DISQUS

Good luck Ben. Break a leg up there...

The idea is that the correct tags will be generated more frequently by the crowd, thus giving those terms a greater preponderance than the mistakes or falsehoods... simple enough, no?

in regards to MAC's point, where are the loruses for that matter?

Quite simply, it's a great design.

Smooth on the eyes, easily navigable and facilitates information consumption. I love it.

However, I'm going to depart from the pack (surprise) and slam the footer. I think it's redundant and clutter-y. Recent Posts is already in the 2nd column, you should move Recent Archives and Categories to that column as well for better use of the whitespace you have there. More people will see that stuff in the 2nd column anyway, as few people ever read down to the bottom of a blog (if this is reading habit you're trying to change, then I suggest it's a misguided attempt.) You've already provided a short bio at the top, why do we need a 'medium' length bio at the bottom? It's too much, IMHO. Axe the footer and the blog will be better for it.

One small error in the header: Rolling over the RSS Icon and/or the Mail icon should link to those subscription links. Right now clicking on those icons brings the user back to the homepage.

Final note: I'd get rid of MyBlogLog, as it junkies up the page (but I know you'll ignore this one... so go ahead and ignore) ;)

Nice work Ben.

Nice round-up Ben. In one post you highlight a prodigious output that -- despite your misgivings about slow posting recently -- put most of us to shame.

You always publish well-thought-out and well-written stuff, and look forward to following your startup coaster in the coming months.

Good luck to you and the SoJ crew!

It's all about the community.

The community surrounding reddit is largely older (?) more educated and more thoughtful (definitely). That's why you see more flow from it than digg, even though digg is more highly trafficked.

A $300M price tag for the community surrounding digg just doesn't smell right to me.

Robert,

Some time ago you published a video accompanied by a text chronology of the major discussion topics. In my opinion this is an absolute necessity to accompany any information-dense video, no matter what the length. I'm sure this is time-intensive to create, but really, it would be worth it for your audience.

Let me, the user, chose what chunks of the whole I want to consume.

I'm sure you knew a headline like that would lure me out of the bushes...

I'm not interested in "montezing my content" through AdSense. I oppose the practice. But yet, I'm happy to give away my content for free without prejudice.

Why? Because for me, a blog is a mind on display. I put my thinking online so that later, at some point down the road, future clients/employers/business associates can evaluate me in the purest way possible: based on my ability to think and communicate that thought clearly, persuasively and articulately.

This represents a deferred, but far greater (I expect) and more meaningful (in my opinion) way to benefit from one's blog.

Ha - my doctors might not agree that I have the
"intestinal fortitude" to survive the entrepreneurial life ;)

I'm 100% with you on the first two: trust and loyalty - I'm not sure about the big ideas part. Who doesn't have big ideas? I'd swap that for "unbelievable execution", because ultimately that's more important.

Techmeme serves a very useful purpose in the blogosphere: it takes its pulse.

I find it very useful to be able to glance at a single page, and figure out what are the most important issues being discussed, in about 27 seconds. It takes me much longer than that to mentally parse my feed stream to synthesize the same amount of information, even if the blogs being tracked are largely the same.

Another great thing about TechMeme is the speed with which it surfaces information. When something hits TechMeme for the first time, it's usually pretty darn fresh.

So TM for me serves two useful purposes: aggregation and discovery, especially when I am particularly time-crunched.

Of course, some human intelligence on top of TM would be great, and this is the next great opportunity... I believe we will see the return of human editorializing on top of automated aggregation.

Actually I think Web2.0 for business is thriving, it's just not on the radar of the sources you and I track.

The "Enterprise 2.0" meme has been going strong for sometime now since Andrew McAfee (at Harvard) starting thinking about this last year...

I think there is plenty being done in this space, but it is inherently not sexy because it's just rehashing, and making more robust/stable/secure, the stuff that first emerges as B2C.

The few innovation Enterprise 2.0 apps that would not first go through a gestation period in B2C are just not interesting enough for most of us to ever register on our radars...

@vaspers
Sorry to take so long to come back to this thread. Interesting take - we're whiners for wanting to consider the road ahead? Yes, the printing press was a success - but why? Because the educated/literate were able to (mostly) control what was put out over the medium, which resulted in lots of value being printed onto dead trees.

Now the "democratization" of media allows anyone with a voice with unprecedented access to my attention. You seek to draw a corollary, but I beg to differ. If we don't soon succeed in building tools that will aid good content from being weeded from the chaff, I'm afraid we'll poison our collective media to the point where we no longer know where to look for quality.

"This is a Historical First: the internet, web, blogosphere, lifecasting, the whole humachine movement."

Hmm. Since you seem to use analogies so freely, I would submit that the people who developed the atomic bomb probably thought it was pretty swell thing at the time as well.

Lesson: Not all technology is a boon for society. Let's look before we leap.

I like this post, and I think the message applies more broadly, i.e. not limited to entrepreneurship.

Your ideas, whatever they might be: political, religious, philosophical or favorite Ninja Turtle will always be met with opposition by people that a) have legitimate criticism; b) are soft of mind; c) are combative by nature; or d) are close-minded.

You really only to worry about the first type of criticism, and figure out ways to address it and prioritize it. The trick is figure out which is which.

I'm generally not a fan of vlogging, but I think these whiteboard sessions are a nice way to bounce around some ideas.

I'd like to see them complemented by a blog post that distills the key content though. It can become quite tiresome to sit through an entire video, as it is a definitionally sequential medium.

The nice thing about consuming written content is that the eye, and the mind, can bounce around as it so pleases.

While stealing avatars is clearly in poor taste, I feel that avatars - and the questionable choices people make for their pics - can often cheapen a site.

How to encourage your users to make avatar choices that are mature and representative of their personal brands, in such a way that they add, rather than detract from, your sites overall level of community and legitimacy?

Nice work taking the brawl back to your home turf Ben ;)

"We get to overwhelm ourselves, destroy our attention capacity and move on."

This is bad! If this is what the tools we collectively create do to us, then we seriously have to step back and re-evaluate our motivations for building web technologies in the first place.

The technologies we build should have the intention of lessening the not-insignificant problems we face. To build technologies that have the opposite effect, that erode our sense of being and our capacity to interpret the world is simple wrong-headed of us.

Dismissing the issue by claiming that it's OK to damage the early-adopter crowd is myopic. These technologies (and not only necessarily the good ones) WILL seep through into the collective social fabric.

As technologists I think we have a stewardship role to play in bringing to the rest of society technologies designed for the greater good. Too few people in our little bubble actually consider the ramifications of what they build (and use!) preferring to simply build (use) for the sake of building (using). I think we can, and should, do better than that by being more thoughtful about what we architect and why.

Nice tips Ben. Searching for keywords to decide on who to link to is something that wasn't even on my radar.

Part of me (the purist part) cringes at the thought of manipulating the system like this, though. I know, I know... I'm a naive fool.

Like a slow drip on a stone... eventualy you will wear it down. :)

Any word on whether your employer will similarly dismantle its "increasingly absurd" paywall any time soon?

I hope you have some pull over there.

Yeah that's a cool story from Dick. He seems like a pretty congenial guy. He should have hired me back in the day... ;)

Hope you had a good time in SF Ben - I look forward to a bucket load of posts in the coming days with all the wisdom you gleaned ;)

It amazes me that more people aren't familiar with the basics of human communication.

But I think I'll hold off on my pity for VCs though ;)

I read each of your posts about VCs with interest Ben -- this will greatly help all those who come after you, myself included.

I expect this list of questions to be particularly useful, so thanks.

Nice post Ben. I don't know how you do it. I don't yet have kids and can barely find time to prepare a bowl of cereal for dinner most nights ;) *slight* exaggeration

Thanks Ben -- we're definitely banging away hard at the spam problem, and like you say it's a tough nut to crack.

We're looking forward to rolling out more beta invites soon.

And a big public Thank You, for being one of our first, and most patient, testers.

Cheers,

Mat
Defensio.com