Your point is somewhat diminished by all the sponsored words in your post -- speech, memorial service, victims, lead, t-shirts, memorials services, etc, etc...

Despite what everyone thinks about me (and which, honestly, I never bother to deny) I've never had anything stronger than alcohol. So when I had my wisdom teeth removed and was given Vicodin, I was similarly freaked out.

I took one pill when I got home and it was probably the greatest four hours of my life. Felt like I had crawled back into the womb -- just pure, unmitigated bliss. Threw away the rest of the package the next morning and haven't touched them since.

Glad your experience was much (and much less) better :)

The other white meat?

Goddamn, I love Woot's crazy-ass writing style. Reminds me a little bit of what we used to do with MyBlogLog, only Woot does it much, MUCH better.

For instance, in our FAQ, we had a random question -- What's the meaning of life? -- with this answer:

"What we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One, people are not wearing enough hats. Two, Matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields, which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source, which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist automatically, as orthodox Christianity teaches, but has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved due to mankind's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia."

Then we got acquired by Yahoo and one of Yahoo's umptity billion users complained on a blog that we were misrepresenting Christianity. Yahoo requested that we pull the FAQ entry.

We told Yahoo that 1) it was funny and 2) it was a quote from Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" so if people felt we were inaccurate they should take it up with John Cleese.

Yahoo let us know that this wasn't really a request at all and was more of an "or else" sorta demand.

So, hey, yeah, woot for Woot! I hope that Amazon acquisition works out for ya. $110M will almost certainly dull the pain :D

C'mon, TechCrunch! You can't have an article about Triggit (especially one celebrating their funding) without a picture of Zach in that godawful red Triggit shirt. I've bumped into him at probably 15 events in the last two years and he's worn that shirt every time. I'm betting that he has 14 of them in his closet and does laundry every two weeks.

Regardless, congrats to Zach and company for raising capital from two of my favorite firms. Huzzah, amigo!

Massive win for an awesome Techstars team. And serious fucking proof that if you follow your passion good things will follow. Huzzah!

Congrats to Ted and the rest of the Dogster team on the re-launch. They are some of my favorite entrepreneurs, doing it their own way and with serious style.

Simply put, you should have a reason when you take money.

Best case, you are taking money because you *know* that adding resources will add adoption and/or revenue. Money as a catalyst for growth is a wonderful thing, but usage has to be known before the money is raised. "We have a repeatable business model and we're going to spend this money on a direct sales force" or "we know that for every ten dollars spent on partnership deals we're seeing seven registrations, so we're raising this money to hit a step function in our user base."

Second best, you are taking money because it''s the only way to keep going. You rarely get this on good terms, but when the alternative is to let the company die, you might have no other options. In this situation, it's still wise to question whether you should take the money -- maybe you should let the company die, maybe the product just isn't going to be successful. If you don't know what you're trying to achieve in the runway created by the new capital, you probably shouldn't be raising it. Unless, of course, you're just scared of losing a paycheck ;)

Mike -- I've seen people angry at their loss of privacy. I've seen people threaten to and then follow through on leaving Facebook and I've seem people urge others to do so as well. And I've seen loads people engage in hyperbole.

Can you show me one legitimate source "stopping one step short of calling for physical violence against Zuckerberg"?

Like I said in my talk, I think the problem is we need more information and less data. It's only a matter of time before we see a flood of companies taking the next step, from simply aggregating data to creating meaning from it.