I’ve had a lot of fun over the past few years as an investor in NewWest.Net.  I’ve learned a bunch from Jonathan Weber – the founder – about the intersection of Internet media and print media. 

NewWest.Net launched in 2005 as a local and regional online publication about growth and change in the Rocky Mountain West. The company then launched a conference series which has been quite successful.  Recently they came out with their first print product, The New West Magazine.

It’s a reversal of the old-media way of doing things; the Web site is the center of the enterprise, a general-interest publication with local and regional dimensions, while the print mag is a brand extension that is focused tightly on the growth and development story. New West founder Jonathan Weber has always advocated a multi-platform approach for journalism-driven publishing, and it’s easy to see how The New West is print does some things that can’t be done as well online, even as NewWest.Net online does lots of things that can’t be done in print.

The conferences continue to be a key part of the mix as well: New West’s new conference, Designing the New West, Architecture and Landscape in the Mountain West, will happen April 24-25 in Bozeman. Even in an online-centric, social-networked world, there’s no substitute for in-person gatherings – or for the look and feel and portability of old-fashioned print.  Subscribe today (free via questionnaire or $9.95 if you don’t want to fill out the questionnaire.)

Josh Kopelman doesn’t blog that frequently, but almost all of them are worth reading carefully.  His latest post – Feed Frenzy – is great.  Josh is facing the "multiple news feed problem" as he joins more and more services that publish a news feed.  He takes on the notification side of the equation – the opposite of what FriendFeed and SocialThing do.

All of the social network sites continue to use email as a notification mechanism.  When something happens on the social network that pertains to you (including messages), you get an email.  Anyone that has a meaningful volume of social network activity quickly learns how to turn these notifications off.  This defeats part of the real time value of social networks – now I have to go check and see what’s going on to see if anything relevant to me has happened.

As the "too much email" meme continues to circulate, someone is going to realize that one of the drivers of it is the endless notification cycle and the least common denominator – namely email – that is the mechanism for the notifications.

The solution – as Josh points out – is analogous to SNMP and network operations.  Josh wants an SNMP enabled dashboard for all his news feeds.  Aggregate everything into one easy to monitor dashboard, take action automatically on critical things that I’ve told the dashboard it can take action on, and organize the rest of the notifications in a way that I can deal with.

As an extra special bonus, this dashboard would help me connect all the atomic data (namely – my friend data) on the various social networks I’m getting news feed data from.  Fred Wilson would be "Fred Wilson" across twitter, his blog, his tumblr, facebook, linkedin, myspace, disqus, intense debate, etc.  I’d be able to interact with "Fred Wilson", not each of the discrete Fred Wilson’s.

There was a moment in time where I thought RSS might be the solution for this.  But it’s not – there’s a second order problem (and opportunity) here that requires something additional, especially given that new API’s are appearing for handling specific services news feeds. 

Stuff like FriendFeed and SocialThing address part of the problem, but not all of it (and – ironically – often create additional data as anyone who was been notified by email that a new friend has signed up to follow them on FriendFeed has discovered.)

I love recursive problems.

My partner Seth Levine just put up a post about our "Glue" theme on the Foundry Group blog.

In our continuing series discussing some of our investment themes, we’d like to introduce a topic that we’re calling “glue”. Glue is our term for the web infrastructure layer that facilitates the connections between web services and content companies. As this ecosystem becomes increasingly complex and as web sites and web based applications rely on more underlying services, this “glue” layer of the Internet is becoming more and more core to overall web infrastructure.

This is a theme that we’ve stuck with for a while.  Seth draws the analogy to EAI and the emergence of enterprise glue in the 1998 – 2001 time frame.  We think there are lots of different types of glue, so we’ve once again started a conference with Eric Norlin – this time called the Glue Conference.  Gluecon will be modeled after Defrag – it’ll be a place for smart people to hang out and talk about glue, and hopefully stick together (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) as they work on creating some interesting things.

Take a look at Seth’s longer post on Glue and tell us what you think.

Lisp is still my favorite programming language.  6.001 is still one of my favorite classes.  Parentheses are my friend.

Thanks Shawn.

I know many of my blog readers are Warren Buffett fans as a result of the numerous requests I get for the Annual Letters of Buffett Partnership, Limited, 1957 – 1970.  I got a request tonight from a reader who kindly included a link to CNBC’s Warren Buffett Watch complete with an RSS feed for your subscribing pleasure.  This web thing is really cool.

Last week, while on vacation, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Working on Vacation.  It began as follows:

The title of this post sounds like an oxymoron. But it is a fact of life for me and probably many of the people who read this blog. The idea of a ‘get away from it all’ vacation is a romantic notion that I cannot seem to achieve as much as the Gotham Gal and my kids would like me to.

Later in the post he says:

My friend Brad Feld does ‘go off the grid’ for one week a quarter every quarter. I’ve asked him how he does it and I honestly can’t see myself pulling it off. I wish I could.

Fred is referring to my quarterly vacation (which Amy and I refer to as Qx Vacation) that I first wrote about in my post Discovering Work Life Balance.  In this post, I talked about five habits, including Spend Time Away.

Spend Time Away: Amy and I take a week long vacation each quarter (which we fondly refer to as “Qx Vacation” depending on which quarter of the year it is) where we completely disappear.  No cell phone, no email, no computer, no conference calls – my assistant knows how to find me in case of an emergency; otherwise I’m completely unavailable for the week.

Fred’s post acknowledges his struggle with the concept of a complete disconnect for a week.  Coincidentally, his post appeared on the first day of a 10 day "downshift" for me.  We subsequently had a twitter exchange about it and – after pondering Fred’s post for a few days (since I’m in downshift mode, I didn’t feel any urgency to react to it), I formed some thoughts about the definition of a vacation.  I came up with five different categories.

1. Spend Time Away: This is a complete disconnect for at least a week.  I have been doing this four times a year since 2000 and view this as a key part of my existence on this planet.  It gives me a week to catch my breath, rest, spend time with Amy, explore new things, and clear my brain.  I’ve felt completely invigorated every time I’ve returned from spending time away.
2. Go Dark Weekend: When I find myself feeling burned out, I do a go dark weekend.  I turn off my computer and cell phone at 6pm on Friday night and don’t turn it back on until 5am Monday morning.  I cancel anything that is scheduled for the weekend and just do whatever I feel like doing.  This is usually a once a quarter event; occasionally more frequently depending on how busy I am.  I’m considering doing this around each of my marathon weekends also.
3. Excursion: This is what Fred was just on.  It’s a vacation to a neat new place with your immediate family and possibly some friends, but there is still structured work time.  In Fred’s case, he scheduled 90 minutes early in the morning for calls and tried to be disciplined about only checking his blackberry during "down time."  I was in Scottsdale at the Phoenician from last Friday until Tuesday for my dad’s 70th birthday – I’d put this in the same category.  I spent lots of time hanging out with my family, running, playing tennis, eating, and sleeping late, but I kept on top of my email, had a few scheduled calls, and was available for important things that came up.
4. Downshift: This is what I’m currently on.  Amy and I are at our place in Keystone for a 10 day stretch.  We’ve got plenty of friends coming and going so there’s lots of social time.  I’ve got a chunk of phone calls scheduled each day (10am to noon) but no board meetings, no in person meetings, and lots of random thinking / reading / chilling out time.  I’m completely available for important things, but I’m not initiating anything substantive this week.
5. Visit: We all know this one – it’s the infamous family trip where you go visit your parents / relatives or they come visit you.  It’s a key part of life, but you often return more tired then when you departed.

I find myself regularly taking vacations in each of these categories and realize that when the expectation of the type of vacation is set in advance (mostly with Amy, but often with other people we are with) the experience is much more satisfying and relaxing for everyone.

I’m sure there are plenty of nuances to each of these categories (or possibly different categories) – please weigh in if you disagree with my categorization or have any to add.

I haven’t been reading much lately – I just haven’t felt like it.  I’m usually a two to three book a week person so my dry spell has been a little odd, but I’ve rolled with it. 

Today I snuggled into the couch with my dogs, my Kindle, and Stuart Woods latest book – Beverly Hills Dead.  Woods is one of my top five "mental floss" writers.  I was finished it a couple of hours later and am pleased that my reading drought is over.

In Beverly Hills Dead Woods winds the clock back to the 1940’s and post-World War II Hollywood.  The book works through the story of the early days of Woods’ characters Rick Barron and Vance Calder.  The story and intrigue is good, but I especially liked the Hollywood anti-communist theme that the book was built around as it nicely complimented Good Night, and Good Luck.

While there is nothing special here if you aren’t a Stuart Woods fan, if you are looking for mental floss, give Woods a shot.

Looking for hint about Gnip?  Jud’s got one sitting on his desk.

Recently I bitched about Active’s "upgrade" of CoolRunning (which they acquired) to Active Trainer.  I loved CoolRunning; I hated Active Trainer.  Oh well – life with software.

I went on a search for a new running log.  I got a wide range of great suggestions from readers of this blog.  Thank you to everyone who commented – I tried almost all of the systems.

TrainingPeaks wins.  It is spectacular and worth every penny.  In addition, the folks running the company are incredible responsive – they didn’t have a specific CoolRunning importer, but I sent them my data and a week later all of it automagically appeared in my TrainingPeaks log as though I’d be using it from the beginning.

Their log software is superb (and entirely web based, which is a requirement for me.)  They have awesome mapping software and data visualization with the software and several client side products for importing all your data from your watch (I use a Garmin Forerunner 305 and it works perfectly) as well as a new release of the WKO+ software which provides extensive data analysis for data nerds like me.

My hat is off to the TrainingPeaks guys – what a great product.  As a special bonus they are based in Colorado.  I can once again satisfy my data obsessed running desires.