alexophile

Freddie was, by most accounts, paranoid - he was an incredibly talented musician but he was always afraid someone was trying to steal his material. People say he even played with a handkerchief over his fingers to conceal the notes he was playing. Because of this, the people that do remember him remember him as the guy who turned down the offer to be the first ever recorded jazz artist.

The Victor Talking Machine Company (makers of the Victrola) then made the offer to The Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

The record sold a million copies... in 1917.

If you cut some of the latter and reform the rest into more general questions I think it could be really effective. (e.g. "Can I see a list of all the CEOs I know in San Francisco?", "Can I see a list of everyone I know in the 312 area code?" >> "Can I view groups of clients by contact info?" "Can I view lists of contacts with stacked filters")

[edit:] Alternatively, you could make the list predominantly use cases.

If you don't know, about a year ago (?), Andrew Warner initiated a system wherein new interviews would always be free, but you would have to pay for archival content. This seems to be working for Mixergy, but I submit that it could be even better for a record label - it promotes long-term development of artists, using their work as its own promotional material, and adds incentives to maintain a working relationship. It also rewards fans the fans that are most likely to evangelize.

Ugh. Maybe it's just me, but I can't stand this. Whatever happened to just being useful? If I like your product, I'm fully capable of sharing it myself. You see so many pages now that look like they were designed to maximize the possibility that you will accidentally like them on facebook.

There's nothing wrong with a "share this post/page/app/etc" panel but, unless your core functionality is based on social interactions, please keep it reasonable.

Also, not everything needs to be customizable. I don't know who all these people are that supposedly love making accounts and filling out profiles for every little thing they want to try on the internet - I think it's a huge pain. When I studied UX it was pretty well agreed upon that you shouldn't force people to create an account until it was absolutely necessary, not the other way around.

Jeez, I'm way too young to be having these get off my lawn moments.

edit: I also have a problem with his opening sentiments, but it's more of a semantic issue.

I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).

It's views like this that make people sneer when I say I'm doing marketing. So, thanks.

I believe marketing is how you capitalize on the thoughts and feelings of your audience. This is why you should take support very seriously - people spend sick money trying to find out what your customers (current and potential) are thinking - when they offer it to you for free, that's the biggest marketing opportunity you're likely to get, so treat it as such.

The idea seems to be to compare civic participation that's driven by [social v political v interest] factors and, from what I can tell, it appears that people who have hobbies and use the internet to build community around their interests are more likely to foster a stronger community in the physical world, whereas people who participate online out of political motivations tend to only increase political participation (e.g. campaign involvement.)

From the study: "Among all the predictors included, parental involvement, strength of ideology, college student status, and political interest were found to be strong and consistent predictors of increased politically driven online participation. Particularly strong, however, was interest-driven participation (B = .59, p < .001). The entry of interest-based participation in Model 2 accounted for an additional 19.1% (= 48.2%–29.1%) of explained variance in politically driven participation." [http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/publications/Onlin...]

For comparison: http://www.ticketmaster.com/h/help.html

That being said, the point I was trying to make is that you can become very successful in SV and have nobody outside of the tech community know your name - your product is your product. In Hollywood, your product is you, success is, by definition, corellated with fame.

Didn't we already collectively agree that the events depicted in the Social Network were more Hollywood than Silicon Valley?

Not that I totally disagree with the comparison, I've made it myself as recently as yesterday, but it's not exactly a bad thing. There was a time when Hollywood was making a lot of good films. But those films brought in money, and money brought in vanity and all that other nastiness. There's certainly plenty of money bouncing around SV, but the fame is a bit more self-contained. If you move to the valley and send a letter home to your mom about how you bumped into Fred Wilson in a coffee shop, she would probably not run off to tell all her friends about it.

If the worst thing you can say about the valley is that everybody there wants to build something great and is willing to risk a lot to make an effort at it, that sounds like a fantastic environment.

This was significantly more meaningful in Ultima Online - finding new and exciting ways to break into houses was probably the most popular pastime. One such method was to make fairly particular stacks of objects (IIRC it involved books, tables, and assorted food items) into stairs and walk up onto people's enclosed balconies. I heard that, in some cases, people even walked up over the roof and drop right on through.

So Rdio shows a page of what's in heavy rotation amongst my friends - but it's not accompanied by any sort of indication that I'm likely to enjoy any of these. My suggestion would be to use some of that $17M to buy up like.fm and push hard on recommendations.

There's also "recommendations" which I assume uses the same data to provide 1:1 recommendations for new artists based on your recent listening history.

Consider this question on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-did-DuckDuckGo-block-Mahalo-com

You are one of the closest conceivable people to the question, and your answer got downvoted because it was ostensibly broken English, which made it look spammy (and thus, kind of ironic)

I worked with an early stage company that relied on user-generated content that essentially did this but didn't tell the new CMs, so we spent the first couple weeks trying to get increased activity out of the clones.

Bonus example, there was an interview with the founder of thathigh.com on here not too long ago where he talked about doing exactly this.

The game isn't new, only the players - and you can always spot a newb, even if he has really nice equipment.

[Edit, appending part of my reddit comment on the sme article]: Here in Chicago, elections are (or at least were for a long time) considered to be basically a running joke. It's a city of horriffic corruption, and everyone's pretty much gotten used to it. This should be far more unsettling than gov contractors manufacturing an echo chamber. At least when they're sneaky about it you know they're scared.

What really bothers me is that the lines separating media, commerce, and legislation have been blurred beyond recognition - candidates are rarely measured on any sort of substantive metric, but on fundraising numbers and media presence.