Last week I wrote about FriendFeed and why I think there are good and bad parts of the service. Today NYC venture capitalist Fred Wilson posted an article which is worth reading where he basically agrees with me regarding the centralization of the conversation input.

I’ve put together the video below to go over my thoughts on the topic. The bottom line is that there’s no reason why FriendFeed can’t aggregate the comments from all of the sources and then allow the conversation to remain on the content creator’s location. It doesn’t matter if it’s photos, videos, text, audio, whatever, the conversation should be "centralized in, decentralized out." Will this work in 100% of the scenarios? Of course not but it will work in more than any other and probably 90%+ and is worth discussing. This model doesn’t take any additional time over commenting in FriendFeed. Rather than go on here, please view the video.

Most importantly it allows everyone to participate in the entire conversation and when that happens, we all win.

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Why all the lists heading into 2008? Well, laziness. That, and the urge to reflect on the year gone by. No, mostly laziness. And in that spirit, we present you Valleywag’s top 10 list of top 10 lists. Oh yeah — our lazy, it’s meta.

The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists
• 10. Wired’s “The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007” makes our list because it points out why everyone wants an iPhone. Apple’s genius ads.
• 9.The New York Times’ “Buzzwords 2007” can has number 9.
  
  
• 8. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2008 makes our list because we’re so handy with their charts.
  
  
• 7. Tumblr founder David Karp’s 2008 Tech Predictions.
  

  Google will launch the Web Service competitors GStorage, GCompute, and GAmazonFlexiblePaymentService.

• 6.Your Best Shot 2007 Samplr, collected by Flickr, features the most interestingness of any list in our top ten.
  
  
• 5.Silicon Alley VC blogger Fred Wilson sure can pick ‘em. No, not startups. Rock bands. Like the ones in his Top Ten Records 2007.
  function streampadPop(l,n){window.open(”http://flash.streampad.com/playerL.swf?autostart=yes&list=”+l+”&songNumber=”+n, “Streampad”,”toolbar=no,width=200,height=300,resizable=yes”);}
  
• 4.The second Wired entry — out of nearly a dozen folks, so there’s real competition here! — to make our list has to be The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 because it reviews how we did playing God last year.
  

  Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria
  Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

• 3.We’re not going to pretend we understand the Large Hadron Collider, which comes online in 2008, according to Ars Technica’spredictions for 2008. “The Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, and dark matter candidates all beckon,” Chris Lee writes. We’ll just show you this neat video.
  newVideoPlayer(”Ars_LHC.flv”, 475, 376);
  

• 2.Tech CEOs say the darndest things, don’t they? Like remember when Zuck said media changes every 100 years? Wired’s editors do, and they bring it all back in their 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards.
  

  There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get. — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, which is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined.

• 1. How’s this for meta? We’re going to declare Valleywag’s own “The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists” the winner. Meta FTW!

(Photo by andrer69)

newVideoPlayer(”Wilson_Values_Facebook.flv”, 475, 376);
BusinessWeek roped VC blogger Fred Wilson into putting a number on Facebook. “If I had to buy Facebook right now, I think $5 billion to $7 billion would be the right price.” If I had to buy Facebook right now, I’d need more than $12 a post. And goodnight! Tip your waitresses.

As we previously reported, Neil Budde, the founding editor of WSJ.com recruited to run Yahoo News three years ago, plans to leave the company. This from PaidContent, the same source which had earlier scoffed at the rumor. Reportedly, new Yahoo media chief Scott Moore never made room for Budde in his new organizational chart. What, Scott Moore pushing out a highly respected underling? Never heard that one before.

Source:Valleywag

Silicon Alley Insider posted this shot, taken at Curbed’s holiday party last night in New York. Sure, Wilson puts a kind, fatherly face on his blog. But as it would be with any VC worth his limited partners’ salt, we’re sure more than a few of Wilson’s fundees have felt like that bull from time to time. Yeehaw!

Venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson has a lot to be thankful for, he tells us. “Three awesome kids,” “a work life that is stimulating,” and, of course, “a wife who loves me even though at times she threatens to kill me.” If the image Wilson embedded with his post is any hint, it seems he might be having a little trouble pulling himself away from his laptop this holiday. Let’s all take Mrs. Wilson’s advice this holiday weekend, shall we?

New York venture capitalist Fred Wilson admits it. It’s not him, it’s you. The guy has to tell you needy entrepreneurs out there “no” a lot. And he’s getting better at it. Typically all it takes is a quick email reply along the lines of “it doesn’t fit into our investment strategy” or “we don’t invest in content businesses” or “it’s too early stage” or “it’s too late stage”. But sometimes you people get somehow get your piss-poor business plans past the front door. That’s when Wilson gets to tell you “no” to your face and the fun starts.

Sometimes it’s not even the plan that yields a negative result. Sometimes its you. And Wilson says he’s going to let you know.

What do you say if the reason you don’t want to invest is you don’t have confidence in the person running the company (the person you are saying no to in most cases)? Do you tell them that? Or do you make up some other reason?

I’ve tried every way to say no and my belief is the truth, no holds barred, is the best approach. If you don’t think the entrepreneur can run the business, tell them that. If you think the market is too small, tell them that. If you think the competition is too tough, tell them that. Many entrepreneurs will take a “shoot the messenger” approach and be annoyed or upset with you. But that is vastly preferable to blowing someone off with a “my partners weren’t into it” or “we just couldn’t get there”.

(Photo by Ben Scicluna)

Know those phantom vibrations that make you check your phone even when no one’s calling? Venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who competed in a Blackberry race on video early this year for the stock show Wallstrip, tells CNN that he gets them, but in a way that makes him more important than you. “Of course I get them. I’ve been getting them for over 10 years since I started with the pager-style BlackBerry.”

Source:Valleywag

Is the Internet boring? Well, generally speaking, duh. Except, of course, when blogging luminaries get into a scrap over whether it is. Billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban started things a month ago when, in an offhand sentence, he declared the Internet “dead as a growth platform” because of a stagnation in the speed of home broadband connections. He reiterated his comments to Portfolio.com, and then repeated them on his blog. Say something often enough, and people start to notice. People like Web 2.0 venture capitalist Fred Wilson. A classic blogfight — observing the three rules of the genre — ensued.

First, a recap of Cuban’s actual argument — what people actually said being one of those nuances that’s lost in a blogfight:

We have reached a point of diminishing returns with today’s internet. The speed of broadband to your home won’t increase much more in the next five years than it has in the last five years. That is not enough to work as a platform for new levels of applications that will require much, much higher levels of bandwidth.

Which brings us to the first rule of a blogfight: Change the subject. Don’t respond to your opponent’s actual point. Instead, respond to the headline, or a phrase lifted out of context, as an excuse to tout your personal brand and projects you’re involved in. In this case, Cuban provided perfect fodder in “The Internet is dead and boring.” Wilson’s response:

My delicious toolbar records my most visited web services. Typepad, Google Finance, Techmeme, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, hypemachine, yottamusic. I did not use one of those services 5 years ago. Not one of them!

In other words, Wilson, an investor in Del.icio.us and Twitter, is an Internet hipster, while Cuban’s an aging Web 1.0 fuddy-duddy.

Which brings us to our next rule of the blogfight: Make it personal. Wilson writes:

Clearly Mark’s not using the Internet the way I am.

Stung by the suggestion that he lacks early-adopter cool, Cuban was forced into a long disquisition defending his Web cred, including the uncomfortable admission that he stays up late on Saturday nights reading Facebook API documentation.

And then Cuban wraps up with the third rule of the blogfight: Assert superior knowledge. In this case, Cuban taunts Wilson, and his audience, with the size of his hidden Internet-startup portfolio:

I have a ton of Internet investments that you don’t and won’t know about.

So there you have it. The three rules of the blogfight: Change the subject, make it personal, and assert superior knowledge. There are actually more rules, but I’m not going to tell them to you, because I find your stance on net neutrality to be annoying.

I’ve been thinking, obsessively, about the revelation Google CEO Eric Schmidt made in last week’s earnings call that his company had overhired. Even more curiously, Schmidt defended the hiring binge, expressing his delight in the quality of the people Google’s overeager recruiters had brought on board.

If the new guys are so great, though, why stop hiring? Here’s a radical idea: Keep on adding new employees, but start ripping out some of the dead wood that’s accumulated at the world’s most adjective-ridden company.

And with that, I present “Toogle Many Googlers!”, a series in which I nominate Googlers who need to be given a gentle push out of the Googleplex. Read on for the first batch of names. Got a nomination? Send it in, preferably with a pic of the victim.

Chris Sacca Google’s “head of special initiatives,” with an inflated title and an inflated ego, specializes in hot-air projects guaranteed never to go anywhere, and hence, never require any real work on his part. If it weren’t for the special halo of protection draped on his shoulders by CEO Eric Schmidt, or so we hear, Sacca would have been given the sack long ago. No time like the present! Congratulations, Chris Sacca: You’re the first person Valleywag nominates as one Googler toogle many!

He’s already said he’s got the world’s easiest job. So why not just ease David Lawee right on out of it? With no rea