Sun has organized a really cool event at their Menlo Park offices on March 19 in the evening - a discussion between Sun’s Timothy Bray and me on venture capital and Web 2.0. Registration is free.
Please come and cheer me on. Tim is smarter than two of me put together, so I need audience support. 
I’ve signed up. Better make my time worth the while
Should be fun. I am in. You think they will let us film it?
Indian - I find it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
ROFL. Good one. I just think it would be cool if I can post the info videos on my site. I am gonna try for sure.
Mike, you’re debating pro-VC funding for Web 2.0 companies? Though I can’t be there, I’m cheering for you in spirit!
kick his ass seabass!
hahahah, Steven–best line from dumb & dumber… ever!!
Awesome event. Hopefully it will get filmed and uploaded. It’d be awesome to listen to it live on talkshoe or watch it on stickam or something.
VC is over-rated. If millions are desired to create a web 2.0 site, one should re-think about how they operate a business. A truly successful venture is one that can achieve even with out millions of dollars to jump start. So many of these cheesy “web 2.0″ start-ups need to seek smart money, not big money. For most of them, it comes back and bites them in the ass.
Cool, youre debating on my birthday.
Why we should cheer you on, when you can’t find a little bit time to answer our e-mails?:)
The important thing, Ivan, is that I am READING your emails.
But it is nice to send “yes” or “no” to an offer. Ok, cheers.
everybody says ‘ye but you could just reply quickly’, but when you multiply that out over 200 emails a day it doubles the time spent in email
mike you should setup an auto responder that says ‘thanks!’ and thats all, or perhaps it randomly selects on of the following:
1. Thanks
2. No
3. Maybe
4. Call my PA on 650-400-4000 and arrange it with her
5. your idea is brilliant, I would love to invest
6. sure, I have no problems finding developers for you
7. great, see you there!
8. would love to speak at your conference, pity I wont really read this email until the conference is well over
Does the winner get to shave “VC” into the remaining hair on the loser’s head?
Here’s an argument to help your side: He’s going to argue that there’s nothing really new about Web 2.0, that it’s just evolution. That’s a semantic argument.
History is always the best tool in these sorts of debates. Look at the history of, for instance, music. Songs once only got popular by people singing them in pubs. Music evolved from that, but many famous symphonies are based old drinking-song melodies. Recording made it possible for music to be spread in different ways, and iTunes is changing that again. Would someone say that digital recordings are not significant in the history of music? Of course not?
Saying that Web 2.0 advancements are not significant is similarly obstreperous.
I have an admittedly self-serving blog entry about Web 2.0 and the intersection of the internet and government on the front page of my web 2.0 site, clickable above. It has a handy graph illustrating how new media always begins by using content from other media, but then eventually finds its own voice. That’s what I think Web 2.0 is all about: the web finding its own true nature.
Knock ‘em dead, Michael! We’re pulling for you!
-Scott
Michael ; Your a brillant man. You are smarter than you give your self credit for.
- Your Humble and that is cool, I appreciate your blog.
Nice job lowering expectations ahead of the debate, Mike - you will make an excellent Presidential candidate
Hey, I am coming out of my basement in Atlanta to see this.
Hopefully the sunlight in Palo Alto won’t make me shrivel up
or burn to a crisp. I suspect it will be fun.
Steve Kohler
Normally I’d drive down for something like this but I was at GDC and then Menlo Park last week so I’m beat down. I’d be interested in seeing the video….
Sounds great. Im in.
Good Luck. I would like to see a video posted if possible.
Will the debate be recorded? Can’t make it in time based on traffic and would like to see the debate.
lol…it will be like Mike Tyson taking on Woody Allen
Sounds great. I have signed up and will be there to support you.
Michael - I saw John B. was hoping for the event to be broadcast live on TalkShoe in his post #8 above: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....nt-1215877
We would love to host this for your fans
You could moderate it or we would be happy to handle it for you. You/Tim would only need to dial in and it could be streamed to 1000’s of listeners and have 100’s join into the moderated Live Interactive discussion and text chat.
Just let me know if you have an interest!
Cheers, Brian (the TalkShoe team)
Hi Mike and all at TechCrunch
Please can we suggest you publicise a tag for this event, something like “MikeArringtonAndTimBrayDebate” so we can track photos, videos and blogs via Technorati.
Also for info we’ve created a tool to help normal people create unique versions of these sort of shared tags and we’ve called them HubTags to make it easier to talk about them in the real world. It’s at http://www.hubtag.com.
Hope you like it
Tobs
What happens if the system can’t compute because the dynamic nature of the world give it something it
doesn’t have a variable for?
http://www.audioripper.net
Hi Michael. You were great. I very much enjoyed the smack-down. You made me laugh several times, including after the event when I asked your thoughts on our simple service for capturing presentations and associated discussion. You said you’d be interested in visiting us sometime because it sounded like we’d come up with “the most complicated way to solve the problem”.
Okay, so maybe it was the wine. I’m guessing Greg Linden did a better job when he described it here: http://glinden.blogspot.com/20.....emory.html. Our focus has since shifted to an online service for indexing and organizing captured presentations (with multiple simple, low-cost capture options). Let me know if you’d ever like to visit FXPAL. We’d love to show you some cool stuff!