The Gong Show

Calacanis and Arrington’s respective announcements about the TechCrunch 20 conference are interesting. It’s a smart move by jumping in front of the growing anti-DEMO-payola parade. I love to see anything that features cool technology, and I’m sure Calacanis and Arrington will assemble a stellar judging panel.

I do have one concern. Check out this except from the description on the post by Calacanis:

2. We will have around 250 people at the event.

250 people, that’s 12 people per company presenting… seems so limited/exclusive to me. They could easily hold the event at Stanford’s MemAud (holds 1700 people) on the cheap. Bummer.

I bet there are 250 VCs in the valley willing to pay scalpers’ prices for admission to see the 20 hottest companies in the opinion of Calacanis/Arrington. Maybe this is an intentional choice on behalf of the organizers in order to make the conference more “elite.” I hope not. It could also be that their desire to throw the event in SF is a significant limiting factor to capacity.

Anyway, this is just an implementation detail that I’m sure these guys will work out as their idea snowballs. Aside from the attendance issue, I really like the spirit of this idea.

Brad has a great post up on the USV blog. My favorite part:

Is there a basis for competition beyond the governance systems underlying these services? If pressed, I would guess it will be values. It might be possible for two equally effective governance systems to compete by internalizing different values.

Values as the competitive element in the governance layer of the stack… what a hot concept.

We are starting to see companies compete on values already. Think about companies emphasizing their double bottom lines in both profits and community benefit, like craigslist or Google. Or the competing values of ReviewMe vs PayPerPost as they walk the line of journalistic ethics. Or the recently released Do The Right Thing, a platform for people to converse about competing company values. I am glad to see competition in values, and I hope this recent rise in ethics is more than a trend. We would all be better for it.

Anyway, this comment only scratches the tip of the iceberg. Give Brad’s post a read.

Fred Destin posted a nice set of photos on his blog depicting his impression of New York. This European take on New York is a refreshing reminder of how uncommon some of New York’s typical scenes really are. My personal favorite is one I would have titled “Police 2.0,” depicted on the right.

Enjoy! And, to Fred, I hope the city treats you well.

I attended The Scene at Second Stage on Saturday night. It’s a cast of four, which was both intimiate in size and star-studded with Tony Shalhoub and Patricia Heaton.

The play was dark commentary on our image obsessed culture. Though the play was a sad portrait of a man’s downward spiral, it certainly was not a tragedy because there was no virtuous character, no protagonist. No one was genuinely bad, and no one was genuinely good. Every character had their flaws and their good intentions. Their morality was authentically nuanced.

I liked the first act a lot as it waved the banner of hedonism; the second act was the necessary consequences of hedonisms, which was required for authenticity, but less entertaining to watch.

Here’s the NYTimes review for more thorough summary and analysis.

I have nothing but good things to say about Second Stage. Terrific venue. I especially liked the size (not to small, but not too big) and the design.

I enjoy the archived content I find on the websites for email lists like Thrillist, UrbanDaddy, and Very Short List, but I hate the amount of attention they demand by requiring that I subscribe via email to get updates. Why not offer an RSS feed? RSS was invented to deliver this type of content better. It should be a no brainer to offer a feed for content in this format…

Here’s a few reasonable guesses and rebuttals as to why these services are not offering RSS feeds:

• Issue: RSS doesn’t fit into the site’s “image” because it’s too geeky. Offering RSS would lower themselves.
  • Retort: This is the most likely reason in my mind, but this is a very short-sighted reason. As RSS becomes more user-friendly and abstracted, adoption will climb. A little subtle design work could eliminate this issue.
• Issue: There isn’t enough ROI to implement RSS because mainstream adoption of RSS is too low.
  • Retort: An ROI arguement has to take into account both the return on investment and the effort/time invested. While the return might be low, it’s way to easy to implement RSS to justify an ROI arguement. It’s a few hours of programming and a few hours of design work… wouldn’t even take a week. And, I know these email lists have techies on staff. I don’t buy it.
• Issue: Open rate tracking isn’t good enough in RSS compared to email, and they want to be able to measure users’ behavior.
  • Retort: I call bullshit. FeedBurner stats are excellent (and too cheap) to justify this arguement. In fact, considering all the anti-tracking mechanisms built into email clients these days, FeedBurner tracking is probably more accurate than email tracking.
• Issue: Formatting options in RSS isn’t as rich as in HTML.
  • Retort: This is true, but since so many email clients refuse to download pictures and CSS from the net, rich HTML-formatted emails get mangled in most modern email clients. RSS would avoid this problem.
• Issue: Owning an email list is more valuable than owning a feed with subscribers.
  • Retort: This is only true if the owners violate their privacy policy and resell their lists. From a consumer’s perspective, this is one of the biggest reasons why RSS is better than email lists. So, for any ethical service, this point is not true.

These cultural email digests are niche clones of DailyCandy, the queen of the medium based on traction. I bet if DailyCandy started offering RSS feeds, these clones would all follow suit. So maybe the RSS decision is less about rationale and more about following the leader.

Today I decided to unsubscribe from all email lists that could/should otherwise be offering a feed. I’m done until they start feeding me (or until someone mashes up a feed from them for me).

For fellow Tarantino fans: the trailer for Grindhouse defines new levels of awesomeness.

Here’s a brief official synopsys:

“Grind House” – noun – A downtown movie theater – in disrepair since its glory days as a movie palace of the ’30s and ’40s – known for “grinding out” non-stop double-bill programs of B-movies. From groundbreaking directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez comes the ultimate film experience: a double-bill of thrillers that will recall both filmmakers’ favorite exploitation films. “Grind House” will be presented as one full-length feature comprised of two individual films helmed separately by each director. Tarantino’s film, Death Proof, is a rip-roaring slasher flick where the killer pursues his victims with a car rather than a knife, while Rodriguez’s film explores an alien world eerily familiar to ours in Planet Terror. Welcome to the grind house – it’ll tear you in two.

Like everything Tarantino touches, this trailer is not suitable for all audiences. Don’t play it if that doesn’t sound like it’s up your alley.

Update: This post by Nabeel is a great argument in favor of the time spent on a site metric. Time Spent per Vists * Visits is fairly accurate way to measure engagement, and that analysis leads to interesting conclusions about the importance and size of pogo.com. I wish I had read this before I wrote this post below.

Original Post: This Compete post ranking the top 20 websites based on time spent online was very interesting to me. It satiated both my voyeuristic and statistical needs for the day.

I was surprised to see Pogo.com so high on the list. I know that casual games are huge, but I doubt that Pogo is the biggest casual games portal (I suspect Yahoo owns that crown). Of course, Yahoo is ranked higher than Pogo on this list, which makes sense… but if I’m correct that Pogo is at best the #2 player in the casual games, then it’s remarkable just how big the causal games space must be such that users spent an equal amount of time on the second largest casual games site compared to YouTube and Facebook combined! I guess games generally consume more time than watching videos or stalking friends’ profiles.

Also, one of the reasons why I like this list so much (enough to blog about it) is because time spent viewing a site is a far better metric for engagement than pageviews. I don’t know how accurately Compete can measure viewing time (in other words, I know nothing about their methodology), but if it is in fact accurate, then I think this is a much better way to rank the largest sites in the world.

For example, Craigslist is often quoted as the 7th biggest site English-speaking site on the web. But, that’s because Craigslist’s site is design to generate TONS of pageviews, where as on Pogo.com, users could spend hours and hours on a single game generating zero pageviews. It seems to me that if a user spends more time on Pogo than on Craigslist, then Pogo should be considered larger than Craigslist.

So, not only is time spent viewing a page a better metric for engagement, it’s also a better metric for determining which sites are larger than others IMHO.

Last time I posted about a talk in NYC (by Cory Doctorow), I bumped into a few readers, which was great, so I’m posting here again.

The same NYU Free Culture organization that brought Cory Doctorow is now bringing Jimmy Wales to come speak. I plan to attend.

The details are in the original post.

Also, here’s a cool tool for finding NYC tech events that was posted to NextNY today by Charlie.

I often times find things on the net that I find very interesting, but they are not substancial enough to merit a post of their own. So here’s an aggregation of some of those items I have been storing up for the past few weeks:

• YouTube Video titled Le Grand Content: Like the blog Indexed but in Video form.
• Flickrball: A web2.0 game… like Six Degrees for image tags.
• Multiples vs IRR: This is an interesting and nuanced concept in VC. There is always debate between VCs and LPs about the importance of IRRs relative to Multiples.
• Girl Talk does Grizzly Bear vs Clipse: Terrific New Mashup by Girl Talk
• Faces of the Dead in Iraq: A powerful and moving Flash app by the NYTimes regarding the death toll in Iraq.

I could just stick my del.icio.us feed into my feedburner feed, but I find those del.icio.us feed posts get tedious after awhile, so I’ll try doing posts like this instead.

Also, sorry to anyone who has already seen these links a million times. Sometimes I’m slow to pick up what’s stale and what’s new.