I’ve been listening to NPR since I was 7 years old.  Whenever my mom or dad drove me to school, NPR’s Morning Edition was playing.  Guilty weekend pleasures of mine include Car Talk and Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!  While I don’t watch any news on TV, I do admit to listening to NPR on my drive to the office in the morning and I occasionally catch Talk of the Nation.

Yesterday I was on NPR for the first time as a guest on the Talk of the Nation segment Who Pays for Our Online Lives?  Neal Conan interviewed me, Chris Anderson, and Kevin Rose about the challenges companies face building online businesses when consumers are used to getting information for free.  We covered some good ground, including the freemium model, different ways of making money online, issues (and rewards) of scale, and the difference between the potential of a popular site like Digg and JoesCars.com (who will now get some traffic because of this post.)  It’s all online (about 30 minutes) if you are interested.

The experience of doing the show was fascinating.  I don’t do much live radio (or TV) so it’s not a natural medium for me. I do loads of podcasts and live speaking things, but for some reason live radio felt different. 

It started on Tuesday afternoon when my partner Ryan McIntyre got an email inviting him to be on the show.  It turned out that he was on a flight to the bay area during the broadcast so he forwarded the invite over to me.  I connected via email with the show’s producer who filled me in on the topic.  I said I was happy to do it and waited for further instructions.

I got a call early the next morning with a "pre-interview interview."  I think the producer was calling to make sure I had at least a partial clue.  We had a nice 15 minute talk about the potential content after which I got the thumbs up to be on the show.  Then the "where do you need to go" scramble begun.  I was at my house in Keystone and I didn’t feel like roundtripping it to Denver for the day.  After an hour they came up with a studio in Edwards which was a lot closer.  There apparently used to be a studio in Breckenridge (right around the corner) but it’s now a "ghost studio" which I assume means that no one is ever there.

I drove to KZYR (97.87) in Edwards and met up with Steve at the station.  He did a great job of orienting me in a nice little studio with boom microphones and lots of computer / audio stuff I didn’t know what to do with.  The little clock counted to 1pm and then everything just started working.  The audio fidelity was superb – everything "just worked" – probably because all of the equipment was afraid of Steve.

I thought the interview went well (and was fun) although I realize that I have to reorient my brain on live radio (at least on TOTN) to talk in 30 second chunks (rather than my normal 1 or 2 minute podcast / panel chunks.)  I got a lot of great feedback from friends that feel into the "cool to hear you on TOTN" category and plenty of encouraging tweets along the way.

While being on TOTN wasn’t on my "100 things to do before I die" list, it certainly is on the "1000 things to do before I die" list if I ever got around to making it!

Time to actually figure out the real job board thing on this blog since I’m now posting job notices a couple of times a week (feel free to comment if you provide these things and I’ll try them out and pick one.)  There has been plenty of response to the job postings so I assume those of you that don’t care are just filtering them out and those of you that do are appreciating them!

Rally Software is actively recruiting sales people.  On Thursday April 17th from 5:30pm – 7:30pm they are having a Sales Recruiting – Speed Interviewing event.  It’s happening at Bacaro at 921 Pearl Street in Boulder. 

Over the past few years, Rally has grown to be one of the largest and fastest growing software companies in Boulder.  They recently passed 100 people on their way to 150 at the end of this year.  I’ve worked with them from the beginning – it’s an awesome team that is just crushing it.  Send cfields@rallydev.com a note if you are a sales hunter who wants to join a winner.

P.S. Hey mom – notice that I used "who" correctly this time instead of "that."  Special bonus points.

As I was reading through my RSS feeds this morning, I came across Graeme Thickins reposting of the Google 2007 Annual Letter (this year written by Larry Page.)  It a good one – written in plain, straightforward English.  Worth a careful read for anyone that interacts with The Google.

Smart move – I’ve been wondering when this would happen.  You can now SEO your Facebook applications with Sitemaps.  If you are a Facebook app developer, it’s well worth your time to figure this out.  I view this as a deliberate, healthy, and intelligent cracks opening in the walled garden.

The guys at Slice of Lime are looking to add a Boulder-based PHP Web Developer to their team.  If you fit the bill and are looking for a great gig, send Kevin Menzie a note.

I was going to edit my Getting A VC’s Attention post but I thought the point I was going to add was important enough to highlight it in a separate post.  In the post I wrote:

The feature is not the magic.  Listening to your customers (in the case a prominent VC blogger – who’s attention is in high demand) and reacting to requests quickly and publicly is.

What I meant to emphasize is that the magic is in "the doing."  It’s not about talking.  It’s not about commenting.  It’s not about emailing.  It’s about doing.  Rapidly iterating your product – demonstrating that you know how to process feedback, prioritize (based on whatever your current goals are), and executing. 

If your goal is getting a VC’s Attention (as I expect Bret Taylor had as one of his goals), this was a brilliant approach.  I’m not suggesting that you should orient your development schedule and feature list around what a VC wants (yeah – that would be a generically bad idea), but if you are trying to get a specific VC’s attention that you think has something to add to the mix, this is a great way to do it.

All of this (and the early morning, thin mountain air) made me think of my favorite Star Wars quote.  "Do, or do not.  There is no try."  … Yoda

I regularly get asked "how do you get a VC’s attention?"  Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures just demonstrated – on his blog – how this works.

Last week while Working On Vacation, Fred was screwing around with FriendFeed.  He wrote a post titled Ten Things I’d Like FriendFeed To Do.  Bret Taylor from FriendFeed immediately commented on the post "Thanks for the thoughtful comments. Wanted to let you know we all read them here at FriendFeed, and I agree with you on almost every single request."  A few days later FriendFeed implemented the ability to post an @reply to twitter from FriendFeed.

Result: Fred posts I Just Fell In Love With FriendFeed.  For those of you that don’t know, Twitter is one of Fred’s investments.  So – the fact that FriendFeed rapidly integrated with his investment is the clincher.

Now – the "post an @reply to Twitter" feature is no big deal.  SocialThing – one of the TechStars companies – that does something similar but different to FriendFeed – has had this feature for a while.  The feature is not the magic.  Listening to your customers (in the case a prominent VC blogger – who’s attention is in high demand) and reacting to requests quickly and publicly is.

I’ve had similar experiences over the years with great entrepreneurs.  The first one was within a month after I started blogging when I got connected with Dick Costolo at FeedBurner.  If you go way back in my blog archives to June 4, 2004 (eek) you’ll see Feedburner signals improved feed stats coming soon.  I wasn’t yet an investor, nor did I realize that "Feedburner" was really spelled "FeedBurner" but Costolo was all over me (and Fred) and we both fell in love with him (and FeedBurner.)

Speaking of Dick Costolo, yesterday he had an insightful tweet about M&A and Sex which Paul Kedrosky picked up.  What a deliciously self referential world I live in.  I wonder how good his 14 year old is at Rock Band?  I guess we’ll find out tonight.

Finally.  I can watch Kenny die over and over again.  For free.  On South Park Studios.  I never again have to illegally download the Underpants Gnomes to teach people how to make a profit.  I am so deeply pleased this morning.

Thanks to my friend Bruce Wyman – the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum – I bring you a picture of the Apollo 11 Landing Site overlayed on a baseball diamond.

Click on the image for a larger version of it on the NASA site.  Fiercely cool.