Feedburner is releasing a new set of features on Monday.  I got a note from Dick Costolo – CEO – saying they were all set to go but were going to adhere to the “don’t be an idiot and launch a product on Friday” policy.

This was eerily reminiscent of our release policy at my first company (Feld Technologies) in the late 1980’s.  We had a policy that we’d only release on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.  We were a custom software company and had clients around the US – in the age of pre-Internet, Carbon Copy / PC Anywhere, and Fedexing disks around, if you screwed up on a Friday, you were miserable.  In addition, if you weren’t ready to go by Friday for a Monday release, your weekend sucked.  So – we solved the problem by limiting the release window.  I don’t think our clients ever really noticed this in the affirmative sense, but we certainly sucked less because we didn’t ruin their Friday nights, weekends, or Monday mornings.

Release early and often, but never on Friday’s.

My mom step-sister just sent me a “Palmer for President” bumper sticker and a “Counter Terrorist Unit / USA” coffee mug.  If you don’t get the reference, you need to start watching 24.

NewsGator and Factiva announced a partnership today.  As part of this, Factiva customers (and there are a lot of them) will be able to transform their existing “Factiva Track Folders” into RSS feeds and view them via a NewsGator Business Subscription.  Also – all NewsGator premium subscribers will start receiving Factiva’s Editor’s Choice Feeds. 

If you don’t know of Factiva, they are a Dow Jones & Reuters Company that provides content from over 9,000 sources, including Dow Jones and Reuters Newswires and the Wall Street Journal. NewsGator has a long series of partnerships like this queued up – more coming soon.

I’ve been reading Friedman’s The World Is Flat but I keep getting distracted by mental floss as all of my favorite writers release their summer junk. I got sucked into Stuart Woods’ Two Dollar Bill on a flight home on Friday; today it was Robert Parker’s latest Spenser (and Hawk) novel Cold Service.

I like Spenser, I adore Susan, but I want to come back as Hawk in another life (combining Hawk, Jack Bauer, and Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar would be sweet.)  Cold Service is way more about Hawk than about Spenser, which is fun for a change.  Denver to Seattle and back equals one book and it was fun.  Time to go brush my teeth, eat my Wheaties, and finish off The World Is Flat.

I hooked up with Dan Bricklin last week when I was in Boston.  I met Dan in the mid-1990’s when he was starting up Trellix (which I was an early investor in).  I still remember the day I cracked open my copy of Visicalc for the Apple II (I think it was copy 200–something.  It was the actual copy used in Triumph of the Nerds as Dan didn’t want to risk losing one of his few remaining copies.  We got it back eventually from some Oregon Public Radio dude, but that’s another long story.)  I adore (and worship) Dan – Visicalc and my Apple II had a huge impact on my life as it was an integral part of my first real introduction to computers (beyond a high-low game I wrote on some mainframe somewhere and a day of APL in front of a Frito-Lay computer with my Uncle Charlie.)  I remember /SL and /SQY like it was yesterday.  Of course, this led to a thousand hours playing Ultima and Choplifter, but that was more an issue of lack of self control as a teenager.

Dan has been spending a lot of time thinking about Open Source issues over the past year.  He’s written extensively on it and just created a video called A Developer’s Introduction to Copyright and Open Source: Why a Lawyer is a Developer’s Friend (eek – lawyers – scary).  Given all the issues surrounding Open Source licensing and copyright issues these days and based on the synopsis, Dan’s video looks comprehensive and highly relevant (I’d expect nothing less from Dan.) 

Dan promised that my autographed copy is on its way.  You can buy an evaluation copy here and a corporate training edition here.  And – no – I don’t get a commission on this one – just karma points.  Maybe Dan will also send me an autographed copy of Dan Bricklin’s Demo Program (I lost mine in a move somewhere.)

Dave Taylor – a Boulder-based entrepreneur and blogger – has created a half day workshop for business executives and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to use blogging in their business.  New West Network – in which I’m an angel investor – is a sponsor and the agenda looks interesting and relevant.  If you want to get up to speed on business blogging, this looks like a content rich and reasonably priced ($175) event that’s being held at the Boulder Outlook Hotel on 5/5/05 (ah – fun with numbers) from 9am – 12n.

Ah – it’s spring time and all of the writers who crank out summer mental floss books are seeing their books hit the stores now.  Stuart Woods new Stone Barrington novel – Two Dollar Bill – is out.  Stone is my hero – an ex-cop turned “legal problem solver” (e.g. the law firm he’s associated with gives him the weird shit they don’t want to deal with) who gets laid constantly by the female protagonists but always manages to get involved in something that messes up his relationships.  In the middle of the mess that is his personal life, he takes endless rafts of shit from his ex-cop-partner Dino (who is the son-in-law of a big time mafioso and – try as hard as he can to not end up being pegged for a cop – wears black rubber shoes, white socks, and eats donuts on stake outs.)  Oh – and each book has a bad guy problem that Stone and Dino get mixed up in and inevitably have to solve through lots of car chases, stake outs, explosions, kidnapings, random killings, and eventually a complex plot twist. 

I covered a lot of mileage this week – Boulder to Dallas to Palo Alto to Boston to Boulder – and decided that I deserved a Stone Barrington novel for the flight home from Boston (instead of email or something heavier, such as Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.)  $29.50 later (the book and a powerbar for the flight) and I made four hours disappear.

While Amy and I are involved in and support a number of non-profits, I limit the number of non-profit boards I sit on at any one time to a total of three as I’ve seen way too many “passive non-profit board members.”  While this might be good for the person’s resume, ego, or the non-profit’s external perception of involvement from meaningful people in the community, it’s just not my way – if I’m going to sit on a board, I take it seriously and give it the energy, time, and attention it deserves.

Currently I’m chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and on the boards of the Colorado Conservation Trust and the Watershed School.  NCWIT and CCT both released radically updated websites this week.  If you are interested in either organization or have looked at their sites in the past, it’s worth a refresher.

Google Ads have started appearing in select RSS feeds on a trial basis.  This has been long anticipated, is a completely logical extension of Google AdSense, and – while some people may fight ads in RSS – it’s an inevitable part of the RSS ecosystem. 

Feedburner announced today that they support Google AdSense in feeds.  Feedburner already supports Yahoo! Search Marketing (fka Overture Advertising) and Amazon Associates as part of their “commerce services” – it was straightforward for Feedburner to incorporate Google AdSense into this.  While the publisher (e.g. you, me) needs to set up Google AdSense and be invited into their Google AdSense for RSS program, once your Google AdSense ID is approved for RSS, you will be able to immediately turn this capability on in Feedburner with minimal configuration.

As Dick Costolo – the CEO of Feedburner – mentioned in a post about the financing round we led, Feedburner’s core competency is managing complexity with regard to RSS feed management.  While setting up Google Ads on a web site is pretty straightforward (but still requires some technical understanding), it gets a lot harder to modify your RSS feed to include Google Ads.  Feedburner makes it simple, lets you have more flexibility (e.g ad frequency, category optimization, ad formatting), and handles all the weird issues that Feedburner has learned about my managing a large number of feeds (e.g. feed read/unread problems when you insert ads, ad formatting in different RSS aggregators).