Clinton's invitation to a debate a week for the next month.  The Times quotes Obama as saying:

“I don’t think anybody is clamoring for more debates,” Mr. Obama said. “We’ve had 18 debates so far.”

Mr. Obama added that he would agree to at least one debate, but noted, “It’s very important for me to spend time with voters.”

Well Barack, I am clamoring for more debates. That makes one person. Please weigh in via the comments if you too would like more debates.

I honestly don't know a better way to "spend time with voters" than by answering questions side by side with his competitor in front of a national television audience.

I made my decision to vote for Hillary on the morning I voted. Apparently many others did the same and the last minute vote broke for Hillary.

For me, a big part of my decision was the substance she showed in contrast to the lack of substance that Obama showed in the Los Angeles debate. If Obama is going to be the nominee, and I've said many times that I'd be fine with that, then he needs to show more substance, define what exactly he'd do to fix the big issues that face our country. And now that the country is watching, there is no better way to do that than a debate a week for the next month.

Some Data On The Coming Employee Exodus at MSFT/YHOO

Josh Kopelman is a very clever guy. After the Microsoft bid for Yahoo! was announced, he restarted a Facebook ad campaign targeting Yahoo! and Microsoft employees. And guess what, the click rate increased dramatically for both companies.

Here's the data.

Blogging Money/Tech Today and Tomorrow

It's easier to twitter the big insights I am getting from this conference than to blog it.

So go here or subscribe to this feed if you want to follow my thoughts from money/tech today and tomorrow.

Blogging Money Tech

I'll be spending the next couple days at O'Reilly's Money/Tech Conference here in NYC.

This is a sector I've invested in since the very early days of the Internet and really enjoy thinking and learning about. I plan to bring my new macbook and blog and twitter as much of it as I can.

Clinton vs Obama Is Like Ali vs Frazier

Between 1971 and 1975, Ali and Frazier fought three times. Ali lost the first and won the next two culminating in the Thrilla In Manila in October 1975. Those three fights made a lasting impression on me, the first one coming when I was 10, the last one coming when I was 14.

Those two heavyweights, including the greatest heavyweight of all time, went at each other for 14-15 rounds. It always seemed to go back and forth. Ali would win the early rounds, then Frazier would get strong and take the middle rounds, and then whoever was still standing in the late rounds would emerge victorious.

And that's what's going on in the Democrat primary battle between Hillary and Barack. They are giving each other all they can take and then some. And both are taking it and firing back with all they've got. It's fun to watch.

Yesterday morning, I was pretty sure Obama was going to deliver the knockout blow by taking California. But he didn't.  You can almost hear Barack say Ali's famous line to Hillary at the end of last night:

Hillary, they told me you was all washed up

And you can almost hear Hillary growl back:

They lied

Josh Michael Micah Marshall summed up Super Tuesday best for me. He said:

But I think all these competing scenarios make one point clear. The only arguments for one side or the other being a winner here come down to airy and finally meaningless arguments about expectations. And the result tells a different tale. It's about delegates. It's dead even. You've got two well-funded candidates who've demonstrated an ability to power back from defeats. And neither is going anywhere.

The flip side of the proportional representation in delegates is that not only does it allow a challenger like Obama not to get put away early, it also makes it difficult to put away an opponent late. The conventional wisdom is that Obama will do well in this weekend's and next Tuesday's contests. But if he does, proportionality will reign there too. It's hard to see where this doesn't go all the way to the convention.

Contrary to most pundits' opinions, I think this is incredibly helpful to the Democrat party and to the country as a whole. We are going to see more of these two fantastic candidates in the coming month. Maybe we'll get a situation which they'll both have to react to that will be telling. We'll get to see them start to tool their messages against John McCain who appears to be the Republican nominee. We'll get to see them debate each other some more (hopefully).

I don't think we'll see this get very negative. Obama has built his whole campaign on a positive message and he's sticking to it. He turned the other cheek in South Carolina and showed Hillary that going negative against him didn't work. So now it's all about the candidates, their positions, and how they'd govern. As it should be.

The Gotham Gal and I have not given to either candidate yet. I am going to talk to her at breakfast about giving the max to both of them now. They've earned it.

I'm hoping that we'll emerge with a Hillary/Barack ticket at the end of this. That would be very hard to beat.  But regardless of whomever emerges from this epic battle  victorious, it has been well fought and I will be thrilled to support them.

Voting Today (continued)

Josef sent me this link earlier today but I was out on my blackberry.

It's a google/twitter/twittervision mashup built by google that shows people voting or talking about voting in a map visualization. I love america, I love democracy, I love google, and I love twitter.

Voting Today

Seth Godin has a classic Seth post on voting this morning. Give it a read if you can before you vote. Not that it will change the way you vote. But it will make you feel better about voting. It sure did that for me.

I am headed to the gym and then to the polling place.  If you live in NYC, you can use this web app to figure out where your polling place is this morning. My son Josh is going to vote with The Gotham Gal on his way to school. I agree with Seth. Take your kids to vote with you if you can.

As for the question of who I am going to vote for, well I woke up with this image in my mind.

When I first saw the