After seeing Borat last weekend, Warren and I were debating which scenes were real and which scenes were faked.  Warren apparently stayed up late researching it, but if he’d waited a week he could have read the Slate story titled What’s real in “Borat”?  The reactions of the people involved to the Slate reporter are fascinating.

Earlier this week Intel announced Suite Two – an appliance that integrates NewsGator’s Enterprise Server product with SixApart’s Movable Type, SocialText’s wiki, and SimpleFeed corporate feed management.  The products are being integrated by SpikeSource who will also handle maintenance and support.  Another step in NewsGator’s “buy and deploy our RSS aggregator products however you – the customer – wants” strategy.

Charlie Wood wrote up a quick anecdote about how he quickly integrated his Spanning Salesforce and Spanning Feed Builder products with Salesforce.com and NewsGator’s Enterprise Server to help a marcomm manager to send updates about her company’s marketing events from Salesforce.com direct to her executives BlackBerries.  The company is already using Salesforce.com and NewsGator Enterprise Server – Charlie’s glue connected the pieces together and got things up an running in 30 minutes.  Very neat.

Finally, if you are a NewsGator customer (consumer or enterprise) and you are bored of your existing screen saver, take a look at the NewsGator Screen Saver.  I’ve had it running on my laptop for a couple of weeks and it’s one of those simple things that gets a “wow – cool!” reaction every time.  Nick Harris – one of the NewsGator wizards – needed something to play around with to exercise the NewsGator REST API.  Voila – screen saver.  He’s also snuck in a few new things coming soon such as a new and improved location manager.

The FeedBurner Venture Capital Network continues to expand with the additions of new VC bloggers Santo Politi from Spark Capital and Susan Wu from Charles River Ventures.  I’m on the board of Me.dium with Santo and we’ve been having a good time working together – expect plenty of deep and insightful stuff from his blog.

Dean Karnazes just finished running 50 marathons in 50 days (one in each state.)  He finished up with the New York Marathon on Sunday and then didn’t know what to do with himself on Monday, so he ran the New York Marathon backwards.  On Tuesday, he still didn’t know what to do with himself so he went for a 26.2 mile run.  Yesterday he decided to run home – from New York to San Francisco.

One of my portfolio companies recently put together a short video for a recent company meeting.  The video consisted of a series of questions for each board member and a few key advisors and clients.  One of the questions was “what could they improve?”  Following is my answer:

The pretzels were tasty.

BarCamp Boulder is happening on Friday (7pm – ?) and Saturday (9am – 5pm) with a party afterwards at Me.dium’s offices at 1738 Pearl Street, Boulder, CO.  The attendee list looks great.  If you are in town and like BarCamp events, check it out.

I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan (I can sing Dark Side of the Moon forward and backward and the worms still eat into my brain on a regular basis.)  A friend sent me the Pink Floyd Back Catalog the other day.  I just ordered my own copy from Amazon ( Art Poster Metal Framed Print – Pink Floyd-Back Catalog – Artist: unknown- Poster Size: 24 X 36).

Beautiful.

As I slowly work my way through State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, the phrase “trust but verify” has appeared at least once.  Now that Rumsfeld is no longer Secretary of Defense, I guess I don’t have to finish the book.  However, the phrase jumped out at me after a conversation I had earlier this week with an entrepreneur that I’ve worked with in the past.

In the conversation, something came up that happened three years ago.  A third person made an attribution to the entrepreneur about me and a set of assumptions about what I was thinking at the time about the company’s situation.  These attributions came from a fourth person.  The entrepreneur processed this information, assumed it was true, and acted on it.

He never asked me about it.  He never confronted me about it.  He never questioned it.  We have a direct relationship – but I was entirely clueless that this was going on behind the scenes.  As a result of this information, the entrepreneur set off a chain of events based on the conclusions he had drawn.

His conclusion was wrong.  His assumption was wrong.  The data being attributed to me and my behavior was wrong. Fortunately, the outcome of the situation resolved appropriately independent of the bad assumptions. However, a lot of time and energy was wasted by several people – although – ironically – not by me.  It all might have been avoided if the entrepreneur had simply confronted me with “hey Brad – I just heard this – is it true?  Can you explain what’s going on and what you are thinking?”

I literally just found out about this earlier this week.  It caught me completely off guard – it was too long ago for me to remember whether I was aware of any “noise in the system”, but I don’t recall noticing anything. 

Trust, but verify.

I spent the weekend in Louisville, Kentucky thinking about analogies (and how new things are like old things.)  Amy and I took four friends to the Breeders Cup (also known as the Super Bowl of Horse Racing.)  I’m not a horse person (I’m actually afraid of them), but I like to humor my wife whenever I can.  We had a great time and – as I looked around the very expansive race track (that I’d been at once before for the Kentucky Derby) – I realized that horse racing is “NASCAR for Snooty People.”  I was down $40 for the day (I quit betting after I lost my second race in a row – I still can’t figure out how to bet a trifecta.)

As we read the newspaper on Sunday, we ran into plenty of “heads up your ass” type of stuff.  My friend Warren (who is from Boston) pointed me to the delightful Christy Mihos for Governor ads – including “Heads Up” – his commercial about The Big Dig.

We were part of the $26.4m spent on the opening weekend of Borat.  Watching it in a full theater in Louisville, KY was kind of bizarre.  All three of us that saw it were incredibly subdued as we walked out of the theater and waited for a cab back to the hotel.  Pascal states things clearly – it’s fundamentally a depressing movie about the state of intolerance and bigotry in America.

Finally – MySpace does a joint venture in Japan (MySpace Japan) with Softbank and Charles River Ventures announced a seed program last week to tons of buzz in the blogosphere.  What’s old is new again.