I’m in Reston, Virginia today at the The New New Internet Conference.  Brian Williams – the CEO of Viget Labs – invited me to speak on a panel after spending some time this summer in Boulder with the TechStars gang. 

A lot of my friends that live in Silicon Valley rarely stray out of Silicon Valley.  “Center of the startup universe” is no longer a cliche – rather, it’s like a scab that has been picked so many times it no longer will heal.  Silicon Valley is a critically important place in the world for creating companies, but it’s not the only place smart people that are doing interesting and important things hang out.

Last night at the pre-conference dinner I found a bunch of this type of person including dudes like Ryan Carson, Frank Gruber, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Rohit Bhargava.  Om Malik hung out, teased me about my clothing, and had a conversation with James Surowiecki that I snooped on. 

While Silicon Valley is on a fault line (literally and metaphorically), it’s important not to forget all the other interesting stuff going on “not in Silicon Valley.” 

For example, at this conference there is a “Government Track” with topics such as “Web 2.0 at the State Level”, “Current Web 2.0 Initiatives within Government Agencies”, “Virtual Government: Real Life Uses for Second Life”, “Intellipedia”, and “Let my data go! Making the case for transparent Government.” 

Now – before you go “yawn” or “Government 2.0” – remember my premise that the next 36 months will see massive crossover adoption into the enterprise (and government) of the consumer Internet innovations we’ve seen in the past 24 months.  Assuming that is correct, the dollars that will be spent are going to be massive and much of it will happen in Fortune 5000 headquarters and large government agencies that aren’t based in Silicon Valley.

A wise man once told me “go visit your customers.”  Today, he might say something like “son – buy a plane ticket and fly somewhere other than the center of the startup universe just to see what is going on and how people are thinking about this stuff.”

I spent part of my Friday night installing Leopard (also known as Mac OS X 10.5) on my Mac at home.  The install went perfectly and I was generally pleased with the new apps (like Time Machine and Spaces) and kept suggesting to my Vista machine sitting nearby that it already needed some new eye candy.

As I was reading my daily RSS feeds on my Vista machine (aha!) I came across a 2,174 page long blog post on Ars Technica titled Max OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review.  This is a spectacular review – in exhilarating detail – of Leopard.  The first few pages are a great rant about the new UI stuff, followed by a very thorough and deep analysis (both non-technical and technical) of all the new features and components in the upgrade.  Ok – it’s only 17 pages long – but these are real pages chock full of interesting information for all Mac nerds.

Nicely done John Siracusa.  Now, if I could just get Entourage to sync my tasks (and not suck so much in general as an email client) I might use my Mac more.

Following is a guest post by my partner Jason Mendelson.  All of the thoughts and grammar errors are his.  All of the formatting errors are mine.

Every year I go back to the University of Michigan and spend a day teaching undergrads in the economics department.   I’ve been doing it for a few years now and it’s a way to give back to the program.  Specifically, one of my former professors, Jan Gerson had a huge impact on me and I promised that I’d come back every year (if I ever got “smart”) and impart some knowledge.  I’m not sure that I ever got smart, but I do like to visit Ann Arbor. 

This year, I did something a bit differently.  Instead of me pontificating the whole time, I decided to ask some questions re: social networks and music usage, as I’ve been looking at several deals in the space.  I figured the undergrad crowd (of which I’m now twice their age, egads) would provide some interesting answers.  I’m not pretending this is a significantly accurate sample, etc., so take it for what it is worth. 

Over the course of the day, I was able to poll approximately 300 students, by my estimation.  Here were the “results.” 

1. Students who said they DIDN’T use Facebook:  2.  Yes, 2.  And one of them was a 37 year-old undergrad (great guy, too).  I asked how many of them were “regular” users, as defined by 7 times a week and all but a dozen or so confirmed they were “regular” Facebook users.
2. I asked how many of them used other social networks, or similar things, Flickr, Twitter, etc..  Shockingly 2 people indicated they used Twitter, 10 used MySpace about 20 used Flickr.  I was blown away.  My guess would be that they were using several networks.  MySpace was deemed “has been” material. Even for pictures, they are all using Facebook. 
3. I asked how much of their “email” traffic was on Facebook and the vast majority said somewhere around 20% and growing. Many of they wanted my opinion on the Microsoft investment with most everyone thinking it was stupid. None of them could think of an applicable business model for Facebook and they all claimed they’d seen little to no advertising.  This was interesting in that there was a strong visceral reaction to the MSFT investment.
4. I asked how many of them “bought music legally.”  No more that 15-20% indicated that they bought music legally.
5. I asked how many of them “stole music” – 100%.  And all but a couple indicated that a majority of their music was stolen.
6. Biggest concern of stealing music was not getting caught, it was that they “felt badly” for stealing it.
7. Almost no one buys CDs, but those that do are all into classic rock and jazz (Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, AC/DC).  I was relieved to discover that “classic rock” is still “classic rock.”  If the definition had become “Pearl Jam or Nirvana” I would have had to kill myself. 
8. I also had the opportunity to meet with a dozen or so folks after particular classes.  One question that I asked them was whether or not they felt computers aided in their education or detracted from it.  Almost unanimously, they all thought that computers detracted from their education because of all the distractions of web surfing, media consumption and social network participation.  I was surprised of their self awareness and a bit frightened by the answer.
9. Best question of the day to me was:  “How did you make plans with your friends to go to parties if you didn’t have a cell or email?”  I let them know about a quaint little device supplied to all dorm rooms called a telephone. 

I’ve decided that next year I’m going to come even better prepared to ask questions and try to actually add some science to it – instead of asking questions in the open, fill out a questionnaire, etc.

I was not surprised by the attitudes around music, but was surprised about the uniformity of Facebook usage and the lack of any other social network in their lives.

Anyways, there you go – my un-scientific, scientific study.  It was fun. 

Within 10 minutes of the end of the Red Sox game, I got the following email from StubHub.

I’ve also received several emails in the past 24 hours from folks looking for Rockies / Red Sox tickets.  I officially don’t have any – my best suggestion at this point is StubHub!

I’ve got my share of friends who I think of as “big brains suspended in something” (where the typical instantiation is human form, but I often imagine them as something else.)

My friend Bruce Wyman – the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum fits nicely into this slot in my brain.  Bruce has done some amazing things by himself – or with his very small team – during his time at the Denver Art Museum. 

Whenever we get together, we often rap about stuff like Human Computer Interaction, one of my current investment themes.  Fortunately, Bruce is not all talk – he actually goes out and builds stuff – often from scratch.  Take a look at his Touch of the Brush Tables currently on display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta as part of the Inspiring Impressionism exhibit that is coming to Denver in a few months.

Note the hardware and hacker-like setup – combined with a Mac and a bunch of magic special software that Bruce and his gang put together.

The subtitle of this post is “Wow – that boy can write.”  If you found my post titled CTO vs. VP Engineering to be relevant to your universe, grab a cup of coffee and wander over to Niel Robertson’s post titled Do Programming Languages Matter Anymore. 

I’ve worked on various companies with Niel over the past decade, including NetGenesis, Service Metrics, and most recently Newmerix.  In addition to being a phenomenal CTO (confirmed by Tom Higley – Niel’s partner at Service Metrics), Niel can write an essay like very few others.  This one covers his view of programming languages, how they fit in SAP’s world, and why SAP (and others) should “integrate a CLR runtime engine native in the application server (or at least have a three legged stool of ABAP, Java, and CLR-based runtime).”

If you aren’t a software developer (or an exec at a software company), you probably won’t care – other than to get a sense as to how a CTO should integrate programming, english, reasoning, and writing skills (plus you’ll get to learn why CLR matters.  For the rest of you – especially those of you that think “Microsoft is dead”, this is an important essay that helps uncover one more reason why large parts of Microsoft’s long term technology strategy are brilliant (and possibly unassailable in the medium-term.)

John Markoff suggests there is a looming battle of semantics between Web 3.0 and semantic web.  Markoff summarizes by saying:

“There is no easy consensus about how to define what is meant by Web 3.0, but it is generally seen as a reference to the semantic Web. While it is not that much more precise a phrase, the semantic Web refers to technology to make using the Internet better by understanding the meaning of what people are doing, not just the way pages link to each other.”

I’ll take it up a notch.  Let’s toss “implicit web” into the mix and expand it beyond just “what people are doing” and “the way pages link to each other.”  It’s not only about people and pages – it’s about getting the computer to figure out a lot of stuff for you based on what you – and people that you “trust” or “find relevant” do.  You could be cynical and just assert that this is the way our friend the “social graph” finds its way into the mix of Web 2.0.  Or – you could keep playing – the way we are planning to at Defrag – and say something all encompassing like:

“Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the “aha” moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, “social” networking, collaboration and business intelligence. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.”

It doesn’t really matter what you call it – a wave of startups tackling “the next problem” are starting to appear.  Look for a panoply of new and exciting buzzwords – and look past them to the meat.

John Markoff has a fun little story about the origin of the phrase What-You-See-Is-What–You-Get in his article titled The Real History of WYSIWYG.  WYSIWYG appeared on the scene 30+ years ago – it seems like the wikipedia page on it needs a little updating.

Now that WYSIWYG is part of our collective consciousness (and a deep expectation of most computer users, even though there are many apps that don’t quite cut the mustard), I’m less concerned with WYSIWYG these days. I’m more intrigued with WYWIWYG – “What-You-Want-Is-What-You-Get.” 

Come to Defrag on Nov 5 and 6 in Denver and talk to me (and a bunch of other smart people including folks like David Weinberger, Clay Shirky, JP Rangaswami, Jerry Michalski, Ester Dyson, Doc Searls, Bradley Horowitz, Paul Kedrosky, Chris Shipley) and a long list of others about WYWIWYG.

You know you’ve been thinking about registering, but your computer won’t do it for you (at least not yet.)  You still have to click here and type some stuff in.  Maybe someday WYWIWYG.

I’m not at Web 2.0 (nor do I want to be, although I have field agents there), but I am intrigued with Microsoft Popfly.  I got a preview of it recently via Christopher Griffin at Microsoft and have been messing around with it a little (once we got past the badly formed email in the spam folder problem.)  I especially like the way David Utter reports on how the name came to be:

Q Why did you call it Popfly?

A Well, left to our own devices we would have called it “Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, October 2007 Community Tech Preview Internets Edition,” but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.

I assume this is either something Ballmer said during his presentation or it’s merely sarcasm.  Either way, it’s cute.  Microsoft is showing its range on the heals of their unified communications announcements.