TED Blog is being highlighted by Typepad today. It is the work of Apperceptive which is led by two immensely talented people - David Jacobs and John Emerson. The blog has a post about Natalie MacMaster who I got to see at Celebrate Brooklyn this year (and last on Canada Day), as the post on TED Blog says, if she is playing near you - drop everything.
John Battelle has a post about the bubble we seem to be in called "Failure to Fail". It is worth a read.
...In short, we don't have a company creation crisis. But we might have a company destruction crisis. Something is off in our ecosystem - there's simply not enough failure out there right now. For an ecosystem to be truly healthy, bad ideas (or good ideas poorly executed) need to fail, so we can all learn from the failure, incorporate the lessons, and move on.
On a similar note Tom Evslin's post "Life on the Long Tail - an Introduction" (via avc.blogs.com) Very interesting post about authorship but it also contains this which is related to the article above.
...The power law also explains why it is bad idea to be the twentieth social networking site or VoIP phone company even if #1 was just purchased for a gazillion dollars. Let’s assume that a gazillion means a $24 million just to make the math easy. Power law says that #2 is worth $12,000,000 (still not bad), #3 is worth $8,000,000 (you’d get by even after your VCs’ cut). But #20 is worth only $1.2 million. When you check the liquidation preference (see Brad Feld on this) in your financing, you’ll find that you don’t get any of that – it all goes to the investors and they won’t even be happy.
The lengthening tail affects copy-cat entrepreneurs as well as authors. The ever lower cost of starting and running an Internet business means that #20 will always have to contend with #21 through #50 if it looks like any money is going to made in the category. Tough to get the investors’ money back. Actually, since so much of the value is at the head of the curve when talking about network businesses, it is impossible for any but a handful of network business to succeed within a category.
Scoble defines what blogging is, hmm.
If there are any masochists in the house then today's Media Bistro job board contains something big for you. The NY Observer is looking for a VP General Manager Online. On the one hand you could go after NYMetro.com and gawker, etc but though, I don't know first hand, I suspect that working for someone "whose “... 25-ness is a huge asset" and "who is not weighed down by the debris of conventional wisdom." could really be a drag but then again I'm perhaps I'm just too jaded a character.
Someone I know is creating a novelization of the next Mr. Bean movie. Now that is a tough assignment.
