Persistent problems with Yahoo's blogging mechanism - Yahoo! 360 - have meant we have decided to migrate our Web2.0 blog to TypePad, which is where our Enterprise2.0 blog already resides.

The new egoboss Web2.0 blog is:http://egoboss.typepad.com/egoboss_web20/

The corresponding RSS Feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Egoboss_web20

The old Web2.0 blog/archive will remain at: http://360.yahoo.com/carlg

Apologies in advance for any disruption in service, but we are sure the quality of the new feed/blog will make this transition worthwhile. Thank you.

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www.egoboss.com

Updated: Adeo Ressi, the serial entrepreneur behind the venture-capital rating site TheFunded, has been getting a lot of attention for a presentation he gave at Harvard Business School in which he argued that the VC industry is “broken.” His central point is that there are simply too many venture capital funds chasing too few opportunities, with unrealistic expectations. The result, as he notes in one eye-grabbing slide, is that VC returns over the past five years have fallen below the total amount of money invested over that same time period.

It’s certainly the kind of slide that makes you sit up and take notice. But is it evidence that the VC game is kaput? Hardly. Instead, it’s reminiscent of Warren Buffett’s quip about how if he had been at Kitty Hawk he would have shot Orville Wright’s plane out of the air, because the airline industry over the last 100 years has been a net destroyer of capital. While that may be true (I haven’t double-checked Buffett’s numbers), that’s not to say investors haven’t been able to make money throughout that troubled history. To quote another great economic mind, John Maynard Keynes, in the long run we are all dead. In the short run, however, some successes are possible.

Have there been too many funds created, too much money poured into finding the next Facebook, Twitter or YouTube? Undoubtedly. But the VC industry is subject to the same economic forces and laws of supply and demand as any other industry — in other words, if some funds are making money, others will emerge and try to duplicate that success, even if they know the odds are against them. The same dynamic can be seen in plenty of other businesses, including the mining industry: When gold is hot, everyone wants to be (or invest in) a gold miner, even though they all secretly know that too many miners means less gold for everyone.

An industry like that is inevitably going to grow and contract, and now sure feels like a time of contraction. But that doesn’t mean smart VCs can’t prosper by concentrating on what they know, or by staying small enough to get more “home runs,” as angel investor Austin Hill notes in a comment at TechCrunch (disclosure: I know Austin, and consider him a friend). The VC industry isn’t broken any more than any other boom-and-bust industry is broken. It’s likely to go through a restructuring as a result of the current downturn, and some VCs will undoubtedly go out of business, as they should. But there will always be VCs, just as there will always be gold companies — and airlines.

Update from Om: Looks like Darwin is doing his thing. Bloomberg reports that universities and pension fund investors are dumping their stakes in VC funds. “Investors have venture-capital stakes valued at more than $2 billion up for sale, double the $800 million this time last year,” the newswire writes. Everyone including large university endowments are having sleepless nights.

http://gigaom.com/2008/11/14/is-the-vc-model-broken-far-from-it/

Over the weekend, TechCrunch postulated that with a frenzy of election-related activity, Twitter hit its hockey stick moment in late October. The theory goes that Twitter saw a 25 percent increase in U.S. visits from September to October and is thus about to experience the sort of explosive growth that will propel it into mainstream consciousness.

That could well be the case. In the course of researching our new report, "Twitter and the Micromessaging Revolution," we found that Twitter's user base grew more than 500 percent from October 2007 to October 2008. But we were even more interested to discover that the service has enjoyed an usual effect: as more and more people have joined, the percentage of active users has remained constant [updated:] at about 20%. Among active users (those who post at least once a month), approximately 20 percent post daily and about eight percent post more than 100 times a month (not including known bots and feeds). Though web services usually see a drop in the rate of use as lots of tire-kickers come and go, Twitter's steady usage suggests that a jump in visitors during October could correspond to a big increase in regular users.

Yesterday, a Twitterer asked Tim O'Reilly why "Twitter and the Micromessaging Revolution" would be money well spent. Here are ten solid things the report provides (most explained in 140 characters or fewer):

1. Highly readable investigation into why Twitter works--and why it's important

2. Growth statistics from Twitter, synthesized with stories and analysis to give you a comprehensive picture of the Twittersphere

3. Examines the entire micro-messaging ecosystem, including the various players, where Twitter fits and some new developments

4. Clever and useful tips on how to integrate Twitter into your business, backed up by stories about how others are using Twitter successfully

5. Why follower counts may not be the best way to measure Twitter influence, and an alternate model, analogous to Google Page Rank, for identifying influential users

6. Why and how Twitter's loose social graph and the default public nature of Twittering make for a remarkably intuitive and interesting social network

7. Exclusive interviews with Twitter founders and leading users

8. Gentle introduction to using Twitter for the newbie

9. Twitter business models and why Twitter data is important

10. Dozens of links to key resources and examples

We've also created a free webcast that pulls from the report's Twitter Primer to give you an introductory overview of the service. (The presentation also has tips and examples not included in the report.) Nearly 450 people watched when we broadcast it live last week, and more than 1,800 have viewed it since we posted it to YouTube four days ago. Perhaps we've hit our webcast hockey stick moment?

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/twitters-hockey-stick-moment.html