Last month we Launched Los Angeles Tech and in the announcement we provide the Hot List for the first half of January 2009. Top for January 16, 2009 - January 31, 2009 Posts Are You Selling Online Yet? This hot list is based on various social signals of what people are writing about, reading, bookmarking, searching, etc.

I'm beginning my final preparation for my presentation at eLearn 2009. As I did for my keynote at ASTD TechKnowledge in January, I'm using what I described in Twitter Conference Ideas. FYI – I'll also plan to do a wrap up over the weekend following the presentation

thought we should take a moment to reflect on some of the awesomeness that came out of SXSWi 2009. Tags: Articles sxsw sxsw 2009 sxswi Most of Los Angeles is gearing up for this years SXSW Interactive and will be hitting the streets of Austin, Texas over the course of the next few days. Photo (CC) Brian Solis. www.briansolis.com ).

Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp, Sept 2009) View more documents from Dave McClure. A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation. This is a great presentation and one that I'm going to point out to startup / early stage company CEOs. You only build what you need to prove that model. Great stuff.

However in 2009 he has taken Mahalo to huge traffic numbers and even some revenue. Although sponsored bar events continued to decline in 2009 due to the economy, you all managed to get out on way too many school nights. Megan has managed to ruffle a few feathers in 2009, but apparently not enough. RIGHT! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

However in 2009 he has taken Mahalo to huge traffic numbers and even some revenue. Although sponsored bar events continued to decline in 2009 due to the economy, you all managed to get out on way too many school nights. Megan has managed to ruffle a few feathers in 2009, but apparently not enough. RIGHT! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

Because I was the Acting CTO for eHarmony at it's start, I quite often get introduced to people who have an idea for a startup company that is based on some kind of matching algorithm. They describe the company as the eHarmony of careers, clothes, jobs, college, tutoring services, doctors, service companies, investments, etc. That feels powerful.

I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. The mess really comes from a developer who was willing to get started on a product that was not fully thought out. always take a very different approach in early conversations.

I recently had a conversation with an pre-launch startup where they discussed how SEO was going to be really important for them. They went on to describe a fairly common type of site that has some original content, but not much. This isn't the first time I've had this same conversation. won't say that I'm truly an expert on SEO. That's pretty low.

While the economy in 2009 looks challenging for most companies, the outlook of marketing executives is rather bright and upbeat. Deborah Kania and her team at Brightworks Interactive have just released results of their survey of marketing executives' plans for 2009. Marketing Trend #5: Increased use of analytics tools (e.g.,