The Outsidr

By now you must have read about the widely-covered TechCrunch / Last.fm fiasco. To recap very, very quickly: TechCrunch posted what turned out to be a completely unsubstantiated rumor that Last.fm had handed sensitive user data over to the RIAA, Last.fm said it was completely false several times, Ars Technica revealed that not even the RIAA knew what TechCrunch was talking about and then Last.fm clarified the situation one last time in a blog post entitled, “Techcrunch are full of shit”. Zoinks.

To be fair, I can definitely empathize with Erick Schonfeld’s situation. I am a tech blogger and I know what kind of pressure bloggers can be under to be the first to cover an exclusive scoop. At the same time, when dealing with a sensitive topic that essentially accuses a company of violating the trust of its users, one must exercise some restraint. Schonfled did the right thing by reaching out for comment and Last.fm did the wrong thing by responding with PResque bullshit: “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.”

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Am I the only one sick of seeing all of this Jim Goldman-bashing? He’s part of mainstream media, he got a story wrong and he tried to cover his ass. How is this something new? Maybe the fact that bloggers have no accountability is what draws so many to this story. Or perhaps it’s the fact that most of the bloggers covering Goldman’s bungle reported his initial claim as gospel and discounted Gizmodo’s scoop as a result…

Whatever the case, enough. Stop. Please. I’m a big fan of several of the blogs currently trying to cover their own asses by running several Goldman-bashing stories, sometimes reaching into the double-digits. Please keep me as a fan and get over it.

The race is a bit too close to call at this point but if I was a betting man, my money might just be on “Social Media” to take the title of Most Painfully and Annoyingly Overused Term on the Internet, 2008. Sure it has some stiff competition with the likes of “I can haz”, “kitten”, “lol”, “bff” and any word with a “z” vexatiously slapped on at the end, but I think social media is positioned to make a huge run at the gold in the final months of this turbulent year. Experts overuse it, self-proclaimed experts overuse it, PR people overuse it, marketing people overuse it, bloggers overuse it… A word of warning: The next time someone says “social media” to me, I can haz to smash your kittenz and lolz – or something like that.

If you follow any VC blogs then the odds are just about 100% you have read several posts that respond to the ever-present question, “how do I connect with VCs to pitch them?” The answer is always the same; you can try to do this and you can try to do that but the only real way for a VC to take you seriously is through an introduction. In other words, for a real shot at pitching a VC you need to know a guy who knows a guy.

Fair enough, right? The old saying goes, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” In business, those with the ability to network and effectively sell themselves will excel 99 out of 100 times. In the world of Web however, this model is very broken in my opinion.

The Internet is currently traveling down a very bad road and VC money is a big part of the problem. Just as blogging exploded a while back and we now see 175,000 new blogs created every day, so too are the broader realms of social-focus and web applications exploding. Blogging has now become diluted to the max. The big boys got big by networking (link exchanges) and the little guys disappear into the vast wasteland that is the blogosphere. I can promise you that you have not found (and likely will never find) most of the blogs that have the potential to be among your favorites.

A big part of the problem in my humble opinion, is the system by which VCs invest in internet startups.

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A follow up to Sunday’s post.

It looks like the big guys aren’t the only ones feeling the wrath of the RIAA these days, and it’s only bound to get worse. Muxtape, a service that allows users to upload music from their personal libraries to create an online mixtape, currently services less than 90,000 unique visitors per month according to Compete. That won’t keep it under the RIAA’s radar it would appear, as the service went down yesterday with the note “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA” on its homepage. A post on the Muxtape blog provides the following message:

No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.

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