I’m not a huge baseball fan.  I grew up in Dallas and dealing with the Texas Rangers in the Billy Martin / Jeff Burroughs / Ferguson Jenkins / Jim Sundberg era was a tough gig.  Plus, by that time the Dallas Cowboys were America’s team and Roger Staubach was every kids hero (at least in Dallas.)

By the time I moved to Boston in 1983, I was ruined on baseball.  I go to a couple of games a year – mostly just to generate stories that people can tell their grandkids.  Amy is a big fan, but since the scores at the Rockies games are really football scores (I’m always surprised when the winning team doesn’t score at least double digits), it’s mostly just a good time to hang out and get a sunburn.

When David Halberstam died a few months ago, I decided to read all of his books (similar to what I’m doing with Vonnegut.)  I had a copy of Summer of ’49 (<— note the SmartLink – play with it) on my shelf of infinite books to read so I grabbed it and consumed it over the last few days.  It seemed fitting to finish it up on the 4^th of July.

I thought of my dad 5,417 times while I read this book.  These were his and my uncle Charlies’ Yankees.  My dad was 11 that summer and it must have been an awesome time for him and Charlie.  The Yankee / Red Sox rivalry was at one of its apexes, DiMaggio was the man, Yogi Berra was behind the plate, and the great Yankee run under Casey Stengel had just begun.

The age of radio was at its peak and the dawn of the TV age was beginning.  Mel Allen was the great Yankee radio announcer.  Halberstam captures the relationships between everyone well – including Allen and the writers – and his descriptions of the games helped me understand the difference between radio baseball and TV baseball.

Overall, Summer of ’49 is a beautiful book.  You don’t have to be a baseball fan to love it, but you do have to be interested in understanding the summertime in a different era.  Members of the Red Sox Nation will also love this book, even though it is heartbreaking at times, since that’s something all card carrying Red Sox Nation members understand.

Next up – The Design of Everyday Things – a book at least 11 people have recommended I read.

Last week Lijit announced that they had raised a $3.3 million financing.  If you aren’t familiar with Lijit, it’s the search box on the top right of my blog.

Now that Google owns FeedBurner, I miss my friends there (ok – we still talk – a lot – but I still miss them.)  Think of Lijit as “my next investment like FeedBurner.”  While Lijit is a totally different service for publishers, the game plan and strategy is identical – provide as much value of publishers as humanly possible on the dimension of “network search.”  Our goal – replace the search function on all blogs with Lijit’s version.

When I first invested in FeedBurner, some of the FeedBack was “nice service for RSS Brad, but where’s the business?”  The business strategy was a simple one – provide huge direct benefit from publishers (to drive adoption on blogs) and then create an ad network around a new piece of inventory (in this case the RSS feed.)  FeedBurner did that brilliantly – today they have over 450,000 publishers and – as of this morning – now provide all of their services free to the publisher (including the previously charged for Stats PRO and MyBrand.)

Lijit is free to publishers.  It’s a trivial install – one click for TypePad and Blogger and a single line of Javascript for everyone else (except WordPress.com – maybe someday they let us in.)  If you are a blogger and haven’t tried it yet, try it and tell me how it goes.

While I expect plenty of people to say “network search? – what’s the big deal – I’ve already got Google search on my blog.”  If you fall into this category, think back to the distant past of 2005 when FeedBurner’s popularity started accelerating and see if you can remember if you were one of the people that said “RSS feeds – I don’t need any help managing that – I’ve already got one of my blog.” 

Typical blog search is crappy.  You end up with two common choices: whatever comes with the blog platform (yuck – pages only – and mediocre relevance algorithms) or Google search (better, but now you are a slave to pagerank and still limited to the pages on your site.)  In both cases, the search only works for the content on your blog – it doesn’t incorporate any of your other content (e.g. other blogs you publish, your bookmarks (e.g. Blink List, BlueDot, ClipMarks, del.icio.us, digg, Furl, Ma.gnolia, reddit, and Stumble Upon), you photos and videos (flickr and YouTube), your social networks (LinkedIn, Live Journal, MySpace, Twitter, MyBlogLog), or other RSS/OPML you manage or generate.  That’s “part 1” of the concept of the “network” (e.g. all of my stuff.)

Part 2 is your actual network.  Most blogs have a blogroll – that is a list of common blogs that the blogger reads or respects.  This is an easy place to start building a network.  Another would be the blogs a blogger reads (pretty easily available via an OPML reader that most RSS readers will export.)  Of course, once these bloggers become part of the Lijit network, Lijit will automagically connect all of their own content (“part 1”) up to the network which makes it even richer.  If you want to see some great stuff about my network, take a look at my Lijit User page.

It gets better, but I’ll save that for another post (and yeah – I realize I didn’t tell you the revenue model, but it’s a groovy one like FeedBurners.) For now, try it.  The current version of search lives on top of Google’s Custom Search engine, but there is some fancy magic search stuff coming (that you’ll get to alpha test on my blog.)

I was FeedBurner publisher #699.  I am Lijit publisher #31.  Three years after I started publishing my blog with FeedBurner they had 450,000 publishers and were acquired for a tidy sum.  Lijit’s publisher network is growing nicely – it’s up around 2,000 now and expanding at the same daily rate that FeedBurner was early on.  Help me help the growth curve continue!

Now that I’ve given up on my iPhone, handed it back to Ross (my IT guy), and said “do what you want with it”, I’m enjoying discovery various iSatire (and iSarcasm) on the web.  Today’s best iSatire is iPerbole.  (Thanks Jill.)

You are going to see SmartLinks start appearing on my site.  They are from AdaptiveBlue and are evolving rapidly into a really cool way to enhance the value of a link.  For more on what a SmartLink is, check out the post from Alex Iskold titled BlueBlog » SmartLinks Primer: The Idea and the Technology. (<— Click on the little blue square to see a SmartLink in action.)

Colorado is a beautiful place.  I’ve lived her 12 years and while I’ve done plenty of hiking and trail running, I’ve never climbed a fourteener (mountain > 14,000 ft – there are 54 of them here.)  Today I climbed two of them – Grays Peak (14,270 ft) and Torreys Peak (14,267 ft.)

This is Joe Jilk, Maureen Amundson, Dave Jilk, me, and Jason Mendelson on the top of Grays Peak (the first one.)  Dave has a picture of us on top of Torreys on his Facebook page.

It was an awesome experience.  We spent Sunday night at my place in Keystone, got up at 4am, and were on the trail at 5:45am.  We got to the top of Grays around 8:30, bagged Torreys at about 9:30, and were back down to the trailhead at about 12:30 (about 8 miles round trip.)  I ran the last mile and then went another mile and half down the road until Dave drove by and rescued me from myself.  We finished it off with lunch in Idaho Springs at Two Brothers Deli and then headed home.

52 to go.  Here’s another shot for perspective.

Yeah, I didn’t know that either.  However, through the magic of NewsGator’s syndication services, I can automagically put the Shark Week Widget (from the Discovery Channel) on my blog (yes – I’m just playing around to see how it works.)

I also automagically put Shark Week on my Facebook page.  Click, click – widgets everywhere.  I love sharks – especially ones with laser beams.