Bill Gates is quoted today talking about some traffic chasing froth in the internet space. He is right and wromg.
He is wrong if he is referring about YouTube ($1.6 billion – despite any legal anxiety – is cheap)and he is :) , and sounds like sour grapes, and right about most of the rest of the blog and internet deals.
Robert Scoble is taking the other side of Bill’s bet and my money is with Bill (no offense Robert). It’s great that Robert is part of a start-up and raised so much money, but that space is so cowded and so underfunded for what ultimately would be required to win/if their is even to be a winner. So much noise and so much poorly spent venture money in podcasting and blogging that the odds of survival are low.
Just last Friday, Fred Wilson also mentioned the word “bubble” in his interview on wallstrip.
Big Bill is pretty accurate when he say *some* people are focussing on taffic and not much else and that was a recipe for disaster in Bubble 1.0 Scoble actually does a pretty good job of countering Gates’ point although I agree with you that the best that most vlogs/podcast can hope for is niche success.
Now, an aggregated conversation like Wallstrip, that’s my pick for the future. I continue to be impressed with how well you’re executing Wallstrip – I’m looking forward to the day when I get to say “You know those Wallstrip billionaires/ I knew them *before* they srated Wallstrip!”
Shoot. I thought we weren’t even in the 2nd inning yet this time. Oh well, I hope 2.0 busts quickly because I’m really preparing hard for 3.0.
I guess time will tell. I was kind of thinking the YouTube sale was equivalent to the Netscape IPO. But maybe Google was, and this is the tail end.