Hilarious new show

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:

1. What month does Columbus Day fall in?
2. Who was the first president to be impeached?
3. What ship did the Pilgrims come over on?
   

Can we as a society really be that dumb? To answer that question, I suggest you check out the show..................

Check this blog out..................

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......

StartUpping.com

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!

Cross Widget Platform Compatibility

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!

Is Community Your Most Valuable Asset?

I just read through the presentation that the guys at Dogster (Ted Rheingold, John Vars and Steven Reading) gave at the CommunityNext Conference last weekend at Stanford. Unfortunately I was not there in person (trust me, I wanted to go, but it was out of my hands, but I digress) to witness it firsthand, but the I imagine the web version is almost as good!
The presentation is titled "Community is Your Most Valuable Asset" and it discusses why those guys feel (and I would venture to guess they are pretty dead on considering their successes) that you live and die by your community. They highlight several key points on how to stay connected with your community because at the end of the day, without them, you are left with just a bunch of code.

• Customer Service - An often overlooked function, it is a deal breaker if you really think about it. Word of mouth is a powerful advertising machine and unhappy customers = short shelf life!
• Reflect User Passion - Listen to your customers likes and dislikes and reflect those in your product. From UI design, to color palettes to the "voice" of the product. Another point here that they stress is be sincere. Do not give your customers a bunch of lip service, follow through on everything. If you do not, see equation above.
• Community Guidelines - If your product is community based, you need to establish the rules of the road for participation and stick with them. Of course, in anything you do, get user input and feedback and incorporate them into your guidelines.
• Community Uptime - Mission critical here, must be up 100% of the time.
• Community is a Garden - (gratuitous cliche here) so tend it well.
• Make Great Things - Again, listen to your community and strive to have a product that is reflective of their needs. Give it your all and you will be rewarded by continuous community involvement.
• Core Components - These are the core things that you really need to nail: Entertainment, Information, Sociality and Services.

There are a few more key points to the presentation, all very worthwhile. So in summary, I would have to say that if your are playing in the social networking world, without a doubt, your COMMUNITY IS YOUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET. Listen to them, understand their motives, their needs, their likes and dislikes and do whatever you can to cater to them all! Afterall, they are what drives your bottom line!

KillerStartups.com

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the blogs that I read. I still am sticking to those blogs, but I have found a few others since then, and the most notable one is KillerStartUps.com. One could argue that it is similar in nature to Mashable, VentureBeat or even TechCrunch in that it is a review up and coming Internet companies, but that would be an unfair comparison. Whereas Mashable, VentureBeat and TechCrunch have a staff of bloggers writing about companies that they either receive tips on, know someone there and are returning a favor, or have researched the companies themselves, KillerStartups is a community for the people by the people. What I mean by this is that it is a user driven internet startups community. It’s intended for entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers to stay updated on new internet startups. Companies are submitted along with a quick write up and they can be voted on whether or not they will succeed. There is a good amount of information on the companies, along with some interesting opinions on the viability of said company. If you are in the industry and need to stay up to date on new companies, add this site to your stable of places you go to for industry information.

Online Safety and Children

Yesterday, I attended an interesting presentation by Anne Collier and Larry Magid of BlogSafety.com. They came to my work to discuss their new book, MySpace Unraveled. I went into the presentation with the expectation that they would be discussing specific cases that MySpace has been confronted with (child predators, bullying, etc.) and how MySpace has delt with it. Given that I am a product Manager for a social networking product, I tought I would be able to take away a few key points that we could implement for our product to increase our overall safety for underage children.
Instead, what we got was a more general discussion around web 2.0 and general facts of what is taking place in this new landscape and some proposed legislation on the table to really restrict underage children's usage of the new web. With that being said, I did think that the larger point they were trying to make, and one in which I totally agree with (more so now that I am a parent), is that we as technology companies can make all the technologies in the world to protect our children and we can institute all sorts of laws to protect them, but they will find a way around it. What we as a society need to do, and this is where I think their greatest point was, is do a better job in parenting. It really all comes down to this, if we spend more time with our children explaining to them the dos and dont's, what is right and wrong, and instilling better morals in them, we may not have as great of a problem on our hands as we think we do. With our busy lifestyles, I think society as a whole has gotten away from this, and instead look for reasons as to why these things are happening instead of taking a look at ourselves and thinking for a moment that perhaps if we spent more time parenting and less time placing blame on everyone or everything else, that these things may not be happening. Absentee parenting is the problem, and we need to focus out time an attention on fixing this first!

Global Warming...To Believe or Not to Believe

I have to admit, I have been a bad global citizen and have not paid that much attention to the whole Global Warming hoopla that has been gaining steam lately. However, that all changed last week when my wife and I decided to stay the night in (like we really have a choice with 3 year old triplets in the house) and thought it was a good idea to watch Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth". For the record, I did vote for the Clinton / Gore ticket in 1992 and 1996, however I countered that by voting for the Bush / Cheney ticket in 2000 and 2004. Needless to say, my political allegiances are all over the map.
After watching the movie, we both walked away with the feeling that Gore may be on to something here. There are some hard, cold facts that cannot be denied. I will not go into all of them here, I suggest you just watch the movie and decide for yourself. If the facts that he discussed in the documentary were not enough, the Mercury News has an article today stating that there is over a 90% certainty by the experts that humans are the cause of global warming. If you want to read the article, click on this title "Experts send strongest message yet on warming" to take you there.
I will close with this, there is definitely something strange going on and we all need to pull our own weight if we want a world to be left for our children.