Entries tagged “dick costolo”

Today's Blog of the Year Picks: Ask the Wizard and Fortuitous.

Between these two blogs, there have barely been twenty posts this year. Yet either one alone could be the best small-business (or small tech business) site of the year. Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner (now part of Google) writes Ask the Wizard, and Matt Haughey, proprietor of MetaFilter, is behind Fortuitous. Both these guys are a little too busy running their businesses to post more often than they do, but I'll take what I can get. And both are creative, funny, honest writers whose openness and candor are inspiring.

Ask the Wizard is about the financial and organizational building blocks for creating and launching a company that is venture-backed and designed for growth. Dick's done what a lot of tech entrepreneurs consider the holy grail, starting up a little tech firm, getting some first-rate funding, and then flipping it to Google. He and his team even did it in Chicago, of all places. And it's not the first-time this team's built a successful company. (Shout out to Spyonit!) So there's a level of credibility and experience here that goes way beyond the endless sea of would-be tech business pundits who are mostly just talking out their asses.

And from the side of the independent entrepreneur who worked his ass off for years and self-funded a business into being a nice little stable company with a great set of ethics, nobody's got better credentials than Matt Haughey. MetaFilter has grown from one of the earliest and most influential group blogs into a whole network of related sites, including Ask MetaFilter, which I raved about last year for beating Google and for being one of the best sites on the web. Appropriately, Matt's not talking about venture capitalists and boards of directors -- he's talking about the nuts and bolts of starting up a company and running it every day. And this stuff can be downright nerve-wracking, since there isn't exactly a school you can go to for this kind of stuff. If you have a little company, tasks like talking to the press and hiring an accountant are the kind of things that can keep you up for a lot of long, sleepless nights. So Matt walks through his own process of how he figured those things out, accompanied by a remarkable honesty about the intimidating situations and neophyte's mistakes he encountered along the way.

Best of all, both of these guys are great storytellers. You don't have to be an entrepreneur or a geek to get into the narrative of what they're saying; It's just a really modern retelling of a story as old as the American dream.

Pick of the Posts:

• Have a company voice
• No Exit: This is the piece of advice that every entrepreneur hears, and only the good ones obey.
• How to talk to the press
• How to pick an accountant for your online business

If you like this, try: blog.pmarca.com. Worst name ever for an amazingly good blog. Marc Andreessen should have been blogging, oh, about ten years ago. But I guess he was busy. He's made up for lost time with an astoundingly frequent set of posts that are up-to-the-minute in their topicality but informed by the fact that no matter what part of the geek business world you're in, he's done it bigger, louder, and earlier. I usually try to play it cool with the name-dropping and the fanboyism, and I'm very fortunate that I get to meet and work with a lot of my inspirations, but I'm not ashamed at all to admit that I was totally geeked out to see one of my posts referred to by Marc as "the smartest thing anyone has said today", even if it was only in the context of Open Social.

This is one in a series of posts about Blogs of the Year for 2007. They're my subjective picks about blogs that inspired or influenced me this year, and you can check out my introductory post to find more.

Do you want links? Because I'll give you some damn links, I'm not afraid of you! I'm not afraid of NOBODY!

• Reyhan Harmanci on the third wave of academic study of hip hop:

Dominant, a UC Berkeley alumnus who actually attended the much-publicized class on Shakur in the late '90s, says that he finds value in hip-hop studies, provided they take the long view. "With hip-hop and all black music, you can't talk about the art separate from a lot of other things," he says. "You can't talk about hip-hop as an art form without talking about the people, the economics, how and why it was made. You have to be pretty thorough."

Finding ways to teach and study hip-hop from within a university setting is not easy. "I worry that scholars like us get so obsessed with trying to justify hip-hop that we end up running in circles," says Berkeley grad student Felicia Viator, a DJ who's finishing up a doctorate in history.

• Businessweek's Catherine Holahan looks at the unfiltered conversations that have sprung up in light of community changes after USA Today's recent web redesign. I don't know that I'd make a change in the cultural assumptions of a site at the same time as aesthetic/UI changes, because then you don't know which one caused everybody to lose their minds.

• Speaking of which, I started a shitstorm by suggesting that Ask MetaFilter should have a white background. My personal experience is that the site is white, since I've customized my account, but I didn't, uh... make a very good case that it should be the default because I was a bit uncharacteristically combative. On the other hand, I learned I'm a twit, a shrill, self-promoting, a-list retard who's not good at building community, more than out of touch, prone to issuing stridently absurd protestations, deserved of getting pissed on by an elephant, who is only being taken seriously ... because [I'm] friends with Matt Haughey and I'm encouraging selling out. One of my toughest critics in the thread had actually proposed a winning redesign in a contest on the site, an entry that featured a white background and was voted the winner by the entire community. I don't know why people think the blogosphere is an unfriendly place, when an honest suggestion to change the background color on one subsite of a popular community blog that I'm a huge fan of can inspire those kinds of delightful, well-considered reactions. At least there was only one vague threat of violence.

• I was surprised to find a list of Fall Out Boy's favorite albums to be somewhat interesting.

• Ask the Wizard, written by Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo is, flat out, the best new blog of 2007. The thing I love about great writing is it makes the pervasive truths seem self-evident and even obvious. Plus it's actually funny, not another tech exec wearing a goofy tie and claiming to be full of ha-ha.

• There was a lot of link love for the list of NYC's ugliest buildings on Gridskipper, but the overlooked gem was the pan of the Astor Place Monster from the New Yorker a few years back. Man, that thing still startles me (in a bad way!) every time I walk by.

• Dear Drew, have you considered changing the font on Fark's homepage?

• This is the old Top 5% of all Web Sites graphic that used to be used by Point. Which was actually Point Communications, which was actually at pointcom.com, until it sold to Lycos during a period of the web's history 10 years ago that is apparently so old nobody caught the reference. Winning the meaningless award used to be accompanied by an email alerting you to the good news. I suspect Todd Whitney is not still toiling away at Lycos.

• Indie rock is a cult of failure. Could be worse, it could be emo.

• I spoke at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver a little over a week ago, and there's video of my presentation up on the web, albeit with suboptimal sound. But it kind of gives you a feel for what we were all talking about, if you have the patience to sit through it. (My part starts about five minutes in.)

• I wanted to be uniformly supportive of the Times story about the struggle of Asian pop acts, but I'd felt kind of conflicted and couldn't articulate why. Fortunately, Sree Sreenivasan articulated it concisely: We're Asians too, dammit.

• If you've somehow missed them, a few articles on the tech generation gap. Emily Nussbaum's excellent, definitive look at the distinctions between the technological expectations of those born before and after 1977 in regard to privacy seems like the coming-out party for the topics danah has been talking about forever. A simpler, but still compelling, Tim Bajarin piece in PC Magazine complements it nicely. And the WaPo sez colleges have lost track of students because the schools are still trying to use phones and email to talk to kids who only use Facebook and IM. Whoops.

• Here, take this: A capella Beastie Boys vocals from some of their best tracks.

• Remind me to run all of this through the Cliché Detector later.

• Someday, me and Kal Penn in a steel cage match for Most Famous Indian in America. Someday.