First, I'd like to thank my subconscious for waking me up without my alarm.

Second, I'd like to tell my subconscious that this was a bizarre way to wake me up.

In my dream, Jason Calacanis was standing next to me in his usual pink collared dress shirt while I sat in front of a giant media PC and edited audio files. We were working on the latest audio track for one of our customers. Jason and I were back in a startup again and this time our business was making jingles for radio commercials. Our customer was a skin cancer clinic.

Continue reading Get out of my dreams, get into my car ›

Then we added three more people to our team yesterday.

We are keeping ADP very busy!

The author wrote Jeffrey to explain that his Designing With Web Standards book had changed his entire career.

I remember what I now refer to as a pivotal moment in my web career. I was sitting in bed reading your book. I knew nothing really about CSS (other than for setting fonts/colours and I couldn’t see what was wrong with the old way of doing things). However as I read, it was like a slow realisation. I remember vividly turning to my wife and saying “This book is amazing. I am going to have to relearn everything I know about building websites”. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On one hand the enormity of what you were suggesting was overwhelming but on the other hand it was just the injection I needed in my own career.

I reached the end of the book and made a decision. I was going to move the whole of Headscape across to standards based design. Not only that was I was going to do it as soon as possible. By 2005 we had made the transition and have never looked back.

The author was Paul Boag, whose Boagworld podcasts I've enjoyed. As the author was revealed it felt like reading some of Brando's fan mail -- signed by a young Al Pacino.

It reminded me that I had the opposite reaction with Jeffrey.

When I've talked to people recently about working on several projects with Jeffrey when Happy Cog was a one-man shop, I've said something like "I was a designer and Zeldman was a designer. But he had a book, so I did the server-side work." That's an oversimplification of course. Front-end web design work in the days of Netscape 4 and the Great Browser Wars was a nightmare. Working in SQL stored procedures and ASP and VB Script was harder than HTML in many ways, but 100 times easier than dealing with browser compatibility. All the code I wrote was guaranteed to run the same way over and over, regardless of the visiting browser.

So thanks in part to working with Jeffrey, I quit doing web design and never looked back.

George Reese from O'Reilly had the best early recap and perspective of the dozens of stories I read:

If you think this week exposed weakness in the cloud, you don't get it: it was the cloud's shining moment, exposing the strength of cloud computing.

In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model. The strength of cloud computing is that it puts control over application availability in the hands of the application developer and not in the hands of your IT staff, data center limitations, or a managed services provider.

Here are some excerpts from our story in the trenches:

After informing the Amazon representative that we had failed over to the West coast and that we no longer needed this running instance, he urged us to decommission all the US East instances that we were not using in order to free capacity in that region.

He was impressed that we had successfully failed over to the US West region when so many others were still down and said: "You were one of the very few to have a West coast contingency plan and recover quickly. Bravo."

Read our very detailed Crowd Fusion cloudpocalypse story here.

I was just going to link to his scathing Leaving in a Huff post on Twitter, but there were too many great quotes for 140 characters:

• "Say what you will about AOL, but when you perform work for them, they pay you. They're old-fashioned like that."
• "That's how newspapers operate, and goodness knows that industry is running smoothly."
• "We were like stewardesses handing out peanuts on the Hindenburg."
• "He knows that when space aliens invade, and a weaselly human swears allegiance to them in exchange for not being killed, the weaselly human always winds up getting killed anyway."
• "We may be whores, but we are not sluts."
• "You will note that, as with most professional communiques regarding the termination of a subcontractor's services, this one begins with the traditional 'Hi there.'"
• "You've got fail."

And many, many more. It ends with a recap of the wild email thread where people at AOL were still asking bloggers who were fired or resigned to pitch posts. For pay. I think.

Enjoy.

Note: While I'm against a lot of things that are going on and it's easy to jump on the AOL hating bandwagon, I understand that there is always a logical consolidation of overlapping divisions and brands in a merger. And sometimes companies take the opportunity to trim profitable divisions that don't overlap with newly merged brands under the pretenses of that merger. Which is probably what happened to Download Squad. There is psychic organizational overhead in trying to manage 100+ brands, so sometimes sites get shut down for reasons other than profit and traffic.

I also don't believe the unpaid HuffPo bloggers deserve a financial settlement. "Implied contracts" aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Mathew Ingram said it best in Blogging for HuffPo Is Like Writing Open-Source Code. The only settlement Arianna Huffington will face on this front is with karma.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving everything I’ve seen about the iPad 2 and I plan on grabbing one next Friday when they become available, but watching the event from Wednesday,the use of the phrase “post-PC” was just blatantly incorrect.

I agree with C.K. that it's really hard for Apple to declare PCs dead when you have to plug your iPhones and iPads into computers running iTunes to do anything, but I have the feeling that Steve Jobs has already planned all of this stuff out so perfectly that if it isn't true today, it will be true soon.

You know how Apple designs iPhones and iPads with copy and paste, cameras, dozens of ports and 3D laser sensors and then they trim out the features so they can sell you a new iPad every year for the next 3 years?

I have plenty of faith in Apple to carry us into the magical post-PC age. I'm sure we're just a software update or two away from full-on iTunes on my iPad without no PC required. When I close my eyes, I'm already there -- waiting for C.K.

The feedback I got from other audience members is that Larry asked a couple of tough questions, but the panel was mostly evasive, especially on the topic of Google's "Farmer" update.

Felix Salmon told the panel that Twitter is his best place to find news and links and asked when these publishers' sites are going to be as good as Twitter. I'm not really paraphrasing. There were no great answers from the panel because the question was flawed. Of course Felix's Twitter stream is full of golden content, he follows really smart people who like many of the same things he likes!

A comparison of Felix Salmon's personalized Twitter stream vs. content farms is apples and oranges. If Felix was forced to spend an hour watching the straight not-signed-in stream of every tweet ever, he'd say it was way worse than *any* content site, especially if he was comparing the generic Twitter firehose to a content site in a vertical he cared about. We all see low quality content on Twitter every day in Twitter's trending topics list. Lady Gaga is not on that list because she's the best content, she's in there because she's liked a little bit by a really wide audience. The top ten of all topics on earth will always be the lowest common denominator content, not the highest quality content. It's not targeted and neither are Google results.

A better question for that panel would be:

When are you going to let me personalize my experience of your content into a format that looks like my Facebook/Myspace/Twitter stream -- filled with the topics I care about and devoid of the content I despise?

I don't think any of those publishers are working on that.

TechMeme comes really close without exposing actual personalization controls because they made topic and source constraints that already matched hardcore tech/investor preferences: TechCrunch, Engadget, Boy Genius Report, The New York Times, ReadWriteWeb and the WSJ's MediaMemo and BoomTown. Oh my god, it's like TechMeme knows me.

It will be a real shame if publishers are waiting on a combined Bing and Facebook to deliver everyone a useful, personalized view into their content. Big publishers are worrying about giving up 30% cuts and all kinds of control to Apple, but they're not looking at content consumption preferences and taking control of their own destiny.

There were three groups of presenting startups. 1.0 companies were all companies launching for the first time. 2.0 companies were announcing a new product. LAUNCH Pad companies were not scheduled to present on stage. They rented tables and tried to catch the attention of people passing by for a quick demo. If they caught the attention of a judge, they could be nominated to actually spend three minutes on stage pitching their product.

From the LAUNCH Pad companies, I picked an Amazon cloud-hosted GoToMeeting/Webex competitor called MeetingBurner. Not surprisingly, Joyent CEO David Young told them they were using the wrong cloud. That never gets old, right? LAUNCH Pad winners included GreenGoose, whose wireless sensors can track daily activity, and fluidinfo, an openly writable shared meta data service for everything. GreenGoose closed a $500K angel round that Friday and fluidinfo was voted "most likely to need Crowd Fusion as an interface."

In the 2.0 group, Disconnect won for best technology. It's a browser plugin that monitors how much of your personal data is being shared with third party sites, like what gets sent to Facebook when you're visiting ESPN. I spent some time with Disconnect's genius creator Brian Kennish on Friday and told him I hoped Disconnect would fail so I could hire him. Seriously!

The overall winner in the 2.0 group was Stack Overflow. I sat out on this vote because I was quoted in Joel's Careers 2.0 press release.

Some of the 1.0 winners were Room77 (best overall, see the view from your hotel room before you book it), NeuAer (best tech, automate your digital life) and Cabana (best design, a Photoshop/Pipes-style interface for making apps without coding). The NeuAer example that really stuck with me was how you can script your devices so that every time you turn your car off, your smartphone can drop a map pin so you don't have to remember where you parked. Very slick.

All of the winners are listed on the LAUNCH blog. Between the 1.0, 2.0 and LAUNCH Page companies there were 140 great companies competing for 13 awards. What a fantastic event.

A cab ride in SF prompted this tweet:

My evening cab ride through SF was insane! Cab left the ground 3 times going over hills and screeched to a stop once. #foulplay

Over on Facebook, my sister sent me the YouTube video for that scene. The first thing I noticed was that they were playing music from The Mikado. Wow! Then they were cutting to scenes of the actual Mikado being performed. It's where they were racing to, to prevent a murder or something.

I was turned on to The Mikado by an issue of The Question I read in high school. Written by Denny O'Neil and edited by my ComicMix partner Mike Gold. In college I bought the double disc musical and many years later Niki and I saw The Mikado live in New York City.

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time
To let the punishment fit the crime
The punishment fit the crime.
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment
Of innocent merriment!

Peter Drucker, I am paraphrasing, basically said that every oganization needs to recruit and retain customers (although that is not always what they call them). Anyone who faced a customer was in marketing. He also said that anyone who was not directly related to that function, who was below the C-level, could be outsourced.

Interesting. I can't imagine that this "outsource everyone below C-level" strategy has ever worked, but I had to add my own Drucker-infused take on the importance of marketing:

The Drucker quote that always sticks with me (paraphrased here from memory) is that "companies have only two functions: innovation and marketing. All the rest are costs."

"Innovate and market" means "create something amazing and then go tell people about it."

Fred Wilson is smart, but his original post that said "marketing is for companies with terrible products or companies that need to squeeze profits out of new customers" is flawed. I'm sure he has seen plenty of startups who believe that marketing spending will make up for failing to innovate, but marketing simply means telling a story to an audience.

I market to customers. I market to investors. I market to talent. I market to partners. I don't just throw a budget line at marketing after failing to create something attention worthy. There is a difference.

After a little digging, I found that the actual quote is:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

It's not so easy to dismiss the importance of marketing -- even in startups!

Rand Fishkin has a great, longer rebuttal to Fred's flawed post on marketing over on SEOmoz. He points out that marketing is for companies that have great products. Some of this was referenced in Fred's third marketing post.