Sick Blogging: Graphing Social Patterns and DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge

One of the good things about being home sick is that you have time to blog. So let me catch up on a couple of quick things.

Graphing Social Patterns Conference: The first one is that my friend Dave McClure has organized an interesting conference that is coming up called "Graphing Social Patterns: The Business and Technology of Facebook" The event is all about Facebook as a platform for other businesses and will have some great speakers like Tim O'Reilly and Reid Hoffman. The Facebook phenomenon is sweeping Silicon Valley and this is the first event to try to put it in some perspective. The conference is in San Jose from October 7th through 9th and you can REGISTER HERE to get a 25% discount on the conference (because VentureBlog isn't just about information, it is also all about value). Also, don't miss the VideoEgg conference called App Camp on how to build a real business on Facebook. VideoEgg have become The experts on rich media advertising and monetization of social media. Given that, App Camp will be a very interesting discussion of how to actually make money on Facebook. I have been saying for a long time that I believed social networking (or, the "social graph" in today's parlance) would become a core piece of infrastructure in all sorts of applications and the Facebook platform is the perfect extension of that observation -- now application providers can outsource the entire social networking infrastructure to Facebook and focus on the overlying application. It will be interesting to see how these applications and monetization continue to evolve.

DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge: The second random snippet of this fine sick day is Kara Swisher's quest for lunch with Jerry Yang. According to Kara, the Yahoo PR machine won't give her direct access to Jerry, so she is working on an end run to the problem. In support of the DonorsChoose blogger challenge, Yahoo has offered a lunch with Jerry for the blogger who gets the most donors to give money to schools through DonorChoose.org. Kara is hoping to earn that honor so that she can dine with Jerry and, no doubt, put it on video tape. The DonorsChoose blogger challenge is a fantastic way to help out worthy school projects. But since I'm late to the challenge, I may as well lend my support to Kara, who has chosen some great projects to fund. So if you are interested in contributing to some worthy causes, click HERE to get to Kara's DonorChoose page.

Hope you all are healthy. I strongly recommend getting flu shots. Trust me. Get the shots.

Comments

[Dave]

muchas gracias mr. hornik... and hope you feel better soon.

(have a virtual cup o' chicken soup on me :)

- dmc

[rdauster.wordpress.com]

David,
This is a question, not a comment.
I am a long time fan of your podcast (what happened to it!) and was wondering if you could talk about VCs view of European start-ups.

Suggested title: Are VCs afraid of water?

Question: Can you talk some more--you touched on this topic before--how important is "co-location" for a VC to invest in a start-up. Have you ever invested in an European-based start-up? Would you ever? under what conditions? Do your peers?

* * *

Get well soon. I trust you mom is making you special chicken soups.

Cheers, Rodrigo

[jglsx]

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when we finally meet the person, we will know how to be grateful.;

[Syven]

There is a great synergy between people like who want to use the web as vehicle of discovery and people like you who want people to discover those investments which should hopefully advance the web experience.

I don't do comments, I believe in user observations, where the user does not belong as property right or as a "communication" but as an individual thinker.

To be an individual thinker, one inverses what Tim O'Reilly says about Web 2.0. There is no Thinker 2.0, how we scale and develop as an individual is an individual freedom. If I am permitted to paraphrase Slide 32 of O'Reilly's presentation at "Graphing Social Patterns", this the inverse relationship that I would write:

"Every TRUE individual builds a database whose personal value grows in proportion to their individual simplicity/sophistication of personal online participation. The return to the individual is not accelerated capital returns but accelerated intelligence".

I also took a quick snapshot of Charlene Li's presentation from Forrester. I started life online when I was 37 years old, next year I am 47 years old. The 35+ demographic which Charlene stated via Nielsen Net Ratings is a growing reality. Social media isn't about social myths, it is about what each unit of intelligence that interacts with it, turns it into.

As an observer of the web, I don't want others to get in the way of my observations, for I firmly believe that if they spend less time on what others are thinking and more time using the web as intelligent resource, to shape and aware of it is is they are thinking themselves, then we have advanced from Socrates Know-Thyself to Socrates 2.0.

There can be a virtuous loop between the venture capitalist who is investing in the next new thing and the purposeful web nomad who doesn't give about a running fart about media popularity or A-List credentials but is keenly aware of the Power Law Distribution that Tim O'Reilly features in his presentation.

This virtuous loop is about personal growth and development, not social judgment and soundbite media. This means understanding how Power Law Distribution operates from a personal life viewpoint, how to think in terms of database thinking rather than just blog thinking and how to read what is we are writing ourselves, revisiting over a longer time frame to turn the web into an adaptive experience rather than turn ones life into a software release number.

As Danger Man once said "I am not a number — I am a free man!" -
so leave me, let me engage my own business and my own thinking (as I have done for the last 10 years) and thank you for providing this resource, to enable me to achieve such synergy.
I also like to thank my mom for sending me to a speed typing school when I was 13...and for social media is as social as the creation of ones own home. After all home sweet home is where I typed this particular observation.

Again thanks for the thinking material here Mr Hornik.

M.

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