I spent last night listening to Fred's Radio and tonight reading his State of the Union post.

I won't mince words: it is the best post I have ever read and it sums up the way a lot of us feel about the people and political parties who wage a war of weapons against an unseen enemy, a war of words against each other, and a war of bullshit against the American people.

You're not alone Fred. Not by a long shot.

After tossing up its Google Video store to less than rousing reviews, the latest rumor is that Google is about to enter the online music fray. I suggested the other day that Google buy Pandora, my favorite online listening spot.

But the perceived money is in downloadable songs. And while I am on record that I won't buy any DRM infested music, a lot of people will. So unlike selling downloadable videos, which I think is a supply in search of a demand, I think there is something to be said for selling downloadable songs.

There are two ways to build an online music store. From the ground up, which may result in a better, more innovative product, but takes longer to develop and much longer to generate any meaningful market share. The other way is to buy and incorporate an existing store. Yahoo got music by acquisition when it bought Launchcast and then MusicMatch.

So the word on the web is that Google is thinking about buying Napster, the popular, but DRM-infested namesake of the once innovative and much maligned by the RIAA peer to peer music service. Or maybe not. Once again, we're all talking about something that might be a creation of the blogosphere.

I think buying Napster is probably Google's best avenue to enter the online music business. For one thing, Google can't afford the fallout from another blown opening. Additionally, while I don't use Napster, I've read pretty good stuff about it. Napster gives Google instant market share and music credibility. Plus we know what Napster looks like already, so there won't be hundreds of "are you kidding" posts the day Google goes live with it.

I'd love to see Google change the world again by bringing forth a new, innovative online music store. But the legal restrictions, the RIAA-gone-wild problem and the somewhat mature market make that unlikely. Plus, if Google thought Google Video was going to rock the house, then I'm not sure I want it to try to reinvent too many wheels.

So buying entry might be the way to go. But Google must recognize and remember that online music is quickly becoming a commodity. Online music stores are no longer destinations. They are online gas stations, dispensing song files they squeeze out of the record label cartel.

As such, brand building is almost an exercise in futility and the online music stores will always be at the mercy of the record labels. Exxon just proved that you can make money in commodities, but to do so you must have an inherent advantage or learn to operate cheaply and quickly. One of the best advantages in a commodity game is the ability to predict where the market is going next. Predicting the actions of the granny hating, catless bag holding, all-in-a panic record industry sounds like a tough order to fill. So I don't see much chance for an advantage.

Without an inherent advantage and with what most believe to be very thin margins that don't leave much room for competing on price, Google has to compete on service and name alone. That's harder to do. There's a lot of demand for online music, but it is, at the end of the day, a commodity. Since people care less about where they buy a commodity, it makes sense to enter the game by acquiring someone who has market share. But the price has to be right.

All in all, it's a good move for Google. If the price is right.

Technorati Tags:
google, napster, digital music

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I have become a customer evangelist for Technorati. I think it is the backbone of the blogosphere and use it daily to find posts to read on whatever topic I am thinking about at the time. I also use it to find inbound links so I can return the link via the Most Recent Inbound Links list on the right side of the main Newsome.Org page.

I've had technical problems with Technorati before. Dave Sifry threw me the 99 yard pass of tech support back in December. After that, things worked great, for a while. Then I noticed some hiccups. First, some of my own posts started showing up in my inbound links search results. Then my posts went away, and I thought the problem was fixed. Then about half of my inbound links just disappeared, with no links over 21 days old appearing in my search results. Then the list kept shrinking.

As of today, the oldest link that shows up is only 19 days old. My link numbers are less than half what they were a couple of weeks ago.

I wrote Technorati via the contact link several days ago. No response yet.

I have been hesitant to even mention these problems because I figured Technorati would fix whatever the problem is and I couldn't be sure that this problem wasn't unique to me. Then I read this post at The Blog Herald, and the comments thereto. It seems I am not the only user experiencing problems.

I still love Technorati. And I believe these problems will be fixed. I just hope they are fixed soon so I can continue to rely on Technorati.

Dave, I'm open- hit me!

UPDATE: Once again, Dave comes to the rescue (via the Comments below). Technorati is growing fast, and there will always be growing pains when you have to scale at the speed of clicks. But they are building a ton of goodwill and a legion of customer evangelists by being a positive and responsive presence in the blogosphere. I really like this company a lot. Maybe when they get huge I can be their Scoble!

Dave indicates in a comment to The Blog Herald post that third party pingers may be causing some of the problems. I am going to take Dave's advice and only ping Technorati directly from now on. I suggest that anyone having similar problems do the same.

Technorati Tags:
technorati

Scoble has a post today about the widespread corporate fear of the new. He says:

I present to a lot of corporations. Everywhere I go I smell the fear. People are scared to do something different.

His post was inspired by this excellent post by Kathy Sierra. Among many good points she makes is the following:

Sometimes managers are putting the best interests of the company first. That's great--they're often more experienced and have a better grasp of the bigger context. But (and it's a really big but) sometimes they're just worried about their own damn job.

Both of these quotes are completely consistent with my experiences. In fact, in one of my 2006 predictions posts I talked about this exact issue, oddly enough in the context of Microsoft Office's move towards the web:

Yes, Microsoft Office will be more "web like," which is a very good thing, but no major corporation (and certainly no law or accounting firm) is going to allow mass storage of documents online for two reasons: one, liability; two, the fear of a bad decision ("if it's always been done this way and I keep doing it this way, I'm not responsible if it doesn't work; but if I change how it's done and it doesn't work, I'm toast"- I've actually had clients say this very thing to me before on more than one occasion).

Actually, I can't count on two hands the times I have heard this spiel in one form or another. The safest decision for the fearful manager will always be the status quo. If the status quo isn't possible, then the easiest choice will be the thing that is the most consistent with the status quo. With innovation or a change in direction comes responsibility and with responsibility comes risk. And many corporate managers are taught, not by the company, but through their experiences and observations, to be risk averse above all other things.

People believe that if they can get what they want while making someone else responsible for the decision, they are much safer in the corporate environment. At the crossroads of safety and innovation, safety wins almost all the time.

I agree that a company is better served by people who are willing to make decisions, seek innovation and take responsibility. But I think it's going to be very hard to change this behavior without a significant paradigm shift in corporate training, management and advancement.

Don't it make you want to rock and roll
All night long Mohammed's Radio
I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful
On the radio, Mohammed's Radio

Several of us have been talking about the relative merits of Pandora vs. the Last.fm player as a way to find good music you've never heard. Fred Wilson really digs Last.fm. I like Last.fm, but so far I'm more sold on Pandora.

Fred's one of my Last.fm "friends" so I thought I'd fire up his Personal Radio and see what songs played and what I think about them. Here are the first 10 that played and my thoughts about them:

1) Ween - Take Me Away. Though Fred and I like a lot of the same music, his tastes are chronologically broader than mine. I know everything about music prior to 1990 and almost nothing about music after 1995. Ween is sort of in between- I've heard a few of their songs, but not many. This one doesn't do much for me.

2) Cat Power - Willie. My God, what a beautiful song! It sent a shiver up my spine. Perfectly beautiful. Great use of horns. A 10+.

3) M. Ward - Paul's Song. I've read about M. Ward on Fred's blog, but this is the first song of his I've ever heard. Fred, if you like this guy, go check out Bill Morrissey's first 4 records. Good writing. I like it, but I've got Cat Power on my brain now.

4) Nirvana - Where Did You Sleep Last Night. As a general rule, I'm not big on the whole grunge thing. But this song actually has a melody, perhaps because it's a cover of an old blues song. I'm no Nirvana fan, but this sounds good.

5) Rolling Stones - Stop Breaking Down. Fred and I share a love of Exile on Main Street. I love this song.

6) Peter Green Splinter Group - Running After You. Peter Green, the original force behind the first and better incarnation of Fleetwood Mac was one of the greatest guitar players in the world until he basically went mad. Peter Green average is better than just about anyone else's finest moment. Not an earth shattering song, but any Peter Green is good.

7) Billy Bragg & Wilco - Airline to Heaven. Fine song off of the second Mermaid Avenue record. Good 12 string guitar.

8) Kings of Convenience - Misread. Never heard of this band before. Mellow indy sound. I like it, but I don't love it. This would be a good song to listen to sitting on a deck overlooking some water on a fall day.

9) The Flaming Lips - Fight Test. I assume Cat Stevens got co-writing credit for this song, because it is virtually identical in melody and close in lyrics to Father and Son, one of Cat's best songs. I like it a lot, but I keep thinking of the original song when I hear it.

10) The Zutons - Moons and Horror Shows. Never heard of them either. Great folksy number, that actually turns into an even better song half way through. I like it a lot.

All in all, I am pretty impressed by Fred's Radio. Last.fm will become a significant part of my music listening experience. But I still slightly prefer Pandora.

Mathew Ingram isn't impressed with the new version of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Mike Arrington likes it.

Having once idiotically said that I didn't see what the big deal was about Firefox, I now use it exclusively. So I don't get to try out the new Google Toolbar.

When Google does update the Google Toolbar for Firefox, here are 5 things I'd like to see added (the things I really want added, like embedded Delicious and Flickr searches aren't feasible since Google fell asleep and let Yahoo buy those sites first):

1) Bloglines support. Build a plugin or let Bloglines build one that alerts me when my blogroll content is updated. Even better, let me read the new content in a pop up window, or click on a link to pull up my Bloglines page.

2) Technorati AND Google Blog Search support. Give me an option to search via Technorati and Google Blog Search from the toolbar and to easily see a list of other blogs that link to the page I am reading. Google may feel that Technorati is a competitor to its blog search feature. I don't think so, but if Google bought Technorati like I've been telling it to, that would solve any perceived problem.

3) Give me multiple auto-fill options. I want to have my home and business particulars available at the click of a button. Multiple credit card information would be a plus too.

4) Wikipedia support. Let me search words and phrases in Wikipedia the way I can with Google and Google Groups, etc.

5) Embed a Pandora player. If Google wants to buy Pandora, fine. That would be a great kick-start to and advantage for the rumored Google Music site. But either way, give me a one click play button for my Pandora account.

We've been kicking around the boom, bubble or bust thing for the past few days, and just when I started to believe that we had not actually forgotten the hard lessons we learned from the last bubble and bust, I read this article in the NY Times. If there was one perfect example of the bubble mentality of the late nineties, it is the story of Blue Mountain and the E-Card.

Here's the part of that article that matters most:

Excite@Home, the ill-fated online portal and high-speed Internet service, bought Blue Mountain for $780 million in 1999, partly for its ability to give advertisers a way to reach a wide swath of the Internet audience. Excite sold Blue Mountain two years later for $35 million to American Greetings....

If we truly see a resurgence of E-Cards, then we know the dirty bubble is lurking somewhere. I realize that an E-Card in and of itself does not create a bubble, but the mere fact that E-Cards are mentioned in a major newspaper is a bad omen that should send us running for the hills.

Technorati Tags:
bubble, e-cards

I've noticed on Bloglines that a few of my posts have been showing up as partial feeds. A friend of mine tells me he has seen the same thing when reading Newsome.Org there.

Be assured, I have my feeds configured to be full feeds. If you get any partial feeds, please send me an email by clicking here and let me know.

I want to make sure I get this fixed before I lose too many readers.

Thanks

Well, now that my fantasy football season is over (I had the best record in the league, again, and choked in the playoffs, again), it's time to move on. In light of all the VC conversations we've been having lately, I'm going to play fantasy VC, based on the start-ups mentioned by Mike Arrington in this post. Everyone is welcome to join my league.

Here we go.

BillMonk:

"Anytime you feel the need to track finances with your friends, think of BillMonk."

I go to lunch with the same group of guys several times a week. One guy is a vegetarian, so his food is always cheaper. When we just split the bill equally the rest of us call it the vegetarian subsidy. He hates it; we love it. But I don't see a business plan based on tracking who owes who for lunch, or even who owes their half of the rent.

First of all, someone has to enter the data for the website to track it. Second, most of this stuff could be done with a spreadsheet, without the need to put it on the web. Most importantly, I don't see how doing this stuff on the web, even with cell phones, is going to make my life easier.

Outlook: neat idea, but I don't see a business here.

Would I Pay for It: no chance.

411 Metro

Truth is, 411 should be free. So, we changed it. By simply including short, relevant ad messages from local businesses, we deliver the best possible directory service experience for you, the consumer, and the businesses you're calling.

My wife must believe 411 is free. Otherwise why would she call it so much. 411 Metro, which says it is ad supported, has a toll free number. The FAQ says they charge the business we call a fee. Well, OK, but does that mean businesses have to sign up (i.e., agree to pay the charge) in order for us to find their number via this service? A quick read of the website doesn't provide an answer for this.

I see two possible problems. First, my cell provider doesn't charge extra for 411 calls and if this service takes off (and businesses are willing to be charged for connections), what prevents the cell phone companies from doing the same thing? Second, to the extent I was required to listen to an add when I called to get a number, it would be a deal stopper.

Outlook: interesting concept, but I don't see much of a barrier to entry for better positioned competition.

Would I Pay for It: not likely.

Standpoint:

Standpoint is a social encyclopedia of belief. It's a place where you can share your perspective and learn about the perspectives of other people. It's a tool for organizing the web by opinion.

This looks to me like a super-charged, improved version of the internet message board. Someone posts an opinion and others are encouraged to chime in. As we have talked about, I think message boards are still relevant, and this looks like a good Web 2.0 angle on modernizing the message board concept.

I can tell the developers from vast experience that policing the users, weeding out the disrupters and ensuring that everyone feels welcome will be a significant challenge. If that happens, I could see myself using this site some.

Outlook: I like the idea a lot. But online ad revenue as the only revenue source is a tough sell.

Would I Pay for It: unlikely.

LiketyShip:

No information available from the website, so I'll rely on Mike's description:

It is an ecommerce service that can deliver purchased goods within two hours of placing the order. The magic? They combing local retail shops with the apparent over-capacity in the local courier market. Couriers pick items up at retail shops and deliver them immediately.

Very similar things have been tried before (remember Kozmo?). Yes, a lot of people have items shipped overnight or 2-day by Amazon and other retailers, but many people (including me) pay yearly for Amaazon Prime which makes 2-day shipping free. Amazon Prime was a stroke of brilliance by Amazon. If Amazon discontinues Amazon Prime, I might use a service like LiketyShip once in a while. But it assumes that what I want is available in my town for the same price I can get it online, and that's not always the case.

Outlook: new implementation of an old idea.

Would I Pay for It: maybe once in a while, if the delivery add on is reasonable.

Flagr:

Share your favorite places with your friends or the world right from your mobile phone.

They are only collecting emails for an upcoming beta, so there's not much I can tell from the website. Here's Mike's description:

The company promises to allow people to send tips on real world stuff in via a text message on a cell phone. Type in the title, address and comments, send it to Flagr and broadcast it to your friends or everyone.

Maybe, but what's better about this than an email or text message? There may be more to this that meets the eye, so we'll have to wait and see.

Outlook: too early to tell.

Would I Pay for It: no, unless there's much more than meets the eye.

PlaceSite:

PlaceSite introduces a new way of using wireless networks -- to create digital community services by, for and about people who are together in the same physical place.

OK, now we have something that grabs me. This sounds like a modern, anywhere version of the old Area Code restaurant I went to a few times in Florida back in college. Each table had a unique "area code" displayed on a big sign above the table. So you could ring up the table of girls across the room and chat them up.

This seems like an online, text messaging, chat room version of that. I'm far too old to be interested in this, but I can imagine a huge market for this sort of thing.

Outlook: very good.

Would I Pay for It: no, but if I were a 20-something I would certainly frequent places that had this service running.

Box.Net:

Box.net is your personal online space (or box) where you can store your documents, photos, music files, video clips, and more!

Box.Net is a player in the fast moving online storage game. For $2.99 a month you get 1GB of online storage. Mark Cuban is funding this venture, so you can be assured there's a good business model in place.

I have not yet concluded that I need any online storage, but if I did, I would certainly consider Box.Net.

Outlook: competitive space, but they may be far enough down the road to be a long-term player.

Would I Pay for It: not yet.

Skobee:

Wondering what your friends are up to this weekend? Wanna get some co-workers together for a happy hour? Trying to find tonight's hot spot?

They are only collecting emails for an upcoming beta, so there's not much I can tell from the website. Here's Mike's description:

Skobee [is] focused on event planning (as opposed to an evite which looks at organizing people once the event specifics have been finalized). One thing I really like about Skobee is that users just email back and forth, cc’ing a unique skobee email address. Based on the live demo the service seems to be quite good at turning natural language into structured text.

I get Evites all the time for stuff, and I think it's a good service, because it lets you see who's coming and it makes it easy to RSVP one way or the other and to change your response if something changes. I know Skobee is focused on creating the specifics as opposed to sending invitations, but sometimes doing something on a computer is more cumbersome than just picking on the phone. I can see some people using this, but I can't see it taking the party planning world by storm.

Outlook: too early to tell, but I'm not blown away by the concept.

Would I Pay for It: no chance.

NeuroSky:

Neurosky has developed a non-invasive neural sensor and signal processing technology that converts brainwaves and eye movements into useful electronic signals to communicate with a wide range of electronic devices, consoles, and computers.

This sounds too Jurassic Park for me to understand, much less comment on, but if it works, it could be very big. I'm naturally skeptical, so I am a little...skeptical.

Outlook: interesting.

Would I Pay for It: I don't know.


Anybody else want to join my Fantasy VC League?

We were in Galveston at a wedding this weekend, so other than my cautionary post on Saturday morning I missed a good bit of the big VC Debate.

I've been catching up on my reading, and here are my thoughts on what some folks are saying:

Mark Evans: Makes a good point that, while there are some bubble signs, we need VCs to shepherd the companies through the monetization process and provide a level of comfort to outside investors. I agree with this as long as the VCs don't get caught up in the madness of the greater fool theory and rush a bunch of companies to market that have no way to turn their ideas into a profit. This happened far too much leading up to the last dot.com bust. And as an aside, online ad revenue by itself does not a business plan make.

Mathew Ingram: Says that the VCs didn't create the bubble and that as a practical matter, we can't simply take the middleman away under our current system. He also says, and I heartily agree, that the smart investors who might otherwise serve as a balance against another bubble in Dave Winer's new market proposal didn't exactly distinguish themselves the last time around. They didn't, although the people who really got killed last time around were the retail buyers of stocks and mutual funds. Most of the insiders and big players made out like bandits. And while I technically agree that bubbles are built on the demand side, there is a huge machine in place designed to create that demand- both at the IPO and before. So while the VCs are not the creators of the greater fool theory, they certainly profit from it. And a greater fool will do wonders for a bad business plan.

Scoble: Points out that there is more access today via the sort of communication engendered by free conferences, blogs and other new media. I think that's true but the roads out of all those small meeting rooms still lead to the existing market structure. Things may be better now than then, but the system to turn an idea into a ton of cash is the same as before.

Rick Segal: Good, thoughtful post on the place, purpose and challenges of the VC industry in 2006. I like this quote (other than the fact Kent Newsome isn't in that list ):

My working theory is that a Capital firm with Esther Dyson, Mark Evans, Shel Israel, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, or some combination, might have value that, along side my money, could bring ideas into the mainstream in a much different fashion with great returns for all.

AS LONG AS the all includes all the retail buyers should the deal go public. Too often those folks get forgotten about.

Anne 2.0: Says that Web 2.0 won't give the super-sized returns needed to get the attention of traditional VCs. This is the best point yet, and I hope she's right about this. Because if a bunch of people get in a room and try to engineer some of those returns, the traditional way to get there is to sell to someone else based on projected growth, etc. We are the someone else, as we learned last time around.

Jeremy Wright: Talks about the need for passion in the VC arena. People who build these Web 2.0 applications have passion for the application. The VCs have a passion too, but it's usually a passion for making money- that's precisely why they get hired. I agree with Jeremy that you should strive for a passion for both, but too often the two passions can conflict with one another. Much like a musician who is passionate about her music dealing with a record label whose job it is to commercialize and monetize that music.

Phil Sim: Talks about the launch of his start-up, without traditional VC money. More importantly, he talks about the need for a good business plan. I love this quote:

My original business plan didn't suddenly start to suck because the bubble had popped. I think about what we might have done differently with MediaConnect had we had venture capital and realistically, I think we'd have been far less worried about ensuring everything we did was monetised and our business model was profitable and I'm not convinced we'd have come out the other side. Bootstrapping is a wonderful way to ensure you're focused on what should really be the core concern of most every business - getting profitable.

Fred Wilson: Recommends this approach:

Be the entrepreneur's partner. Help him or her. Be there for them. Support them. Counsel them. Share the risk with them. Have fun with them. Laugh and cry with them. And make boatloads of money with them. It's a time tested formula and it will work forever.

The most important word in that quote is "forever." It can't be a slash and burn (the retail stock buyer). There has to be first a real, sustainable product. Then a real, sustainable profit that can be grown over time. Do that, and I'll buy your stock all day long.

Obviously, there are other ways to make money without going public. I talked a little about that yesterday. But as someone who made a ton of money and then lost a ton of money during the last tech boom, bubble and bust, and as someone who created and developed a product that got into the VC pipeline the last go around, I think we have to proceed thoughtfully and with caution this time around.

The cliff is out there somewhere. Just beyond our view perhaps, but it's there. If we hold hands, maybe we can help each other from wandering too close.

The Globe and Mail has a long and interesting article today about NTP, the company that's in the process of kicking RIM's tail in court. RIM is the maker of everyone's favorite email gadget, the Blackberry.

I guess the public relations campaign mentioned in the article worked, because until today I had the impression that NTP was merely a patent troll, trying to extract some easy money from RIM.

This article doesn't necessarily make me change my mind about the case, but it does remind me that there are two sides to the story.

It's always next to impossible to get the real story based on what you read or hear on the news. People tell reporters carefully crafted versions of the facts. But it sounds like there may be a little more to this lawsuit than I thought.

It seems the TV networks are taking a page from the record label cartel book and raking in almost all of the $1.99 per episode charged to download their shows onto our iPods and computers.

I still want someone to explain to me why there is a big market for downloadable videos, other than the few tech savvy, long distance rail commuters and the guy whose TIVO hiccuped and failed to record last night's episode of Lost. Seriously, I want to know.

Selling downloadable video is the biggest much ado about nothing since Y2K.

Even if there are teens of teens who actually want to buy these reruns of free TV shows, how much jack does Apple stand to make if Apple's take for each sale is only 54 cents. Let's see 10,000 downloads of Lost equals $5400. Net out your costs, and put a few grand in the bank.

Yes, iPods are driving a significant portion of the online content economy. And if you have one of those video iPods I suppose you have to find something to watch on it. But in weeks and months, after the new and the cool fades, how many people are going to regularly buy and download this stuff?

The more I read about this stuff, the less I get it.

Heather Green has a timely article today wondering if we are in the middle of a great boom or heading towards another bust. It's a great question, and one I have wondered about too as I see Gather getting crazy money and hear rumors of Digg getting bought for $30M.

Back in the nineties, I and many others, bought stock in companies that were going to change the world and make a ton of money in the process. Study the phrase "were going to" in that sentence. We ignored it at the time, but "were going to" is very different from "were." Back then, nobody expected these companies to make money right away- we were in the middle of a tech revolution that was going to change the way things worked and create tons of revenue for every smart idea. Here's a list of some companies that proved to us that a smart idea does not ensure profitability, or even survival: Exodus, 360Networks, JDS Uniphase, ICGE, Enron, VerticalNet, Wind River Systems, Portal Software- you get the picture.

The combination of too much money, the greater fool theory, a media frenzy over dot.coms and good old fashioned momentum chasing led millions of people into the tech fray. And millions of people got slaughtered when the gig was up. All because the investing world got too enamored with tech and stopped caring about investing fundamentals.

Are we in danger of the same thing today?

Hopefully not on anything approaching the same scale. But if enough of these startups with good ideas and bad balance sheets catch come of the crazy money out there looking for deals, we could start moving towards the cliff. There are two ways these good idea companies can hit a homerun: get bought by a Yahoo-equivalent (e.g., del.icio.us) or do an IPO and get bought by you and me. The Yahoos can take care of themselves. If we start hearing rumblings that some of these startups are going public, then I think we need to proceed with caution.

There's something else I wonder about. If everyone is out there trying to hit that $30M homerun, will there be any money left over for a truly useful application or product that has reasonable prospects? In other words, is there money for a company that hits singles and doubles.

Our economy was built on singles and doubles, but these days it looks like everyone is swinging for the fences.

And that makes for bad baseball and bad investing.

I've read some good reviews of FeedLounge, the premium (meaning you have to pay for it) RSS feed reader. So the other night I decided to give it a whirl.

I signed up, paid via Paypal (the official and convenient payment service for Web 2.0) and imported my feeds. To say I am underwhelmed would be an understatement.

First of all, the layout is nothing revolutionary. Granted, you can easily switch between 3 different views (3 pane vertical, 3 pane mixed and 2 pane), but there's nothing particularly novel about the way content displays. You can tag RSS content, which would be great if I could think of a good reason why I would want to. Tagging is like Pink Floyd's song Money- the first 10,000 times I heard it I thought it was cool. Now I'm sick of it, but it still gets played about every half hour.

But none of that is the real problem. The real problem is that FeedLounge seems slower than freeze dried molasses. By comparison, Bloglines seems like greased lightning. At times, FeedLounge seems to be about as responsive as Bloglines. At other times, it seems much slower. I might pay for a lot faster. The same or slower doesn't seem all that pay-worthy.

Another problem is the updating formula. Bloglines FAQ says it checks for updated content every hour. I didn't have my team of mathematicians with me so I couldn't decipher the FeedLounge FAQ on this point, but it seems that FeedLounge checks for updates somewhere between every half hour (twice as good) to every 48 hours (48 times worse).

Someone please tell me what I'm missing.

This is the another installment in my series of favorite records. The list so far is here.

Any of the Eagles' first five records could make a good argument for this list. Their California influenced country rock sound further defined the genre founded by the Byrds and Dillard and Clark. Great records all, but my clear favorite is 1973's Desperado.

Desperado is a concept album about old west outlaws, but the songs themselves run the gamit from a country waltz (Saturday Night), to semi-bluegrass (Twenty-one), to acoustic county rock (Tequila Sunrise). But the masterpieces on the record are Bernie Leadon's Bitter Creek, Don Henley's title track (which has some of the most beautiful lyrics of any song you'll ever hear) and the three versions of Doolin'-Dalton.

The record has been mildly criticized by some as being too much Don Henley and too little everyone else. I'm a huge fan of Bernie Leadon's contributions to the Eagles' catalog (Train Leaves Here this Morning, from their first record, being perhaps my favorite Eagles song, with Journey of the Sorcerer not far behind), but I can find very little to criticize about this record.

Technorati Tags:
top 50 albums, record reviews

Dennis Howlett is howling about how Tech Memeorandum is somehow hosing him and some other guys (literally if you buy his metaphor) by not somehow linking to enough stories "impacting business." Then he proceeds to dump all over Scoble and Dave Winer over all sorts of perceived injustices.

He posts part of an email from Gabe Rivera, the creator of Memeorandum, that explains how Memeorandum's algorithm selects what shows up on the page, and even says that Gabe manually added the allegedly excluded site to Memeorandum's database. Yet somehow Memeorandum is not doing its job because their posts aren't showing up.

I love Memeorandum. I read it daily. I'm no A-Lister, but my posts show up there regularly. It's one of the very few places in the Blogosphere where new voices have a chance to be heard.

It's not perfect. As I have mentioned before, sometimes my posts disappear there for days at a time only (so far at least) to reappear. I wrote Gabe about it a few weeks ago, and I got a similar response to the one posted by Dennis. Sure, I'd love to be assured that all of my applicable posts will show up on the Memeorandum page immediately, but that's not how it was designed and that's not the way it works. What we have is still way better than watching the pigs fly by our window while we wait for that link from Om or Mike.

Gabe was brilliant in several ways by leaving the selection process to the algorithm. First, it levels the playing field a little. You still need links, which a lot of the A-Listers won't give- or at least won't give to me. But that's not Gabe's fault. Additionally, it provides for a good answer when I, Dennis and others make inquiries.

Now about that business stuff. Right now there are 17 main stories on the Memeorandum page. All but 5 of them definitely concern businesses more than the consumer and the other 5 at have at least some relevance for business. Granted, Memeorandum's not the online edition of the Wall Street Journal (ZZZZZ...), but that's why so many people like it.

As everyone knows, I think the Blogosphere is somewhat of a closed society. But if we want to start pointing fingers about why that is, Memeorandum is not the place to start.

Brad Feld talks today about what he believes is the coming irrelevance of My Yahoo, and presumably other portals. We talked about this the other day when I provided my initial defense of portals.

Like me, Brad has used his customized My Yahoo page for many years, primarily to track stock prices and news for the public companies he follows. He has decided that his My Yahoo page has become less useful because he no longer checks stock prices several times a day and because he feels like he's missing newsworthy stories by relying on My Yahoo's relatively static content.

As I said the other day, I still find My Yahoo very useful. I don't check my stock prices daily either, but I really like having my entire portfolio listed on the left side of My Yahoo page- right below the overall market charts and summaries. I use the headlines, business, sports and tech stories in the middle of the page as a newspaper substitute. And I like the weather and sports scores on the right side. I think you can get more information faster from My Yahoo than you can sifting through a bunch of RSS feeds (having a separate RSS feed for every stock I follow seems highly cumbersome to me). Plus, as Fred Wilson points out, you can easily add and intermix any crucial RSS feeds with the other news feeds on your My Yahoo page.

One thing I very much agree with Brad about is the overwhelming effect of trying to list the news stories for all of your stocks on your main My Yahoo page. It is absolutely overwhelming. I tried it briefly and then decided to move all of my stock news to a separate My Yahoo page- you can have several and navigation back and forth is easy via the drop down menu at the top right of the page. So now I have a second page called "Investing" where I display the stock news stories. That page is still a little overwhelming, so candidly I don't use it that much. But the information is there when I want it and it keeps my main My Yahoo page uncluttered and more newspaper-like.

As an aside, I use Morningstar for my stock news tracking purposes. You can customize your email alert preferences to get one email per day with links to all news stories about the stocks in your portfolio. I find this to be the perfect solution.

So while I am a big user of RSS feeds, I don't think they serve the same purpose as My Yahoo or any similar portal. RSS feeds aren't a good substitute for the morning paper, whereas My Yahoo is. That's why I'm still a big fan of My Yahoo.

I've never done one of these deals, but someone sent me this in an email, so I'll do it here.

Four jobs I've had in my life:

1) Bag Boy
2) Lifeguard
3) Heat Set Machine Operator
4) Lawyer

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1) Spaceballs
2) The Holy Grail
3) Raising Arizona
4) Up in Smoke

Four TV shows I love to watch:

1) Battlestar Galactica
2) The Amazing Race
3) Survivor
4) Lost

Four places I've been on vacation:

1) Bahamas
2) Cozumel
3) Santa Fe
4) Kamloops

Four of my favorite dishes:

1) Sushi
2) Poblano Chicken
3) Gumbo
4) Garlic mashed potatoes

Four websites I visit daily:

1) Flickr
2) My Yahoo
3) Bloglines
4) Tech Memeorandum

Four places I would rather be right now:

1) Camping
2) Fishing
3) Ocean Drive
4) Sleeping

Four bloggers I am tagging:

1) Improbulus
2) Richard Querin
3) Dwight Silverman
4) Amy Gahran

First Yahoo was going to buy Digg. Now it's not. Yahoo gave up on search. Wait, no they didn't.

I feel like I'm at the playground with my kids and all of their friends when someone runs up to me every three minutes and shares a breaking story about who used potty talk and who isn't sharing his or her toys.

When I speak of bloggers talking at and not to each other, this is what I'm talking about. Someone throws a topic out there and like a nineties dot.com stock everybody buys it immediately. Few people stop to wonder if it's a good buy or not. Most just start reporting the news and/or telling us what they think about it.

And while I'm on the topic of nineties dot.com stocks, if Yahoo does pay $30M for Digg, I am going to sell all of my tech stocks because another dot.com bust is headed our way.

Cool is good. Digg is cool. Traffic is good. Digg has a lot of traffic. To warrant a $30M price tag, however, lots and lots of revenue needs to be in the pipeline, not on the drawing board. Digg has revenue, but I'd be very surprised if anything close to a $30M price tag isn't some combination of betting on the come (which lost us all a ton of money back in the nineties) and the greater fool theory (which is the basis of far too much of our markets at this point).

When I see these sites, even great ones like Digg, get mentioned in the same breath as $30M, I wonder what, if anything, we learned from the last dot.com boom and the portfolio killing bust that naturally followed.

Google is now admitting that it screwed up the much ballyhooed launch of Google Video by not adequately promoting all the great free TV shows that could be bought, downloaded and watched in a tiny box on your iPod or computer. Somehow things would have been different if all those free shows for sale had been pasted all over the Google Video homepage.

Well, friends, now there are links to Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy episodes right there on the homepage. Buy as many as you want for $1.99 a piece. Or you can tune into TV Land any night of the week and watch them on your TV for free.

There's also a link to the CSI-Name any City show that anyone who cares has already seen. You can buy it and watch it for a whole day for $1.99. That's right, a whole day.

But it's just cooler to watch them on your computer. Right.

Steve Rubel points out that this is the week for tech titans to fall all over themselves admitting their mistakes and promising to do better. He also says that smart people knew all along that Google was blowing it. He cites an article from January 10 questioning the announcement and content of Google video. Steve must have missed my post of January 6 where I asked if anyone was going to line up to pay to watch repeats of boring NBA games and otherwise free TV shows on their computers.

I don't think the homepage has all that much to do with it. I just don't think anyone wants to buy much of what they're selling.

I can see a modest market for downloadable, DRM-infested video courtesy of frequent travelers who need something to watch while on planes and in airports. I use Movielink for just that purpose. So while people might want to download something to watch on the plane or train, how many people will do that regularly? My guess: very few.

For one thing, it's a little hard to watch a video on a laptop or iPod, even on a long flight. I know, because I sometimes watch movies on my Tablet PC on long flights. But more often than not, I end up turning off the movie and reading a book or sleeping. Plus, people don't like to pay twice and all of us already have access to these shows via our TVs and TIVOs. Finally, how many long distance commuters (a) prefer watching I Love Lucy to sleeping, talking or staring out the window and (b) have the means and methods to find, download and play I Love Lucy on their iPods or laptops?

I'll say it again: Other than the occasional lottery scam video, I just don't get the whole downloadable video thing.

I think someone's trying to create a market for a demand that doesn't exist.

Blogspotting asks today if the lack of a community mindset might make it hard for the citizen media movement to take hold in the sprawling metropolitan areas many of us live in.

The question originated from Amy Gahran's conversation about whether the lack of a broad community mindset with respect to the Bay Area might have contributed to Bayosphere's demise.

Amy makes some good points. One of them, via a conversation she had with a friend from the Bay Area:

My colleague, who lives in the Bay Area, observed that in that region there's virtually no awareness of the Bay Area as a community. People there, he said, tend to be more aware of and engaged with their towns or neighborhoods, not the "Bay Area."

I expect that sort of thing is true for a lot of people. I live in Houston, but not really. Although I live barely 8 miles from downtown, I live in a town called Bellaire. My kids go to school there. They play sports there. The places we eat and the places we shop are there. Most of our friends live there.

I care about Houston, but I care a lot about Bellaire.

But I think the internet and the citizen media that's a part thereof should be looked at from a different angle.

When I read and talk about tech, music or current events, it is the opportunity to converse with people from all over the world that drives me to the internet. I think the internet in general and the blogosphere in particular have to develop community awareness around topics, as opposed to geography.

I read Dwight Silverman's blog every day. Not because he lives in Houston, but because he writes well on topics that interest me. Similarly, I read Ed Bott every day for the same reason, and I don't even know where he lives. Many of the folks I converse with on a regular basis are from Canada or the UK.

So for me the question becomes can we build cross-blog communities (not to be confused with clubs where you have to be invited to join) based on shared interests? I hope so, but candidly I'm not sure.

I talked about message boards the other day and explained why I think they are still relevant. The main reason is because there is more immediate give and take on active message boards. There are actual conversations you can follow as they meander around the topic.

It's harder to do that with blogs. A lot of times it seems like bloggers are just talking over or at each other. To converse you have to listen. I don't know how we do it, but we have to figure out how to stop talking at each other and start talking to (and listening to) each other.

Otherwise we're just noise.

This is part fourteen of my A-Z review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I've already done A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L M and N.

There aren't many O's, but I found a good one:

Overdo's Land of Nothingness (RSS Feed)

Overdo's Land of Nothingness is a tech/general interest blog, with a lot of Microsoft tech tips, beta coverage and stories.

Honorable Mention:

Om Malik on Broadband (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I like every other living human read it)

So Google has agreed to censor its web search results in China. No Tiananmen Square, no independent Taiwan. No Gmail, no blogs.

It sucks that Google has to do this, but I think, all things considered, this falls on the right side of the OK line. Here's why.

There's definitely an OK line when it comes to ignoring basic rights in the name of global expansion. For example, I would be outraged if Google agreed to censor out stories about successful business women or members of a particular religion just to get some deal working in some far away country that doesn't share our views about equality and religious freedom.

On the other hand, I don't know that the Chinese people have voiced any desire to avoid reading about Tiananmen Square or Taiwan. To the contrary, they are being denied that right by the government. The top down origin of this restriction is, at least for me, the difference maker. While Google can't allow its Chinese users to read about these things, it can give them something- a Chinese Google- they don't already have. Maybe by becoming a player in the Chinese internet, Google can, over time, be a force for positive change.

Most of the efforts leading to this positive change will ultimately have to come from within China, not without. So I'm not bothered by Google's decision to give the Chinese people something as opposed to nothing.

Plus, as Mathew Ingram points out, Google is not the first major U.S. internet player to make concessions in the name of Chinese expansion.

To get carried away and claim that this somehow represents Google's transformation into Darth Vader is simply naive. Americans sometimes seem to believe that everyone has to start acting like us immediately and that anyone who doesn't is, well, evil. That's just not the way the world works. The important thing is to seek positive change and avoid going backwards. Google's China game is certainly not a giant step forward, but being realistic and trying to work within the system is not going backwards either.

We can draw lots of lines in family discussions at the dinner table and in newspapers and blogs, but positive change sometimes requires compromise. Once you draw the wrong line, the conversation is over and the battle lost. At least this way Google lives, in China, to hopefully fight another day.