August is theoretically a slow month.  Um, yeah.  As I pondered what I’ve got in front of me the next few weeks, I thought I’d share the things you are invited to come to and play with me.

Thursday 8/14 @ 5:30pm: Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado party on top of the Foundry Roof Deck.

Saturday 8/16 @ 8am: Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Annual Give Back Event at Foothills Community Park.

Monday 8/18 @ 6pm: The 2008 Boulder Sushi Regurge Open sponsored by Lijit.  Contact Micah Baldwin for more info.  There are only seven sushi restaurants in downtown Boulder – surely you can find us.

Tuesday 8/19 @ 6pm: Gnip office warming party in Boulder at Gnip’s new top secret location on the east end of Pearl Street.

Wednesday 8/20 @ 10am: TechStars Demo and Investor Day.  There are still some general admission seats left.  If you are an angel or VC investor and interested in a floor ticket, email me and I’ll get you set up.

Wednesday 8/20 @ 6:30pm: Boulder TECH Cocktail 2.  I assure you this will not be dull. 

Saturday 8/23: Mesa Falls Marathon in Ashton, Idaho.  Root for me.

Tuesday 8/26 @ 9:00am: 2008 Technology Roundtable as part of the DNC.  I’m a panelist along with a bunch of people that are much more serious than I am. I guess they invited me to lighten things up. 

Yeah – that feels like enough social events.  I think I’ll then go hide under a rock until after Labor Day weekend is over.

Eric Norlin has a good post up titled Enterprise 2.0 as part of a larger theme.  In it he addresses the question "Is enterprise 2.0 bullshit?"  Eric doesn’t think it is, nor do I.  However, there is still a lot of difficultly getting real alignment on what it means, what is unique about the enterprise characteristics, and why anyone should really care.

I’ve seeing an interesting and predictable phenomenon occurring.  Corporate IT has gotten energized about implementing "social computing" and "all that Web 2.0 stuff."  The analyst crowd is writing about all the different Enterprise 2.0 categories and starting to extensively position products in pretty matrices.  Several big software companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are making major pushes into this "category."  Loads of startups are emerging in every segment.  TechCrunch even has an a new property called TechCrunchIT.

Early adopters are doing what they always do – pilots, proof of concepts, workgroup deployments.  White papers are appearing.  Web conferences are happening.  Inevitably an "Enterprise 2.0 Conference" (or several derivatives) will appear.

But Eric and I think something is missing.  What is going round and round as Enterprise 2.0 is a subset of something bigger.  For example, we are in the beginning phase of new issues surrounding the entirety of identity computing and the web.  We are now in a land where people have multiple online personas – their "work self", their "home friend self", their "secret second life self", their "hidden porn login self", and their "this is what I wish I was like self".  While "identity management" has been an endless "IT problem to solve", this isn’t really "identity management" anymore – it’s "I consume and generate a shitload of data in different contexts that are persistently stored out in the open for all to see – how do I deal with that?"

I could give another dozen examples of the subset issues contained in what we are trying to explore with Defrag.  I expect Eric will keep banging away on them on his blog.  And – more importantly – I hope you’ll come join us at Defrag on November 3rd and 4th in Denver as a group of really interesting and smart people attack some of these issues and try to make sense of them.  If you register this month, use the code "brad1" and get $100 off your registration fee.

Since last summer I’ve been talking about comments as the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere.  I use Intense Debate* for the comment system on my blog and have learned a lot by experimenting with it. 

In the past six months comments have moved to the forefront of the discussion around user generated content.  While the various new commenting systems that have emerged have played a part in this, I think the broad activity around systems that enable small bursts of user generated content (Twitter, BrightKite*) and systems that aggregate a wide variety of user generated content (FriendFeed, SocialThing*) are playing a huge role in this and more "comment-like" data is being generated all over the Web.

One of the investment themes I’m most fascinated with right now is the one we call "Glue".  We’ve made a handful of investments in the Glue theme at Foundry Group including Gnip, AdMeld, and Topspin.  We’ve also been working with our good friend Eric Norlin – the creator of the Defrag Conference – on a Glue Conference.

I’m always looking for great, simple examples of Glue and I found one accidentally the other day.  I put up a blog post titled Brilliant Op-Ed Crushing McCain On The Economy.  I posted it on Sunday morning and then went out for a two hour run.  I came back to about 20 comments on it in my inbox.  Even though the post was done on my blog, I noticed the comments were from FriendFeed accounts being emailed to me by Intense Debate.

Here’s what happened.  My blog is one of my FriendFeed services.  A vigorous debate broke out on FriendFeed between a couple of people.  I wouldn’t have noticed it until Monday when I checked my FriendFeed ego feed (I only do this once a day.)  However, Intense Debate is "glued" to my FriendFeed account so any comments that show up on a blog post of mine on FriendFeed automatically show up in Intense Debate on my blog.  It’s a small feature, but a brilliant one, as it brings the overall conversation associated with my blog post back to my blog where I actually want it.

There are now 46 comments on this particular blog post (unexpected – I don’t write that much about politics and it was a Sunday post.)  Most of them are from the FriendFeed discussion, but some are from my blog readers.  They are intermixed where I want them – on my blog.  Even though they are coming from multiple sources, they persist permanently on my blog due to a tiny feature in Intense Debate.

Now – this is all much too complex still, but it’s why the Glue is so interesting to us.  We are continually looking for unnecessary complexity in the metaverse and ways to build really large companies that (a) take advantage of the complexity, (b) simplify the complexity, or (c) both.  If you make glue, email me!

* Yes – I’m aware that each of Intense Debate, BrightKite, and SocialThing are TechStars companies from 2007 – and I’m immensely proud of the progress each has made and the fact they are in the midst of what I consider to be a very interesting and vigorous segment of our little tech universe

I have some weeks where I wake up and realize there is a speaking engagement almost every day.  This is one of them.

Last night was TechStars – The FeedBurner Story.  This was part of Google Day at TechStars. I was on a panel with Dick Costolo and Rick Klau telling the FeedBurner story (and helping Rick be Dick’s straight man.)

Tonight is a TiE Rockies event titled "Funding Your Business in Hard Times"  I’m on a panel with Vipanj Patel (iSherpa), Mike Devery (Silicon Valley Bank), and Dan Caruso (BearEquity / Zayo Group) that is being moderated by Catharine Merigold (Vista Ventures).  The event is happening tonight at the PPA Event Center in Denver from 5:30pm – 8:30pm. 

Tomorrow is more TechStars – The NewsGator Story.  This is part of Microsoft Day at TechStars.  I expect I’ll mostly be taunting JB Holston and Greg Reinacker this time.

Thursday is the CSIA Apex Awards event.  This is a great event for Colorado software / Internet execs and entrepreneurs – the nominee list is long and impressive.  A dozen awards are given out and copious network occurs.  The event takes place at the EXDO Event Center from 5pm – 9pm. 

On Saturday I’m in Boston at my 20th MIT Sloan School Reunion.  Actually, I’m going to be spending most of the weekend at Wellesley at my wife Amy’s 20th college reunion.  Er – I’ll probably just be hanging out in Boston, Cambridge, and Wellesley with a bunch of friends playing hooky from most of the reunions.  I am – however – involved in a bunch of stuff during the day on Saturday including a speech from 10am – 11am as part of the Reunion Back to the Classroom series titled "Software Innovation – Do You Think The Last 20 Years Were Exciting?  The Next 20 Years Will Blow Your Mind."

Yeah – that’s a lot.  No talks / panels / speeches / lectures / events next week.  If you are interested, please come to the TiE Rockies event tonight or the CSIA Apex Awards event on Thursday night.  While the TechStars events are closed to TechStars members only, there will be video of some of them up on the TechStars Community site.  And – I’ll put up the slides from my MIT presentation on this site.

I’m giving a presentation at my MIT Sloan 20th Reunion on June 7th.  I’m part of the "Back to the Classroom" series and am giving a presentation titled Software Innovation – Do You Think The Last 20 Years Were Exciting?  The Next 20 Years Will Blow Your Mind.

The rest of the program includes several great MIT professors talking about the following:

• Prof. Roberto Rigobon The United States and the World’s Recession
• Prof. Anjali Sastry Projects for change: Bringing management tools and ideas, collaboration, and learning-by-doing to the challenge of global health delivery for tuberculosis, HIV/AIDs, and other diseases in resource-poor settings
• Prof. JoAnne Yates, CrackBerrys: Exploring the Social Implications of Wireless Email Devices
• Prof. Drazen Prelec, Neuroeconomics

It should be a stimulating day.  As a result, I’ve started working on my presentation, a full month before I have to give it. 

For the opening, I’m going to do a rapid fire year by year walk through of software from 1988 to 2008.  I’m then going to roll forward to 2028. 

I’m looking for help on imagery.  If you have great jpg’s / gif’s of "software images" (I’m not defining this yet – just casting the net widely) please email them to me.  If you know of interesting images or videos on the web, post the URL in the comments.  If you have any other suggestions for interesting places to look for stuff, post a comment.

I’m mostly interested in imagery that I can tie to a specific year between 1988 and 2008.  For example, 1993 is a screen shot of Mosaic Version 1.0.

Thanks in advance for any help y’all can provide.  I’ll put the presentation up on the web after I’ve given it.

I’m attending and speaking at TECH Cocktail in Chicago on May 29th.  Since I’m not a conference guy, it’ll be entertaining to see if I can sit still the whole day since my panel isn’t until 3pm. 

If you are in the Chicago area, I encourage you to come to this event put on my Frank Gruber and Eric Olson.  There are going to be some dynamite speakers that I expect will deliver something different than the typical Silicon Valley conference thing.  Plus it’s at Loyola University, a place I’ve never been before which is always fun for me.

Registration is easy and painless.  I’ll be there all day – come out and play.

Loic Le Meur totally nailed why glue matters in his post My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog.  Following is the defining image from Loic’s notebook.

I’m not sure the answer (I want it back on my blog) is correct, but we are in the middle of yet another massive decentralization of data – this time very personal.  Loic’s identity and content is spread all over the web (as is mine.)  He wants it back in one place – one that belongs to him.

If we only had 10 web services participating in this grand decentralization of Loic, it would be no big deal.  But there are now thousands – all which want to be able to play with all the others.  With each new unit of data, and each new service, it gets a little messier (and a little more fun.)

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.

Are you a Facebook developer?  Do you live in Denver or Boulder?  Do you like food?

On Thursday March 27th, from 6pm to 9pm, there is a Facebook Developer Garage meeting.  It’s happening at the TechStars office (also fondly known as "The Bunker") is Boulder.  Sign up via the Facebook Developers Boulder Denver site (recursive, I know) and then check out the meeting info.

We (Foundry Group) are providing the food so there should be plenty of it.