I will no longer be posting to this blog. I have moved over to my new address at 15 Meanings (www.15meanings.com) . This place has served it's purpose, to get me into the groove of blogging, now it is time to move on to bigger and better things! This new site will be my home for the foreseeable future. I will continue to ramble on about my opinions on the web community, hot companies, and my life, as well as any other nonsense I can think of.
Thanks,
Will
For those of you who had not seen the previews for Fox's new show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, then you may be excused. If you did see the previews and did not watch the premier last night, then you should be ashamed, very ashamed. This is quite possibly the funniest, most hilarious show going right now.
It is hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, of the You Might be a Redneck fame (for the record, I have not seen any of his shows, but I do know who he is), and he does a pretty good job of humiliating the contestants (the adults, not the 5th graders), although the two that were on last night did a pretty good job by themselves. The premise is that contestants compete for a million dollars, but they have to answer questions ranging from 1st grade history to 5th grade science.
Seems easy enough, right? Wrong! The first contestant last night was unable to answer his first 3 questions (that is as far as he got) on his own. That is just down right terrible when you consider he was a 40 year old college graduate from UCLA who majored in US History. Side note, one of the questions he missed was a US History question, how ironic!
To give you an idea of some of the questions that were asked, here are a few:
I recently met Noah Kagan of OkDork (as well as Entrepreneur27), very cool guy I might add. His blog is one of the better ones I have read, and he has a very cool feature on his blog that really embraces the whole attitude of community involvement and user generated content. He has a section titled User Generated Tuesdays, where every Tuesday he posts a blog entry by one of his readers. Very cool concept, I like it a lot. He has a very good reader base (1100+), so it is a great way to get your writings in front of a bunch of eye balls. Anyways, today was my day to shine, as he posted a blog entry written by me! If you want to read it, go here......
I know a lot of people have been posting about Startupping recently (Fred Wilson and Ross Mayfield to name a few), so I thought I would jump on the bandwagon. This is an excellent site chock full of nuggets for those entrepreneurial types looking to get a foot in an otherwise exclusive club. It was created by Mark Fletcher, who is a successful serial entrepreneur (thank goodness, it was started by someone with some cred). There are four main areas of the site, all of which are extremely useful. Theres the blog, discussion forums, WIKI and a blog aggregator. The blog contains a lot of useful posts by those people who have been there before, in the trenches, who know what works and what doesn't. There have already been two posts by John Batelle in one week, very impressive! According to Mark, the discussion forums are the heart of startupping. Great place to get advice on anything from should you accept VC funding to upcoming industry events that you should not miss. The WIKI contains helpful pointers to outside resources, from legal document templates to term sheets. The last section is the blog aggregator, which I find extremely interesting. Mark has created a one stop shop for all of the top blogs of VCs, angel investors and entrepreneurs. If you are looking for the money, you should start reading here!
I truly believe this site is going to be a main stay, anyone and everyone who is trying to start a company these days (who isn't, right???) should be on here!
Interesting article has just been posted on TechCrunch titled "Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility". The widget marketplace is quickly becoming the hot topic for 2007, and the fact that there is a multitude of widgets that run on various platforms, it is easy to see that this is a fragmented space. There are already a few companies out there that are attempting to overcome this fragmentation, to mention a few: ClearSpring, and WidgetBox and now it seems that Netvibes is throwing it's hat into the ring as well. This is an interesting play, considering that Netvibes is one of the platforms that widgets run on. They do have a pretty slick product right now, but to my knowledge, all of the widgets they have available on their site do not run on any other platforms.
The W3C is apparently working on a draft for a universal widget specification, but I wonder if the Netvibes spec will become the standard by default? Nonetheless, this should shape up to be an interesting space and I hope that a standard is settled on so we can take our widgets where ever we want!
