DISQUS

Nic - I agree, although it is slightly intellectually disappointing that there isn't a new fangled business model that has emerged yet, but clearly - as you say - the advice has to be to accelerate into the freeness and distributedness of content, and to use clumsy but proven tools to monetize (advertising!).

listening now!

Hi Nick, we're not in a recession yet and I hope that we don't find ourselves in one eventually. I'd say though that a correction is needed and welcomed (just house prices alone here in the UK are ridiculous, and the sub prime thing is still rippling through the banking system).

Lean business is good business and I expect smart start ups will thrive regardless.

The main concern is the too many firms chasing too few ad dollars, per the Publicis top dog (Levy?). It'll be interesting to see how that kicks in and shakes out VC portfolios.

Fred - looking forward to seeing which investments you make next year, some great picks so far, cheers from the UK.

If you're saying that Jaiku is better than Twitter because it's more feature rich, and better looking, than I wholeheartedly disagree with you.

Good web apps are lean.

If you look at the evolution of classical traditional software apps, they've suffered immensely from gradually becoming huge bloated pieces of software - MS Word, for example.

Abundance of features does not equal better.

i have been using my panda tshirt extensively - i think you'll like the results, they are suitably glamorous and gorgeous: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrwilleeumm/155388...

Writing snappy headlines feels a little phoney, a little contrived. It's not necessarily the most authentic blogging style but it's worth being aware of for those specifically seeking increased profile and traffic. The rest of the time, who can be bothered? Not me :)

It's worth experimenting with. There are certainly ethical concerns to be aware of but the feeling from our discussion was that it's cool to Digg yourself once to seed the community, but definitely not cool to then be digging multiple times in order to manipulate things.

Here are the results our very modest experiment yielded - it basically works... http://blog.willmcinnes.co.uk/blog/2006/06/notes_on_using_.html

Nice blog by the way :)

Online payment from Ether to you (the consultant) is surely a must have, rather than nice-to-have: the idea of cheques is quite at odds with the entire proposition (being online; automating etc).
You pay 15% for:
- removing hassle by them handling payment
- removing hassle by them setting call up
- removing hassle by using their tools to arrange calls at convenient times
I'm really not sure the proposition itself is that powerful.
What does Ether really do for a freelancer or consultant that they cannot quite easily arrange themselves?