I’m really pleased that FeedBurner has finally implemented a Socialize feature.  With a few settings, I can now connect my Twitter account to my FeedBurner profile and, when I post something to my blog, have it automatically tweeted out.  There are plenty of nice options to help me format this and the traffic data is supposed to show up in my Google Analytics account, but I haven’t seen it yet.

While I love that I no longer have to do anything to tweet my post (no Mom, that’s not an obscene thing to do, although it sure sounds like it) one thing annoys me.  The short URL.  It’s Goo.gl/fb/…  That’s both (a) not so short and (b) not what I want.  I want fndry.gr/.  That’s my happy short URL that I get from using Awe.sm. 

I’ve now gone through the following Short URL evolution with Twitter.  I started with TinyURL and manual shorted my URL’s before I tweeted them.  That was a long time ago.  Then Twitter started automatically shortening them with TinyURL and that made it a little easier.  Then Twitter started using Bit.ly to shorten URLs so I switched to Bit.ly.  Then I started using TweetDeck with automatically shortened things using Bit.ly and that made it even easier.  But then we got our own customer URL shortener (fndry.gr) via Awe.sm.  And I shortened things manually for a while.  Then I installed Tweetmeme on my blog and shortened things using bit.ly again for a few days until I figured out how to using the API to use Awe.sm at which point I started using fndry.gr again until FeedBurner Socialize came out.  Now I’m using Goog.gl/fb/

Confused yet?

Oh – and my stats are totally foobared.  I’ve got partial stats about click throughs in Bit.ly, Awe.sm, and Google Analytics.  I realize this is totally self imposed as I shift from shortener to shortener, but I’m just trying to get to the nirvana of (a) using a shortener that I want (fndry.gr), (b) not having to do anything to shorten a URL  (e.g. I want it integrated into my workflow), and (c) having stats about click throughs.

When I went looking around to see how many distinct URL shorteners there are, I was surprised at how lame the Wikipedia page for URL shortening is.  I expected a comprehensive directory – no suck luck. A Google search on URL shortener  wasn’t much help either.  A Bing search on URL shortener was a little better (eek!) and ironically pointed to a Google Knol on URL Shorteners.  Of course, Joshua Schachter’s fantastic rant On URL Shorteners was appropriately at the top of Bing’s search results (Joshua now works at Google if you missed the irony of that one.)

I finally found a Mashable directory on URL Shorteners (90 of them) but it’s from January 2008 – ergo very obsolete.

This is now officially a complete mess.  And it’s going to get a lot messier with the brand spanking new Facebook short URL fb.me.  I can’t wait to see Microsoft’s URL shortener – I’m guessing something like Microso.ft/bing/.

Someone please stand up and help stop the madness.  Al Gore, where are you when we really need you.

I have to keep reminding myself that some things just take a long time.  My rampage against software patents continues and, while my efforts around the StartupVisa have dominated my “government time” in the past quarter, I’ve still got my eye on the ultimate goal of rendering the construct of a software patent invalid.

I smiled yesterday when I saw the short article titled 3D Computer Graphics Patents Deemed Invalid.  The key line from the article is “Though the calculations may be performed on a computer, they are not tied to any particular computer. For these reasons, the claims of the [patents-in-suit] fail to pass muster under the Bilski machine implementation test for patentability under 35 U.S.C. § 101.” 

This is super important because the vast majority of software patents have this problem.

In addition, the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in Hewlett-Packard Co. v. Acceleron LLC that makes it much easy for a company to file a declaratory judgment action when threatened by a “nonpracticing patent owner” (also known as an – ahem – patent troll).  The law firm Morgan Lewis has a great summary of this up on the web and the opinion is online.

I am an optimist.  And I am optimistic that progress will be made against software patents and for a Startup Visa in 2010.

I’ve introduced two new devices into my personal human instrumentation experiment.  In addition to my Zeo, I am now carrying around a FitBit and using a Withings scale.  I’ve discovered the mild embarrassment associated with having a scale mis-tweet your weight by 10 pounds too much (e.g. “Brad – you gained a lot of weight recently – everything ok?”)  But I suppose that is part of the experiment.

The comparison on the Zeo and FitBit sleep data is fascinating.  Take a look.  Zeo from last night first.

Now the FitBit from last night.

The Zeo breaks things down into four categories: Wake, REM, Deep Sleep, and Light Sleep.  The FitBit only has two: Active and Asleep.  My FitBit time setting is wrong (it has me going to sleep at 9:17 but I went to bed at 11:10 – I’ll need to figure out how to fix that).  But both have me in bed for a little over 9 hours, although the FitBit thinks I was only asleep for 8:17 of it.  The Zeo has me asleep for 97% of the time; the FitBit has me at a Sleep Efficiency of 95%.

I need a few more nights of comparative data to completely understand the differences, but I thought I’d toss up a baseline to get started.    Oh – and I slept in this morning – I felt kind of crummy and decided to just sleep to try to shake off whatever was creeping up on me.

Last week I complained about how miserable I was with AT&T.  I love my iPhone, but the AT&T service (both data and voice) is abysmal here in Boulder.  All my Blackberry friends on Verizon are happier, so I decided to try a Droid on Verizon.  After 24 hours I bailed and went back to my iPhone – the Droid just isn’t ready for prime time IMHO.

Thaddeus Arroyo, the CIO of AT&T Services, is on the National Center for Women & Information Technology board with me and saw my tweet (apparently via Facebook) whining about AT&T.  He reached out to me immediately and asked if he could help in any way.  I sent him a long note which has resulted in a call tomorrow with the senior regional area support executive.

So – I’ve got my issues and can clearly articulate them, but I’m looking for a longer list.  If you are a Boulder-area AT&T / iPhone user and you are having trouble with voice or data, please leave a comment here with some details for me to share.

One of my recent obsessions has become “human instrumentation.”  I’ve always been really interested in the data that I generate (sleep, fitness, diet, medical) and in the past six months have started buying every personal measurement product or device I can find that is integrated with the web.

One of my favorites is the Zeo.  We looked at investing a while ago and I got to play with one of the alpha prototypes.  It was cool but we just didn’t get there on the investment, even though I loved the product and had a great impression of the founding team and what they were up to.  We keep a list of “companies we hope we regret not investing in” which means (in English) that we are huge fans and will do whatever we can to help, even though we aren’t investors.  Zeo is on that list for me.

But – back to my sleeping skills.  Last night I set a new personal ZQ of 137.  Here’s my sleep graph from last night.

Light green is REM – I had four REM cycles last night (I usually have one or two) and during the week my score is usually between 50 and 70.  The red wake up spikes are bathroom trips (three last night – eek – getting older) and the last one on the far right is when Amy came in to the room at 11am to make sure I was still alive.

I just got a Fitbit and I’m starting to use it also so at some point I’ll do a comparison of the Zeo vs. Fitbit sleep data.  In the mean time, I think the Zeo is a great present – definitely consider it for any friends who either (a) love data or (b) have trouble sleeping.  I get some kind of affiliate thingy if you clicking on that link above, so if you do buy a Zeo, help me fund my endless toy habit.

I’m still really cold this morning and I’m dreaming of a time when I can put my meat puppet into hibernation for a while and just romp around in the metaverse.  Then I lost 30 minutes of my life to “restarting my connection to the metaverse” and it reminded me that if I went into hibernation, there’s a pretty good chance the metaverse would crash and I’d be in suspended animation forever.

It started while I responding to a Facebook message from a friend who is a senior executive at AT&T.  I twhined (whine on twitter) last night that “I think AT&T might have lost me today.”  He saw this message and this morning I woke up to a Facebook message from him asking “I see you had a bad experiece with AT&T, something I can help you with?”.  I give my friend (and – by reference AT&T) – huge props for reaching out.

As I was responding about the tragic AT&T iPhone coverage in Boulder along with the noise yesterday that AT&T was exploring trying to give high-bandwidth users incentives to reduce or modify their usage (which the pundits immediately turned into “AT&T is going to charge high-bandwidth users more”) Firefox crashed.  This was the second Firefox crash I’d had this morning so I decided to reboot.  Rebooting hung so I forced reboot.  Ten minutes later W7 and all my apps were running again (of course, in this process, W7 installed an upgrade) but I had no network.  I messed around on my computer for a little while but quickly checked my iPhone which also had no network (via my home WiFi).  I stumbled around in the dark, found my Comcast modem, and reset it by unplugging it from the wall and plugging it back in.  I sat and meditated for about five minutes – eventually I had Internet connectivity again.  However, the message to my AT&T friend that was half completed was gone when I brought up Facebook again (no surprise there, just more reinforcement of how fragile it all is.)

I’m feeling mentally bipolar about all of this.  It’s absolutely incredible to me that this stuff even works.  The range and pace of innovation is awesome.  And when I project out 20 years my brain explodes with joy and anticipation.  Yet, as I watch the little cylinder shaped LED on my laptop computer light up as the hard drive is pinned, I shudder a little.

Did I say that I’m cold?

I spent the last two days at the Defrag Conference.  It was awesome on so many levels including the content, the venue, seeing a bunch of great friends, and meeting a bunch of new people.

The conference originated out of an email exchange that Eric Norlin (the amazing guy who puts on the Defrag and Glue Conferences with his even more amazing wife Kim) and I had as a result of a series of blog posts that I wrote in 2006 starting with There Is A Major Software Innovation Wave Coming and Intelligence Amplification.

Over the past three years there has been an incredible amount of innovation around this theme (which we originally called the Implicit Web.)  While lots of it is still messy, sloppy, or ineffective, that’s just part of the innovation cycle.  A consistent discussion point at Defrag was “how to deal with this overwhelming amount of information” – there is no debate about the (a) amount, (b) need to deal with it, or (c) value of dealing with it.  However, a lot of the subtext was that there was too much information and we needed better ways to deal with it.

I agree with the conclusion, but not the premise.  I don’t think there is too much information.  I want more.  More, more, more, more, more.  MORE.  I don’t want to stop until I have all the information.  MORE!  You can’t give me too much information!

I don’t believe the issue is too much information.  This is an independent variable that we can’t control.  For the foreseeable future, there will be a continuous and rapid increase of information as more of the world gets digitized, more individuals become content creators, more systems open up and provide access to their data, and more infrastructure for creating, storing, and transmitting information (and data) gets built.

Yeah – I know – that’s obvious.  But there are a few ways to approach it.  My desired way is to accept the thing you can’t control (more information) and drastically improve the methods for consuming it.  I spent the better part of two days having this thought over and over again. 

By the end of the second day, I’d decided that my original premise was correct – there continues to be a huge innovation wave in software that addresses this.  And we are just starting to deal with it.  And while software is at the core of it, we’ve learned an enormous amount in the past few years about the power of people to help curate it, both directly (by doing things to it) and indirectly (by software interpreting the broad signals of what a large number of people are doing to it.)

The user interfaces – and user interaction model – for all of this stuff still sucks rocks.  And I love things that suck, because that creates huge opportunities for innovation.

The Boulder Camera highlighted a few CU Boulder students and their newest project in the article CU-Boulder students create Pac-Man Roomba game.  For anyone that played Pac-Man as a kid (as I did) or anyone that loves robots, it’s sheer brilliance.

Information about the entire project is up on the web at Roomba Pac-Man.  Now they need to do a Ms. Roomba Pac-Man – that would be a nice marriage of technologies.

I had an incredible experience yesterday.  My friend Phil Weiser, who is now the Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the US Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (I prefer to call him America’s Top Cop on Agriculture) invited me, my partner Jason Mendelson, and my wife Amy Batchelor to attend the Supreme Court Oral Arguments for re Bilski.  A rare tie sighting ensued as a jacket and tie is required to attend.

For those that know about my fervent anti-patent bias with regards to software, Bilski is an important case.  Depending on how the Supreme Court rules, it could open the door for both the invalidation of business method patents as well as begin a serious discussion about the validity of software patents.  One can hope.  So, this wasn’t a random Supreme Court visit, but rather one that is highly relevant to something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, talking, and writing about.

As you walk up the steps to the Supreme Court, you can’t help but stop and stare.  It was a beautiful day and we just soaked up the sunshine for a few minutes.  We then walked to the side entrance, went through security, and proceeded to the Supreme Court Cafeteria where we met Phil for lunch.  We were all a little nervous which was evident as we struggled to get salads from the salad bar (how hard is it to get lunch?) before sitting down in the relatively small cafeteria.

The Oral Arguments were from 1pm to 2pm so at 12:30 we mobilized.  The process of getting into the Courtroom is tedious, but surprisingly chaotic as they check IDs and accompany people in waves.  But once in, it’s powerful.

We sat down and waited quietly.  The courtroom was full.  At exactly 1pm, the Justices entered.  They sat, and immediately called the Petitioner (J. Michael Jakes).  Jakes got about thirty seconds into his oral argument when Justice Scalia jumped in with a question.  A short attempt at an answer by Jakes followed by a question by Breyer.  Another short answer and then a question by Ginsburg.  Then Breyer. Then Sotomayor.  Within five minutes I was stunned at the high level of understanding the Justices had in this particular case, the insightfulness of their questions, and their level of participation.

Breyer, Roberts, Scalia, and Sotomayor continued to question the petitioner for the next five minutes.  Their tone was aggressive – bordering on hostile – but never quite crossing the line.  Jakes kept his cool although he didn’t have strong responses to much of anything (at least from my perspective).  While I was biased against the Petitioner and could have heard what I wanted to hear, it sounded to me like the Justices were leaning strongly against business method patents and trying to understand how they could possibly be valid.

The Petitioner abruptly finished (reserving the balance of his time) and the Respondent (Malcolm L. Stewart) began.  It was a similar drill – the Petitioner got started and Justice Alito jumped in with a question.  A short answer followed by Sotomayor.  This continued for about 30 minutes.  Several times the idea of software came up.  Stewart steered the conversation away from this each time or – in some cases – refused to address the question.  This was frustrating to me as I thought the Justices were throwing him fat pitches to link software in with business methods as things that shouldn’t be patent eligible.  At some point it became clear that Stewart had a clear charge to keep software out of it as he went so far as to say that the government had argued against having the Supreme Court hear this case as there were difficult problems in software innovation that hadn’t yet been worked through.  Near the end, the State Street Bank case came up (not surprisingly) although in my opinion Stewart really fumbled his response.

At the end, the Petitioner got a four minute rebuttal.  At 1:55 Chief Justice Roberts promptly stated “Thank you, Counsel.  The case is submitted.”  The justices then rose and left the courtroom.  A minute later everyone else left.

We quickly said our goodbyes to Phil (he had to get back to work), wandered around for a few minutes looking for our car, and then headed to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to head back to Colorado.

When we landed, the transcript of the Oral Argument was up. And John Schwartz, the NY Times reporter who we stood behind in the security line (he’s got a cool black skull wallet), had his article up titled Justices Hear Patent Case on Protecting the Abstract. The web is an amazing thing.

In short, the experience was awesome.  I’m rarely speechless but as I walked out of the Supreme Court afterwards I realized I had nothing to say.