I love my mother – she’s the best mother I’ve ever had.  One of her most endearing traits is that she is a jewish mother.  If you don’t know what I mean, here are some examples from history.

MONA LISA’S JEWISH MOTHER: “After all the money your father and I spent on braces, this you call a smile?”

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS’ JEWISH MOTHER: “I don’t care what you’ve discovered, you didn’t call, you didn’t write.”

MICHELANGELO’S JEWISH MOTHER: “A ceiling you paint? Not good enough for you the walls, like the other children? Do you know how hard it is to get that schmutz off the ceiling?”

NAPOLEON’S JEWISH MOTHER: “You’re not hiding your report card? Show me! Take your hand out of your jacket and show me!”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S JEWISH MOTHER: “Again with that hat! Why can’t you wear a baseball cap like the other kids?”

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S JEWISH MOTHER: “Next time I catch you throwing money across the Potomac, you can kiss your allowance good-bye!

THOMAS EDISON’S JEWISH MOTHER: “Okay, so I’m proud that you invented the electric light bulb. Now turn it off already and go to sleep!”

PAUL REVERE’S JEWISH MOTHER: “I don’t care where you think you have to go, young man, midnight is long past your bedtime!”

ALBERT EINSTEIN’S JEWISH MOTHER: “Your senior photograph and you couldn’t have done something with your hair?”

MOSES’ JEWISH MOTHER: “Desert, schmesert!! Where have you really been for the last forty years?”

BILL GATES’ JEWISH MOTHER: “It would have killed you to become a doctor?”

BILL CLINTON’S JEWISH MOTHER: “Well, at least she was a nice Jewish girl, that Monica!”

Mom – love ya! (Greg – thx.)

Timothy Lee of the Cato Institute has an outstanding Op-Ed in the New York Times today titled A Patent Lie.  He makes an assertion that I strongly share:

“But don’t software companies need patent protection? In fact, companies, especially those that are focused on innovation, don’t: software is already protected by copyright law, and there’s no reason any industry needs both types of protection. The rules of copyright are simpler and protection is available to everyone at very low cost. In contrast, the patent system is cumbersome and expensive. Applying for patents and conducting patent searches can cost tens of thousands of dollars. That is not a huge burden for large companies like Microsoft, but it can be a serious burden for the small start-up firms that produce some of the most important software innovations.”

Toss the trade secret doctrine into the mix and you are all set.

Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder/CTO – has a post up describing in detail how he thinks about the NewsGator Syndication Services line of products.  This part of NewsGator’s business is growing at an extraordinary rate and is great reinforcement in the value of creating the NewsGator core online platform.  Some stats – from Greg’s post – that give you a sense of today’s scale of the thing called “core.”

This is a significant beast – it has about 1.5 billion articles indexed, sees about 7 million new articles per day, sustains around 650 new articles per second at peak times during the day, and supports about 15 million API calls per day from customers and our own clients. It also collects usage metadata, which can be used to calculate relevance information (more on this another day).

Greg has several customer examples in his post, including USA Today, CBS News, Media General, and Discovery (look for the widget on the right sidebar for Everest.)  When we started doing stuff around “Private Label” eighteen months ago, I didn’t understand the potential magnitude of this stuff.  “Private Label” is now “Syndication Services” – that sounds much more interesting. 

Bill Gates gave the commencement speech at Harvard today.  He also received an honorary degree, finally making him a college graduate.  His speech is fantastic and worth reading.  His call to action is clear:

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.  Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

Remember, Fear is the mind-killer.  Let’s get on with it.

Via a member of my fraternity (ADP) at MIT, I discovered the geek test v.3.1.  I scored 32.34714% rating me a “total geek.”  Yes – this was sent to me via a listserv.  My lack of affinity for all things Star Trek appears to have lowered my score.

Do you want to hear me blather on about the Implicit Web?  Or hear Stan James of Lijit talk about how he ended up in Boulder.  Or watch David Cohen dodge a ping pong ball?  All this and more in the short (10 minutes) TechStars Video Update from Week #1. 

I have a superb packing algorithm.  I can pack my magic blue bag (think “Felix the Cat’s bag”) with seven days worth of clothes in under five minutes.  This used to annoy Amy since she believes that packing should expand to fill all available time until you must leave for the airport right now damnit now now now but she has mellowed with age.

I always either wear my running shoes or pack my running shoes since – well – I’m endlessly training for a marathon.  I got up at 4am yesterday, speed packed, and flew to Las Vegas.  I wore dress shoes on the plane since I had a meeting in the morning and then kept them on all day since the gang I was with (aka “The Last Horseman Down Bachelor Party”) went out to a nice restaurant last night.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I went to grab my running shoes and discovered another pair of dress shoes.  I stood stunned for a minute in my running clothes, trying to process what to do next.  Eventually, I realized I had a day off.

I think this is the first time this has ever happen to me in 20+ years of travel as a grownup.

Sometimes you’ve got to read between the lines in emails – this classic from Ze Frank is worth watching.  (Thanks Will.)

Today, FeedBurner announced that they had been acquired by Google and Google announced that they had acquired FeedBurner.  There’s a nice symmetry to that.  I’m burning with glee for all my friends in Chicago, especially Dick, Steve, Eric, and Matt (aka “the founders.”)

A little over two years ago (4/5/05 to be exact) I made an investment in FeedBurner.  At the time, I didn’t realize how important it was to Dick Costolo that I capitalize the “B” in FeedBurner so I accidentally titled my post on the investment I’m Hot on Feedburner. 

I’ve been very successful investing in stuff around SMTP (er – email) and after playing around with RSS, the ecosystem that could be developed around the RSS protocol felt analogous to what had happened around the SMTP protocol.  I (along with my partners Seth Levine and Ryan McIntyre) identified three key parts to the RSS / feed puzzle – subscribe, publish, and search.  FeedBurner was our investment that addressed publish (NewsGator addresses subscribe; Technorati addresses search.) 

From my first interaction with Dick (5/8/04) five days after I started blogging, I knew he and his gang was creating something special.  I’m FeedBurner publisher #699 (not quite as low as Fred’s number, but a very beautiful number nonetheless.)  Today, there are over 430,000 publishers.  FeedBurner’s ability to scale, their ability to regularly roll out new functionality, their dedication to their publishers, and their sense of humor, good looks, and charm has served them well.

Congrats to everyone at FeedBurner.  To my friends at Google (which I guess now includes my FeedBurner friends in a recursive sort of way), you picked up a great one (and make sure you ask Dick for a FeedBurner sticker!)