Rick Segal is writing some awesome stuff lately. Here’s some posts of his that caught my eye:

1) How to make a corporate butt pucker. Do you think your company has an indefensible position in the market? Look at how he tears a couple of executives’ apart by coding up a prototype right in front of them.
2) VC Checkpoints. He demonstrates how a VC in Silicon Valley got a cheap attitude.
3) A Scoble Moment at SAP. He talks about Jeff Nolan complaining about the IT department at SAP who blocked his IM. Oh, I never complained about IT at Microsoft. I didn’t complain when Microsoft blocked Skype. Nope, what did I do? I got EVDO and expensed it. Heheh! If IT turns into idiots, route around them!

I complained about things I couldn’t route around like marketers who didn’t know what RSS is.

Heheh, I remember all through Apple’s history that people would say “Apple is dying.” Or worse.

This time Tomi Ahonen says the same thing with a very long (but excellent) essay saying the iPod is on decline. Why? Because of cell phones eating into iPod’s market share.

Tomi does have a point. I don’t have to look any further than the Nokia phone sitting on the table in front of me. It has a four gig drive.

At Reboot last year someone asked the audience “who is carrying a cell phone?” Every hand went up. Then they asked “who is carrying an iPod?” Only one or two hands went up.

Cool new site (thanks to Gary Price, who forwarded this to me, and is keeper of the ResourceShelf blog, which is a most excellent set of search resources): Search for Video Podcasts and Videocasts which is a subsite of the Search for Video.com site.

The podcast part of the site adds value, but I don’t see where the general search one is better than Google’s Video search site or YouTube.

Ahh, so 100 people do about 56% of all the Digging. This is just like life. Some people do a LOT more than other people. I remember meeting Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research. He has the most patents at Microsoft. The #2 guy? Has about half as many.

So, why do people get into a tizzy when someone tries to hire those 100 people away? Cause they aren’t getting paid the value that they are creating for Digg. That is the definition of business value. Sell something for more than it costs. Profits.

If Jason Calacanis could actually hire away all of the top Digg’ers, that’d cost him $1.2 million. But, look at the value that would be created by doing that! Digg is already valued at many times that amount.

The problem is that hiring those people isn’t good enough to recreate Digg. If you take away those 100 people another 100 would jump into their spots. Why? Cause our relationship is with Digg, not with those people.

But, what if there was a community site where the community’s members shared in the profits?

I’d like to be a part of something like that.

An interesting discussion of Web 2.0 business models is over on Ajit Jaokar’s blog.

I’m on vacation (er, cleaning out the garage isn’t quite what I wanted to do with my vacation time) so am thinking about such things cause I’m joining a Silicon Valley startup company that got $5.5 million in funding. Now, I am pretty naive, but one thing I’ve learned in my life is that VC’s want their money back. Oh, and they are hoping you’re gonna give them nine more bags of money the same size along with that payback.

Life isn’t easy for entrepreneurs and the pressure is on. What do I do to add value? $30 million worth?

Whew, that’s a challenge. Any ideas?

Hmmm, I can’t pay for ideas. But I do have this little thing called Google PageRank. How about you give me an idea and I’ll link to it? It’s a trade, but it’s the only one I got cause they haven’t given me a corporate credit card yet. Heheh.

Anyway, one myth of creating a Web business is that all that matters is getting a big audience. Absolutely NOT true.

Remember that I talked about my house and it got linked to all over the place? Well, Stan, our realtor, was amazed at the hit rates his pages were seeing. But, Maryam and I were telling ourselves “we don’t care, we just want a buyer.”

That’s a lot like how advertisers look at the world. You think they are paying millions of dollars for WorldCup ads just cause they like football? Heheh. No, they are fishing that giant sea of billions of viewers trying to find enough to pay for the ads.

Now, I would have paid $1,000 to find one buyer. Why? Cause the upside was so large. When you’re selling a house for $450,000 giving up $1,000 isn’t a big deal.

Did you know that mortgage companies are paying $60 everytime you click on their ads? Everytime! Why? Cause they know that if they get one customer it’ll pay that back and more.

So, how do you find buyers? Well, this is why I study Google keywords so much. Buyers tend to use search engines to find things. If you’re looking to buy a camcorder, where are you going to go? How about Google or Yahoo to do a search on “camcorder?”

Here, what’s more profitable? Camcorder or “World peace?” Now, you might be able to intuit that camcorder is worth more, right? But do you do a scientific analysis on that? That’s what tools like Nichebot are for.

Anyway, if you’re in the Web world there’s not too many ways to make money. One is by selling things (houses, books, etc). Another is by providing services (plumbing, lawyering, teaching). Another is by building audiences of buyers and then showing them things that sellers are offering (Google does this, so does eBay).

Hmmm, I almost erased this whole post cause it just is boring to most people to think about business models. But, I enjoy reading about business models. Some of my favorite bloggers, like A VC Fred, writes regularly about business models. There’s lots of blogs out there talking about business models too.

Fun reading while I’m avoiding cleaning out the garage.

Nice to see the new CoComment (a tool that lets you track wherever you post comments around on other people’s blogs). I have to try it out again. I lost interest after switching computers again, but I’m off to download. Thanks to TechCrunch for bringing this to my attention.

Disclaimer: we use, and love, 37 Signals products at PodTech.

Congrats to them for getting a small investment from Jeff Bezos.

Can’t wait to see what else 37 Signals brings us.

A cool feature arrived today from Google Video: you can now link to specific parts of videos hosted there. The video space just keeps getting hotter. Speaking of hot videos, have you checked out Genève’s Kitchen, a cooking show by Geneve Stewart? As she says, Holy Guacamole. Stick that into your Google Video and link to it!

Christopher Mascis was just here to pick up the red couch. It’ll end up in office 16/1385, he tells me.

But, what was funny was he had a giant smile on his face when he came to the door. We did the usual “hello, how you doing?” bit that everyone does when they meet someone for the first time. He answered “a lot better than an hour ago.”

Why is that? Because Microsoft just announced a $40 billion stock buyback and MSFT has gone up 6% in after-hours trading.

The tech market this week has been mixed. Apple was way up (the MacBook Pros popping up all over Microsoft should have been a big hint that Apple’s sales were going up). eBay is down after delivering an unconvincing story around Skype. Google has headed lower after Yahoo delivered poor results earlier this week, but Google announced results above what analysts had expected, which shows that the online advertising market is doing quite well, just that companies are going with Google rather than putting their money other places.

For the future? Microsoft probably has a few more rough quarters ahead of it. Why? Xbox spending and compete-with-Google spending. Microsoft is pushing out Xboxes — and losing money on each one. They need four Christmas’s to make money on each one (you’ll buy several games a year, the more games you buy, the more profitable consoles become). So, the Xbox team won’t show profitability until 2008. That doesn’t worry me at all and it shouldn’t worry investors either.

But the spend to compete Google isn’t as easy to see where it’ll pay off. Like the guy said in the Bloomberg article above, people have decided on the search engine they are using and switching them is going to prove very difficult. I know, I worked at Microsoft and getting me to try MSN Search took real effort on my behalf.

That challenge is in Ray Ozzie’s hands.

Does this mean anything to PodTech? Yeah, actually it does. First, we’re looking at advertising models. This week tells me that money continues flowing through Google’s veins. Hence going with Google’s advertising network is going to be a safe and predictable way to get some cash flow, which will help PodTech survive long term after the VC cash is gone.

Second, because Microsoft wants in on the online advertising market they are gonna try anything and everything to get back in the game. That means that Microsoft will pay for anyone that can deliver an audience to them. Good for companies like PodTech (we aren’t an automatic winner, but at least there’ll be some money out there to compete for).

One of my favorite people to watch is Scott Hanselman. I’m not sure why, but I remember him getting good scores in front of programmers at our conferences in the 1990s and he’s built himself into a microbrand in my head.

Is it his cute pictures of his kid? No.

I think it has a lot more to do with both his blog, his community work, and his podcast. His latest podcast talks about his favorite developer-oriented blogs, by the way. A real treasure trove of programmer-oriented blogs, albeit Microsoft focused.

Two college kids in Iowa start a company (aimed at making it easier for families to stay in touch in a secure way) and now they are doing something interesting to get outside the echo chamber: they renovated a 1971 VW van and are driving that across country.

Is it working? I just subscribed.

Speaking of getting outside the echochamber, this next week is moving week. We’re up in Seattle getting our stuff together for the movers. We’ll be here until Monday evening, then driving down again to the Bay Area.

Road trip ahead!

Former Senator John Edwards is using BitTorrent to distribute content, Taegan Goddard reports on his Political Wire blog.

Oh, that has got to chafe the recording industry’s behind.

Why? Because it demonstrates there’s a legitimate purpose behind BitTorrent. It also will drag in tons of non-geeks who’ll try it out for the first time and discover they can distribute all sorts of stuff here, like HD video from their camcorders.

For instance, check out the Scourist. These guys take cool traveling trips, and put up their videos. They are slow to download. But if BitTorrent were in place (or, the easier to use RedSwoosh) then distributing stuff like this would be a breeze and wouldn’t cost anyone huge money.

One thing this shows is that John Edwards is positioning himself as a technology literate guy. It’ll be interesting to see if, and how, he uses that position if he runs for President next year.

Dave Winer linked over to a Canadian podcast directory. That’s very cool. He asks whether there’s interest in a community podcast directory. I’m interested. I’d like to work on that with other people and I won’t just link to cool PodTech.net stuff, either. It’s bigger than one person, or one company, too.

It’s too hard to find good podcasts. I know, I’m actively looking for them and it’s really hard. There’s a lot of them out there and you can only listen to one or two a day (I have more time than that, but the average person won’t).

One thing I’m gonna do is do a blog just for Dave where I link to one podcast a day that I think he should listen to. Why? Cause he asked me to. Of course you can suggest stuff to get to Dave (and everyone will get to read that RSS feed too). I’ll listen to anything sent my way and decide whether it’s worthy or not to send along to Dave. Sound interesting? How about I do a feed for you? What would you like me to find for you?

A UK blogger, living in France, was sacked (Roland Piquepaille, famous technologist blogged that).

She won’t be the last one. Blogging is like hopping on stage at a major conference. You wouldn’t do that and start talking smack about your boss, would you? Would you honestly expect to stay employed?

If your boss doesn’t know you’re doing it, that should set off alarm bells right there. Talking online WILL get back to your boss. Unless you are so freaking careful to make sure you stay anonymous (like MiniMicrosoft, Microsoft’s anonymous blogger, has so far). This person obviously didn’t stay anonymous enough. It’s why I don’t advise anyone try the anonymous route: either be straight up with your boss and everyone, or stay off the Internet.

The lawsuit that springs out of this will be interesting to watch. If it succeeds it’ll set back corporate blogging in Europe because corporations will just adopt a zero tolerance policy toward any blogging out of school. I hope she gets kicked out of court.

Here in California and Washington we are an “work at will” state. I can get fired for pretty much any reason, especially when I talk about my workplace on stage in public (my contracts with all my recent employers says that and rubs it in). Such a lawsuit would be laughed out of court here.

Anytime you are identifyable with your company you’ve gotta be professional about your behavior. It’s why at Microsoft we said the policy was “be smart.” That roughly translated to “don’t piss off your boss.”

I’ve been waiting for this one for a while, having seen some of the early designs while I was still working at Microsoft. On10.net is in the middle of pushing out a new design this morning. You can see the new logo. It was designed by a Microsoft customer who won a contest. More changes will probably trickle out over the coming hours. I bet Adam Kinney and team are staying up late to get everything deployed to the servers.

Jeff Sandquist has more on the new design. Promises new AJAXy forums. They decided to rewrite everything from scratch in .NET 2.0 instead of relying on code from other places — Channel 9 was built on top of a pre-alpha version of ASP.NET Forums that was the predecessor of Telligent’s Community Server, which is what drives Microsoft’s blogs.

Nice job guys! It’ll be interesting to see what the community thinks. Especially now that Dell and Ford are getting into corporate online communities and videoblogging too.

Update: they are still fixing the usual bugs that come up. I’m sure they aren’t very happy I linked to them in the middle of the night while they are trying to get everything running, but that’s OK. It’s down right now with a nasty error. Come back later if it’s not up.

One of the things I always loved about Channel 9 is that the customers took it onto themselves to build content for the site. Jamie is my favorite. His “GoogleParks” are hillarious. I’ve heard that they got emailed all around inside Google. He’s an extremely talented designer.

I love that Duncan took his camera to Toronto and met up with Jamie.

Remember. This is a guy who wasn’t paid by Microsoft. Just did it because he liked the community.

Jim Minatel of Wiley wrote to Shel Israel and me this morning with some sales figures from our book. Seems that they are selling pretty well on Amazon and other places all of a sudden and he was seeing if we had a theory about why. He says that a spike in sales counter to the trends almost never happens in the publishing industry.

Neither of us could explain it until I saw Amazon’s page for Chris Anderson’s new book, the Long Tail, which is at #2 right now on Amazon. On that page our book was also listed as a good book to buy along with the Long Tail.

Is the Long Tail wagging Naked? Hmmm. Sure looks like it. Amazon has us listed at #346 right now. We’ve never been that high in the rankings. That’s out of 4.5 million books.

Shel has the details over on Naked Conversations blog.

Do you know who Edward Osborne Wilson is? Me neither. I had to go to Wikipedia to look him up. Distinguished biologist and a whole long list of other stuff.

One smart dude.

So, why did I care? Well, Jim Posner emailed me about Slate’s MeaningofLife video show. This is remarkable stuff. Edward is interviewed on there. Along with a bunch of other people who’ll raise your IQ by a couple of points just by listening to them.

It’s earnings week in the tech industry. Yahoo today. Ebay tomorrow. Microsoft and Google Thursday.

Yahoo didn’t please.

By the way, the view out PodTech’s office window is quite stunning. I’m looking down at Silicon Valley. It’s quite interesting the motivational effect that has. It’s almost like “we’re gonna throw you to the wolves in the valley and if you’re really lucky you’ll get to come back up here on the hill. Sand Hill, that is.

Oh, while we’re talking about the offices, here’s Irina standing in front of the office. Well, we only occupy about 1/30th of this building. Like my son says, nothing like Microsoft!

Did I say how much I like Flickr’s new clustering technology? Maybe that’ll pay off next quarter for Yahoo.

It’s a little slick, but you can see Channel 9 influences on Ford’s new videoblog. And comments. What do you think? Would it get me back? Yeah. I like seeing how things are built. By the way, my Ford Focus is still flawless at 30,000 miles. It’s an awesome car. Yeah, Maryam’s BMW is better, but anyone can build a cool car for $45,000. Building a good and reliable car that costs under $20,000 is a LOT harder of an engineering challenge.

Update: I missed this intro video. Good stuff, we never really got into meetings at Microsoft cause we knew they’d never get approved if they were really authentic or people would hold back and change their behavior if they knew cameras were rolling.

I’m dealing with that even on a smaller scale. A friend throws the most amazing dinners. But, they are off-the-record, drink-some-wine-and-really-talk kinds of affairs. Turn on the cameras and will they be as special? Doubt it. But I wanna try.