
The Hidden Assumptions That Neuter Criticism in Silicon Valley
The contretemps of the day comes courtesy of TechCrunch, where Professor Vivek Wadhwa has published a guest post addressing a Twitter debate he had with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (now how’s that for meta?):http://tcrn.ch/GD0570The controversy began with…

The Troll Economy
Q: What do you get when journalists get paid by the number of pageviews their stories generate? A: The Troll economy. Not to sound like a grumpy old man (though I am) but what passes for journalism has sunk to a new low. As far as I can tell, headlines are now chosen based on […]

The content continuum and why I’m worried about the direction of the online world
At the risk of sounding (even more) like a crotchety old man, I feel like the online world is moving in exactly the wrong direction.I would argue that there is a direct correlation between the amount of effort a creator expends and the quality and valu…

Social Media Hysteria
Yesterday, after the Amazon outage, I tweeted a comment highlighting the difficulties faced by AWS customers (applicable, in general, to all public cloud customers) when there is an outage. It was a tweet meant to highlight how desperate the situation becomes for AWS customers as well as AWS employees. I compared the situation after such […]

Is There A Social Media Bubble?
Of course there’s a social media bubble. All over the map, everyone ranging from seed-stage investors to the public markets are paying inflated prices for social media assets. But while the current frenzy is a bubble, it doesn’t even come close to the magnitude and madness of the Dot-Com bubble. Back in those days, “eyeballs” […]

Is Social Media Marketing A Crock?
I recently had the pleasure of attending a dinner for startup VPs of Marketing. I had a great time chatting with peers and laughing about the unrealistic demands we all face. “Get me in the Journal and fill the pipeline–but don’t spend any money.”The …