Mark Geller

A number of my friends and colleagues who do not work in high-tech or startups have mentioned recently they have read some of my blog entries and have a growing interest in consumer Internet and entrepreneurship. Several of them have asked for references to other blogs on the subject, so I thought it might be helpful to give a brief summary of the blogs and news sources I follow along with why I find them valuable. Below are some of the main ones, arranged in order by usefulness and the order I consume them. I read most of these in Google Reader, which is free and I recommend highly for quickly reviewing lots of blog entries and sharing with friends.

• Stories that have been shared with me by friends and colleagues. I have 3 or 4 friends who share articles with me through Google Reader–I wish I had more… so feel free to share with me and I will do the same! Several of these are colleagues from Google and the articles they send are always interesting, ranging from high-tech to politics to general interest and travel.
• Fred Wilson’s blog, A VC. Fred is a well-known and respected early-stage venture capitalist based in New York. He has excellent intuition on which sites and services are going to make a major impact and which aren’t. (Some of his recent seed stage investments include Twitter and Foursquare.) If you only read one page per day to keep up with the latest in consumer Internet, it should be this one.
• Chris Dixon is a successful Internet entrepreneur and angel investor based in New York City, who started blogging only a few weeks ago and has already become one of the must-reads for startup founders. He is extremely knowledgeable about tech startups, raising capital, and dealing with investors, and often has useful tips for young technologists learning the business side of the Internet.
• Joel On Software is the blog of Joel Spolsky. He has written over 1,000 articles on subjects relating to the right way–and the wrong way–to create software as well as manage a successful high-tech company. Joel also founded and runs Fog Creek Software as well as Stackoverflow.com, the gold standard in software development community sites. If you want to speak the same language as your developers, check this out.
• Next up on my Google Reader list is items that have been starred by “JH”. JH is Jeff Huber, the VP of engineering for the group in which I worked (as a PM) at Google. I started following his feed at Google and have kept up afterward. Every day he stars about 20-30 fascinating stories relating to Google products, Google as a company, trends in technology, and general interest. If you follow me, maybe I will share some with you.  ;-)
• TechCrunch, this is the no-brainer single best site on the Web to keep up with everything interesting and new with consumer Internet, software, hardware, and peripherals.
• Next up, in no particular order, are a variety of blogs on entrepreneurship and gaming: Venture Beat GamesBeat, Venture Beat Entrepreneur Corner,  Inside Social Games, Watercooler Games, and Gamasutra Features
• I also follow several blogs of local entrepreneurs and VCs from Los Angeles, including:
  • Both Sides of The Table, from Mark Suster, a successful founder turned VC, with great advice for new founders
  • Jason Nazar, CEO of Docstoc and a force on the L.A. tech scene
  • Mixergy, Andrew Warner’s great site for insightful interviews with successful entrepreneurs
  • QuickSprout from Neil Patel, founder of CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics, who recently moved from SoCal to Seattle.
• The blog of Tim Ferriss, author of The 4 Hour Work Week, for interesting stories on entrepreneurship, lifestyle design, and travel.
• The last source I consume several times a week is the New York Times, which I do almost exclusively using their great free iPhone app, which allows you to quickly see the most popular (most emailed) and latest articles from NYTimes.com

Besides this I peruse maybe a dozen other blogs from VCs and technologists (Matt Cutts’ blog at Google is a great one if you are interested in SEO), although this should be enough to get you started. All of the above are excellent blogs, I recommend them all highly. Of course I am always on the lookout for great new sources as well, so feel free to contact to let me know your favorites.