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I've just spent an hour on gapminder. So cool. Much better than Swivel, in my opinion, though clearly more limited.

Are you referring specifically to video content, or music content? There is a whole crop of new web-based video-editing applications that have launched in the past six months, and they make it very easy to produce video...

It seems like the take-away is that "original content" is equivalent to "good content". The challenge is to find the good content.

If that's the case, then the important (and successful) content applications should primarily be filtering technologies. Which explains the success of Digg and Techmeme, among others...

Check out this graph in an old post by Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/12/squid_soup_part_2.html His point is that in order for a new idea or product to catch on, it first needs to be adopted by the "innovators" -- the "geeks". Then, and only then, can it spread to the broader population. If you try to skip the geeks and go straight to the mass market, you will fail.

I'm not sure I buy that as a hard and fast rule, but I think the concept is generally solid. If a company makes it on TC, it will subsequently and consequently grow beyond TC.

Yes, they had 53K a year ago, and now they have over 300K

Doesn't that prove the post wrong? Clearly those 53K were a very powerful group...

hat tip Venture Blog: http://p6.hostingprod.com/@www.ventureblog.com/articles/indiv/2007/001274.html

The part about healthy eating is definitely true. I have a lot more energy, and need a lot less sleep, now that I'm strict with myself about my diet...

For the serial entrepreneurs among us: it's important to keep in mind that you only get one shot with friends and family money. If you don't succeed, and decide to move on to another idea, your friends and family will be very reluctant to invest in yet another venture. This can be problematic if you're the sort of person who likes to jump from idea to idea.

I financed a company a few years ago with a small amount of money from family, and ultimately it didn't take off. I'm now very hesitant to approach them again. I wish I had been a little more cautious before deciding to take that route...

Make sure to check out the link to the "5 principles to design by" --- another great post.

Someone should make an S3 interface that does automatic file versioning. Basically a CVS for non-coders. It seems like that would be an intuitive feature for any online storage product.

Do any of the current online storage products do this already? I know some of the new ones use S3 (elephant drive and jungle disk, to name two), but I don't think either of them have a versioning feature built-in. It shouldn't be too hard to create...

true. my parents met on craigslist.

(just kidding. i don't think that's possible.)

I do the visual design, my partner does the technical design. We collaborate on the conceptual design.

I also do the marketing and sales.

There are certainly a lot of ways to monetize MySpace beyond ad revenue, and using it as a music distribution channel is one of the easiest. (maybe News Corp. should buy Amie Street, and integrate it into myspace?)

But shouldn't they start by doing a better job capitalizing on the advertising potential? Theoretically, MySpace should know a massive amount of information about each user (everything they list on their profile page), including location, age, interests, media consumption patterns, etc. They could be selling very highly-targeted ads based on all of those parameters. Wouldn't it be more lucrative NOT to sell a graphical ad on the homepage at a daily rate of $250,000 (as the post reports), but instead to make the homepage ad dynamically tailored to each user?

yes, we should do an east coast meetup. Count me in. Say, next week some time?