I use a lot of music web services but I don't like to invest in this sector. Nonetheless, it's an area that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I've written endlessly on this blog about the music web services I use,...

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I use a lot of music web services but I don't like to invest in this sector. Nonetheless, it's an area that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I've written endlessly on this blog about the music web services I use, why I use them, and where I think the music web is going.The most interesting music web service to me has been audioscrobbler (aka last.fm). I'm not all that interested in last.fm as a social network, but I am obsessed with it's value as a data asset. I report all my music listens to last.fm via the audioscrobbler technology and it has built a deep data asset on my musical listening habits (and therefore musical taste). Since October 2005, I've recorded 60,168 song listens with audioscrobbler. That's roughly 40 listens per day. Sounds like a lot, right? Well we listen to music all the time in our house and we've had audioscrobbler on our Sonos for the past year or so.There are a bunch of music web services I use that leverage the power of the audioscrobbler data via the last.fm api. So I show up at a new music web service and it can instantly know what I like to listen to by simply asking me for my last.fm user name and password. It's like magic. I love it.The developer of audioscrobbler is a guy named Richard Jones (aka RJ) who built it while he was in college. He merged it into last.fm and became the CTO.Well RJ is back to building interesting new web music stuff and his new thing is called Playdar. And like audioscrobbler, I think this could be a powerful foundational platform technology for the music web.Playdar is a "music content resolver" platform. You put the Playdar software on all the machines you have with music on them. And then Playdar makes it so that you can play your music via the web whenever and wherever you want. This is not the first effort to do this sort of thing, but it is the first time this has been done as an open source platform.This is an important distinction. Like audioscrobber was the foundational technology for last.fm and many other music web services, Playdar can and will be the same.The Playdar ecosystem is just getting going but there are already some interesting demos. I like Toby Padilla's Playgrub which turns web pages into playlists. I also like James Wheare's Playlick which turns last.fm accounts into playlists.Open platforms and ecosystems are powerful and the music web needs more of them. I am excited to see where Playdar goes. I'll be following it closely and if you are into web music, you should too.

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Our portfolio company Covestor is looking for a VP Product and a head of marketing. Both positions are in New York City.Covestor has created an entirely new form of investment product - people powered investing. With...

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Our portfolio company Covestor is looking for a VP Product and a head of marketing. Both positions are in New York City.Covestor has created an entirely new form of investment product - people powered investing. With Covestor you don't buy stocks and you don't buy funds. You "follow investors" with your capital. I've been investing this way since the summer and it's a very interesting new way to manage your money.These two job openings are opportunities to help define this new form of investing, from the product side and the messaging side. If you are looking for a new challenge and the opportunity to change the game in an important industry, then these positions might just be the thing for you. If you want to learn more, click on the links at the top of this post and if you want to send in your resume, email it to jobs1009 [at] covestor.com.

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I saw this tweet from Charlie O'Donnell yesterday:LinkedIn pulled avatars of @laughingsquid @fredwilson @hunterwalk and me down. Isn't our "professionalism" for our networks to judge?It's true. Here's my LinkedIn...

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I saw this tweet from Charlie O'Donnell yesterday:LinkedIn pulled avatars of @laughingsquid @fredwilson @hunterwalk and me down. Isn't our "professionalism" for our networks to judge?It's true. Here's my LinkedIn profile this morning: My avatar is gone, taken down.That's unfortunate. I'm with Charlie on this one. I think we should be able to determine what we want to use to represent ourselves professionally within reason (no porn, no emotionally disturbing images, etc).In my case, the "AVC avatar" has become my online brand and I use it everywhere other than the usv.com website where we've opted to go with a consistent presentation across all of the professionals in our firm.The good news is that Linked In seems to be aware of the issue. I got this tweet last night from their community person.@fredwilson I hear you. lmk talk to our CS teams abt the profile pic issue. feel free to DM me if you've q's...So hopefully they'll change their minds and let those of us who choose to use our online brands on Linked In have them back on our profiles. Stay tuned.Related articles by ZemantaIs more business getting done on Twitter than on LinkedIn? One reason why (thisisgoingtobebig.com)

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I went down to city hall yesterday to participate in a hearing on net neutrality. I realize the NYC city council has no oversight on this issue but the lobbyists were coming out in force so I figured I might as well...

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I went down to city hall yesterday to participate in a hearing on net neutrality. I realize the NYC city council has no oversight on this issue but the lobbyists were coming out in force so I figured I might as well show up too. They were live streaming the event. My testimony is about 26 minutes into that stream. But this post is not about net neutrality. It's about an issue that came up during the questioning. A councilmember mentioned the idea that we should help infrastructure providers protect their businesses. I am all in favor of the survival instinct in the marketplace. All companies should be executing strategies that will result in their survival. But the idea that government should "protect businesses" seems very dangerous to me. Businesses come and go. Jobs come and go. Products and services come and go. That's the way of capitalism. Our government stepped in and protected a bunch of businesses during the financial crisis. Examples are Citibank, AIG, and General Motors. In a time of financial panic, government does have a role of restoring confidence and we can argue whether those actions were necessary or not to do that. But the financial panic is long gone. We still have big economic issues in this country and it would be a mistake for our government to continue to protect businesses and jobs now that markets are functioning again. If the telcos and cable companies can't run profitable businesses without government protections, then I think we should let them go under and allow entrepreneurs to pick up their assets and make them work instead. I also believe that government should be fostering a lot of competition in the access business. That was the idea of the telcom reform act. But it hasn't played out that way. We have an ever increasing consolidation of power in the access business. Just like we had in the banking and brokerage business. This is not good. I could go on and on about this issue but I'll stop here and let the discussion start in the comments. I'll be in there with you.

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 I saw this tweet when I got up this morning:hey @fredwilson - whats the story behind ur avatar?While longtime readers know it, I figure many of you don't. So here it goes.Starting about four years ago, Howard Lindzon...

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 I saw this tweet when I got up this morning:hey @fredwilson - whats the story behind ur avatar?While longtime readers know it, I figure many of you don't. So here it goes.Starting about four years ago, Howard Lindzon started commenting actively on this blog. He was funny, he was smart, and I enjoyed our banter in the comments.One march vacation, our family made a short stop in Phoenix, where Howard used to live. He emailed me and offered my son and me two tickets to the Suns game. We took him up on that and that's how we met for the first time.It turned out Howard was hatching an idea for a web show for investors. Think Rocketboom meets Jim Cramer. I told him it was a good idea and encouraged him to do it. Howard would fire ideas at me and I would give him feedback on them.Out of that came Wallstrip. Here's a post I wrote a little over three years ago announcing the launch of Wallstrip.One of the original ideas for the show that never really worked out was that there would be a dozen well known bloggers who would write short posts about each daily show. Howard asked me to do that and I agree to do it at least once a week.So that's how the avatar came to be. Howard asked his friend Jenny Ignaszewski to draw up avatars for all dozen of the stock bloggers using photos of them that were available on the web. The first time I saw my avatar was when Wallstrip launched and there it was along with Howard's and a bunch of others.From the minute I saw it, I liked it. It uses my favorite color (green) as the backdrop and the eye color (my eyes are sometimes blue and sometimes green and sometimes something else). It looks like me, but not too much.So I began to use it a bit here and there around the web as I set up new profiles. But by no means was it the only profile picture I used. For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I'd use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I'd use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.But then I started to realize that the Wallstrip avatar was becoming my online identity. People would comment about it all the time. Around the time we sold Wallstrip, Howard asked Jenny to do a real painting of it which I now have in my office at Union Square Ventures. It's a real conversation starter.Sometime in early 2008, I just decided to go with it everywhere. It's at the top of this blog and everywhere else I have an online identity. It's my online brand now.Like this blog, this was not planned. It just happened. That's the way most of the important things in my life have come to be.

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