The short distance between two points...

is through a new medium. At least, that's according to Mark Pincus, who has a post based on a email exchange we had yesterday. (I even get a nice reference as a "smart kid")

with the introduction of every new communication medium comes a short window to more easily get the attention of influential people. when email first came out and then instant messaging i was surprised how easily i could get to ceo's playing with the new medium (but not yet getting a lot of incoming msgs) where today it's impossible even to get people you know.

This came about because I mentioned Mark in yesterday's post, and he found my entry through a technorati search. To some extent, a blog is a much more public way of doing this than the email/im channels Mark mentions, but that also means you can grab people's attention just by talking about things that they are interested in, rather than having to mention them by name. For instance, another VC blogger I read has two portfolio companies - del.icio.us and Return Path. Both are interesting services that try to help us manage the overwhelming amounts of information we see and create on the net. Without ever mentioning him by name, I've now created a post that he may see if he watches for new mentions of his companies (I'll see if I get a hit based on these and post later if I do).

However, the reason Mark and I had a conversation over such a mundane activity, as him reading my blog, is a little more interesting. His post yesterday mentioned he was in Hawaii, and when I looked over my statcounter logs yesterday (yes, I have developed an addiction to seeing how many people are reading these posts), I saw a hit from an IP in Hawaii, with the referring page being a technorati search for "Mark Pincus". If it hadn't been Hawaii, or if I hadn't read his post within a minute of looking at my logs, I probably wouldn't have noticed, but as it was, I was able to put two and two together and figure out that he had searched on his own name, and had read my blog when it showed up in that search.

As Mark mentions, this is probably a short-lived phenomena, and it's probably already too late for some people. A technorati search for "Bill Gates" for instance, returns over 10 pages of hits from just the past 24 hours. But given the somewhat more intimate world of Venture Capital, it still might be a useful tool for a while. A search for "John Doerr" still reaches back over 2 weeks on the first page of results. (In fact, that may come to be a new buzz metric - how far back does your first page of results go. The shorter the time, the more buzz worthy you are right now).

And just for the record, a search for "Keshava Dasarathy" returns nothing right now.