Sorry for spending so much time on this subject today, but its on my mind. Jeff Jarvis thinks i should invite a few more candidates over for coffee before making up my mind on Clark. Maybe i should. It would be Dean, Kerry, and Gephardt if i had to choose. Dean because he’s in front and knows something about the Internet and its power to fuel democracy like nothing else. Kerry because i like him, i think he’s a good man, he served his country well in Vietnam, and i mostly agree with his politics. And Gephart because i think he is the truest to his core beliefs with the possible exception of Wes Clark. But i don’t think any of these three has a chance in hell of beating Bush next year.

This was a really sad week for the NBA and New York Knicks fans. Alonzo Mourning retired due to a freak kidney disease that has turned off the bright flame that could have been one of the best centers in NBA history.

I still remember the brawl at MSG (pictured above) when former teammates Larry Johnson and Mourning went out it. You might remember Jeff Van Gundy ridding on Zo’s leg trying to break it up.

It really is the end of an era. An era when the NBA, driven by the Knicks, was hard core. When players played defense, and when winning was more then your stat line.

Sad.

As a total aside. I went to Lever House the other night with my friend Barry Wine. Amazing place. Barry I spent some time in the kitchen watching an amazing operation feed a room filled with folks like Edgar Brofman who was eating at 11PM. He must have been putting the final touches on his music deal. This place is the new power hangout. The room was PACKED at 11PM.

Sitting in a Charbucks somewhere in midtown blogging this, turns out someone left their wifi open for me so I don’t have to pay T-Mobile or Verizon for the bandwidth. Thanks to all the unnamed free bandwidth providers out there. I salute you.

Spent the last couple of days visiting with some local VC firms here in New York getting some perspective on where they see the industry.

Nooooooooo, I’m not raising capital for a new project (not even Weblogs, Inc.). I’m just getting the pulse on where the industry is and where it is going. Really, you gotta believe me.

Just finished breakfast at the Yale club with Ed Goodman of Milestone Ventures, a smart guy.

Ed runs a $13 million fund that puts $250K to $500K into small tech and services firms. Of course in New York there aren’t that many deals to be done. Turns out that many of the Silicon Alley entrepreneurs I used to cover in Silicon Alley Reporter have all run for the hills (or more specifically run to the turntables to spin records and take drugsI kid you not). Go figure: now is the best time to raise capital in the past four years.

On my way now to meet up with my old friends Tom Phillips, formerly of Deja News and Spy Magazine, and Deven Parekh of Insight Venture Partners (http://www.insightpartners.com/).

Met with Howard Morgan of idealab! (who is also an angel investor), as well as Steve Brotman of Silicon Alley Venture Partners and Stonehenge (two different funds). They are both doing smaller investments, $250K to $500K. The valuations are not huge, $1 to $3m, but that gives the entrepreneur enough room to raise further capital and still own a 1/3 to 1/4 of their firm after two or three rounds when an exit might happen.

Dropped by to see Stuart Ellman of RRE Ventures, one of the largest firms in New York City (they did their third fund of $225m recently). Of course, with that kind of money they need to invest big (think $5-10m a pop), and that really doesn’t work in New York anymore. Of course, if Howard, Ed and Steve do their job they will have deals to feed up to folks like RRE Ventures over the next year or two.

The interesting thing is that in order to raise capital you need to have some the business built outcomplete with revenue. As one person told me “come to me with a client who loves you and is spending five to six figures with you and I’ll invest.”

This is, of course, the way it should have always been. I never really understood the idea of investing in an idea, with the possible exception of a handful of entrepreneurs who have hit it big in the past. Having a couple of hurdles to hit before getting a wire transfer is a nice check and balance for a venture business that has been, frankly, lazy and loose in recent history.

If you want a very entertaining read from the desktop of a publicly traded CEO, stop by Alan Meckler’s blog.

It is amazing. You get to hear him bash COMDEX on an almost daily basis while trying to rationalize what went wrong with his own show in Vegas (the airport in Vegas, IT people being too busy, etc.).

I’m friendly with Meckler, we go to lunch once a quarter or so, and I respect what he has done. The blog is just brutal honesty and who knows some day maybe every public CEO will have onebut I doubt it.

Seems Michael Jackson is taking a note from the Martha Stewart book of public relations by starting his own official webpage. It seems if you are going to have a site like this you need to sign it personally.

Is there a handwriting analyst in the audience out there that can tell us about Michael and Martha based on these JPEGS?! Seems to me that Michael is very cramped up and sloppy, isolated perhaps. Martha’s is very “here I am, look how much more perfect I sign my name then everyone else.”

I wonder if their PR consultants consulted them on their signatures?

this is just a test

 I kind of liked Tony’s idea of writing a book on Google collaboratively. However, the NYT took a negative slant on this with the headline “Collaborative Book Idea Gets a Nasty Review” and a photo of Tony looking really slyperhaps evil.

Amazing how the Grey Lady can spin things. This story is so one-sided I gotta think this is old media beating up new media ideas or simply the continuation of Nick Denton’s crew piling on Tony because he is a commercial blogger (of wait, Nick’s doing porn, the most commecial thing ever!).

Regardless, I salute Tony for pushing the envelope and I don’t hate him because he is super connected, driven and successfuland neither should non-commercial bloggers. He’s contributed a lot to the tech media space and one of the reasons bloggers and indie media is doing so well is because of the projects he’s worked on.

Something about the proposition struck Brian Dear, a software entrepreneur and writer, as being a lot like Tom Sawyer’s inviting the other boys to paint the fence. Mr. Dear found the posting especially galling, he said, because he has been grinding away for years on a history of the user community that grew up around Plato, an early computer network. “It just kind of rubbed me the wrong way,” he said of the Perkins proposal, “and I thought, You know, I should denounce this.’ “

So on his own Web log, brianstorms.com, Mr. Dear ridiculed Mr. Perkins’s e-mail message line by line.

Mr. Perkins had written: “Writing a book is a very painful experience. And frankly, the only way I can pull this off under a tight deadline (I want it out before Google goes public), is to write it with AlwaysOn members.”

Mr. Dear replied: “Writing a book is so painful, I find it easier if someone else does all the hard work. So I’m asking you, members of the AlwaysOn network, to give me all of your ideas.”

Mr. Perkins wrote: “As we say in the world of journalism, This is a story that needs to be told.’ ”

Mr. Dear responded: “As we say in Silicon Valley, There’s never enough money. Make more.’ “

The blast has been widely circulated online. Mr. Perkins, for his part, said, “I thought it was pretty clever, and have referred it to many people, including my wife, for laughs.”

But his online readers have generally been supportive, he said. “I can’t imagine not blogging all my books into existence.”

Call me a cynic, but at this point it has become clear that releasing “home movies” are part of an overall marketing strategy by the media. As such, look for the following in the near future:

• Creation and leaking of “home movies” as part of a recording or TV contract: “Before the delivery of a fifth CD, and immediately before the release a best of‘ compilation, the artist agrees to create and release an private adult video. Such creation will remain the property of the artist, but will be available for reasonable publicity purposes by the corporation.”)

• Three of the following in a home movie: Paris Hilton, Madonna, Britney Spears, Snoop Dog and William Shatner.

• Celebrity Porn Uncensored #12 on E!

• Former child-celebrity “home videos” from: Screech, Gary Coleman, Shannon Doherty and Elizabeth Berkeley (or just about any other cast member of Saved by the Bell, 90210 or [insert late 80s sitcom here]).

Once again I’m chillin n’ bloggin’ at the Mac store. This time I’m at the one in Santa Monica using a G4 with one of the huge studio monitors. Macs are really starting to feel much more stable from the days when I was trying to convert from Windoze. The new X operating system, with that cool navigation bar at the bottom, has breathed new life into the platform.

Just got back from seeing the movie The Station Agent, which I was unable to get into at Sundance. It wound up winning a bunch of awards, and rightfully soit’s amazing. Go see it with someone you love. It’s great.

Also, make sure you see Capturing the Friedmans, also award-winning from Sundance. Sort of a downer, but a very compelling search for the truth.