Jackie and I spent our Saturday at TechDirt Greenhouse in San Jose. The idea: early-stage entrepreneurs who ranged from venture-backed cos with a launched product to college kids with a fresh batch of home-cooked Ajax gave five minute presentations, followed by small group discussions aimed at generating constructive advice.
One of the groups I landed in was charged with discussing the "new" business model for 2006 (result: "organically grown"--ie., "97% investment dollar free!"). The group also disagreed with Andy Kessler's assertion that every business has to scalable to the moon and back--the web needs its mom and pop dry-cleaning shops, too.
Another session dissected topix.net, at which point I briefly (and annoyingly I'm sure) dragged out two of my rickety soapboxes: the one about how I don't think the news aggregator is the killer new media app everyone else thinks it is, and the one about "information overload" being a myth: Analogy: Do you sit around fretting about the fact that there are six billion people in the world, and how will you ever sort through them? Of course not. Another analogy: Do you walk into Borders and suffer a panic attack over how many books there are? Of course not. So there are a lot of blogs now--you'll get used to it. More importantly, as Umair Haque said, if you're under 18, you're already used to it.
I was very curious to hear Umair keep making quietly prophetic references to MySpace. He thinks we're not talking about this consumer end of 2.0 enough--and I agree. I'd like to see Umair, who is the Robert Venturi of Web 2.0 architecture, to write a "Learning from MySpace" manifesto in the spirit of Learning from Las Vegas (that's Venturi's 1972 book about the significance of architectural kitsch, not the movie about the drunk and the hooker).
Tags: techdirt greenhouse, techdirtgreenhouse
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