Intense Web Media

I was in Boulder, Colorado over the weekend for TechStars and had a blast.

As some of you know, I am a Midwestern boy coming from a small town in Ohio. Unless you are from Cleveland, Ohioans don’t really have an accent or speak a weird vernacular.

Long story short, since moving to Jacksonville, FL and being involved in sales for a major company I have learned to speak to my customers in a new way. I say “Y’all” all the time. I try not to use it too much, but the use of it has huge benefits. The most important of which is that “Y’all” is an endearing term in the South. People are much more likely to trust someone they can identify with and my use of “Y’all” brings me toward their level.

Now, getting back to Boulder. While in Boulder I accidentally said Y’all a few times and wouldn’t you know it, they look at me like I have three eyeballs.

I think the business lesson here is–Know your audience and speak to them in a way they will best understand.

I have learned quite a bit over the course of the last week. I thought it would be nice if I shared some lessons:

• If you begin a startup virtually, just pay the money and meet your partners in person. You will work much better having already met. This is not to say that I have had a bad experience with my current startup, which happened to be completely virtual. Isaac an Jon are good people and I am very lucky. Still, if I could go back, I would have done visited them earlier. We could have been more productive.
• Realize that when you have it all figured out, you really don’t. My team literally went from having a solution for each of our challenges and a go to market strategy, to having to rethink our entire direction and product. When it happens it feels like a punch in the stomach, but in the end it just makes you tougher.
• Get involved in your space. If you run a grocery store, hang out with other people who run grocery stores. You will thank yourself later. Where I live I normally don’t get the chance to hang out with people in my industry. So, seek them out!

There are others, but these stood out. I have some interesting insight into the word y’all which I will save for a later post.

Here is Brad Feld and David Cohen talking about the program, applicants, and the selected teams. They will be a wealth of knowledge. Here is a link to the post if you do not see it below.

Yes, I changed my tagline from “Web News And Observation” (which sounded amateurish at best IMHO) to “World’s Worst Blog Title.”

The reason for such a change is simple. I realized my choice for a domain name and blog title was awful. I no longer like it. Unfortunately, I can’t turnaround from here and re-brand this sucker. Besides, I like where this blog is headed and the things I write about.

I suppose having a bad title can’t hurt as it will stand out from the crowd and I am all about standing out.

I am trying to talk my designer over at Intense Debate into helping me pimp this blog out. It is crying for some customization.

“In a response filed in federal court in New York late Monday, Google said that YouTube respects the importance of copyrights and goes above and beyond what is required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives Web hosts protection from copyright lawsuits so long as they comply with requests to remove unauthorized material.”

However, this begs the question, how can YouTube police porn so well, yet be so belligerent to not find all of the obvious copyright material. The answer is obvious. They cannot remove all of this material because they would lose 75% or more of their content.

I hope this isn’t the case, but YouTube may be the next Broadcast.com. I think YouTube could be a wonderful service to content creators as it serves as a great viral tool. However, until creators can see some immediate value, then I am afraid YouTube is on the way down.