I was at a dinner with a startup company in the CRM/marketing space last night at Chat’n'Chew in New York City (off of Union Square) and the conversation turned to: "Which dot com have you worked for?"  It then got into a friendly battle of who worked for the "oldest" dot com.  I’m not so sure that this is something to brag about, but it leads me to write this post about which were the top 10 oldest dot coms.  Any ideas?  Here we go…. (this list is taken from the top 100)

I spent 30 minutes with PersonalDNA this morning.  One of my colleagues has taken a Myers-Briggs assessment and wanted me to do so as well, but I had heard of PersonalDNA thru another colleague and decided to try.  My results are pretty good- I agree with most of the things that they have assessed.

If you’d like to review my report, please click here.  Feel free to shoot me an email if you agree/disagree with the assessment.

I have been surfing the Internet trying to find which companies are emerging in Web 2.0 (a term that I may/may not subscribe to) and the following have made Vince Veneziani’s hotlist at Design Technica.

• Flickr
• Vimeo
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Bloglines
• Netvibes
• Writeboard
• Google Maps
• Meebo
• amongst others…

I have to say that I’m a fan of Netvibes.com and their full Ajax implementation. You do not even need an account… start using the start-page functionality right away.

I’ve been to 3 networking events in the past 96 hours here in NYC and have to say that the amount of companies hiring is on the rise. I’ve been receiving an increasing number of job descriptions across my desk in the past few weeks and have to say that this is starting to feel like 1998 and it’s extremely refreshing.Â

With the increasing hiring - salaries will go up, perks will start to kick in, and the stories will begin…again. I think everyone in New York City knew who Herman Miller was - due to their extremely popular (and still is!) Aeron chair. This >$800 chair was the quintessential throne for anyone working in a technology/media company. Are they coming back into fashion?

For recruiters and HR execs, the hard part is not finding the talent in the marketplace. Rather, it’s about keeping the talent at a company. We’ve all heard Google’s “perks” such as free meals, dry cleaning, Naked drinks, etc - they do a great job retaining people. With new jobs increasingly opening up here in NYC, companies are going to have to work harder than ever to keep their employees so they don’t jump ship to the next hottest start up or media company. What will these perks be? I’m looking forward to monitoring this….

Where’s the next Silicon Alley?

This post is a precursor of what a future post or two will discuss on this blog, but I’d like to mention that the Beastie Boy’s will be screening a concert-turned-movie that was shot in October 2004 at the Loews 34th Street theater on March 28 @ 7:30pm EST. Tickets apparently are $24.

This is one of the first movies that will showcase concerts on the big screen (in theaters).  This is a trend that will be coming in the near future to movie theaters across the USA (think companies like Network Live). Apparently, this Beastie Boy concert was recorded by over 50 handheld cameras that were given out to fans at the show. The footage should be spectacular and catch many concert moments that the more “professional” crews would miss.

“Fight for your right to party!”

The term Web 2.0 is proliferating through social groups faster than Google now checking undergraduate GPA’s. I thought it would be beneficial that I would post a (not “the”) Web 2.0 definition from Wikipedia. Please note that you can find the full definition here.

Web 2.0 is a term popularized by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International
as the name for a series of web development conferences that started in
October 2004. It has since come to refer to what some people describe
as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997). They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis. To some extent Web 2.0 has become a buzzword, incorporating whatever is newly popular on the Web (such as tags and podcasts). A consensus on its exact meaning has not yet been reached. - wikipedia.org

Having worked at FortuneCity in the past, I know the value of online communities and free web page creation.  Heck, even at Student.com, we allowed users to create their own free web pages.  The reason why FCTY or SC allowed users to create their own pages is because we can monetize them through advertising.  Google generates billions of dollars through Adsense, the program that allows publishers to generate revenue through CPC campaigns on their websites.  The only thing stopping Google from generating additional revenue is the shortage of content; so allowing users to create their own web pages and monetizing it thru Adsense is a simple way to generate more revenue.

I’m going to confess, I am a member of Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Base, Tribe, Orkut, Quintessentially, Student.com, Skidnet, and probably a half dozen others that I cannot remember.  The first week of joining a social network is probably the most addicting – I call it the “addiction phase.â€?

Once you realize you have an addiction of looking up all your high school friends, or business school classmates, you realize that it’s more addicting then your Crackberry, oh, wait, I mean Blackberry.  By the time you “friendâ€? or “link inâ€? to all of your friends, peers, industry colleagues, people you met for 15 seconds at a mixer, and your grandmother, you’ve built out a network consisting of quite a few people.  It’s part of the addiction… to build a bigger network than your coworker or roommate. 

Looking at my top 8 on MySpace, I realize that most everyone there is a true friend.  However, there are one or two people on my Top 8 that are extremely close to me.  I’d consider them tier 1 friends.  In this tier, there are only one or two friends that one might have that are truly “best friends.â€?  That leaves 6 other people who are considered “friendsâ€? in my Top 8 – and I get the same access to them, as I do to my 2 “best friends.â€?  Why?

In that lies the issue I have with social networks: we are given the same exact access to our “best friendsâ€? as we are to our industry peers and once-a-year-tradeshow-friends.  This is a flaw in the social networking model… what is a friend and how much access do we allow into this friend.  Should there be different levels of a friend? 

Now, in order for me to have somewhat of an argument here, I need to provide a rough solution.  I haven’t done any social networking consulting for the past 2 years, so I’m a bit out of the loop, but I can say that there are some work arounds.  One of these workarounds include having the underlying technology infrastructure decide who your friends are (and categorize them) based on the contacts within your network vs. the universe (universe = size of the social network).  If I have a lot of mutual contacts with someone else in the network, we should have tighter relationships than just someone in which we only share one or two contacts.  This could be a work around, and stops the ultra-sleezy networkers who build up their contacts to show their popularity.

Would love to hear some feedback on this…

I happen to fancy anything that takes place in the digital music world. I believe that the music business is doing well, however, the record business needs to discover new business models ASAP to save itself from spirally uncontrollably. Jamendo is a site that a buddy forwarded to me that allows for independent artists to distribute their music on P2P services and typical “hot” Web2.0 trinkets are included.

I really don’t see a play here. Users can donate to Jamendo bands - but Jamendo as a company makes its money off of advertising space. In order to make serious money off ads, you must have traffic - and with only 415 hours of music under Jamendo currently (per their stats), they’re going to have to do a bit better. Jamendo is betting that they’ll distribute the music under a new “creative commons license” and in turn, bands music will get out freely, and more people will go to the bands concerts. In theory, that happens… but generally, these bands are non-national acts, in which most of the time, they only play in a 100 mile radius of their homes. How will these bands play ‘out’ enough to get money flowing in…. I give this under 12 months….

This video was sent to me from a colleague here in the office - so I don’t take the credit of finding it.  I think it’s extremely amazing to see the technology within automobiles these days.  We’ve all heard about cars parking themselves, but have you actually seen it?  Check it out.