Two interesting NewsGator posts today.  Activity Scoring in NewsGator Online talks about a new feature in NewsGator Online that incorporates the massive amount of attention data that NewsGator is collecting daily. 

Next is Nick Bradbury (the programming maestro who created FeedDemon) talking about The Joys of String Allocation.  Even maestro’s write code that – if optimized – can generate over 1000% performance improvement.

I’m supposed to have my new MacBook Air tomorrow.  It’ll be running Vista.  If you care, Ross tells you how to set Vista up on the MacBook Air (and when to go get a cup of coffee.)  I feel like such a cross dresser.

My long time friend Ben Neumann has a detailed post up titled Network Outage.  Ben is CEO / owner of Globat, a successful web hosting company.  I met Ben through an acquisition in the late1990’s when Interliant bought his previous company Icom (also a web hosting company.)

Ben’s company had a tough day yesterday.  Multi-hour critical failure is a way of life in any rapidly growing SaaS / hosting / web business.  It’s nice to fantasize that it will never happen, but virtually every high growth company has "its moment of fun."  It’s all in how you deal with it, how you treat and communicate with your customers, and what you learn from it. 

Part of dealing with it is being open about what happened and what you are doing about it going forward.  Ben does a nice job of setting an example here of how to do it.

On top of the outage, it was Ben’s wife Andrea’s birthday. Andrea – I hope you gave Ben a raincheck and decided to celebrate your birthday this weekend!  Ben – hint – flowers, chocolate, jewelry, and a trip to Hawaii.

Katherine McIntyre has a scathing post up describing her experience at the Colorado Democratic primary caucus.  I think the caucus, primary process, and superdelegate thing is idiotic, a gigantic waste of economic resources, and about as far from a representative democracy as you can get and still be in a democracy.

All that said, I’m still proud to be an American and love that we have a democratic political process.  I just wish it started in August, finished in November, and was "whoever gets the most votes wins."

By the way, when did the word "evangelical" become a noun?  I thought it was an adjective?

I stumbled upon the MIT Sloan Blog last week.  I am a Sloan grad (’88) and am a speaker at my 20th business school reunion this summer.  The folks behind the blog have done a nice job of tidying up TypePad and stringing together a series of Student Bloggers.  I asked to be added to the blog roll and voila – there I am.  They also added Lijit for search (which will be fascinating across the network of bloggers in the sidebar) and Intense Debate for comments (enhancing the social network that gets built through the comments to the collection of blogs.)

Even more fun is that the new Dean of the MIT Sloan School – David Schmittlein – also has a blog!

Yesterday, it was announced that ConocoPhillips is the mystery buyer of the old StorageTek campus.  There was much revelry and prognosticating about how magnificent this is for the universe.  I agree – but only if ConocoPhillips razes the entire grotesque ugly thing and builds something nice and integrated into the natural beauty of the 432 acres they just bought with perfect views of the flatirons.

I was at a board meeting yesterday when this was announced and my first reaction was "superb – it’s not a large tech company."  A friend – who is on the board with me – said "damn, it’s not a large tech company."  One of the founders said "thankfully it’s not a large tech company." 

The early rumors were that Google or Microsoft had bought the campus and were going to build out one of their largest non-HQ campuses. This never made sense to me because the local tech community could never support a buildout like this.  The positive argument was "it’ll bring loads of new jobs to the area."  The counter argument is "yeah – right now we are strapped for great talent anyway, so bunches of people will have to move here to make it work."  You can go around and around in circles on this discussion, but I think to ultimately make it work you have to believe that you are going to be a huge net importer of new people.  While the Boulder/Denver software industry has been a large net importer of great folks from the coasts, I’m skeptical that we’d gracefully add 10,000 new high end software engineering jobs to this region without some real "entertainment."

Now – ConocoPhillips is planning to turn the campus into "a center to research hydrogen fuel cells, solar and wind power, and clean diesel fuel made from renewable resources. It also plans to establish a learning center to train employees from more than 40 countries."  That actually sounds perfect – the "cleantech" interest, talent, and expertise in the Boulder area is extensive but there are relatively few real non-govt / non-academic jobs.  Many people around here have been talking about how important the cleantech industry is – now Boulder is going to have an anchor tenant that is making a serious investment in it.  That feels much more sustainable and achievable to me.

Of course, it might be that ConocoPhillips has figured out a cost efficient way to extract fuel from the massive stores of shale located under the 432 acres and will be digging big holes in the ground.  That’ll stir up all my eco-friendly buddies in town.

Regardless – the big mystery is over.  And no – I’m not going to suddenly start investing in cleantech.

My friends at FeedBurner surfaced today with a post titled Hello? Hellooooo?  In it, they explain what they’ve been up to post-acquisition by Google.  Two words – technical integration.

It’s hard.  I’ve talked to Dick Costolo – FeedBurner’s CEO – a couple of times about it in general terms.  They are basically rewriting FeedBurner to work on Google’s architecture.  The leverage they get out of this is enormous, but they have to rewrite a bunch of stuff to get there.

The brilliant thing about the FeedBurner service is while there hasn’t been many new features since the Google acquisition, it’s continued to work flawlessly over the past few quarters.  This is a testament to the quality of the service in the first place.

These days, whenever someone tells me that "scaling is no big deal" or "after that, we just need the money to scale things up", I just burst out laughing.  The deep dark hole of post acquisition integration is often deep and dark.  When it works, it can be a beautiful thing.

My partner Ryan McIntyre discovered some old trippy TV ads that Excite did in 1996 based on Jimmy Hendrix’s Are You Experienced.  When I saw him in the office yesterday, he was fondling a rectangular black thing that was about an inch high and roughly the shape of a book.  It had two plastic turny things on it and a cover-like thing that sort of – but didn’t really – protect a long thin shiny black strip. He also had a big box that he claimed you stuck the thing into, mechanical stuff happened, and video came out the back of it.  Weird.

Fortunately he put the videos up on Youtube for all to see.  Wander over to Ryan’s post Are Your Experienced? to see the videos and have your own personal Excite flash back experience.

Andrew Hyde (the creator of StartupWeekend) and Matt Emmi (the founder of OneButtonLife and the dude that keeps all my home electronics working smoothly) have launched their latest company – Venture Capital Wear.  It’s been making the rounds today and is brilliant.  Included is an ode to my treadputer.

Don’t miss out on the ppt pitch.