I thought that some of our readers might be interested and qualified to attend one of our upcoming private hedge fund dinners.

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Seeking Ecommerce Experts for New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Hedge Fund Dinners
December 2006

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Nitron Advisors is organizing a series of dinners for Ecommerce experts to talk with major hedge fund investors interested in this sector. These invitation-only events will be taking place in New York on December 4th, Boston on December 6th, Chicago on December 11th, and San Francisco on December 13th. We will compensate you for flight expenses.

We’re looking for senior industry executives and other experts with the following backgrounds:
+ online specialty retail (eBay, Amazon, Blue Nile, Overstock, Audible, etc.)
+ online auctions (power sellers on eBay, other auction sites)
+ search engine space (Google, Yahoo, MSN)
+ consumer generated media/ free video hosting services (YouTube, MSN Video, Yahoo Video, Google Video)
+ online advertising/marketing (ValueClick, 24/7 Real Media, aQuantive)
+ lead generation players (Autobytel Inc, Move Inc, Bankrate, IAC InterActiveCorp, HouseValues, etc.)
+ Online media (PRIMEDIA, New York Times/About.com, etc.)

Qualifications: As an expert, you have at least four years senior experience in the eCommerce space. You have a “big picture” perspective on different firms in the space.

If you are not already a member of our Circle of Experts, please visit http://www.circleofexperts.com/apply-form.html?i=11 and apply to be a member of the Nitron Advisors Circle of Experts. Please contact Mr. Jesse Mandell, 1-212-682-6455, JMandell(AT)nitronadvisors.com, with any questions. Please note that we must review your bio and talk with you before we can accept you for the dinner.

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I should also mention that we’re hosting a dinner on Nov. 15 for consumer technology experts in New York. We’re interested in experts in PCs, flash memory, MP3 players, GPS systems, and mobile telephony. Register at http://www.circleofexperts.com/apply-form.html?i=11. Contact Mr. Jesse Mandell, 1-212-682-6455, JMandell(AT)nitronadvisors.com , for details. We’ll reimburse flight expenses.
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From the “brazen careerist”, 10 Job-hunt tactics you might not know:

2. Use proactive recommendations.
Instead of waiting for a hiring manager to ask for references, have your reference call immediately. This works well if you have a heavy-weight reference, like a well-known CEO or someone who knows the hiring manager. But it also works well if you have little professional experience.

more

More funnies from Chris Pirillo:

Teresa Valdez Klein and Jason Preston have been posting their notes from the various presentations at this week’s Blog Business Summit. Among the highlights:

• A link to 15 Ways to a Killer Blog with Maryam and Robert Scoble

• Ben Edwards on Branding and Social Media
• A link to a link to Jeremy Popper’s Unclear on the Concept; Lessons from Blog Business Summit
• Dave Taylor and Halley Suitt on monitoring RSS and the blogosphere
• Jason Calacanis’s keynote and Teresa Valdez Klein on her conversation with him over the ongoing debate about blogger junkets and pay per post. I agree with Teresa.

There’s a great write-up of danah boyd in Financial Times, which labels her the high priestess of internet friendship. I thought they did a great job, with the exception of not respecting her preference of not capitalizing her name.

In addition to profiling danah, the article also chronicles the development of Friendster and MySpace, and others, as well as some of danah’s insights on social networking sites.

For one thing, danah found that while these sites have created a few celebrities of their own,

…apart from a few intense self-promoters, most people, Boyd found, were using the sites to present themselves to a small group of friends and get their recognition and feedback. The sites are an opportunity to define in public who they are. By providing an audience, and the tools to interact with that audience, the social networks are satisfying that need. Boyd calls this behaviour “identity production” and, employing a favourite phrase of hers, says that young people are trying to “write themselves into being”.

The article goes on to talk about social content sharing, business-oriented social software, and sexual predators. The latter has been covered a lot in the news lately, but I agree with danah:

“The fears are so painfully overblown,” said Boyd. “Is there porn on MySpace? Of course. And bullying, sexual teasing and harassment are rampant among teenagers. It is how you learn to make meaning, cultural roles, norms. These kids need to explore their life among strangers. Teach them how to negotiate this new world. They need these public spaces now that other public spaces are closed to them. They need a place that is theirs. We should not always be chasing them and stopping them from growing up.”

There’s more on the tension of commercialization, as well as answers to the questions, “What are social networks?” and “Do the sites make money?”

Even though it’s ostensibly just a profile of danah, all in all this is probably the best article I’ve seen on the topic of social networking in a mainstream publication.

One of the major themes of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online (see Chapter 16) is the need to preserve ones corporate and personal virtual reputation. I’ve long thought that there was a need for a business that would be a personal PR agent, which would monitor what’s being said about you and destroy any negative information.

That business has been launched: ReputationDefender. What I like about the model is that I think it addresses a real concern that people have (or should have). 10% of Internet searches are for proper names; you are being evaluated every day online. ReputationDefender’s main competition will be the same competition that PR firms have: people providing the service in-house instead of using an outside provider.

An interesting question they’ll have to address as they scale is verifying the identity of the person using the service. If I say that I want to monitor the activity of my child, who verifies that that person is my child? And this is a great tool for stalking and identity theft (as are ZoomInfo and many other online network services): perhaps I fill out a form indicating that I want to monitor the online activities of a certain individual, who may not be me personally. Verifying that a given credit card ties to the name of the person being investigated is an obvious way to verify identity, but of course large numbers of credit card numbers are stolen every year.

I agree with Pete Cashmorethat it would be preferable to offer a very basic automated tracking service for free to get people into the system - “entering your credit card details is a massive barrier for the casual visitor”. After all, people can easily use any search engine/blog reader to view discussion of their name across the net.

More here and here.

Overall, I’m positive on the company’s prospects.

Let me say first off that I am, generally, a MySpace fan. I’m active on there, and my teenage son and my two older stepsons all have accounts.

But you’ve got to be careful on there. Last Thursday I spent the better part of a day cleaning off spyware and a Trojan virus from my son’s machine. I had some precautions in place, but obviously not enough. I won’t go into the whole story, but we’re about 98% sure that it came not directly from MySpace, but from the page of someone who sent my stepson a private message.

It was a particularly nasty virus, known as a keylogger, which records keystrokes from your computer and sends anything interesting — user names and passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. — to a hacker somewhere who collects them, presumably for identity theft purposes.

Turns out there’s another little disturbing fact about MySpace that I was unaware of… it seems you don’t have to actually have a valid e-mail address to use MySpace. In fact, apparently you can register under someone else’s address, as Auren Hoffman writes about in Assuming an Identity on MySpace:

That’s right … I can sign up on MySpace under your email address and assume your identity. MySpace does send an email to verify the email address – but you do not have to click on the verification email to use MySpace. You can still do everything on MySpace you’d always do – like creating an account, adding pictures, adding friends, and generally being active on MySpace. You can assume anyone’s identity on the number one site in America. But this is only if that email address was not used to sign up for an account.

He goes on to note that many people will just ignore the verification e-mail from MySpace, thinking that it’s not a valid one - perhaps a phishing scam - since they didn’t sign up themselves. If they ignore it, though, then someone else now has a MySpace account in not only their name, but their e-mail address as well.

The danger? Auren explains:

Though this can be fun and tame … like me signing up as Clark Kent @ superman.com … it can also be used for malicious purposes. Someone can assume another person’s identity, get people to trust them, and be fooled when that person goes to verify their email address in MySpace (which is the only way to verify someone today).

So what can you do to protect yourself?

First, install good anti-virus and anti-spyware software. If you just want to pay for this, you’re welcome to, but there are some excellent free solutions out there. I have tried most of them, and the ones that in my experience consistently find and fix things the others can’t are AVG Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware.

Beyond that, MySpace offers some safety tips, but they fall way short. At the other end of the spectrum, I think some of the parent-oriented sites and privacy-advocate sites go a little overboard. I recommend Rock Safe from MyCityRocks, which offers practical and realistic guidelines to help users of social networking software protect their identity and participate safely.

Finally, download a free copy of The Virtual Handshake and read Chapter 16 on Privacy & Safety.

Have fun, be safe, and feel free to stop by and connect with me on MySpace.

“People who access the Internet for what have become routine functions — sending emails, writing blogs, and posting photos and information about themselves on social networking sites — do not realize how much of their personal privacy they put at risk, according to Wharton faculty and legal experts. Nor, they add, have the courts fully addressed the ways in which the Internet can be harnessed for questionable purposes that encroach on privacy. ”

Kevin Werbach observes:

…[L]ots of situations that used to be private are now public. It’s not a question of privacy but of social norms. Perhaps the answer is just, ‘That’s too bad.’ If someone had snapped a photo of [the Korean girl who didn’t clean up after her dog on the subway] robbing a bank and she said, ‘You can’t take a photo of me,’ most of us would say, ‘Too bad, you were robbing a bank.’ In a perverse way, we’re going back to the small town where everyone knows what everyone else is doing by virtue of the global information superhighway. My point is, right or wrong, this is going to happen. Google is not going to go away.”

I agree that we may be moving to more of a “small town” environment, where your actions are known to many people, instead of you benefiting from the traditional anonymity of the big city. However, unfortunately so far there’s very little evidence that this is resulting in an increase in standards of behavior, which would be my preferred outcome. Unfortunately, for broader societal reasons, we seem to be steadily defining deviancy down.

More at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1567.cfm

There’s a great piece at Inside Bay Area this week entitled on how Corporate America is embracing social networking. The story focuses on the increase in customers for Visible Path and the in-house social networking being developed by IBM called “Fringe”.

The jury is still out whether any of the fledgling MySpace wannabes for the business world can prove the concept works as well in the business world as it has for young people’s social lives.

But a sudden jump in customers at Visible Path and the success of an in-house social network that IBM Corp.’s San Jose research center created seem to suggest a model that works in the business world — to connect individuals in existing yet far-flung and dispersed networks.

I think the phenomenal growth of both LinkedIn (7.5 million members) and openBC (nearing 2 million) should be considered, as well. LinkedIn’s membership represents about the same order of magnitude of their target demographic (business professionals) as MySpace does of theirs (everybody). I don’t think there’s any question at this point as to whether the concept works well in the business world — it’s just a matter of how it will take shape moving forward.

This week, Work.com relaunched in the form of a Web 2.0-ish business community. The site consists of how-to guides for running your small business, written by a combination of in-house editors, certified topical experts, and members.

While this has admittedly been done before, Work.com has done a great job on the execution:
- great domain name
- a clean, well-organized design
- a highly consistent guide format that includes links to online resources to help you get it done
- a team of professional editors, community leaders and experts to make sure content stays current and appropriate and to help members get engaged in the community

I’m the community leader for the Sales & Marketing Channel, and there’s already a tremendous collection of how-to guides available on the site, including one I wrote on online business networking. Here are some of my other favorites related to virtual relationships, social software and Web 2.0:

• Small Business Blogs

• Start Podcasting for Your Small Business
• RSS for Small Business
• Marketing Your Small Business with a Blog
• Managing Small Business E-mail
• Managing E-mail Overload

I’ve committed to several more guides in the next few weeks — I’ll post here as they go up.

Also, if you have a particular area of expertise and don’t already see it covered (or at least not as well as you think you could), then you can also create a new guide yourself. If you do, be sure to stop by my profile and send me a message so I can have a read and come post comments.

Hope to see you at Work.com!