Author Archives: Jeremy Toeman

When I first started my Geek Dinners last fall, I figured they’d be quaint affairs, with 4 or 5 people getting together to pseudo-geek out, chat about tech trends and whatnot.  Little did I expect last night’s crew of 20 guys & gals (yes, actual gals – plural even!) to come enjoy the finest in Italian Haute Cuisine – Buca di Beppo.

As usual, here’s a list of our merry crew (from left to right):

• Thomas Hawk – photographer, photowalker, and blogger extraordinaire
• Jason Whitt – venture capitalist with VantagePoint Ventures
• Scott Cronce – CTO of Electronic Arts
• Melanie Westlake – the queen of Yahoo! Mobile
• Jeremy Toeman – him?
• Lisa Whelan – business development consultant and social media blogger
• Andrew Kippen – “technology scout” for the French Trade Commission
• Daniel Riveong – technology marketing expert at e-Storm
• Davis Freeberg – prolific digital media blogger and photographer
• Esther Lim – VP, Client Services and Interactive Strategy for e-Storm
• Mehrshad Mansouri – still unemployed
• Cindy Wang – Technical Yahoo! for mobile Web applications
• Joel Sacks (or at least his eyes and forehead) – account exec for CNet
• Sam Levin – influencer marketing expert
• Kristopher Tate – founder of Zooomr
• Guy Horowitz – venture capitalist with Gemini Ventures
• Brian Meckler – product manager at Sling Media
• Jeff Allen – reformed VC, now founder of a new stealthy startup
• Heidi Pollock – another Technical Yahoo! (thus making it Yahoo 3, Google 0 for Geek Dinners)

Dinner was a lot of fun, we even had a little “musical chairs” moment where we shuffled the whole seating arrangement to confuse the waitress help get more people meeting each other.  I overheard and participated in discussions on topics ranging from CES (not much new, lots of bigger/smaller products, with more convergence) to truly converged mobile devices (not gonna happen) to Second Life (wherein I pronounced my desire to start a SL Mob that goes around graffiting things, then charging for “protection”).

We also had a little “around-the-table” on the iPhone, with the simple question of: will you buy it in the first 30 days?  13 said no (primary reasons: no keyboard and locked-down with Cingular service), but 6 said yes (although one was technically a freebie).  While that might be the minority, that’s clearly a good indication of how much excitement Apple has generated so far. 

Lastly, I had a few gadgets from CES that I showed the group, and here were the quick reactions:

• Cell phone call light-up bracelet – didn’t really work
• Netgear travel router – nice idea, but too big compared to Airport Express
• Ethereal’s high-end HDMI cable – don’t spend a lot of money on cables!
• Shure SE420 and E500PTH headphones – tremendous waves of jealousy
• CameraBright – nead idea, might not work well enough
• The Tornado file transfer USB tool – great concept, a little big
• quik-pod solo camera “tripod” – awesome, huge round of applause

I also did a giveaway with a variety of products from the show (and some chocolate), to the people with The Most Video Game Consoles (10), The First Cell Phone Owner (1992), The First GPS Owner (2002), The Most Computers in their Home (12), and the First Portable Computer Owner (I don’t recall the year, but it was a while ago).

Thanks again for coming everyone, please don’t hesitate to add any comments for any highlights I may have forgotten!

One of my favorite VC bloggers, Fred Wilson, recently posted on removing some widgets from his blog.  Now Fred clearly attempts to try every plugin ever made, and I applaud him for the efforts.  I’ve tried a few from time to time, and the two that I’ve decided caused the most hassle for LD are now gone.

1. Sitemeter
   Why I used it: Built-in server statistics are less reliable than Windows ME.
   What I liked: Seemed to keep pretty decent stats, and the stats views are real-time.  Very handy for determining who is linking in.  Considered mostly reliable for site metrics.
   What I didn’t like: Tangibly slowed down page-loading, occasionally prevented site from loading in single-digit-seconds.
   How I’m replacing it: Google Analytics.  It doesn’t boast the same real-time capabilities, but I realized that I don’t care enough on a day-to-day basis to watch the numbers anyway.
2. My Del.ici.ous
   Why I used it: Very convenient way for me to link to a story I found interesting without having to add a full blog post for it.
   What I liked: Helped keep content “fresh” on the home page.
   What I didn’t like: Extremely buggy, caused really ugly script errors that were all-too visible.
   How I’m replacing it: I’m not.  I’ll keep bookmarking sites I like, and those who care can track them here.  I’ll probably try to add more short-form blog posts anyway, since my unbelievably long essays are a little much for the average reader.

Anyone have any other plugin recommendations that I should check out?  I browse the WordPress codex intermittently, am I missing the boat on anything?

For years now, the Press Release (I’m giving it the proper name treatment for this article) was (and really still is) the de facto method for a company to distribute news.  Press Releases go out on the wire (no caps) and show up in the inbox of reporters, based on the regionality of the reporter and the release.  In pre-blogger times, this worked out pretty well as there really aren’t that many journalists out there, so the communication flow was fairly efficient.  With a supposed 57 million blogs online (personally I think that’s missing a decimal point), all of differing degrees of professionalism, the Press Release method is beginning to crumble.

Accordingly, publicists and PR firms are in search of new methods for distributing their information, including leveraging blogs and social networks.  While I think we all should praise these people for seeking out the methods, even though often times the results fall far short of the objectives (3 words: Vista. Ferrari. Bloggers).  Stowe Boyd wrote a great piece yesterday on the Social Media Press Release and how incredibly bad an idea it is.  For a quick definition (from his post):

For those who have missed the idea, a social media press release is supposed to be a webbish/bloggish version of old timey press releases. These will incorporate elements of the now commonplance blog motif: links, tags, comments, and trackbacks, for example.

As he (and Scoble and Jeremiah and probably many others) have expressed, it’s a bad idea in so many ways. Dominic Jones also blogged on the topic this week, and he proposed a different solution:

News release writers today can learn a lot from the Digg front page. That’s where you will see effective attention grabbers that prompt people to click on links. We’re talking about a linked headline and a 25-word summary.

That’s what a newswire news release should look like in 2007.

I think this is a good idea, but doesn’t properly address the problem. First of all, the fact remains that sources such as AP and Reuters still account for a large part of news flow, both offline and online.  The reporters for more traditional outlets don’t necessarily deserve to have their worlds come crashing down just because us “hooligan bloggers” don’t have the patience to read through a full-page of carefully crafted spin information.  And what about financial institutions and analysts, where every word of a news release matters?

I don’t think we can kill the Release just yet, it still serves its purpose.  But smart companies should be trying to complement it.  Scoble suggested using blogging for all information dissemination – I think using blogging in conjunction with a release is the right idea.  Whether it’s 25 words or 40 words or a full page, companies should assign an employee to write a blog post that coincides with and summarizes the release.  With this method, bloggers can simply subscribe to the RSS feeds for the companies they want to track.  Furthermore, services like PR Newswire can offer aggregated (river) feeds that are companions to the Press Releases themselves.

It may sound like more work, and it is more than what publicists had to do in the past.  But it’s probably the most effective method I can think of to address numerous audiences for official company news. 

I received over 300 Press Releases in the two weeks prior to CES. I read less than 10.  My fault for missing some cool news.  Their fault for missing me as a reader.

On the morning I flew out to Vegas for CES 2007, I ran into Team Engadget (plus a little Team CNet) in SFO. On the afternoon as I was leaving Vegas, while saying goodbye to the good folks at WowWee, I ran into Team Engadget. Is it fate? Destiny? Sheer coincidence?

Probably coincidence.

After we clearly established which of our “competing blogs” had the better CES coverage, I put Peter and Ryan on the spot with a few questions of their thoughts on what they had seen at CES. I think we have a clip… clip? Is there a clip? AH, yes.

If you are a long-time reader of mine, you’ve probably noticed a ridiculous upswing in content this week.  If, on the other hand, you are new to the LD, you probably think I’m one of the more prolific bloggers around. 

The simple truth of it is: I captured a ton of content at CES this year, just didn’t get to upload it until after I returned.  Not only that, I didn’t want to blast it all in one day, so I’ve spaced it out for the past few days.  I think it comes to an end tomorrowish.  That said, while I appreciate the ridiculously rapid pace at which the blogosphere addresses news and moves on to the next topic, I think the year’s biggest consumer technology event deserves a few extra days worth of coverage.  And if that means I blog alone on the topic, well, it won’t be the first time!

Also, you’ve probably noticed a bunch of videos and many of you may be thinking “video? cool, but I don’t have the time this moment, I’ll just watch it later.”  Have no fear, the videos are mostly 1 minute long, some of them are… 2!  Yup, nice, bite-size content, perfect for that time while sending/receiving email in the mornings…