A Prolific Little Valley Girl...

Trying to get back to some regularity with my BusinessWeek columns. This one posted tonight for tomorrow, and I'm quite proud of it. It keys off a lot of things I've been writing about on this blog: The hollowness of engineering traffic, obnoxiousness of sites like Twply, and my frustration with too many people trying to game the system versus just build a good product or create good content. It all came together around this idea of Web 2.0 killing the last metric that matters for advertisers: The unique user.

It was an observation Roger McNamee made in the Yahoo greenroom when he came by the studio a few weeks ago, and it's been working its way around my head since, so I fully credit him.

Speaking of Valley Girl, here's my previous column in case you missed it. It has to do with corporate layoffs and features a shout out to Mr. Nathan Wright of Des Moines who I met on the book tour!

If you read the blog a lot, you probably notice a lot of similar themes work themselves out here, then later wind up in a column or on TechTicker. Writing is like thinking, and my commenters always help me sharpen my thinking. You let me know when I'm on to something and push me on another angle when I'm blind to it. So thanks, everyone. Instead of cutting you in on my paycheck, I'll just refrain from annoying you with ads on this site. Deal?

NOW, speaking of Roger McNamee, I have some news. He cut his hair! Background: Roger's hair ignited quite an uproar among TechTicker commenters. I'm sorry-- he's Roger McNamee, a former top fund manager and one of the most successful Valley investors and he's giving you investing advice and you're upset about his hair??? As I Twittered at the time it was an act of civil disobedience against the policies of the Bush administration. Roger says once he got confirmation that Bush was safely back in Texas he cut off a whopping 14 inches giving it to Locks of Love. I don't have an "after" picture, but below is the before, in video form: