262ventures.com

But I had to link to this link from Eric Ries’ blog.  His topic of choice is a summary of books, presentations, and thoughts about why Silicon Valley developed into the tech behemoth of the late 20th and early 21st century, as opposed to Route 128 in Boston.

This is a personal favorite debate of mine, having seen the culture of entrepreneurship at MIT and at Stanford.  The difference is subtle but palpable.  While the students and faculty at both institutions (as well as the other universities at play locally: Harvard, Berkeley, Northeastern, Santa Clara) demonstrate immense intuition for entrepreneurship, the mechanisms for launching startups is different.  In an overgeneralizing, but demonstrative example, MIT entrepreneurship is represented by the 100k competition, a formal route towards bringing enterprising communities together and launching companies, whereas at Stanford students put stuff together in their dorms and meet with random mentors in the Menlo Park, Mountain View community to engender new companies.  The difference is culturally systemic and there is no doubt that both paths have led to extreme success.

I’m going to look forward to reading the referenced book (Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee Saxenian.)

I’ve been messing around with twitter for the past couple of months.  My network is relatively small, keeping small updates on my brother and twit-stalking a few of the VC guys that are big believers in this stuff.  So for me, I use it relatively infrequently.  For others though it’s huge, completely viral, and informative.

Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, has been a big proponent of twit-bots.   For example you can create a twit-bot on wine recommendation (@winetweets) .   This allows everyone interested in wine recommendations to post to the twit-bot and the bot published the recommendation to everyone who follows the twit-bot.  There is some real power of the masses at work here: if you get enough people, surely the wisdom of crowds should allow you to find the cream of the crop recommendations based on number of recommendations alone.  However there is oversaturation of information here as well: what happens when you get 1000, 10000, 1 million recommendations a month from the twitbot?  There is just no way of handling this information.

This leads me to the idea of ‘data-mining’ information from twitter (I’m sure someone is working on this already) . Because of the format, twits are limited to 140 characters, necessitating brevity.  In a comparison with yelp.com, there is no opportunity to supply context for the recommendation that a full review on yelp can provide.  Thus I think it will take some sweet statistical analysis along with some meta-data (some metric for how ‘good’ the recommender is) to really extract some value from this.

Venture hacks always supplies gems for the entrepreneur.  This post is excellent, reading and listening for anyone who wants to get a startup done.

Even more important, Mike Cassidy talks about conflict resolution within a company and how to achieve work-life balance.  Plus the dude plays ultimate which is a super plus in my book.

All this from a guy who sold hundred million dollar companies twice after only a couple years of launch.

We don’t particularly enjoy delving into politics here at 26.2. But really this will wind up being a post more about the Long Tail phenomenon. I am spurred to action by a unique intersection of events which include waking up to NPR’s discussion of last night’s Democratic primaries and an interview of Arianna Huffington on MobLogic. In the interview of Ms. Huffington, done by the excellent Lindsay Campbell (Stanford alum!), they discuss the “lunatic fringe,” or if you will, the political commentators who sit squarely on the long tail. The low economic costs of production and media dissemination, brought on by the internet, have allowed anyone with any opinion to place it in the public sphere to be consumed. Yes it’s out there, but it’s still damn hard to get noticed unless you have something outrageous to say. Think of all the press Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been receiving and been using, despite my disagreements with his equivocations, to great effect for his own pulpit. Or think of all the “click” grubbers who make stuff up about all three candidates.

In current media, differentiation is key. For large mainstream broadcasters, they differentiate themselves from others through the immense size and scale of their existing distribution channels. For smaller broadcasters (bloggers, the fringe) to prosper or to get off of the long tail, they have to figure out a way to turn up the volume. And unfortunately, without possessing existing influence, that means taking a hard stance, being outrageously sensational, and appealing to the primordial herd nature which exist in us all. All this comes at the expense of rational thought. Regardless, the noise gets heard.

A recent blog entry from the Long Tail discussed fragmentation of the search engine market, specifically about the trade off between breadth and depth of quality search. On one hand Google crawls the entire web and determines relevancy algorithmically covering a broad space. On the other, there are a bunch of “human-powered searches”, such as Squidoo, who use human interpreted contextual analysis (read: reading with your eyes and writing at your keyboard) to create more depth and relevancy for more common search terms. The Long Tail appropriately described it as “leaving the long tail to algorithmic search and seeking success by relentlessly editing down to a human-edited short head”.

This may be a good strategy if you can achieve strong market share. This seemingly works for Alltop, Guy Kawasaki’s feed sorter. But allow me to invoke the story of Looksmart in the 1990s. Their human ‘categorization’ method, which consisted of my buddy Dave sorting hundreds of websites per day into their appropriate category, was a rough approximation, a web 1.0 version if you will, of Squidoo.

In this age, I’m not sure anyone doing search would be willing to not use Google. It’s the gold standard for long tail searches. But it’s pretty damn good at the common stuff too. They took charge of an industry long before Looksmart even went public.

And you can ask Dave how that good old 24:1 reverse split worked out.