It’s time for another quick list of interesting things I found this morning on the web along with my occasionally witty commentary.

Harmonix Party: Rock Band owns LA with Who concert.  I love everything about Harmonix and Rock Band.  Er, um, The Who just played at a Harmonix / MTV party at the Orpheum Theater in LA.  The Who.  The Who!  One of my best friends – Warren Katz – who was also an angel investor in Harmonix had the following to say about the party:

"My jaw is on the floor and I am speechless. Not because I semi-randomly got hooked up with a game that’s turning out to be one of the greatest hits of all time. Not because that game is actually fundamentally changing how a great hunk of the world interacts with music. Not because this game hosted a party featuring my favorite rock band of all time, The Who (and I would have hurt myself to get on a plane for this party). I am stunned mute because, in my opinion, one of the three best songs in Rock and Roll history, "Won’t Get Fooled Again" (the other two being "Paradise By the DashBoard Lights" and "Bohemian Rhapsody"), was referred to throughout this article as "the theme from CSI". We cannot possibly be that old, and the youth of today cannot possibly be that out of touch. It actually took me a minute to realize what song they were talking about."

Alex, Eran, and all the rest of the people at Harmonix.  You are the coolest nerds ever.  Ian – you have real competition here in the cool nerd category!

Latest shocker: June prices go up, up, up: "Consumer prices rose 1.1 percent in June from the month before, far faster than the expected rate of 0.7 percent and almost double the reading from May, the Labor Department said Wednesday."  Hmmm – an annualized rate of 13.2% – that would be "inflation."

SAP, Oracle Boost Software Prices: "Unlike price increase for food, fuel and many other commodities, the changes in software don’t stem from a shortage of supply or a rise in demand. They are attempts by software makers to increase their bottom lines, said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities Inc."  Well – yes – but it’s also called an "oligopoly."  SAP annual maintenance, which has been at 17% for a while, will now be at 22%.  Oracle simply implemented a 15% – 20% across the board price increase for US customers.

Blogging’s Dead, Long Live Blogging: While this particular meme goes round and round and round, especially among the A-list bloggers talking about blogging (or not blogging), Fred nails why he – and I – blog in this post.  Whenever someone asks me "why do I blog" I now have a new link to send them to.

Chill out – it’s just a normal cool summer: My part time meteorologist Josh Larson emailed me this link.  Apparently it’s just been a normal summer in Alaska with endless clouds, cool weather, and for the last 24 hours non-stop rain.  ""We were in a warm phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation in the ’80s and ’90s. (Some forecasters) believe we may have entered into the cold phase."  Where is that damn global warming when you really want it?

Last week, Me.dium released its Alpha version of Me.dium Social Search.  This coincided with Yahoo!’s launch of BOSS – Me.dium was one of the initial launch partners.  This was picked up by Techmeme and prominently talked about throughout the blogosphere, tech media, and even the mainstream media.

I’ve been involved with Me.dium since its first financing and the launch of Me.dium Social Search is a key pivot point as it starts to capitalize on the initial vision of the company.  If you are familiar with Me.dium, you may know of it as a company that has a browser sidebar that enables real time browsing with friends.  This concept started out as a "recommendation service" where the algorithms suggested alternative web sites and people based on how your browsing patterns matched the browsing patterns of your friends and the overall community.

This was – and is – a pretty neat idea, but it’s really hard to do effectively in a browser sidebar. Me.dium built out a lot of backend infrastructure to process a large amount of information in real time, which is necessary to make the algorithms useful across a large user base.  In the process of doing this, it occurred to the team that the sidebar might not be the best way to surface the information and that search might be a better way to deliver its value to the user since Me.dium’s collaborative filtering algorithms are an entirely different search algorithm than the PageRank type ones we’ve gotten used to.

A group of folks at Me.dium went heads down and starting working on using the stream of data they were getting to turn out a real time social search engine.  Along the way, Yahoo! decided to open up their search engine infrastructure through Yahoo! BOSS and a natural collaboration was born.

Rather than hold on tight, create a "closed beta", and limit the use and exploration of Me.dium Social Search, they did what I wish more companies would do and went "straight to Alpha".  Even though it’s alpha and still evolving rapidly, Me.dium Social Search produces some really interesting search results that correspond to the web pages that people are looking at right now about specific topics. 

The notion of the Me.dium Sidebar has morphed into a Social Toolbar which, in addition to providing a bevy of social features, also starts including your clickstream in the corpus of data that Me.dium is using for their social search algorithms. Me.dium is fanatical about your privacy and includes a simple one click way in your toolbar to turn Me.dium tracking on and off and never tracks information on secure (via HTTPS) sites.

Yahoo! has stirred the search pot in an interesting way with BOSS.  Me.dium’s going after one particular vector – that of social search – by building on a lot of work they’ve been doing over the past eighteen months.  I expect you’ll hear a lot about The Future of Search in the coming year – I think Me.dium will be one of the companies regularly mentioned in the mix of folks trying new approaches.

Give Me.dium Social Search a try (simply type your search term into the little box and hit the "I Feel Social" button) and tell us what you think.  And – if you want to go deeper on the ideas, take a look at Robert Reich’s (one of Me.dium’s co-founders) blog titled Why to hear him riff on search.

My partner Ryan McIntyre has an excruciating story up titled Sharp’s Dull Service / My eCommerce Nightmare about his experience buying a snazzy new 52" Sharp Aquos LC-52D92U via Amazon only to have to go through over four months of warranty repair hell before his (now old) new TV worked.  He’s being politically correct with his title – I would have titled the post "How To Get Rat Fucked When Buying A High Ticket Consumer Electronics Item From An Amazon Affiliate."  But then again, Ryan is nicer than me.  And he’s apparently more patient than me – I simply give my broken things to Ross and order a new improved thing.

While Amy assures me there is no correlation between "books" and "sun appearance", I have been reading a book each day and there has been no sun since we arrived in Homer 12 days ago.  I was just using the same argument that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster uses to explain global warming.

As is typical of my time in Homer, I’ve covered a lot of ground.  This time I’m reading exclusively on my Kindle which I love; I haven’t cracked open a physical book yet.  That said, some of the books have been great and a few have been clunkers.

Inside Steve’s Brain: In preparation for the launch of the iPhone 3G, I decided to try to get into Inside Steve’s Brain.  This recently became one of the trendy technology books, presumably due to everyone’s desire to be as innovative as Steve Jobs (or at least learn some of his special tricks.)  I had low expectations for the book (I generally dislike books like this); it surprised me by being pretty good.  There were plenty of instructive Steve Jobs stories and interesting Apple history that I hadn’t read in other places.  The summaries / lessons at the end of the chapters were tedious and there were a few "extra" chapters that could have been edited out if the book industry could handle a business book less than 200 pages.  But – overall – it’s good, especially if you are an Apple fanboy.

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company: In my "read all about Steve Jobs" theme, I consumed The Pixar Touch.  If you are choosing between Inside Steve’s Brain and The Pixar Touch, choose this one.  It’s an excellent history of Pixar.  The first half is extraordinarily interesting as it details all the early people and research that formed the computer animation industry.  This book also felt more balanced (e.g. "less sensational") in its coverage of all the twists and turns that Pixar went through along the way to success.

Halting State: Excellent "slightly in the future" science fiction incorporating all kinds of funky technology, a complex plot around virtual worlds virtual money, plenty of good guys, bad guys, a male nerd / female cop protagonist romantic plot twist, some irrational bad guys, and a few things you had to go back and read a second time to make sure you understood what had just happened.  All of it is set in Scotland resulting in some entertaining dialog for this American boy.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies: Boring, but then I had already knew of many of the examples in the book.  If you are a corporate dude looking for examples of the use of "social technologies" in the enterprise, there are lots of useful stories here.  If you like to read Forrester Research stuff, you are the target audience.  Probably in the same category as Scoble and Israel’s Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers – a skimmer if you are in the tech business but important and useful if you are in a large corporation and are trying to figure out what all this social networking stuff means.

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life: Perfect.  I love Steve Martin.  I was in junior high school when he reached the pinnacle of his stand up fame.  I remember being a wild and crazy guy, strutting around while singing King Tut, and shouting out EXCUSE ME at the top of my lungs, much to my mother’s annoyance.  This is a great autobiography – I even learned that he was born in Waco, Texas.

American Nerd: The Story of My People: So so.  I had high expectations for this book since it’s about me.  About 25% of it was great, 25% of it was boring, and 50% was filler.  I think I’m going to start a book imprint called "Books in Under 100 pages", hire a few merciless editors, and make good books great by getting rid of 25% to 75% of them.  While I didn’t get any new and exciting insights into nerds (although you might, especially if you are not a nerd), I learned some interesting things about ethnicity and racism that hadn’t previously cro
ssed my mind.  I’m glad I read this book and think it provides some useful insights into our culture, but damnit it didn’t need to be over 200 pages.

Final Theory: A Novel: Loved it.  A+ mental floss.  I can’t remember who recommended it to me, but thank you.  Physics, murder, sexy smart women, a professor hero, explosions, fast cards, evil mad scientists disguised as pacifists, evil people, complex scientific theories that actually almost work, gratuitous almost sex, a really scary mean bad guy, and some hillbillies.  What more could you want?

Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time: Boring.  This could have been called "the biography of Keith Ferrazzi" with a bunch of anecdotes tossed in about how to treat people.  I think I would have liked it better if it was called "the biography of Keith Ferrazzi" and I was interested in reading the biography of Keith Ferrazzi.  Note to self – don’t write an autobiography and position it as a self-help business book.

Wall Street Stories: Awesome.  Clever, entertaining short stories about Wall Street.  Written in 1901.  All equally relevant today.  While fiction, these could have easily been true stories (and I imagine they were based on real events.)  I don’t play the market and this book clearly explains the reason why.

If you are feeling depressed about your public stock portfolio, pick up a copy of Wall Street Stories – it’ll at least make you laugh.  If you need a real laugh, grab a copy of Born Standing Up.  If you want to understand why you love your new iPhone so much, try out Inside Steve’s Brain.  If you get tired of reading, you can always watch the latest installment of David Cohen and I explaining TechStars on ColoradoBizTV. 

Oh – and please send some sun to Homer, Alaska.

Amy and I woke up at 5am this morning (which was still several hours after dawn here in Homer, AK) to head the big city of Soldotna, Alaska (population 4,087) to run the 2008 Soldotna Rotary Unity 10 Mile Race.  As part of my marathon training I’ve decided to run a lot more races between 10k and a half marathon to try to build up my "racing brain" while having some extra fun wherever I happen to be in the world.

Soldotna is about 75 miles from Homer.  I snoozed while Amy drove.  She woke me once to inform me that there was a moose on the side of the road and asked if I wanted to stop and take a picture.  Since I’m afraid of horses, and a moose looks like three horses stapled together to me, I declined and went back to sleep.  We got to Soldotna High School (home of the Soldotna Stars) and met up with the other 100 or so people involved in the race.

About 50 of us hopped on a yellow school bus and drove to the bustling metropolis of Kenai, Alaska (population 7,464) and stopped at the Kenai High School (home of Kardinals).  Ten minutes later the 50 of us lined up at the starting line painted on the ground in the school parking lot and took off on our race back to Soldotna.

Since I’m targeting a 4:45 marathon in Ashton, Idaho next month, I decided to do the first half in 55 minutes (11 minute miles) and then see what I had in me, being happy with anything under 1:50.  I had a hard time holding myself back – my first mile was in 9:16 and my second mile was in 9:48.  I think at this point I was near the back of the very small pack.  I managed to settle down and did the next three miles around 10:30 and then realized that I was probably in last place.  I felt great so I kicked it into gear.

I cruised through the second half of the race and executed on the elusive perfect negative split (where every subsequent mile in the second half of a race is faster than the previous mile.)  9:45.  9:14:  8:36.  8:26. 7:58.  Total time: 1:34:30.  Avg HR: 154. Max HR: 190.  I passed seven people between mile 5 and mile 7, so I came in 8th from last.

For the full data, take a look at what my trusty Garmin 305 recorded (yes – I have a 405 – it arrived yesterday – but I didn’t want to tempt the new device monster by trying a virgin 405 on my race.)  We grabbed some lunch at Froso’s in Soldotna, Amy drove home (and I napped), and then I took a shower and napped some more.  I feel great – we’ll see how I’m doing at mile 10 of my 13 mile run tomorrow.

I’ve ranted about the TSA plenty on this blog – I travel a lot and find dealing with the TSA one of the more amusing experiences in my life.  So does Patrick Smith of Ask the Pilot – one of my favorite travel blogs.  In a recent post headlined Propped up by a culture of fear, TSA has become a bureaucracy with too much power and little accountability. Where will the lunacy stop? he discusses the case of "pilot re-screening" and the "dangerous airline cutlery."

I’ve heard from several people that NetNewsWire on the iPhone is awesome.  While I’m not a Mac user, I’m anxiously awaiting my new iPhone (Ross promises that I’ll have it – along with Exchange sync – on Monday).  In the mean time, I’m psyched that my friends at NewsGator have once again harnessed the software wizardry of Brent Simmons to create a fully-features RSS Reader – based on NetNewsWire – that runs on the iPhone.  If you have an iPhone you can get it for free at the AppStore now.  I know I will on Monday.

If you follow me on twitter, you know I’ve been whining about the lack of sun in Homer this year.  We’ve been here for a week and didn’t really see the sun until today.  A few days ago I promised "the sun" (via twitter) that I’d blog about it and put up a picture if it ever decided to show up here.

We still have plenty of clouds obscuring the mountains across Kachemak Bay (which makes the sun reflect in strange and unusually ways), but when I returned home from my run Amy was jumping up and down shouting "the sun is out, the sun it out" confirming that it had finally made an appearance.

It wasn’t very cloudy last night when I took this picture at midnight, but the sun was hiding near the horizon.  Amy was asleep so she missed this.  Note all the lights on the Homer Spit and the snow on the mountains in the background.  Pretty. 

I’ve been really pleased with the way NewsGator’s widget business has taken off.  Two years ago I regularly got questions from people about "how would NewsGator monetize the consumer web reader business."  The answer to that is "they won’t – but they’ll use the infrastructure they’ve build – which is rock solid, scalable, and unique – to build a really interesting widget and data business based on RSS content."

NewsGator now has over 100 paying customers for their widget business.  Over the past 30 days, they’ve served almost 19 million unique users over 250 million widget views.  They’ve also served over 44 million API calls to paying data partners (a total over over 385 million API calls if you include all the free clients out there, including NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and NewsGator Go! that call the API on a regular basis.)  This is in support of 2.8 million feeds and 211 million articles over the past 30 days.  The overall NewsGator feed archive now stands at 2.1 billion articles.  Non-trivial!

Today, NewsGator – with AFP – announced a new initiative called The Road to Beijing – the 2008 Games widgets.  This is an Olympics game news widget with a twist – NewsGator will guarantee you a $0.20 CPM for distribution of the widget on you site!  You’ll get co-branding on the widget, traffic, great Olympics content, and a guaranteed CPM.

Jeff Nolan – who runs this part of NewsGator’s business – has a long blog post up at NewsGator and AFP Olympics Widgets, Guaranteed CPM – explaining how it all works.  Join NewsGator and APF on The Road to Beijing and make some money while you are at it.