Fred Wilson does his MP3 of the week thing and Brad Feld is doing term sheet terms of the when he blogs em thing.
With those two categories taken, I present to you: Blasts from the past. Some of the more colorful and interesting things said way back when.
Digging through the billions of fun things people have typed into the virtual knowledge base is great fun on a Sunday evening vs. watching reruns.
First up: Dave Winer circa 1994. Those were the days. The Internet craze was just cranking up and Dave, via DaveNet, was in full force with pleas, predictions and feelin the love.
“I LOVE ARETHA!
I've been listening to lots of Aretha Franklin these days. How about exclusively? Yeah. Some great music. Think! Think about what you're trying to do to me! She just wants respect. Sock it to me. She don't mind company, because company is all right with her, every once in a while.”
He had a some good rants:
“WHO NEEDS ELECTRONIC MONEY?
Does the Internet have to become a system for commerce in order for it to have a place in our world? Can you imagine a world that the Internet is *not* part of? In other words, can you imagine a global network that isn't compatible with TCP/IP? That doesn't have webs and web browsers? Shoot! No way. Will it keep growing? Of course. What's the big deal anyway?
The greedy VCs want to make money, as usual. It's their job. I suppose somebody's got to do it. But does it *have* to be thru electronic shopping? No way!
How about this for a pre-internet plea?
“Does anyone know a stock broker who is online, has an email account, and checks it regularly? If so, please give him or her my email account (dwiner@) [ed: I removed the full address but he does have it here] I want to do some deals at the end of the year. I'm going to have to play phone tag with my broker for the next week or so to get the info I need to make my decision. Why can't I do this via email? Because stock brokers don't have email accounts!
We already have a net that's really good at connecting people to people. We just need more people. And with more people, we're going to want some more software and some new services. [There's hope for the VCs!]
I predict that the first stock broker you can email with is going to make a few million in commissions the first year he or she is online.”
And there was this last little excerpt that caught my eye:
“THE NET-NET OF THE NET FOR THE GREEDY VCS
Focus on building services and software that make it easy for the *people* of businesses to be connected with the people of the world. It has to be much easier to set up a new service. We need a Compaq of ISPs, and no, I don't believe AT&T and PacBell, etc are going to figure out how to do this on their own.”
Compaq, eh? We know how that story turned out as do we know about AT&T.
Anyway, there you go, a little blast from the past from Dave “still diggin” Winer. You can read the entire post here.
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