DISQUS

Fred,

While I understand what you're saying--figure it out for yourself--your title sucks.

It is NEVER different, that's the kind of thinking that got us into this mess. The technology and the names involved may change, but what we're going through right now is almost a play-by-play repeat of 1929-1931.

I find the idea that we're somehow far superior to the generations that came before us and made the same mistakes to be just insanely egotistical. I sure as hell am not basing my investment thesis on it.

Jason

Ha, this post was hilarious to me for some reason. I remember running our startup and Web design is one of the things you "think" you can do on your own. Hell, I'm a developer, I can sling some mean HTML and Javascript, no big deal. My partner did sales, he could write a couple of catchy headlines. We both know some Photoshop.

Looking back on it, I'm surprised Cisco was able to look past our ghetto site with cheesy stock photography and ended up buying us. It's almost embarrassing to look back on the sites we put up, and painful to think of the money we probably lost because of it.

Not so much the look of the sites, but the marketing part of it is really an art. "Back to basics" is a good rule of thumb here.

Excellent post, Robert--very heartfelt. Feeling that you deserve to be on the A-List because of ideas you post, but realizing that being on the A-List requires a marathon of blogging, commenting, and almost perpetually being in front of a computer can be frustrating.

I think you do a good job of exposing the flaws in the current paradigm in this post. I think eventually the dust will settle and there will be two types of blogs: the news-based, reactionary blogs, and the thoughtful, innovative blogs (or what I like to call the "good blogs"). It seems the blogosphere is going through growing pains right now, and what it will grow up to be remains to be seen.

Once again, great post.

I've wondered about this as well. You really don't see any startups launching AT the consumer, they launch at the Silicon Valley crowd. The last time we saw Web startups marketed to Joe Public was during the first dot com bubble, when it was done very poorly (sock puppet Super Bowl commercial?)

It makes me wonder what the marketing plans are they show to the VC's. Surely everyone isn't trying to sell to Google?

Hey not to rub it in, but... how's that GOOG stock working out for ya? ;)

Doesn't matter to GOOG's bottom line if online ads grow but they only pay 25% as much. When we emerge from the recession it will, but that's going to be a big hole for the stock to climb out of before you start seeing profits.

Hope you've got some dry powder so you can buy it all the way down... this thing's going to 3xx by the end of the year. Consumer-driven paid search results are toast until the economy recovers.

We are absolutely in a recession. All you need to do is look at corporate earnings, barring Microsoft. How many weeks have to go by with multi-billion dollar losses and thousands of layoffs before people wake up to that?

The biggest problem is that there's no trust in the financial system right now, which is seizing up commercial credit and business growth. Until companies are forced to mark to market and show true and honest balance sheets, the financial system will continue to implode. Better to take our lumps now and go thru a shorter recession, than to prolong it and make the recession deeper.

Can't find the quote, but someone at the TSA said that it's all basically "security theater" to make people feel safe.

That's hilarious stuff. I can't believe you made it thru the entire analogy while making sense throughout the entire thing... good job :) So many dog-related items just begging for a metaphor: boarding, leg-humping, letting them outside, keeping them off the couch--could go on forever!

I work at home, and I still use podcasts--at the gym, while I'm driving, and when I'm relaxing. I really don't think it's wise for a content publisher to ONLY offer podcasts--it makes the most sense to me to do a weekly summary podcast that boils down what's happened in the text version over the past week. That would serve the additional purpose of luring in listeners who may not want to subscribe to and read yet another blog but want to keep up to date on what's happening while they work out.