A VC — I was emailing with a friend of mine yesterday who is a 30 year veteran of silicon valley. He'd written a post that was quite positive about the iPad. I sent him my post which wasn't so positive. We had a good discussion. Which ended with my friend making this point...

A VC — John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks, parent company to bit.ly, twitterfeed, tweetdeck, chartbeat, and many other interesting web services, posted yesterday on "Ongoing tracking of the real time web..." Through these various Betaworks companies, John and the team have access to a tremendous amount of data and if you are interested in this subject, you really should read John's post. I develop many of my theses based on what I see happening on this blog. And I've been seeing something on this blog that has gotten my attention...

A VC — That's a controversial post headline and I don't mean that social will always beat search, but there's a rising chorus out there about "content farms" and search optimized content creation that is worth touching on. Arrington started it when he posted about "the end of hand crafted content". Richard MacManus penned a similar post the same day called "Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs, and Google should be worried". And over the weekend, Paul Kedrosky addressed the issue of search spam in his quest to find the perfect dishwasher...

Let's say you want to track how something you are working on is doing. You can look at it's web traffic on comScore, Compete, Quantcast, Alexa, etc. You can check out how it is doing on Google Trends. But if you want to do something a bit more sophisticated, you might want to try Trendrr. Trendrr is a free service (for a limited amount of data tracking) that let's you track keywords across multiple data sets. Here's a screen shot of the basic service which shows how it works...

Last week Seth Goldstein's company Social Media put on a social media bootcamp for marketers and he asked John Borthwick and I to start the day off with a panel discussion around social media. During that discussion, we got to talking about what's next in social media. I suggested that the "next layer of the stack" will be services built on top of the primary social media channels. Here's a short video clip that captures the thought...

The next layer on the stack... from Social Media on Vimeo.