So Proud Of My New Tumblr Theme

Image via CrunchBaseI installed a new theme for my Tumblr blog a few days back, and it has been such a pleasant experience. You should go check it out.

I seem to have a thing for the color black. I really like the color. The color black to me feels like is inclusive of all colors. There is this inner glow to the color.

My Tumblr Just Got An Upgrade
David Karp: Tumblr Or Hipstr

I am not black, so it can't be a black pride thing. I am not white, so it can't be a remnant guilt over slavery and segregation thing. People who know me know I am very, very political. But I'd like to believe for me it really is about the color. I really like the color.

My Tumblr Just Got An Upgrade

I signed up for Tumblr as soon as it came out. Because I read about it in the news. Then I forgot about it. During Social Media Week last year (Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever) I attended a panel at JP Morgan, and I put a question to a panelist: Casey Culture. I said I was already on all sorts of social media platforms. Do I still need to be on Tumblr? She reasoned yes. So I became active on Tumblr. But it was a slow start. Then I came across a list by David Noel months later. He had listed the top tech entrepreneurs and VCs on Tumblr. I ended up following the entire list. Then it started making sense to visit Tumblr often.

My Tumblog

I mostly just reblog on Tumblr, and do I! My Blogger blogs are where my primary blogging happens. Pretty much everything I can do on Tumblr, I can do on Blogger as well. I like the idea of playing with some basic code. On Tumblr the editor in me comes out. You follow me and that is as good as following everyone I follow. That is the proposition.

I visit Tumblr near daily. And I spend a good chunk of time each visit, at least 30 minutes.

Gender And The Wilson Household

Cover of John LennonOne thing I appreciate about the Fred Wilson family is that all of them blog. I really, really like that. It is not like they are odd, and I salivate for juicy details - although, as for some of Joanne's food posts. None of that. They are very normal as people. I have not met the kids (and that's fine with me), but I have met Fred and Joanne. I do visit Fred's blog near daily. The guy just recently got called officially the top VC in the world for the kind of return he has shown for the money he has raised. But I have followed him at his blog for two years before that admiring his excellence, and the quality of his mind. He is also just a good person. I have blogged about him a few times. More than a few times.

I have reblogged their three children on Tumblr multiple times. I have taken pleasure.

This crew is like the First Family of the NY tech ecosystem. And they are accessible. One day, some day, I am going to ask for Joanne Wilson's autograph.

One thing the Wilson couple talk frankly about is gender and gender roles. And I really, really appreciate that. We might or might not disagree, but I get suspicious of people who simply don't believe in bringing it up as a topic of conversation.

David Karp: Tumblr Or Hipstr

Some people in the media have been calling David Karp a hipster. I don't know about that. I know him to be a Tumblr. Or, rather, The Tumblr. But I don't know about hipster. I just don't know the guy. Never met him. None of that good stuff.

This Week In Venture Capital: Gotham Gal

I have had one very brief conversation with the Gotham Gal and she blew me out of the water. I do read her husband's blog near daily. And I do follow her daughters on Tumblr. Almost every time I see something from them, I tend to reblog it. This crew is good.

The Gotham Gal
The Wilsons Were In Cairo Recently

Fred Wilson: Mark Suster Interviews The Gotham Gal

Anthony De Rosa

I did two great events earlier in the evening, but the best part was walking from the first to the second with Anthony De Rosa, known as soupsoup on Tumblr.

Why Raissa Nebie Loves Tumblr

Zaho: Kif'n'dir
P-Square: E No Easy
Technology And Social Justice

Tumblr Explore

Image by Julia Roy via FlickrThe new Explore feature on Tumblr has been a major time suck. A few days back I started following the tags animals, landscape and tech. Major time suck. So much so I started to ignore the 100 or so people I have been following on Tumblr.

David Noel created a list of techies and VCs a long time ago, and I think I ended up following pretty much everyone on the list. That is what got me started on Tumblr in the first place.

Like David Noel?

Today I started following the tag food, Amy Cao of FoodSpotting is the Top Editor. It's amazing what pictures of food can do to you. No, not make you hungry, that is not what I had in mind. It is the aesthetics of the appreciation.

Like David Noel?

Twitter thinks I am like David Noel? Why would Twitter think that? I'd not have thought that myself.

Just Found Out Mike Hudack Is Also A High School Dropout

Dropping out of high school is obviously not enough. You also have to go ahead and create a Blip.TV or, in David Karp's case, a Tumblr. But I just now found out Mike Hudack is a high school dropout. Wow.

I knew the name for a while. And I had followed him on Tumblr a while. I had seen him in a video online, he was on some kind of a panel. He came across as a man to watch. There is this raw intensity an entrepreneur throws out like a halo. This guy definitely had it.

Union Square Ventures: You Love Me, You Love Me Not

Image via CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBaseUnion Square Ventures has an impressive portfolio. If you are fascinated by web tech like I am, you would be impressed by what they got. They are into Twitter, FourSquare, Zynga. USV constantly looks for companies that will perhaps come up with the next big thing in tech.

With my FinTech startup, I have made it absolutely clear we are not trying to come up with the next big thing in tech. We are not a web tech startup. Instead we will constantly be surveying the scene for new developments in tech to see what we can put to the service of microfinance.

That would be a good reason for USV to not come for us.

To: CDO Sterne (2)

To: CDO Sterne
Third World Guy
Rachel Sterne: CDO

Oh Ms. Sterne. If you will please excuse me. I totally misunderstood your new job title. Please ignore my last letter. It is called growing up in Nepal during the days of absolute monarchy.

Let me take another crack at the situation. I think this is about social media. I visited the Quora page to make sure.

The Best Way To Deal With Venture Capitalists

Image via WikipediaVCs are money people. And many entrepreneurs fall for that stereotype. VCs are not rich people - well, many are - but my point is VCs are not big money people who are itching to get rid of the money that is, oh, such a burden on them. VCs are entrepreneurs themselves. They go raise money. They raise money promising to grow that money. The good ones do. The best ones grow the money like money were raining from trees. If you put that first 100K into a company like Google, you see a growth that is better than any winning lottery ticket ever.

There are many, many VCs out there. There are many, many, many would be tech entrepreneurs out there. As an entrepreneur you should not need money. You should be able to generate revenues and profits.

As For Quora: Blogging Still Rules

This is Fred Wilson at Quora. And this is Fred Wilson's blog. Some of you might have visited. I visit near daily. The days I miss - rare - I catch up later.

Now that I am active at Quora, I don't feel like, thank God Fred Wilson is on Quora, now I no longer have to visit his blog.

2011: Quora's Year?

Quora is up to something. I can't ignore it no more.

Education Is Media, Action Is Thought

Watch live streaming video from paleycenter at livestream.com

(Source: AVC)

In this video that I first came across here, and then the money quote - like Fred Wilson might put it - that I came across here first, Fred Wilson says Education is media.

Tumblr Down, Tumblr Up

Image via CrunchBase

Business Insider: TUMBLR IS BACK!: an extended outage that started yesterday.... Tumblr's twitter account says: "The recovering database cluster is online and healthy. We're incrementally opening up access to blogs while monitoring performance."

This downtime was significant because (1) it went on and on and on, it lasted a while and (2) enemies of Tumblr had publicly warned a few weeks back that they would take it down. Right now I don't know if the downtime was due to overuse, or some act of those enemies. I am about to go dig up on the story.

Al Wenger Wants To Learn Scala

And so should you.

I came across this post by Al on Tumblr - my idea of TV - not long back and was the first person to reblog it there. Yes!

It is an honest, relatable, inspiring post. And I said so in a comment.

To those of you who might not know - I do have a global audience - Al Wenger is a top notch VC in New York City.

I promptly created a Scala page. This is still early. I first blogged about Scala back in May, and Google still shows only a handful of websites dedicated to Scala. Wow.

Al, I am with you now.



Wait, did I just say a line from The Godfather?

I could hardly call Al a friend, we have met in person but once. And I am strict about using the family metaphor. Some weirdos in Kentucky spoiled it for me.

Al to me is a VC and a blogger, and that is good enough for me.

One small but not unimportant fact I learned about Al during my one meeting with him is that he is Mayor of some horse place upstate.

How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time

Scala - Wikipedia: Scala stands for "scalable language", signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users..... Scala code can call Java libraries (or .NET libraries in the .NET implementation). ..... Scala's operational characteristics are the same as Java's. .... Scala is a pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an object. .... In April 2009 Twitter announced they had switched large portions of their backend from Ruby to Scala and intended to convert the rest. In addition Foursquare uses Scala and Lift

Related articles by Zemanta

• Martin Odersky Announces Scala Solutions (scalasolutions.com)
• imabonehead: Scala. Bridging The .NET and Java EE Worlds. | Java.net (weblogs.java.net)
• Lift 2.1 ships (liftweb.net)
• The Seductions of Scala (oreilly.com)
• Scala | Java Developer Conference 2010 (jdc2010.egjug.org)
• scala-javautils - GitHub (github.com)
• ScalaCheck (code.google.com)
• imabonehead: Mike Nash's Two Cents Worth " Blog Archive " Scala and Java Together (php.jglobal.com)
• Lil Kim Hits Up La Scala Boutique Opening In Harlem [PHOTOS] (hellobeautiful.com)
• Squeryl: A concise, type-safe Scala ORM and DSL (squeryl.org)

Google TV: Much Talk

I go to Tumblr like some people go to their TV sets. I don't own a TV, never have. I follow about 90 techies on Tumblr. Other than that this blog of mine feeds directly into my Tumblr blog, I mostly just reblog at Tumblr. Following me on Tumblr is as good as following 90 people. I perform an editorial function mostly.

And today there is enormous buzz on Tumblr around Google TV. I have more questions than answers on the topic. I don't fully get it. I have not read up on it much. But the buzz is unavoidable.

I just want faster brodband when it comes to online video. My idea of a TV-internet merger is one where the TV simply disappears. But Google seems to think different.

By the way it was on Tumblr that I came across the Eminem video above. It is a work of art.

Official Google Blog: Here comes Google TV

Related articles by Zemanta

• My Tumblr Style (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Google TV is Here (techie-buzz.com)
• Google TV Looks Like the Real Deal in Bridging the Web-TV Divide [Video] (lifehacker.com)
• Here comes Google TV (Ambarish Kenghe/Google TV Blog) (techmeme.com)
• Google TV Gets Ready for Prime Time (dailyfinance.com)
• Introducing Twitter TV, Courtesy of Google TV (fastcompany.com)
• Media companies warm up to Tumblr (lostremote.com)
• Google TV Website Airing Free Tour (taragana.com)
• Google TV Comes With Twitter, Netflix & More (searchengineland.com)
• Tumblr's Biggest Strength is its Biggest Weakness to Google (soshable.com)

My Tumblr Style

Image via CrunchBase

Blogger remains my social media platform of choice. But since February I have also been a little active on Tumblr. And I have come to appreciate the service. I have never owned a TV set, but Tumblr feels like a nice TV substitute. Tumblr sure is that thing between Twitter and Blogger.

It is amazing to me as to how popular Tumblr is among the members of the tech community. If you wish to meet the members of the Hall of Fame in Tech, go to Tumblr, they are all there. The simplicity is appealing even to the sophisticated.

Early on I decided I was going to use Tumblr primarily to listen. So I consume a lot of content on Tumblr, and I reblog a lot. My Blogger blog feeds into my Tumblr stream, so I am all set. Following me on Tumblr is like following 90 people I follow, on days I visit Tumblr that is. I don't visit every day, but I have started to visit on more days than I used to.

My Tumblr experience went up one notch the day I discovered a list put together by David Noel based out of Germany. The list was populated with tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. I had been on a lookout for something of that sort. And after I started following people on that list, Tumblr became more fun, although I think I would like to weed out some of the people from that list by now. I don't know them, and they don't interest me much.

I end up liking many music recommendations from Fred Wilson, and I end up liking many photos that Nina shares. Those two stand out in the non text department. And the founder of Tumblr, David Karp, himself has one of the best tumblogs out there.

Blogger works just fine for me for sharing text, links, photos and videos. I think I like having to play with some code while I prepare a post at Blogger. I get a kick out of it. I think Blogger's big, blank canvass speaks to my creative instincts. Tumblr is more like, let's turn the TV on.

My Tumblr Page
Tumblr: Casey, Nina, David, Fred

Related articles by Zemanta

• How To Monetize Tumblr? (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Tumblr Topples Typepad (blogherald.com)
• Is Tumblr The Next Big Thing? (techie-buzz.com)
• Newsweek Editor Jumps Ship to New, New Media - Joins Tumblr (readwriteweb.com)