I am done with blogging personally.  A little over two years later, It no longer serves the purposes outlined above, and even beyond that I find writing for an open audience is actually exceedingly disingenuous if not straight hypocritical given my strong belief in the value of “information”.

Switching to a premium subscription newsletter makes sense to me because:

so, yes – the old is new again.  I am starting a paid newsletter… and only a small fraction of the rationale is irony.  from now on the commentary that used to find a home here will be distributed to your inbox.  you can sign up at http://letter.ly/lessin and it will cost $1.99 a month…. and of course, if you want to sell your own newsletter – letter.ly is set up for that, because “why build one when you can build two for twice the price”.
, nice experiment, I’ll like to join but not sure if you pln to allow custom domains on the service.

the question is, after a decade of trial, is there finally usable sample/insight in the noise?  Are we finally getting to the point where ‘location’ is both as ubiquitous and as usable as timestamps? 

last weekend my girlfriend and I were trying to figure out what to do on a sunday afternoon, and out of that I was pushed back to looking at my personal foursquare data-set for insights.  this is some of the stuff I found using the 27K check-ins logged by a few hundred NYC forusquare ‘friends’ from 2/8/2010 to 5/15/2010 (I use CSVemail.com + email – the most basic API – to continuously log everything in an easy to manipulate format) — I was going to use the 5M checkins logged in socialgreat, but I didn’t feel like opening anything more serious than excel, and heck – 27K data-points from early adopting new yorkers seems like a good start to me… 

checkins per day in the set


Checkins per hour in the set of my ‘friends’

Checkins per day per person distribution

Stuff I learned from my cut of 27K checkins at 6.7K locations:
1.  the top 5% of my friends drive 25% of all checkins (10% -> 38%)
2.  the top 1% of locations drive 20% of all checkins (5% -> 43%)

People who get up early
(check in highest % of the time between 5 and 9am)
1.  Andy Weissman
2.  Darren Herman
3.  Blake Robinson
4.  Fred Wilson
5.  Jon Steinberg
6.  Roger Ehrenberg
7.  Jim Moran

People who party late
(check in highest % of the time 10pm – 5am)
1.  Andrew Stillman
2.  James Nord
3.  Grellan Harty
4.  Ken Zamkow
5.  Drew Grant
6.  Tina Hui
7.  Josh Newman

Popular early morning spots
1.  Naples 45
2.  Cafe Bacio
3.  Mendez Boxing
4.  Hospital for Joint Diseases
5.  Carrot Creative
6.  Tony Dapolito Recreation Center
7.  Irving Farm
8.  9th Stree Espresso

Popular late night spots
1.  The Wiskey Ward
2.  Planet Rose
3.  The Commodore
4.  Bleecker Street Pizza
5.  Home Sweet Home
6.  Maracuja
7.  Tappan Zee Bridge
8.  Amsterdam Billards and Bar

Overall if I gut check this, some of it feels right — like the ‘early riser’ list — those are definitely the ‘up and at them folk I would think of in the NYC tech scene that use foursquare… others I am just not hip enough to know about…

but the point (other than that data is fun) — looks like there is some useable data in there…  soon enough, location will be every bit as tied to status/sentiment/etc as time is now, and the more dimensions the better in our information. 

I will be playing with more location data and publishing findings at http://letter.ly/modestproposals in the coming weeks

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in my 2020 predictions one of my posits was that the next decade would see a significant power swing back towards content creators and away from the primacy of distribution/filters.

We are only a few months in to the year, but I am starting to feel more and more confident about my call.  Since Jan 1 we have already seen several instances where content creators/owners (fox, book publishers) beat back content distribution & filters (time warner cable, amazon kindle), and I expect these early examples to become more and more frequent this year and this decade.
Focusing just on Entertainment Content and leaving Information Content for another day – while it might appear that this shift back towards Content owners is a meaningful reversal of the recent trend, I think that there is a relatively easy way to explain how this shift fits on the natural continuum of development.

Value is a function of scarcity and where once content was relatively abundant and competitive and filtering/distribution was scarce, now filtering/distribution is just as abundant and competitive as content creation/ownership itself.  The technology that gave distribution companies increased leverage over the last years has advanced to the point that it is actually flattening their overall advantage as they compete themselves higher and higher up the content curve towards scarce and therefore highly valuable content.  We are moving away from a period where tech had the upper hand back towards a much more balanced and competitive market.

Here is my framework for why this is happening:

don’t get me wrong — it is still very hard to build great filtering systems, (just as it is very hard to produce great content), and this is an argument about the relative balance of power — not the absolute balance of power.

Technology/filtering is going to still be central to the equation.  The key to the above framework, however, is that on a relative basis the economic dominance of technology/filtering over content is facing a cycle in which it will get weaker. 
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option 1:  – I want to see where the crowd is… then I want to find ‘margin’ – which is when a venue been mis-priced… and is less busy than it should be.  So, if a place is hot on fridays, I want to go there monday. (perhaps a really good restaurant displays these properties)

option 2:  – I want to see where the crowd is… then I want to go there – meaning, the value of the place is it’s crowd. (perhaps a night club displays these properties – so do social networks)

option 1 applies when the resource of a place is scarce and desirable.  Option 2 occurs when the resources of a place are infinite and the thing that is desirable is the community…  A deserted beach vs. Cancun.  These options are both valid, and the general construct applies across a whole bunch of layers….  the scarcity dynamics of option 1 remind me of the value of information, the compounding value of the crowd option 2, feels a lot like the dynamics that drive entertainment.  — either way, tendency is towards zero margin.

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I have found that a lot of people take issue with this premise.  I am currently wondering if the conversion between social and physical capital is going to become more accepted / legitimate with greater transparency.  I think it will…

the other day Kortina used venmo.com to charge me $2.00 for being late to meet him for coffee. 

– I also think that the exchange rate is changing dramatically as social capital’s value relative to physical capital grows (for another time).

, As always, interesting point Sam. My two cents – it seems to me more intuitive and comfortable for most people to use social capital to gain physical capital than the reverse (even if they don’t describe it as such). The Avon/CutCo/Jewelry party industry is basically built on the premise of turning social capital into physical capital, however I struggle to think of non-romantic (important exception) common and socially acceptable ways to turn physical capital into social capital. Throwing parties, buying beers, etc is the obvious one I suppose, however I doubt to what degree to buys “real” social capital, perhaps only the opportunity to acquire social capital?

Every few months we hit a new strand/clear channel and the fidelity is great for a little bit, and then we overshoot/undershoot and have to hunt for a clear channel again.

why?  because the medium is the message…. and the mediums keep changing.  

1.  For a while in late 2008 I feel like I was tuned in on twitter with high velocity of relatively high value communication… there was a lot of margin in the format and the lines were clear.  Since then, twitter while still great, has felt a lot more noisy/jammed.

2.  Facebook has felt the same through several cycles of fidelity and loss, but that is because unlike twitter, they have an ‘auto-tune’ function in the form of news-feed.  you aren’t turning the dial, they are. 

, I’m finding that the signal to noise ratio is better on Twitter than Facebook… While I’ve blocked almost every application in FB, I still get way more noise… Twitter allows me to filter the noise slightly better, with it not focusing on friendships. It’s easier to unfollow in Twitter than it is to unfriend in FB.

Fort Worth Jake

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, A nice utility man. Good stuff. @gbattle