Besides what I’ve mentioned on the About page there are a few other reasons why I’m doing this.

Brad Feld, a VC in Colorado whose blog I look forward to reading daily, posted yesterday on a topic that, in a roundabout way, is another reason I decided to start this.

In his post, “The Signal to Noise Ratio Feels Out of Whack To Me”, Brad comments on two recent deals and the tech community’s extreme interest in one and apparent lack of interest in the other.

What do these deals have to do with why I’m doing this? Nothing.

However I’ve noticed increasingly that the signal to noise ratio of topics I’m interested in, start-ups/commercialization/innovation/venture capital/… , has been growing increasingly out of whack. Subscribing to the rss feeds on del.icio.us for VC and entrepreneur tags used to yield amazing results. Searching Technorati for a specific topic would usually find 3 to 5 good leads.

Lately I’ve found the VC and entrepreneur tags to be filled with… noise. I have to sift through lots of repeat postings, on less than interesting topics, before I find something of interest. The signal to noise ratio for this method is out of whack, and getting worse. The noise on Technorati is so bad that I’ve given up on it as a source to find new content.

Brad’s post helped me realize that my frustration with the noise motivated me to want to add some new quality content. I also realize the irony in that this can easily just add to the noise problem. I’ll do my best not to go that route.

(another thought: why do you think that on del.icio.us VC is tagged so much more than entrepreneur? I’ve found that funny for a few months now. VC has been tagged 5785 times while entrepreneur has been tagged 4565 times. Is the VC content that much better? Are there that many more VC’s surfing the web? Is VC a lot easier to tag than entrepreneur? Or, do entrepreneurs think they need to learn more about ‘VC’ than they do ‘entrepreneur’?)


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Signal vs. Noise (Why Am I Doing This? Part 1)

Posted on 12.11.05 to General. Subscribe to follow comments on this post. Add your thoughts or trackback from your own site.

Welcome to the conversation.

Hi, I'm Fraser and this is my personal site where I write about the things I'm interested in: start-up strategy, the web, music, and life.

My days are spent commercializing emerging technologies. Currently I'm helping to deliver the promise of semantic web to the consumer market at AdaptiveBlue. Previously I was at Trivaris, a Canadian seed stage investment firm.

I am a co-founder of Innovation Night, a community driven event supporting entrepreneurship in Canadian and US cities.

Here's what I'm doing right now:

    These are the people in my neighborhood: