Feedburner announced a partnership with 20six to incorporate Feedburner’s feed statistics and syndication capabilities for the 20six blogging community.  This will immediately add an additional 50,000 feeds to Feedburner’s “feeds under management” and is the first implementation of the Feedburner partner API.  I think that one of the key drivers of success these days with web-based services is to quickly build out a robust published API to generate real partner activity – John Zagula and Rich Tong at Ignition Partners explain this as part of the “platform play” that they successfully executed at Microsoft as well as other companies they’ve been involved in.  It’s the right metaphor and this is a first visible step in that strategy.

I miss my wife Amy – she’s been in Paris since mid-March learning French, enjoying the Parisian lifestyle (she’s was born in Paris in another life), and wandering around one of the best spring time cities in the world.  Oh – and she’s eating amazing meals – she put up a detailed post on two of them as well as her top 10 list – especially aimed at foodies and people who like to live vicariously. Yum.

Amy and I have been collecting contemporary art for a number of years.  If you’ve even been to our house, my office, or The Nature Conservancy in Boulder, you’ve seen some of our collection.  I attribute this vice to my mom the artist, who always had a great eye for art and surrounded me with it from a very early age.

We’re also big supporters of the Denver Art Museum and are hugely excited about the new Hamilton Building by Daniel Libeskind.  So excited that when we heard from a friend of a showing at The William Havu Gallery of several paintings by Rick Dula of the museum under construction, we bought one.

There was a great article on tax day about the show and Dula’s work as it pertains to the Hamilton Building in the Rocky Mountain News article titled On the edge of hyperrealism.   If you are in Denver and into (a) art, (b) the Hamilton Building, and (c) things that get you “culture points”, swing by The William Havu Gallery and check out the exhibit – tell Nick Ryan I sent you.

Mark Pincus has finally put up a blog (ok – he had one at Blogger – but it’s just his bio.)  Mark’s been a successful entrepreneur for a number of years.  Mark’s latest company – Tribe – is squarely in the middle of all the Web 2.0 stuff going on.  Mark has a history of successful companies – we were investors in two of them (Freeloader – bought by Individual in 1996 and SupportSoft – currently public.) 

Mark always has strong opinions, is super smart, tireless, and has a broad range of interests.  If you are into hearing directly from successful entrepreneurs, his blog is well worth following.

I heard on NPR today during their series this week on income taxes that according to IRS calculations, American’s spend 6.6 billion hours doing their taxes each year.  We apparently also waste 6.6 billion gallons of gas annually while waiting in traffic, there is a 6.6 billion pound gap in AIDS funding, mail volume dropped by 6.6 million pieces in the month following the terrorist attacks in 2001, and the Pak Mun Dam cost 6.6 billion Baht (actually 6.507 billion, but the budget was 6.6 billion.)

Back to the tax thing.  According to the CIA, the current US population is 293,027,571 (estimate as of July 2005).  That’s 20.48 hours per person.  Eek (especially since all the kids under 12 in the US don’t do taxes yet.)  Now, it takes Windows 60 seconds a day to boot.  Assume there are around 200 million PCs in the US and they get booted on average of twice a day (yeah – I know – I (re)boot my various computers at least five times a day – you can have real fun with Windows Math facts if you want.)  That’s 8.30 hours per person.

So – annually, each person in the US spends 20.48 hours on taxes and 8.30 hours rebooting their computer.  Since the average household is around 2.5 people, this is 51.2 hours on taxes and 20.75 hours rebooting their computer per household per year, or three days / household wasted per year. Yeah – I know these numbers are just directionally correct, but they are the right order of magnitude. 

I love numbers – and these are just scary ones.  Good luck on your taxes tomorrow.

I created some custom M&M’s for Amy and surprised her with them when I was in Paris a week ago.  While they aren’t cheap, they were worth it (you get to choose your own colors and two different messages of two lines by eight letters.)  In my continued effort to spread romance throughout the world, I highly recommend this as a gift from a chocolate lover to his/her significant other that is also a chocolate lover.

I’ve gotten plenty of humorous feedback on my post about abolishing the words traction, space, and thrilling from my vocabulary.  Someone asked why I was so mean to words – although this was someone who prefaces each major point he makes with “to tell you the truth” (no, please don’t tell me the truth – lie to me.)

The best note so far was from Ryan Sabga, the CEO of RideonTime.com who donated a really cool scooter to the Boulder Philharmonic Fundraiser we had on Saturday.  He said:

Why not try and introduce a new word to the VC world? I have yet to hear someone mentioned how “gruntled” they are, as in, “great work negotiating that contract, Saunders. I’m positively gruntled.” Sure, I hear “disgruntled” just about every day but what about it’s shorter, stockier antonym? That guy gets ignored more than the high school quarterback at a Back Street Boys back stage party. I think that perhaps you have a higher purpose, and that’s to introduce the world to your buddy “gruntled.”

I’m definitely gruntled by this – thanks Ryan!

Today is my periodic Fred Wilson blog love fest.  Fred’s characterization of the Internet Axis of Evil, which currently consists of Phishing, Click Fraud, DNS Hacking, Comment Spam/Link Spam, Adware/Spyware, Spam, and Viruses is awesome.  In sympathy with Fred and in an effort to help reign down terror on these evil fuckers, I’ve created a new category in my blog called Internet Axis of Evil.

As I a went through my daily early morning ritual of feeding the dogs, drinking some tea, reading various papers on line, and deleting trackback spam (who really responds to “poor credit loans” and “military cash loans”) I came across an article in the Denver Post on Scott Richter, the CEO of the spam firm OptInRealBig.com.  Scott’s making a ton of money spamming people ($19.6m in revenue in 2004; Scott took down $1.2m last year), but the company filed for bankruptcy to help protect itself against a variety of law suits, including one from Microsoft / Hotmail.  C’mon guys, the company is “absolutely profitable” (Scott’s dad and lawyer Steven’s words), but y’all go bankrupt to protect against lawsuits – could it be that you are actually concerned that the lawsuits are legit?

Fortunately, there are plenty of good guys fighting the bad guys.  Today, the Email Service Provider Coalition added a number of members, including our company Return Path.  ESPC also expanded their steering committee to including Return Path.  ESPC exists because the folks involve “recognize the need for strong technological anti-spam solutions that ensure the delivery of legitimate email.” 

While I’m sure this post will generate lots of comment spam, I’m trilled (shit, someone’s going to throw something at me today) that there are plenty of good guys in the world fighting the Internet Axis of Evil.

Fred – I’ll see you and raise you two. 

Fred Wilson had a delightful post on the word “traction” today as part of his VC Cliche of the Week series.  In it, Fred suggests that he’d like to hear the word traction used less in our business.  I’ll go a step further.  I’ll never mention the word traction again.  It has become so overused as to mean nothing (since it’s used to refer to everything and is a placeholder for “we are making progress, whatever the hell progress is.”)

There are two other words that I am abolishing from my business vocabulary effectively immediately.  If you catch me using any of them, please call me on it (feel free to throw something at me, spit on me, or just break out laughing.)

The first is “space.”  Like traction, the word space is used constantly by VCs and entrepreneurs.  This space, that space, we play in this space, we’re going after that space, we’re looking for white space (why doesn’t anyone ever look for purple space?)  Humans used to use words / phrases like market, business, customer segment, product opportunity (and plenty that are actually specific).  Die you generic words.  I’m banishing space to … space.

“Thrilling” is my last annoying as shit word of the day.  I can’t read a press release anymore (including a bunch from my own companies) without seeing how thrilled someone is about something.  Matt Blumberg sent me the draft of the Return Path / IronPort / Bonded Sender press release and voila – there is was – Matt was thrilled.  Matt’s a smart dude so when I told him he should limit being thrilled to his time with his wife Mariquita he got it and appropriately modified the press release.

My grandpa Jack used to have a blast massacring words to make his point.  He was never “thrilled” – he was “trilled”, and my uncle Charlie and I were “typhoons” instead of “tycoons.”  I’ll take it step further – I’ll simply delete them from my vocabulary.