Aaron Cohen INC@NYU

Our logo drawn in chalk for last night’s innagural episode...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:21:16 -0400

Our logo drawn in chalk for last night’s innagural episode of Inside the Internet Garage with @karaswisher and @waltmossberg. video moves to post production now.

Jay Walker Founder of Priceline comes to NYU

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:02:00 -0400

Limited tickets are available.

I’m very happy to announce first episode of my first...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:23:00 -0400

I’m very happy to announce first episode of my first television/web show underwritten by New York University.

"A moment from David Kirkpatricks’ The Facebook Effect that made me think about Trayvon..."

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:07:00 -0400

“

A moment from David Kirkpatricks’ The Facebook Effect that made me think about Trayvon Martin.

“Sean Parker was stressed out. It was a hot afternoon in Palo Alto, and he hated doing physical work. But his lease was up and he was short on cash. So here he was in June 2004 on the sidewalk in front of his girlfriend’s family’s house, unloading boxes from his car. It was, admittedly, a svelte vehicle—a white BMW 5-series he’d bought when times were flush. Parker too was a bit svelte. His curly blond hair was stylishly long. The slim twenty-four-year-old wore a fashionable and pricey T-shirt, which on this day was getting sweaty. When he noticed a group of boys heading toward him he stiffened…. His boxes contained expensive computer equipment. He didn’t like the look of these kids — all wearing sweatshirts with hoods up despite the heat. The shortest one walked right up and said, Parker!”

”

- The hoodied boys turned out to be Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskowitz and some interns.

Guess I’ll never look at a hoodie the same way again.

Tumblr's Historical Moment and the Rise of Media Networking

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:55:00 -0400

David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, dropped by NYU to chat with the students of Rise of Interent Media on Tuesday Night. He and his new editor-in-chief Christopher Mohney spoke for 75 minutes about their backgrounds and the past/present/future of the 95-person startup.

David’s visit catalyzed this essay — an attempt to define the epochs of digital social media.

For David, tumblr exists to enable people to share, test, and promote their creativity. This output then allows communities to form. Democratizing creativity is one cornerstone of the social media revolution, but Tumblr has formed thousands of communities and connected people with one-to-one and one-to-many features. Tracing the arc of social media shows that human communication, creative expression, and community organization are three of the pillars of this perpetually evolving and inchoate new medium.

BBS

Steward Brand first popularized the notion of a digital community with the formation of The WELL a dial-up BBS system that united a nascent group technologically engaged intellectuals that eventually became crucial to the formation of TED and other communities. Importantly, text was the dominant creative medium of The WELL. The Well was not open to all. It was member-based and the culture of the service was fairly highbrow. The mainstream had not arrived.

Online Service Providers (OSP)

AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve advanced the digital community movement by building more robust feature sets that enabled chat, instant messaging, and community organizing. Neither creativity nor self-expression awere hallmarks of the OSPs. Again text played a really significant role in how people communicated and branded themselves. Individual users found ways of making ASCII art or using unusual spellings to express individuality. OSPs were “walled garden”s and it took years (1996) before they provided browsing capability to join the early Web. OSPs sacrified greatly for ease-of-use — especially America Online. Traditionally, ease of use and creative personal expression are competing forces. Think about the vanilla, simple designs of Yahoo or Google vs. the freedom of MySpace, Xanga, or even DeviantArt.

When the graphical browser came to market in 93-4 community formation shifted to the Web and several new categories of services emerged.

Homepage Builders

GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, and The Globe all shared this category. Enormous creative energy flowed through these services. Clearly these services were an ancestor of Tumblr, but navigating them and finding like minded people was a challenge. These companies survived as long as they did because web surfing had grown in popularity. Our expectations of search were not high, so we browsed more.

Blogging

Blogging emerged and prose again became the dominant medium, but with the ability to add graphical components and customization. The key platforms of the era — Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xanga — actually differentiated in what tools and customization methods were made available to their users. In Xanga, particularly, I see the roots of tumblr.

Social Networking

With the birth of social networking, the ability to connect with other people on the web became a mainstream, global phenomena. Regional and philosophical product philosphies emerged from the outset. Friendster offered no customization with a heavy emphasis on connecting to people you know. After failing to scale, Friendster gave way to MySpace.

Having begun as a beautiful people and cool music site, MySpace grew to prominence with an unlimited ability to customize profiles. These profiles became the new homepage and were very reminicisent of the homepage builders but where GeoCities had felt like an isolated suburban neighborhood, MySpace was clearly the college dorm or high school kegger. Friends lists were displayed prominently and leaving notes for friends was the most important feature on the site.

The early growth of YouTube and Photobucket was heavily driven by their respective MySpace strategies. These symbiotic companies popularized the use of embed codes that when taken together with a panoply of profile editors and multimedia tools created the first Social Media ecosystem or platform. I described MySpace as a planet and YouTube as a moon, but a more sensible industry metaphor prevailed: network and widget.

For whatever reasons (poor performance, bad design etc, Newscorp’s acqusiiton), MySpace gave way to Facebook. Widgets disappeared when Facebook launched the Facebook Platform with innaugural apps from Slide and Rockyou like Superpoke and Top Friends. Zynga introduced games as part of a limited group of early facebook partners and never looked back. Apps remain today’s semantic standard.

As Facebook approaches 1bn users, Social Networking has evolved. Today creativity, social expression, and social sharing have given way to a new phase that we might call media networking.

Media Networking.

7 years ago, David Karp used 5 different companies to share his media. His hacked together personal toolkit synthesized these disaggregated apps into a common set of features. Here’s what the media networking landscape looked like in 2005.

PHOTOS: Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, Fotlog, ImageShack and many more.
VIDEO: YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe,VIMEO and many more
BLOGGING: Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga and many more.

According to his talk on Tuesday evening, this personal hack was the genesis of Tumblr.

Today tumblr has 50 million blogs and just reached 20 billion posts. Photos, text, links, audio and video are all shared to varying degrees. Reblogging was a breakthrough feature (that is currently getting imitated around the web). First-to-market, differntiated, and massively adopted features matter. They are vital to the first phases of accelerated growth. Think Checkins on Fourquare or Pins on Pinterest. Remember, Flickr invented or, at minimum, popularized tagging. YouTube popularized embed codes.

Tumblr deserves considerable credit for integrating these features and obsessing about ease-of-use. Companies that delivered best-in-class ease-of-use (AOL, Yahoo, Google, Facebook„ YouTube) often surge to positions of leadership even if they are not first-to-market.

When entrepreneurs create simple, widely adopted media sharing tools the ecosystem can be disrupted and reconstituted. Entrants with differentiated propositions abound. Twitter enables personal broadcast and professional syndication. Pinterest is a media network for curating and collecting content. Instagram borrowed from Adobe (creativity) to create another enormous new photography service. Path? a mobile family oriented tumblr. Draw Something is poised to become the biggest game in IOS history, but I locate it in the media networking revolution. People are sharing their completed drawings all over the social web. Players don’t do this with Angry Birds.

Tumblr makes creative expression simple for everybody. Tumblr’s integration of this simple feature set and its carefully cultivated community ethos that values the output more than the creator is unique and historically significant. Yet, for every tumblr there is a MySpace and for every Instagram there is a flickr. Perhaps the greatest threat to tumblr’s business is from the very creativity that they have manifested.

Could Social Media’s lasting contribution be that media companies themselves become ephemeral?

A Profound moment for both companies.

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:26:02 -0400

A Profound moment for both companies.

innonate: atari: I’ve been a Tumblr user for just under 4...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:05:54 -0400

innonate:

atari:

I’ve been a Tumblr user for just under 4 years. Personally, it’s one of the best blogging platforms around, having solved the problems associated with services like blogspot or self hosting. This is coming from someone who started with greymatter in 1999.

Of course with a service like Tumblr, there are compromises. And that’s part of its charm: with less there is more. And though Karp has moved from unknown, to little-shit, and currently media darling, Tumblr still keeps most of its rakish “for you” community spirit.

So with this duality I am disappointed to see that Tumblr is is pulling my atari.tumblr.com subdomain and handing it over to Atari™ as part of a mostly tepid request on Atari’s part. Rather than educate Atari on it’s custom domain name services and maybe suggest tumblr.atari.com, it is quick to service brands no matter how far their fall from grace. Legally, my site does not borrow on the Atari brand or content so I’m not acting in bad faith. But unlike owning a top level domain name, Tumblr (not the user) owns the subdomain so ultimately it’s their decision. And since they probably don’t want to defend subdomains on the behalf of the non-trademark holder, the choice is pretty clear.

To a point, who cares? I’ll just get another sub-domain and have a silly story to tell over drinks right? So yes, it doesn’t really matter.

But in the micro-context of web communities, it does.

Tumblr has very much built the same sort of McLuhan global village that began as Geocities muck and has ended up with Facebook brass. It proudly represents a range of content and is striving for great. And with great comes growth and a change of priorities, mostly financially driven. But is Tumblr’s way to to financial freedom simply the process of servicing brands with a hurried social pitch over a community of that hopes to build an archive?

To this I have no real answers and no real attacks, just conversation. Will the new atari.tumblr.com have an interest in conversation?

What I love about this is that it’s a conversation and nothing shrill. No matter what happens, we’ll be smarter for it. Thanks Peter.

Simmons on the Knicks so good

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:08:18 -0500

19. Carmelo Anthony
Dear New York Knicks fans,

I know you’re a little testy right now because Linsanity was so much fun, and now it’s not as much fun. I know it’s easy to redirect your anger and angst at someone whose name rhymes with “Bardello.” Just remember …

A. Your team is struggling because its schedule got tougher post-Linsanity, and because you have a floating bull’s-eye on you right now (not because ‘Melo came back).

B. You might want to give one of the best pure scorers of the last 20 years a couple more weeks adjusting to TWO new point guards without any real practice time before deciding this situation can’t be redeemed (especially when those two point guards are a de facto rookie and someone coming off back surgery who hasn’t been relevant in three years).

C. Ask Portland fans what they think of Ray Felton. Ask Denver fans what they think of Timofey Mozgov. You basically acquired Carmelo and the cap space to sign Tyson Chandler for Danilo Gallinari and Wilson Chandler.⁴ I’m pretty sure ANYONE ON THE F-ING PLANET would make that trade again.

D. You’re focusing your frustrations on ‘Melo because it allows you to avoid the elephant in the room … you know, Amar’e’s uninsured/un-amnesty-able/cap-killing contract ($83 million through 2015), his general doughiness, his egregiously awful defense and the fact that he seems a half-step slow permanently. None of this is Carmelo’s fault.

E. I went to Sunday’s nationally televised Knicks-Celtics game in Boston. Carmelo made what seemed to be the clinching basket; Pierce made a 3 to tie; then Carmelo had a chance to win the game in regulation. As ‘Melo was getting off the shot, everyone in the building had a collective slow-motion heart attack. Noooooooooooooooooo! We all thought that shot was going in. In my opinion, seven 2012 players make opposing fans crap their pants in a big moment: Kobe, Wade, Durant, Rose, Dirk, Carmelo … and just on reputation alone, Ray Allen. If you employ one of those players, you have a better chance of winning the title than everyone else. That’s the way basketball works. Everything slows down, the pressure turns suffocating, games swing on one or two possessions, and playoff series hinge on two questions: “Can you get a stop when it matters?” and “Can you get two points when it matters?” You have the second question covered thanks to Carmelo. You need to work on the first question. In short, I think you should give this a few more weeks. You go 10-deep. Your team is scary. Take a deep breath and enjoy the ride … and remember, five years ago, the most riveting Knicks-related story you were following was a sexual-harrassment suit.

Sincerely,
Bill Simmons
President of the “I Still Think Carmelo Can Work in New York” Club⁵

Content Everywhere, But Not A Drop To Drink

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:06:09 -0500

parislemon:

This morning, I woke up and read Nick Bilton’s weekly New York Times’ column. Nick is a friend and one of the best bloggers/writers/journalists out there. But with today’s column, he was way off base.

Having already said what I wanted to say about the Path situation, I debated if I should weigh in again. Then I read Nick’s column again. There’s a way to say what he wants to say, but he goes about it the complete wrong way. I felt like I had to respond.

But before I could, my CrunchFund partner Michael Arrington wrote almost exactly what I would have written — but in a more effective way. As a dog owner/lover, Michael thought up a great analogy: “So the belly is shown.”

Read More

The Rise of Internet Media: Clean Dictionary

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:40:01 -0500

The Rise of Internet Media: Clean Dictionary:

This was done by A student in my NYU class: The Rise of Internet Media.

nethistory2012:

I thought I’d start our class tumblr off with a project that my partner Charles and I just launched in beta today: cleandictionary.com

Clean Dictionary was already well on its way to completion by last Tuesday’s class, but some of the ideas we discussed helped influence and sharpen…

The 2011-12 NBA season has been entertaining, but it could be even better - Grantland

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:46:38 -0500

The 2011-12 NBA season has been entertaining, but it could be even better - Grantland

"I don’t think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:17:38 -0500

“I don’t think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.”

- William Gibson in TheVerge

Mike and the Mad Dog Afficonadoes Rejoice

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:40:49 -0500

From Bill Simmons’ weekend mailbag:

Q: I was watching a shortened Mike Francesa show on YES today. Giants fans only wanted to talk about the blown call on Greg Jennings’ fumble. Mike went on to use the phrase “under the hood” a ridiculous amount of times over the next hour to describe the action of the ref looking at the replay. I finished watching the show but it was bothering me how many times I heard “under the hood”. I was sure it was 40 times at least. I decided to go back and figure it out. Mike used the actual phrase “under the hood” 36 times. Callers used it twice bringing the total to 38. This is where it gets dicey. Mike once said “blew the call under the…” before trailing off. I counted that as 0.75 times . He also used “…before the hood” once. I counted that as 0.25 times bringing the total to 39 and that was it. I missed my theory by one “under the hood”. Now I know how you feel after not covering that Texans-Ravens game. So close. Notes from my study: Mike used the phrase “underneath the hood” once which I counted in his total and all but 1 of the “under the hoods were said in a 60 minute time frame. For the entire 2 hour show Mike’s UTHPM (Under the Hoods per Minute) was 0.65 narrowly edging out Dog’s 0.63 “Unbelieveable”s per minute from 1999 about Darryl Strawberry’s recovery from cancer. If Mike had done the full show he would have been at 195 “under the hoods.” This may or may not be a cry help.
— Mike Z, Decatur, GA

amazing infographic on facebook

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:34:56 -0500

Created by: Accounting Degree Online

What should I read into this targeted advertising on Pandora?

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:56:35 -0500

What should I read into this targeted advertising on Pandora?

mattlehrer: svpply: “Since moving to New York I’ve been...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:10:41 -0500

mattlehrer:

svpply:

“Since moving to New York I’ve been continuously hunting for what I like to call the “10-year parka.” Basically an unassuming, non-technical, weatherproof coat that will hold up to a decade of near daily winter use. It should eschew fads, break-in like a proper pair of boots, and keep me alive should I find myself huddled overnight at a gusty abandoned bus terminal.

The Isle of Man parka is the best option I’ve found.”

An epic product review by Jace.

Freemans Sporting Club — Isle of Man Parka ($200-500) - Svpply

I hope you get a cut of all the extra sales this review is going to produce, Jace.

An Aaron Dispatch

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:35:45 -0500

I’m having a day where my mind can’t keep up with my typing. I need to bullet point it out.

@eisenberg’s this am I listened to an NPR podcast about a woman in Wheaton, IL who lost a good 75k enviromental mgmt job and now works at Target for minimum wage. She’s 45 and doesn’t know what to do and sounded smart.
#Occupy has all kinds of challengers and supporters. VCs @bijan, @fredwilson, @aweissmann have all embraced it very publicly on twitter, tumblr and at last night’s tech fashion show.
Speaking of fashion show, a very glitzy fundraiser held last night for a non-profit dedicated to bringing more engineers to NYC. Essentially Evan Korth and Chris Wiggins created an economic development corporation to support the Internet scene here and everybody turned up to donate money to create more interns for our startups.
Meanwhile my 6th grader son is using google docs in school to do group work with his classmates, but nobody is teaching him to code even though a zillion articles like this one say he must.

There seems to be a massive disconnect between the tech industry and the rest of the world. SOPA is part of this. Media companies have been furious for years. Frankly, non-tech people have been confused, initimidated, resentful, angered and envious of the wealth creation that started with MSFT and has continue through Twitter. With the exception of Hedge Funds, nobody has made more money so quickly and easily.

BETABEAT just published a list of the 20 most poachable executives and most of these non-founders were making 200k plus. The industry sometimes feels like the only one we have awash in capital and open to experimentation. Most normal Americans are grinding it out in a tough economy but @arrington and Kleiner Perkins are investing in high end time share plays.

Something feels Delilloesque to me. It’s like things are slipping away a bit.

That said, here’s some good news. I’m sending my kids to codecademy to preserve their futures. At least somebody is spending time hacking education instead of that brutal problem that so much of the world faces: renting the right mansion in Cabo or Gstaad.

Priceless

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:29:49 -0500

Priceless

How I'm working on my film

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:15:23 -0500

I’m getting ready to launch my Kickstarter campaign for the Aaron Cohens. This morning, I realized I spend very little time sharing what has influenced me during the writing and production process. So here are a handful of creative products that are influencing me.

Before I was 20, 4 films had a huge influence on how my sense of humor developed. You should check them all out: Annie Hall, This is Spinal Tap, and Sherman’s March, and Swimming to Cambodia.
Here are some others worth considering as well as they pop into my mind: Manhattan, Better off Dead, Delirious, Raw, Life of Brian. Richard Lewis concerts.
Philip Roth — in particular The CounterLife.
I go the movies some mostly to watch cinematography. Lately I’ve loved Tree of Life and Tower Heist.
I listen to a huge number of Podcasts. I’m working my way through WTF by the very talented comedy nerd, historian and comic Marc Maron. In particular, I’ve been blown away by Andrew Dice Clay, Norm MacDonald, Chris Rock, Judd Apatow, and Richard Lewis. Long way to go though. I’m learning a lot about the comedy craft. See all the stuff here.
Aaron Cohens influence me a lot. In particular, I work closely with AFC and Chris.
Kickstarter has broadly influenced me. I don’t support as many projects as I would like, but probably up to about 6 or 8.
I think this writer Jonathan Tropper is pretty smart. You should check him out.

I’ll add more to list as it evolves.

Emptyage: Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:07:59 -0400

Emptyage: Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It:

Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…