Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Twenty, Three hundred and forty six, Three hundred and fifty

As I am getting ready to go shopping and cooking for Turkey day, I thought I would share a few lucky numbers of the day.

Twenty

The Web20 Workgroup now has 20 blogs. No the objective is not to start the next Gawker or Weblogs Inc, Yes the idea is to offer a valuable resource covering a number of perspective regarding this new generation of web services and applications. Mike assembled the list that I replicated below:

Category	Sites
Analysis & Trends	Read/WriteWeb, Dion Hinchcliffe, Susan Mernit's Blog, Web 2.0 Explorer
Companies & Products	TechCrunch, SolutionWatch, eHub
Design & Usability	WeBreakStuff, Bokardo, ParticleTree, Emily Chang
VC & Business	Jeff Clavier, Nivi
Podcasting	PodTech, Web 2.0 Show
Tech & Development	Programmable Web, CrunchNotes, Librarystuff
Commentary	Scripting News, HorsePigCow

Three hundred and forty six

It is the position of this blog in the new Feedster 500 that co-founder and CTO Scott Johnson just announced. I know: lists are bad bad bad, but hey, thanks you all for the attention love.

And even though it has nothing to do with my number of incoming links found in RSS feeds on the system, I should remind you that I am an angel investor in Feedster.

Three hundred and fifty

That’s it! Les Blogs II is sold out – two weeks before the event that will gather 350 people in Paris, France. I am really looking forward to the conference, and all the parties, drinks, dinners, hang outs that will ensue. I will blog shortly about my session on “Investing 2.0: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, and suggest how the audience can prepare for it.

Yo Loic! What did we bet again when I told you that we’d sell out at least two weeks before the event ? Congratulations .

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

A pizza can get you fired... and get you on a cruise

Just ask James Garrisson, who was fired for eating a slice of pizza he should not have. James' story was selected by the august judges of the SimplyFired contest. He will now head out for a nice cruise. Per SimplyFired's slogan: if you don't laugh, you will cry.
Here is his original post:

Fired for eating pizza?

Seriously, let me explain. I had been working for a mortgage company as a developer for 18 months and things were going well. Then, one day I saw that a different group in my company had just finished up a pot-luck and had some pizza left over. I thought they would probably end up throwing it away and I was kind of hungry so I went for it ... I took a slice of pizza.

Apparently the employees who threw this pot luck were planning to take it home and were offended by my action. Now I thought we were all basically on the same team and if someone didn't like what I did they would tell me so and I would apologize and maybe offer to pay for the pizza. These employees ended up telling their manager, who told her vice president about what I did.

The worst part about this is that I wasn't told about any of this until a month after the incident. No warning, no second chance.

I know that I left an impression because to this day my former coworkers refer to unattended pizza as "programmer bait".

Here is the list of winners of the contest, and if you have a few minutes, do read some of these stories (over a thousand were received).`

The results were announced during a very nice dinner on Thursday night with the SimplyHired/SimplyFired team, where each judge mentioned his favorite story. It was great fun (thanks again for inviting me!).

   

Steve Rubel, who pointed me to the AP story, was right: it was a clever PR stunt.

Tags: SimplyHired, SimplyFired

Fortune Cookie

Posted by: softtechvc on Buzznet

I was visiting one of the “Big 3” with a startup client of mine the other day, and we had lunch at the cafeteria. Having had the excellent asian cuisine menu selection, we took a few fortune cookies.

The CEO of the company got this “fortune”: ''Unexpected offer deserves serious consideration”.

There was no termsheet on the back of the paper...

But we considered it priceless anyway. Talking about subluminal messages…

PS: True story, I swear.

On this day, my birthday

Isn’t it a bit goofy to mention your birthday on your blog ? Well, I’ll do it anyway but will also point you to what (other more interesting things) happened on an Aug 29th (via the BBC), and to a list of celebrities and luminaries who were born on that “glorious” date (via Wikipedia):

• 1619 - Jean-Baptiste Colbert, French minister of finance (d. 1683)
• 1632 - John Locke, English philosopher (d. 1704)
• 1862 - Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian writer (d. 1949)
• 1915 - Ingrid Bergman, Swedish actress (d. 1982)
• 1920 - Charlie Parker, American jazz saxophonist and composer (d. 1955)
• 1923 - The Lord Attenborough, English film director
• 1936 - John McCain, American politician
• 1938 - Robert Rubin, United States Secretary of the Treasury
• 1938 - Elliott Gould, American actor
• 1939 - Joel Schumacher, American film director
• 1941 - Robin Leach, English television host
• 1946 - Bob Beamon, American jumper
• 1958 - Michael Jackson, American singer and songwriter
• 1962 - Rebecca De Mornay, American actress

As for myself, I celebrated this morning at breakfast with the family since I have a dinner with clients tonight. I was greeted with these two wonderful gifts that my kids painted and cooked in special ceramic oven. So precious.

Damn. Thinking about it, I am one step closer to the big 4–0.

Update: Thank you all for your comments, trackbacks, voicemails, emails, IMs, text messages and other forms of “happy b’day” expressions. I really appreciated it.

New Memes: 10blogs & 5pods

In Ten Blogs I Would Take to a Desert Island, Steve Rubel asks his readers to nominate their top 10 blogs. The original 10blogs list was put together by Laurence Simon.

Doing this selection is a hard one given that I read over 200 feeds, and that my "Quick Read" category contains about 80 of them (Quick Read is what I browse during the day, in order to check what is going on). So - in alphabetical order:

1. Brad Feld: Brad's earned the top post on the VC side - with Bill Burnham right behind him
2. David Weinberger: Reaching out to less techy aspects of the blogosphere (no offense)
3. John Battelle: the number one resource for anything search-related, even though one can feel that he has been busy setting up FM Publishing and producing Web 2.0
4. Loic Le Meur: To track the European blogosphere and what's going on in "mother land"
5. Mary Hodder: a reference on the theory, and the practice, of social computing
6. Om Malik: To know what's going on with broadband, tech & startups, and rumors (ah, the rumors) - SiliconBeat is close second
7. PaidContent: For the media (new + old) side of the house
8. Paul Kedrosky: Tech and trends, eclectic aggregation, with a VC twist
9. Scoble: Because he aggregates the rest of the blogosphere
10. Susan Mernit: Social Media, and stinky French cheese (private joke)

Bonus links:

1. Good Morning Silicon Valley: A compilation of key news, with the risk of wetting yourself because of John Paczkowski's sense of humor and wit
2. TechCrunch: this recent blog is a “must subscribe” for anyone tracking the activity of consumer related startups. Michael does a great job at presenting companies and their products with a lot of details.

Note, this is SO unfair as an exercise – my public blogrolls tell the true story (scroll down, on the right).

And since I spend time listening to podcasts, here is (in alphabetical order) the sister-meme: 5pods.

1. For Immediate Release: Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz cover the PR world, and a lot of other topics
2. Gillmor Gang: Even if it sucks (according to Steve Gillmor, not me)
3. ITConversations: I know, it is a cheat since there are multiple shows but if there was only one, it would be it.
4. PodTech.net: John Furrier has an amazing collection of interviews (just need to fix these ID3 tags/metadata Dude)
5. WebTalkRadio: Rob and Dana Greenlee on tech, even better when Mitch Ratcliffe is on the show

Bonus links: wine-related podcasts I don’t have time to listen to as often as I would like - GrapeRadio & WineCast

Technorati Tags: 10blogs, 5pods

Fired and wanting a vacation ? Tell your story on SimplyFired

My friend and Vertical Leap co-chair, Dave McClure. just announced the official launch of SimplyFired, a site promoting a writing contest (and SimplyHired’s services – let’s not forget). You have a month to tell your “being fired” story, get reviewed by the judges, and hopefully become one of the 10 prize winners.

Oh yeah, and Mark Jen comments on his own story of being fired from Google for blogging. No worries, he is a judge and can’t win the cruise.

More:

• The press release is here.
• Steve Rubel, one of the judges, calls it a “clever PR stunt”.

Nigerian scammers use Google too

Seen in my referrers log today: a google search from a Nigerian IP address searching for "2005 email address of all board of directors in switzerland".

Zoli actually checked the first result for this search and finds this site listing Search phrases used by West Africans to harvest email addresses for scams.

Adding "Humor" as a category tag for that post.

That one is for posterity: Thursday May 5, 05 at 5:05PM

Goofy, but according to Om, only once every 1000 years does that happen, so... here is a uniquely timed post.

So to clarify: 05.05.05 comes only once in 1000 years, and coinciding with Thursday (5th Day of the week) comes only once in 7000 yrs…

(Who cares anyway ?)

What is your "Blog Cheesiness Factor" ? Mine is -48.

Warning: reading this post is most certainly a waste of your time, and if you decide to compute your  "Blog Cheesiness Factor" that I just made up, don't complain that this was a complete waste of time. As a Friday night blogging topic, I'm just granting myself the excuse that it's been a long week, and that it is OK.

Susan points to an entry on lindsayism.com that "calls out the cheesy stuff that bloggers do".

Last night I was reading one of my issues of Might Magazine, specifically Might #7: the Cheese Issue, and I realized that blogs didn't really exist then, but there's a lot of Blog Cheese out there. You know, the tired cliches, tackiness, presumption, bragging, self-indulgence or just proving you have your head so far up your ass your blog is technically a travel blog.
Just off the top of my head (and I've been guilty of so many of these so I'm not making fun of anyone, seriously. Seriously, if you see yourself here, you see me and pretty much every other blogger - I used my own site for inspiration!).
Most of these are just cliches...

Because some of those "cheesy thingies" are classic, I decided to compute a "Blog Cheesiness Factor" for my two blogs: this one, and my photoblog. The BCF is defined as Sum (cheesy things you do on your blogs) - Sum (cheesy things you have not done on your blogs). Going through that profond self examination requires a good 15 minutes and complete honesty. Don't say that you did do something you didn't do, and vice versa. Oh, and things in this list you did in the last five minutes don't count.

Things I do/did:

* Linking to the people you hung out with last night.
* Linking to the famous people you hung out with last night.
* Photos of you and your friends having fun last night.
* Photos of you having fun with famous people last night.
* Blogging drunk.
* Taking someone off your blogroll because they piss you off.
* Introducing people at a party by their blog name. Am appealling on this one, it is their identity!
* Having your picture on your index page.
* Posting pictures you took of people without asking their permission.
* Blogging about your kid.
* Being "recognized."
* Having stupid commenters.                               Happened to me when I blogged about Pud. Turned off comments on that post.
* Having sycophantic commenters.                       See above.
* Having, going to, or blogging about any sort of "blogger get-together", "blogger party" or "blogger bash."
* Having a "guest blogger."
* Friendster. Dodgeball. Flickr. Myspace. Buzznet. LinkedIn. Tribe. Ryze. bla-bla-blah
* Linking to your own press.
* Plugging your friend's stuff.                               I plug if it is good, and disclose the relationship. 
* Blogging about search terms that brought people to your site.
* Starting a post with, "Everyone in the blogosphere has been buzzing about..."
* Saying "blogosphere." Ever. Even ironically.
* Referring to any blogger as "famous."
* Posting pictures that you've taken of your TV.   One of my first test pictures on my Photoblog, does that count ?
* Blogging about weight gain / weight loss / gym membership / ice-cream binges.
And, finally...
* Blogging about blogging.

Plus my personal additions:
* Reading your ego-feeds first.
* Checking your blog/feed/referrer traffic more than once a day.
* Blogging posts like "I love my XXXX", XXXX being any electronic, kitchen, gardening or automobile gear.
* Having a feeling of deep loneliness when your traffic is 50% below average.
* Mentally setting an expectation as to when the first comment on a post or picture will be posted.
* Desperately trying to find something to blog about, just because you have not for a while and your traffic has been in constant decline for the past X weeks.
* Actually wasting my time calculating my BCF.
* Not only wasting my time calculating my BCF, AND blogging about it.
* NEW: Posting way too late/tired, and going "WTF did I mean/write/disclose ?" the next morning.

Note that as a photoblogger, many of these "sins" come with the territory. When you meet someone well known (like Fleury, Le Meur, Scoble), you take pictures, and you... link to them. Likewise, when you meet a bunch on bloggers or photobloggers, you agree on a common tag and you upload!

Things I have not done (yet):

* Posting solely to wish a friend happy birthday.
* Linking to something on another site and bragging that you "helped."
* Blogging about the stupid ideas you got when you smoked pot and watched reality TV last night.
* Having a regular feature on your blog about the ideas you get when you smoke pot.
* Blogging about George W.Bush.
* Blogging about the epiphany you had last night about yourself and your life.
* Posting your results from online personality tests.
* Participating in any blogging "meme" ("Write down the first three venereal diseases that pop into your head.")
* Using the word "meme."
* Blogging about how it's been so long since you've dated/had sex and how you don't care.
* Blogging about natural disasters and pointing out how terrible they are for the people involved.
* Blogging about Coachella.
* Going to Coachella.
* Going to a "secret show" and blogging about it the next day. ("It was so hard to keep the secret, but Julian made me pinkie-swear.")
* Blog "feuds."
* Having an anonymous blog.
* "Coming out" from your anonymous blog.
* Going on "hiatus."
* Coming back from "hiatus."
* The use, ever, of the term "guest list."
* Blogging about your trip to (Prague, Costa Rica, Iceland.)
* Having a blog that never links to anything except your friends blogs that don't link to anything except their friend's blogs, etc.
* Posting anything that requires a "jump."
* Posting a year-end best-of list.
* Apologizing for not posting your year-end best-of list sooner.
* Apologizing for not blogging for a while.
* Apologizing for not blogging for a while because "things have been crazy - I can't talk about it yet but suffice it to say, I've already mentally spent the advance money, lol!"
* Talking about how much you love Tivo/DVR.
* Calling Tivo/DVR "My new boyfriend."
* Putting your iPOD on random and posting the songs it plays.
* Posting anything about your iPOD.
* Posting about things you've recently purchased.
* Posting about things you've recently received. ("Random House sent me a copy of the new David Foster Wallace...")
* Blogging about hipsters or the LES.
* Inventing a nickname for your significant other that you use only on your blog. ("Last night, The Asspounder and I had dinner at a cute little place in the West Village...")
* Inventing nicknames for all your friends on your blog. ("Last night, GirlySue, Desperatina, and the rest of the Tribe went out for decadent deserts to commisserate about how there are no good men out there.")
* Blogging about the restaurants and bars you frequent.
* Blogging from a restaurant or bar.
* Blogging about your dates.
* Blogging about your sexual tastes/prowess/activities of the last evening.
* Posting IM conversations.
* Making fun of how the New York Times is always behind on every trend.
* Having advertisers.
* Not having advertisers for a spelled-out reason (ie, any other reason than just being lazy, not caring.)
* Blogging about how much traffic you've gotten since you received a link from a much bigger blog.
* Blogging about how much traffic you've gotten since you received a link from a much bigger blog, and saying "Welcome (much bigger blog) readers!"
* Writing to someone to ask if you can link to them.
* Blogging drunk about how you shouldn't/never blog drunk.
* "Cryptic" blogging to seem mysterious.
* "Cryptic" blogging to send a secret message to someone.
* "Cryptic" blogging to seem cool. ("I can't really say anything about this right now, but big important things are happening to someone we all know.")
* Having entries in your cellphone like "Mark Whatevs" and "Foxy Jess"
* Having a "pictures of me" page.
* Having a "pictures of me" page where all the pictures are clearly self-portraits.
* Saying "I was approached by _______ who wanted me to post about _______"
* Blogging about your breakup.
* Blogging about your engagement.
* Blogging about being "recognized."
* Blogging about compliments you've gotten.
* Mentioning the amount of traffic you get.
* Mentioning the exact number of readers you have per day.
* Taking down all comments that aren't gushing about how wonderful you are.
* Blogging about how work sucks.
* Blogging about your pet.
* Blogging about the blogging award you got/were nominated for.
* Blogging about how drunk you got last night.
* Taking down all comments that aren't gushing about how wonderful you are.
* Blogging about how work sucks.
* Blogging about your pet.
* Blogging about the blogging award you got/were nominated for.
* Blogging about how drunk you got last night.
* Having a wishlist or asking for donations.
* Writing "I've been listening to (hip band's new album) for weeks and it's so great, it comes out today and you should pick it up."
* Not linking to your own press, but referring "cryptically" to it and mentioning how everyone else is linking to it and musing about how you "don't see what the big deal is."
* Accusing someone of stealing an idea from your blog even if it's the most commonplace, obvious joke about a situation that can be made.
* Blogging in the first-person plural.
* Posting song lyrics.
* Blogging previews. ("I'm going to watch "PoweRGirls" tonight; check back here tomorrow and I'll tell you what I thought about it.")
* Plugging your friend's stuff that sucks, and not specifically saying it's good. "You should all buy my friend's band Mouthfeel's new record."
* Posting about an event instead of going to it. ("Unfortunately I can't make it, but you should all go see my friend read from his book about growing up in the suburbs.").
* Blogging about your bad mood/bad day/general ennui.
* Confronting someone at a party because they don't link to you.

So where does that leave us: 34 - 82 = -48.

What does that mean ? Nothing, besides that I have done less "sins" than I potentially could have!

I did tell you it was a waste of time, didn't I.

Tip: to avoid a painful counting exercise, copy each list separately and paste them in your favorite spreadsheet, it will do the Math for you.

You mean, the gmail account I just paid for... was free ?

The context: John Paczkowski, from Good Morning Silicon Valley fame (a reading I highly recommend), says it best.

Club Gmail fires bouncers: Gmail, Google's 1GB free e-mail service, may finally be coming out of beta. Since Gmail's launch in April of 2004, Google has grown the service through a viral invitation-only program. Periodically, the company has awarded a small number of invitations to registered Gmail users, who are then free to send them on to friends and family who might want an account. Now, I've had a Gmail account since April and the greatest number of invites I've ever been given is six. This morning I logged in to my account and found that I've now got 50 to give away. I assume I'm not the only one. So, either we're nearing the service's official launch or Google is gearing up for some serious load testing.

The inventory: a boatload of bloggers have mentioned that their Gmail account was showing a pool of 50 invitations available. This is also my case, so feel free to send me an email here, and I'll do my best to send you an invitation sometime this week. First come, first served. And be fair, one request per person please. Note that I am also making another pool of 50 invitations available on my Buzznet photoblog.

The mistery: Now, who can explain to me why there are still several hundred auctions going for gmail accounts on eBay, and people are bidding money to get them? This means that there is a category of people paying for something freely available, and there is another category of people expecting to make money off of something freely available - therefore commiting to pay eBay's minimum listing fees.
Eh, no offense intented. It is everybody's genuine right to pay for something that is free.

The conclusion: some Internet business models are still beyond me...

The update: there are over 1.5 million Gmail invites at this site [via Google Weblog]. And Google seems to replenish acccounts anyway, I'm back to 50!