Paul is our VC. He lives upstairs above us in PodTech’s temporary headquarters inside USVP’s headquarters on Sand Hill Road (aka: the money bubble). I’ve just sent him this video from BetterBadNews that calls on Venture Capitalists to compete for their business. Hell, I’m gonna beat him to it. I just called the number and left a message.

Anyway, I love this line from the video: “ScccSssscccoble was going tell everybody about it.” Heheh, I should charge for THAT, if I had any business sense. After all, I just told all my competitors about this cool video show that, if I had any freaking business sense, I should keep as quiet as possible about.

But what fun would that be?

I bet that Venture Capitalists Rick Segal or Fred Wilson or Brad Feld or Jeff Clavier or David Hornick already called them.

Take Digg + Ruby on Rails + Entertainment Weekly and add them all up and you get PopCurrent, which is just about 60 days old now. This is site that copies Digg’s look and feel but that focuses on entertainment media rather than tech stories. Lots of entertaining video and podcasts rated here.

I was just talking with master developer Ray Slakinski (he did one of the first podcasting aggregators, iPodderX) and he was showing me around PopCurrent and explaining to me the challenges of running a Web 2.0 business that’s less than two months old.

He says most of his traffic comes from MySpace.

Not much traffic comes from traditional search engines yet, but he notices that he’s seeing growth there. He says he is getting tens of thousands of unique visitors per day. The bands there, he tells me, are always trying to find new ways to get noticed and so they talk up when they are high on PopCurrent. Also, people who have podcasts who might have 500 to 1,000 listeners talk it up as well.

Two programmers, who live in Toronto, did this site in Ruby on Rails. It’s been open since June.

One of his favorite video shows that gets featured on PopCurrent? HopeIsEmo, which is a show done by a goth girl. A sad goth girl. But, it’s funny. Thanks Ray for letting me know about that!

What makes eBay special? To me it’s not the technology, although that’s pretty damn impressive, especially now. But what sets eBay apart is the community of buyer’s and sellers. I was wondering when we’d see a search engine that’d add both a community of recommenders with an indexer like the one Google has and I just saw what could become just that in Evaal.

It’s very raw, and very early, but I like the impulse of Timothy Anyasi, founder of Idpact, Inc. who makes Evaal, a search engine that matches the power of an indexer , along with the community power which makes a better search experience (in theory).

He called me and asked what I thought. Here’s the scenario. You want to search for a Rolodex Watch. Go to Google and instantly get lost. Too many choices. There’s no way for you to pick out who is good, credible, or who won’t steal your money.

So, instead you go to Evaal. Here’s a search on Evaal for “watches.”

Why won’t someone game this and send me to their brother instead of sending me to a good retailer who’ll treat me well? Well, same way you can tell eBay sellers who are good or not. The community rates them.

The problem? There aren’t enough community members. So, most pages don’t have experts to ask.

The other problem with Evaal? The base index isn’t nearly good enough for me to take it seriously and the UI isn’t good enough to get my recommendation (I HATE frames, for instance, and it doesn’t have the polish that a modern Web site requires for a mass audience — they need to hire a designer who can at least get them up to parity with, say, Digg’s UI).

But, this is an interesting idea and one I’d like to see explored.

The advantage for you to get involved early is that if they fix the UI and index issues they’ll start getting an audience and if you’re the first “recommender” on a page you’ll have a lot of power to help refer search users elsewhere.

Why is that important? Well, say you refer someone to a realtor. Did you know that many realtors will pay a referral fee? Same with Amazon. Same with hosting companies and a whole host of businesses.

Interesting idea! I wonder why anyone hasn’t put an eBay style community onto a search engine before?

Don Dodge doesn’t understand why anyone would invest $5 million in a blogger.

Here’s a question for Don: would you have invested $5 million in Howard Stern? How about Oprah Winfrey? Martha Stewart? Rush Limbaugh? Jon Stewart? Back when those five people were nobodies?

I would have. Oprah alone is worth more than a billion. Not too shabby of a return. Don’t think any bloggers could become worth that much?

Well, I remember when Rush Limbaugh was a ”nobody” only on one radio station in Sacramento, CA.

Why did I like WetPaint and PBWiki? Because they were drop-dead simple to get in and setup. Just enter a URL. I didn’t like Jot because they forced you to look at too many choices before you got to that stage. But, Jot just shipped a new version and WOW it’s a lot better and once you get in it has a ton of features too. I like how it shows a normal, non-geeky user, what’s possible once inside too.

What wiki tool passes your “Blink” test? What is important to you in a wiki tool?

Interesting, my former boss, Steve Sloan, is offering a podcasting class as part of the journalism department at San Jose State University.

I wonder if it would have been better to offer a “multimedia journalism class” instead (which is what this really is)? But that sounds so “old school.”

The skills journalists will need in the future are going to be a lot more varied than just churning out good text. The better journalists are going to understand how to do that, create illustrations (or at least rough drawings that an artist will be able to take and fill out), capture audio, photos, and video, and edit all that together to tell a compelling story on the Web.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you have two journalists of the same quality. One can only do text. But the other one can capture more media. Which one do you expect will get on DIGG?

Anyway, if I were a student I’d be in this class. Why? Because it would help me expand my portfolio that I could show employers. There are VERY FEW journalism jobs available (we keep hearing about newspapers that are laying off journalists) so if you want to be considered for one of those jobs you have to have a better portfolio than the next person. Especially if you want to work online (TechCrunch, Om Malik, and Huffington Post are all hiring).

One of the things we’re working to do with our audio journalists at Podtech is to get them to do text, photos, and a little bit of video so that their stories are more likely to get noticed.

So, who’ll get hired into “new journalism” outfits? Let’s say Digg was going to hire some professional journalists. Don’t you think they’d be more likely to hire someone who could do more media? I do.

Oh, there’s a San Jose blogger meetup on Thursday. I don’t think I’ll be able to get there, unfortunately, had something else going on that evening already.

One difference between Seattle and Silicon Valley? There are a TON more events. It’s amazing how many more things there are to do here at night.

Another difference? When you enter Freeway 280 doing close to 80 mph and a cop passes you at around 90 mph, you know something is different here. In Washington no one drives over 60 (it seems) and if you do you will get a ticket. Not in Silly Valley.