Velocity Interactive Group released some details on Crowd Fusion's funding. Reading it now I just noticed how my contributions were edited. No offense to the other less famous people at our VC's, but my original quote was:

There's no better way to validate an early stage business like ours than to have smart people like Jon Miller, Ross Levinsohn, Alan Patricof and Marc Andreessen tell the world that they believe in what you're doing enough to partner up with you.

Thank heaven for blogs.

Of course, there are way more people working with us than those four -- specifically Ian Sigalow at Greycroft (who is now on our board) and Jorge Espinel at Velocity -- but those are some fantastic investors, don't you think? I am extremely happy with how our money raising project worked out. Jason was a great coach for me on that front.

Here are some more details on the funding:

• Our valuation was "somewhere south of Facebook's".
• Because Crowd Fusion didn't exist when Jon Miller left AOL, Time Warner's non-compete couldn't block him from joining our board.

But seriously, there is some confusion as to whether Crowd Fusion is a publishing company or a platform company. I'll have to do another post to clear that up better, but for now just know that we're a publishing company with our own platform and both are named Crowd Fusion. Did that help?

We are not taking on hosting customers. ComicMix and all of our personal sites are enough of a distraction. Right now we are focused on building out some sample sites so we can show people how it all works. More news on that front coming soon.

I was offline all day yesterday spending time with my family. I sent no text messages and only one email. Today when I loaded up Twitter, this was my status:

REALLY FREAKING BUMMED BECAUSE I'M NOT AT THE DARK KNIGHT. =[

I never posted that to Twitter! I don't use all caps and my smileys are always winking, not an equals sign and a bracket like Gavin always makes. ;-) See?

Here are my theories as to what's going on:

1. Someone guessed my Twitter password, deleted my previous message and posted this new one;
2. Someone figured out a way to hack Twitter or their API, deleted my previous message and posted this new one;
3. Twitter had a database error and swapped one of my tweets with someone else's.

If it's #1, then it only happened to me. I already changed my password. We'll see if it happens again.

If it's #2 or #3, then people who use Twitter are in trouble.

Even stranger: when I tried to get you all a link to my current status message, I get a "this page does not exist" error.

UPDATE: Here is the message I used to have:

In West Dennis, MA unloading our car. Ten great years of marriage complete. Will eat lots of seafood to celebrate.

It was safely preserved in the sidebar of my site because Crowd Fusion spiders my Twitter feed instead of having me just load it via JavaScript. That protects my site from hanging when there's a Twitter outage.

UPDATE 2: Twitter is having an outage right now...

UPDATE 3: The tweet that wasn't mine doesn't show up in my personal timeline. I searched for tweets with "West Dennis" in them and mine from the other night is lost (according to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=west+dennis), but one from my ComicMix editor Rick Marshall does show up. Wild that he was out here in the same town a month ago. What a small world.

So I did a search for some of the text from the message that was showing up as my current status (before I Twittered about Twitter being hacked -- now it's gone from my stream, but I have a screen shot) and this search (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=freaking+bummed) finds that crazy line that I didn't write! It was a message by TaylorIsGreen.

Okay, I think I get what happened now. My account wasn't hacked. Twitter itself wasn't hacked. The Twitter system just had some kind of screw up. The tweet that it said was mine about The Dark Knight was here:

http://twitter.com/frankensite/statuses/861650927 (failbird says "That page doesn't exist!")

and the one I found by TaylorIsGreen is here:

http://twitter.com/TaylorIsGreen/statuses/861650927

Mystery solved! Since they both have the same ID, it just means that Twitter screwed up and lost my tweet from when we arrived for our vacation and started showing the wrong message as my latest one. That bad tweet never seemed to go out in my feed or it would have been on my site in the sidebar.

I'm not thrilled, but it could have been much worse. Even though I've had some laughs at their expense, I am rooting for the Twitter team and I might be the only techie dot com entrepreneur I know who isn't building a Twitter killer.

Of course, then we wouldn't have Tony Shaloub's wicked Monk or NPH's legendary Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother.

Anyway, Joss Whedon, of Buffy TV fame, has a new Internet show that debuts today called Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and it stars NPH. He talked to ComicMix's Rick Marshall about the show. I can't wait to see it.

Doctor Horrible isn't loading for me right now, but our ComicMix interview is. Go check it out!

For now I just wanted to say this: I prefer homage over baiting.

Bill Amend's FoxTrot did a really funny parody of popular webcomics, including my favorite XKCD. I loved it and I'm sure those creators loved seeing their work referenced in thousands of printed newspapers.

Compare that to something sensational like Forbes' Attack of the Blogs, which was probably responsible for a good chunk of their site's traffic and display ad delivery that quarter as well as far more links than they deserved (including mine here).

Homage rules. FoxTrot rules.

I ordered FiOS in May. I got an installation date of June 11. On June 11, Verizon Guy #1 came to my house and said:

I am here to install your FiOS. Did someone from Verizon bring the fiber line up from the street to your house yet?

Of course not.

The next day, Verizon Guy #2 came to my door to bring the fiber line up from the street and said:

Did the guy who came here yesterday leave all the equipment I need so I can bring the line up from the street?

Of course not.

Every week since then I've called Verizon to get my FiOS order back on track. Last week they identified me as a person who "wants to reschedule his installation" and said the best they could do was mid-July. I explained that I didn't want to reschedule at all. I wanted them to come out on June 11 and give me FiOS. Finally someone figured out what was going on and -- after giving me grief for ordering my service online instead of over the phone -- said they would get someone out this week.

Just now Verizon Guy #3 showed up at my door and said:

I am here to install your FiOS. Did someone from Verizon bring the fiber line up from the street to your house yet?

I don't get it.

This is fantastic news: One of our ComicMix titles has been nominated for "Best Online Comic" at this year's Harvey Awards.

Among its competition are Perry Bible Fellowship (we interviewed its creator Nicholas Gurewitch) and Penny Arcade. How cool is that?

If you haven't checked it out, you can read the entire EZ Street run from the beginning -- just keep hitting page down over and over until you're done. Then come back and let me know how you liked it.

New Song #1
It sounded like a Queensrÿche song. I stopped listening to Queensrÿche a long time ago. I even saw them open for someone last year at Jones Beach and I didn't listen. Not a good omen for the rest of the album.

New Song #2
The music here was straight Linkin Park. I heard strings. Okay, I swear Axl got replaced by Queensrÿche's Geoff Tate at some point during the decade long recording process. Towards the end it became an Evanescence song. Without the male vocal parts.

New Song #3
The music sounded like a slow No Doubt or Maroon 5 song. There were a couple of little Spanish guitar solos. The vocals started out sounding like Axl and then drifted back to Queensrÿche. Why?

Chinese Democracy
This song started out like a song from Operation Mindcrime -- not a very good sign. Then, unbelievably, Axl himself started singing! It rocked. This might be a top ten Guns N' Roses song. Maybe there is hope for this album. One rumor I heard is that some of these are throwaway tracks that won't appear on the real release. Hopefully they keep this one since it's the best track so far (and because the album is called Chinese Democracy).

Continue reading Chinese Democracy reviewed ›

First, KG deserved a championship. Like he said in his mostly incoherent post game interview, he is now "certified".

Second, I love Doc Rivers. I was at MSG for his final game ever as a player. As I recall, he was on the Knicks and he went down under one of the baskets with an injury and they carried him off the court and he never, ever played again. (Wikipedia says he spent one more season as a bench player for the Spurs, but we all know that the Wikipedia is full of bogus information. I will have to go correct his entry later tonight.)

Anyway, congrats to Doc, KG, Celtic-lifer Paul Pierce and 3-point machine Ray Allen on beating L.A.

Cinematical also has a good review of the Hulk movie. ComicMix has a great round-up of Hulk movie news including details on the Captain America Hulk cameo which Cinematical covered as well. It seems that the cameo got left on the cutting room floor. Bruce Banner had traveled to the arctic, probably to end his own life, and meets up with Captain America. They say the clip will appear on the DVD and maybe on the Internet. My thought isn't that Banner and Cap have a conversation. I am certain Banner sees (or maybe only the audience sees) Captain America frozen in a block of ice, waiting to be thawed out in his own movie.

One more incredible ComicMix Hulk item. Matt Raub interviewed Hulk producers Kevin Feige and Gale Anne Hurd and director Louis Leterrier on ComicMix TV. I've embedded it here. Enjoy.

They started out with 11 Batman Stories to Read Before Watching The Dark Knight and followed it up with 10 Must-Read Stories Before You Watch Iron Man in Theaters. Today they did 10 Must-Read Stories Before You See The Incredible Hulk. I love these!