Goffspot.com

Prop 8 not withstanding really glad to be in California again. (as usual with NY being among the few other modern places to live in the hemisphere.)

Is it modern that i keep having the urge to gloat about the election to Meg Whitman.

This mailing piece got to me the last possible day before the election. it was clearly composed after the point that they knew they were done.

Classy exit.

There’s not a single possible reason for the careful one man/one woman silhouette image. (with one little man and one little woman, appropriately spaced as well. what are they thinking? it concerns me.) Happily as Jeremy (Goodasyou.org) responded, she’s learning there isn’t a “Buy Now” button on the Governatorship.

This is offensive crap but it’s also nice not to be the ones in a closet, furtively communicating with semio-signifiers.

And it does look like Poltergeist, Close Encounters or a huge bonfire of $140 million and with what little reputation was around burned up as kindling.

The only time i met Meg Whitman was at PCForum, a somewhat selective tech conference of about 600 or s0.  She was fortunate as a first timer to have one of the most known and respected woman exec in the industry at that point  introducing her around and ensuring she was situated. My brief interaction with Whitman was a zero. She was nervous and inappropriately patronizing. Her guide, an open lesbian, was patient and generous, thought could have had a much better time.  Fast forward and in the final months of the campaign, Whitman had her fundraiser at eBay canceled because of her Pro8 support; and founder Pierre Omidyar told the pres he could not endore her and that if he still lived in Caliornia would have found it “difficult” to vote for her. They cynicism is just unfathomable. i hope there is karma in this . Maybe team up with ken Mehman and keep spending.

Make this part of her perm record.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="460" caption="Wonder what that image is for below. Doesn't go with any bullet points."][/caption]

Filed under: BS, Boomers, CA, capitalism, keeper, local, marriage, silicon valley by admin - No Comments →

It’s not Forbes magazine. It’s neo -hippy -do -good -won’t -ipo -customer-focused -san-francisco -kook -free-speech -of-a-business that’s changing offline small business as much as any online entity. Thanks to Craigslist, I just rented my little backhouse in a single day for the third time in five years, at my asking price with plenty of back-up interest. Cost: $0

After the guy who re-did the shower and another who hauled away the junk, Craigslist served up the recent-immigrant entrepreneur whose team cleaned and shampooed the rugs. He doesn’t know where that list came from or who this Craig is, but "I don’t waste my money on the other places anymore. I stopped every one." Not a single ad in newspapers, yellow pages, penny savers, or Yahoo Local like he used to. He gets more calls, almost all from the better-off with more computers. And that’s fine by him. As is the cost. He doesn’t think much of the prospects for newspapers going forward. Does a good job too.

And finally, a business-travel lifehack that’s made my life better…Since about a year ago, if I am in a city for more than a few days with work to do, first thing I buy a used CRT monitor off Craigslist. I send off 3-5 emails when i hit town and usually get a quick response. The longest took 5-6 hours. They’re about 1/10th the cost asked by retail rental services, and these monitors are conveniently all over town rather than in a single store. Here’s the rss feed for monitors under $100 in NY.

I acquired one after a late flight, when it was hard to get a cab but a seller responded in minutes. I was back at my hotel, set up, and revising notes for a morning meeting within 20 minutes. There’s always a choice of 17" and 19" models, ranging from "come and get them" to "$35". And I’ve been lucky to find always find them blocks or a quick cab from my where i’m staying. Most laptops support extended desktop mode, so even a 15" doubles your work area. Twice, I got a full size keyboard thrown in when i asked if they had one for sale. (You can also get them new for under $10 in discount stores.). And when i leave….
Then I just abandon them. I just check out. I leave them in the room. **
It feels wrong. I’ve offered a last gasp of life to those beasts that will never be allowed on my desk at home again. Hotels won’t hold them for others because they really are big and ugly. The maids don’t want them, nor could they get a 1000 pound monitor out without some management rule kicking in. I’ve offered them back to sellers saying I’d leave the monitor for pick up at the front desk. But even with assurances that i’m not looking for a refund, they admit they don’t ever want to see the things again.

I even tried to ignite an entrepreneurial flame in one seller, promising i’d rent one every time if he’d deliver and pickup. And i assured him there were clearly others like me. He wasn’t having it. Maybe someone else out there can make that work. Othewise, I’ll keep doing this until they’re gone.
**ASIDE (Tip): I have learned to leave a note taped to the screen so you don’t get off the plane to messages on every number you have from the concierge, proudly assuring you that your precious equipment is safe and will be shipped off and billed to your credit card. I did head that off.

cc attribution license pics. By Flickr members: southernpixel, endlisnis, and akubba

Filed under: LosAngeles, blogging, capitalism, local, sites, travel, webnotes, work by Goff - No Comments →

It’s not without some sadness that i switch “CEO of Grassroots Media/Bayosphere” from the “Now” to the “Before” category of my bio.

Of course, I couldn’t be more pleased with the outcome: Backfence, the leading hyperlocal community startup has acquired Bayosphere to lead it’s move into the Bay Area and to provide an ongoing home for the community.

And, I’m pleased to be an equity holder, and am even more optimistic about its success with today’s announcement that Merril Brown has joined the Backfence board. Merril ran MSNBC when i ran programming at MSN, and was always available for dinner and good counsel. He’s also a current friend, and constant inspiration to everyone looking at the future of news.

But I will miss being Dan Gillmor’s partner with the daily opportunities for meeting the most interesting people in the world, for challenging even my basic ideas about how things work, and for inspiring better-considered decisions on one hand, and the importance of knowing something is right or wrong even without the math on the other. Dan’s seriousness of purpose and his rigorous conventional training somehow don’t hold back his, at times, wind-power-combine tilting quest to make things work “right”.

We would certainly do things differently if we had it to do again. We catalogued them in Dan’s surprisingly widely-distributed blog entry. The response to that post has been amazing, and many have remarked at how rare it is for entrepreneurs to share the detailed lessons of what hasn’t worked.
While we saw great value in what Bayosphere might become, it was clear last September that it wasn’t going to happen on the rapid timeline we needed for it to work financially. At that point we stopped taking salaries and haven’t spent investor funds over the past six months. (We returned the not insignificant investment capital that remained, covered our own expenses, and Dan covered the cut-back operating expenses. I don’t know many entrepreneurs who have done that.)

Those journalists deserve a great deal of the credit for building the site and bringing in the audience that eventually attracted the eye of Backfence management as they looked west.

I will continue to work with Dan on the advisory board of his non-profit Center for Citizen Media attached to Berkeley and Harvard and will be doing anything i can to help Backfence management with the transitions. And, i hope at some point to write a more detailed version of the year including my deep appreciation to Dan and our supportive investors, Mitch Kapor and Rob Hayes for Omidyar Network, for the opportunity to be a partner in this venture. Commuting to San Francisco to work with these folks has been life affirming and life changing at a time when I really needed that.

I’ve never had a year as intellectually challenging and stimulating. And the side benefits included reconnecting with old colleagues who have naturally found their way to the center of this internet renaissance and meeting new and inspiring people. (Lisa Stone Blogher founder who offers Backfence some great advice today ; Jonathan Weber at NewWest; the Downhill Battle creators, not just because they have the best name for a social activist group ever; and Craig Newmark, yeah, Craig with the lists, come to mind as just the tip of that iceberg.)

I’ll be doing more hybrid/user-generated/citizen/unfiltere

ADDITION: A great round up of some of the more interesting coverage.

Filed under: Bayosphere, DanGillmor, GrassrootsMedia, local by Goff - No Comments →