Thanks to Volkswagen of America, the VW sitting in front of my house — my fourth — is sure to be my last. Not only that, I’m blogging and posting on Satisfaction about my negative experience. (You can read the full details there if you want, but the nutshell is my transmission blew up just barely out of warranty, VWoA accepted my request for help with the matter, and promptly declined it without explanation.)

The point isn’t that my transmission blew up; transmissions blow up. The point is not even that they have a proprietary part that seems to be known by mechanics to be extremely sensitive, want more than half the trade-in value of the car to replace it, and abjectly refuse to stand behind their product.

A little history: the first car I can remember my family owning when I was a child was a rust orange ‘71 squareback that my dad used to commute 80 miles in daily. I’ve owned two Jettas, and currently own two vw’s — the dead Jetta in question and a ‘71 karmann ghia convertible that I love driving (when it’s not raining or too hot or too cold) and proudly tune and troubleshoot myself. I have aftermarket vw parts and replicas catalogs coming to my house, occasionally go to vw-centric swap meets and online classifieds, have been invited to join VW clubs and rallies, and once even entered an air-cooled vw car show (2nd row, middle).

As I’ve said before, the Bug was a true platform. And trust me, I’m far from a true enthusiast compared to many of these folks - these things have just sort of happened as a by-product of owning a vintage car.

So what happens when I call VWoA with this problem? After I make a point of sharing my history and noting that a transmission failure inside of 75,000 miles is unacceptable to the point that I wouldn’t buy another VW if they didn’t help me, they decline to help me.

What amazes me most, though, is that they do so without offering me anything - not even a favorable trade-in or modest incentive on an upsell to a new car (which I would have been very likely to go for under the circumstances).

When I tell my mechanic about my experience with VWoA, he just laughs. Then he shows me the cease-and-desist letter VWoA sent him, because he had the letters “VW” in the name of his business (as in, “____’s VW Repair”). He tells me how he had to buy all new letterhead, new signage, etc., under threat of lawsuit, and that they even tried to collect a settlement from him for the business he had done in alleged violation of their trademark. He tells me everybody knows how poorly they treat their community of fans and customers, and how all the independent mechanics he knows consider them the enemy.

Thinking back on my experiences and visits to the swap meets, I notice I can’t recall any official VW presence there. A quick search shows plenty of examples of C&D’s chilling the community. Unbelievably, they sent one to a rec.autos.makers.vw.aircooled moderator. There’s even an official statement about it, noting that they’ve successfully pursued actions purusant to, among other things, domain names with the letters “vw” in them, such as “anyvwpart.com”.

I do understand trademark protection (setting aside the dubiousness of some of these claims). I also appreciate that random extensions of warranties cost real operating dollars. But what VW just doesn’t seem to get is the opportunity they’re missing to embrace, rather than alienate, their enthusiast community. There’s so much more they could be doing to put their fans to work for them.

Where are the community moderators? Where are the mechanic’s reps? Insiders blogs and message boards, official leaks to influencers, loyalty discounts? How long will it take for vw to discover and claim their brand on Satisfaction? By contrast, another german car manufacturer seems to know how to nurture its life-long fans - and actually use the internet.

In the meantime, I’ll be shopping for a car from another manufacturer. If anyone can recommend a modern car that behaves just a bit more like a supported platform and ecosystem, I’m all ears.

Details on Bug Labs are starting to emerge (see posts by investors Brad Feld and Fred Wilson).

I’m excited about this and think tremendous potential will be unlocked as data and content are increasingly mixable with device functionality. I’ve alluded to this before in terms of user utility, but I’m not just thinking about fun gadgets and 30-boxes-enabled dog bowls. Think devices that will change the world for the handicapped, for example.

Wireless rabbits and squeezy widget viewers are only the beginning; the internet of things is coming. True open-platform potential ups the ante in a very interesting way. Good luck guys!

I haven’t yet posted about the new Wesabe API, but I’m very excited about it.

Aside from enabling 3rd-party developers to build apps that can help users manage their financial data and get on top of their financial lives (think of a SaaS version of Quicken mashed with all manner of GTD apps), there’s a major shift going on here. Banks and credit agencies are no longer the (only) owners of all the data about us - now we own it too, and have the right to pool it with other users’ data to do interesting things with aggregated data from the community.

MyBlogLog flipped a similar switch by giving users benefits from analytics that have historically been publisher only - now you can’t see my history, and I can’t see yours, but when we’re in the same place, we can see each other’s tracks if we both expose them; I can see what other people are doing at my favorite websites, etc.

Wesabe’s API enables similar opportunities for patrons of the same merchant to connect, and for patterns to be extracted in a way that creates value for all sides. I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

After I accepted a colleague’s invitation to join his network today, LinkedIn gave me a list of ten other people I might know. Historically, those lists have been utterly useless for me — “other people who have worked at Self Employed”, etc.

Today, amazingly, 10 out of 10 were people I knew personally. Quite a few of them were non-obvious - people I’d met at conferences, or had specific business communications with. Most of them were people I knew well enough to add to my network.

Maybe it was a lucky batch, but it sure seems like LinkedIn’s algorithm found the people in my connections’ networks that I was most likely to know. If I had to guess, I would hazard they are extracting some kind of parameters from the kind of people already in my network and applying them to the set of people (in my network’s 1st-degree network + matching my employers). The approach is obvious, the execution is probably hard to nail, and the effect is exactly what it should be: magic.

It’s a good reminder that, despite all the exciting things Facebook is doing these days, LinkedIn is a very effective “social graph” for my business network. If they innovate fast enough, there’s a lot more they could do with it — and I look forward to it.

If you’re not already in my network, btw, the link is in the column to the right.

If you’re in LA and have nothing better to do for the next 36 hours than hang around with geeks of various stripes, come join us at BarCampLA. Drop-ins welcome, it’s all free, there’s food, beer, and stuff, and though you’re encouraged to participate, enthusiasm more or less qualifies.

It’s hosted at Little Radio. Potentially addicitive bonus: Guitar Hero.

I had nothing to do with it whatsoever, but I’ve been watching from the sidelines with near-amazement a new Yahoo! service called Pipes.

It’s a stunning visual editor for web data services - reducing the friction required to normalize multiple data inputs, apply operations and parameters to them, and extract standardized outputs.  The benefit, of course, is to enable unexpected data mashups and new kinds of visualizations, along the lines I’ve talked about before here.  Jeremy Z and Tim O’Reilly do it better justice than I do.  I’m delighted to see a few others are picking up on it - to the point, it appears, that the service is down at the moment.

Congratulations to Pasha (who seems to have taken the opportunity to launch a blog) and the rest of the team that made this happen.

So much of the web is built on the idea that anyone can say anything, and it’s up to the viewer and the collecitve media to promote or dismiss it. Which has made for a very interesting political discourse on the web, ranging from mainstream to fringe, and a lot of very effective communities like Daily Kos. Video immediately made the overall pie fight that much more fun, but I hadn’t realized how much of a platform YouTube has become for overt political expression and dialogue.

Then i read about a controversial video campaigning against Harold Ford, Jr., who was a classmate and friend of mine at Penn. The article didn’t have a link, but a search on YouTube revealed the original (linked above) and plenty of others.

It’s a virtual town square out there - both a great way for candidates and their supporters to get their messages out, and a fantastic platform for creative ways of messaging (both good and bad). As always, buyer beware!

The Beck concert last night rocked. I had one of the most meta-digital-mobile moments ever recorded in the history of the web: I was standing behind Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield as he watched, on his phone, a Flickr stream of photos being uploaded in real time by the fans all around, who were us sending up phonecam pix of the live video feed of the puppet dopplegangers of the live Beck concert. And I was liveblogging this to a friend via SMS.

For taste of the puppetastic Beckage, come correct and check this video. There are zillions of pix around too. The concert itself was fantastic - rocking versions of some of his classics, a powerful performance of “The Golden Age”, acoustic covers of the Flaming Lips and Outkast, medleys of Bowie, Michael Jackson, and others.

The guero silverlake scientologist rides again -go see him if you get the chance.

I’ll be in San Diego for DEMO for the next few days, watching emerging companies demonstrate their innovations.  Then I’m off to Yahoo! HQ for Open Hack Day, which you should definitely check out if you’re at all inclined.  If you’re going to be at either, please drop me a line!

This week, Joel Spolsky (whose book Joel on Software is required reading for web entrepreneurs and product managers) launched a job board. It got me thinking about the fact that TechCrunch has a job board, paidContent has a long-running and successful pay-per-post job blog, and, among other sites I consume regularly, Fred Wilson has, instead, an Indeed.com badge configured to list start-up jobs. So my question is, Why do we need niche job blogs when we have highly searchable, filterable, supposedly better, horizontal sites like monster.com, and aggregation/meta-search models with all the web2.0 technology you could wish for like Indeed.com?

Answer: because they work better! Among the 3 niche sites mentioned above, I can find, without hitting a single “next page” button or filter, listings for Director of Philanthropic Relations at Squidoo (wow!), a Product Manager at Google, design guru at Internet Brands (CarsDirect, etc.), and various other VP- and Director-level positions at startups and large internet players all over.

On the other hand, the most interesting job on Fred Wilson’s badge - which is basically a persistent search of jobs with the word “start-up” in them and do not have the word “engineering” in them, a reasonable-looking proxy for non-technical start-up jobs - promises a position as a product manager at a Sequoia funded company, but links to a dead craigslist homepage. Clicking through the badge to see the full list of jobs, one finds 24,250 results for mortgage loan originators and “start-up opportunities” requiring skills like:

candidates will have 3 years or more of progressive experience in operations and customer service, a working knowledge of DOT safety requirements and superior communication and organization skills. Candidates must also meet the following requirements: Have a CDL Class B w/Tanker and Haz-mat endorsements; ability to install propane tanks; excellent customer service, interpersonal and communication skills; and must be qualified for Propane Tank Installations and Bulk Deliveries.

Sorry guys, the only propane installation I’ll be doing any time soon will be for the BBQ I’m having this weekend! And filtering 24,250 jobs has all the hallmarks of a low effort-to-reward exercise when the sliders are inefficient, non-normalized job titles.

On the employer side of the equation, Joel has a good analysis of why it’s hard to find the best people on job sites (nutshell: because they’re rarely seeking jobs). So you need to find them in the places they congregate for other reasons. . . such as reading useful blogs like Joel’s.

This is interesting because it has everything to do with the social dynamics that are behind social media - there’s a delicate balance they must maintain between selectivity (filtering noise) and value (receiving signal), and that balance differs across social groups and functions. LinkedIn is of value to me in business if most of the people in my network are similarly thoughtful to me about who they accept as contacts (it creates a reputational system), but it is not useful to me in finding stuff to buy from trusted parties like ebay is (because there is no marketplace associated with it). Myspace is of low value in maintaining business relationships, but great for bands with a following. paidContent shows that job boards can scale effectively to large audiences, but only because there’s a pricing engine (and possibly an editorial one) maintaining a filter on the thousands of junk listings that would turn up there if they were free. On the other hand, craigslist is a much better place to find apartments for rent, because you need all the signal you can get there and can efficiently filter lots of noise via parameters like price, bedrooms, and location.

Blogs continue to turn out to be great proxies for niche social networks - if a place that I find valuable for information becomes a meat market for jobs, that’s great for me as both a potential employer and employee. On the other hand, the more spaces like this that emerge, the more I have to spread my job listings and consumption across multiple sites. So how do we aggregate this more efficiently?

Hello friends: how about a feed network for job blog sites? How about a Hype Machine for job listings? How about a utility from technorati or Newsgator or MyBlogLog that can identify sites I’m reading or getting readership from or have audiences like me and then surface me feeds of certain kinds of links (podcasts, job listings, product links, Flickr pointers) from my OPML file or community?

What else?