I saw this interesting post linked off of techmeme today:

Redeye VC: 53,651

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been on several phone pitches from west-coast companies that are looking to be the “flickr of XXXX” or “like del.icio.us but YYYY” or “the Digg killer”. It got me thinking – how many people outside of the valley have ever heard of these companies? I asked a bunch of local (Philly-area) acquaintances and the answer came back loud and clear: none – nada – zip. People here have barely heard of Myspace and Craigslist – let alone any of the “hot” Web 2.0 companies.

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

It’s an interesting observation – but I’m wondering if its more of a age segmentation than a geographic segmentation. Heck, my sister’s heard of myspace and she’s hardly tech saavy. In fact, it seems to me a lot of people outside of the Valley have heard of MySpace (not as much for flickr.)

In the end though, wasn’t Google just for geeks? Wasn’t the iPod just for geeks? Heck, it was only for Mac geeks at that since the first iPods were only Mac compatible for a while.

Besides time and a super compelling user experience, what else does it take to make a product successful in the mainstream?

Mark and his colleagues at Plaxo are having a Party 2.0…. uh… Party!

This after a successful and fun Lunch 2.0 that happened on Wednesday here at Microsoft.

(My apologies to SVC Reception 1 for having 20 people show up suddenly to register as visitors!)

So recently I brought my car in for the 60k mile service.

Sure it set me back a bundle. Sure it discovered other problems that will set me back a bundle.

But the worst part was what had to be the least reassuring comment of the year: “You should expect to be stranded in the desert in the next 30k miles. You won’t know when it will happen. It will happen suddenly.”

Ok, so the fine folks at German Motor Specialists didn’t quite say that. But basically they told me that the coolant expansion tank in my car is known to crack after many thousands of miles, and that when it does it will be sudden, without warning. And then I’ll have to be towed.

I appreciate that they didn’t sell me on a new coolant expansion tank, and I appreciate their honesty, but this type of honesty sure doesn’t make you feel better. Guess I need to up my AAA membership level for safety.

In their display case of random parts, they actually had a coolant expansion tank, with the part that usually cracks highlighted in yellow:

I bet if these guys had a blog, their customer load would shoot up dramatically.

This is rather silly, but congrats to Great Neck South High for remaining in the Top 100 High Schools list:

The Complete List: 1,000 Top U.S. Schools – Newsweek America’s Best High Schools – MSNBC.com

31 Great Neck South Great Neck N.Y. 4.321 8.9 70.2