Fred Wilson pointed me (us) to a video from his friend John Mahoney (CTO / co-founder of Instant Information – one of Fred’s portfolio companies) titled Practical RSS.  It’s an excellent seven minute overview of what RSS means from a user’s perspective.  John did an outstanding job both explaining it and creating a high quality video.

David Cohen has been appropriately nudging me to write my counterpoint to his Big of Bullshit: Widgets post.  Lots has been said about widgets over the past six months, including the ultimate counterindicator article The Year of the Widget? from Newsweek (nothing against Newsweek, but whenever something like this shows up it often means we’ve hit the apex of the phenomenon.)

Lest you think Widgets are new, let’s take a short walk back in history.  Do you remember Active Desktop?  Yup – a nice Windows feature dating back to IE 4.0 that never caught on.  I bet Microsoft has a patent floating around somewhere for this, even though it would be a bogus one because of prior art.  How about DoDots (The Web without a browser) – one of our failed investments.  Similar time frame, incredible technology, clearly ahead of its time, and misunderstood (e.g. a random quote I found in an old usenet archive when poking around – “I never understood their business plan. DoDots was creating software that allowed people to embed internet-based applications on the desktop — sorry, but isn’t that a web browser?”)  Oh – and in case you happen to think Microsoft invented this – think again – they were floating around MIT / Project Athena when I was there in the mid-1980’s (anyone remember “Widget Athena Front End”?)

In the spirit of “everything old is new again”, I give you widgets as a great example.  When Konfabulator came out in 2003, I loved it.  Yahoo ended up buying it (it’s now Yahoo! Widgets) – shockingly Microsoft, Apple, and Google now have similar “widgets” (or “gadgets” or “dashboard thingys”).  All basically the same – now just an extension of the operating system.

In 2004 when I started blogging (and became a “publisher”), I discovered this really interesting thing where I could include stuff on my blog using script type=”text/javascript”.  Some folks used script src=”…” and others just gave me a smart link back to their web service.  Eventually embed’s appeared (thank you Youtube for making this radically popular.)

Like Fred Wilson, I’ve gone through a cycle of putting up and taking down widgets.  I’ve gone through my hunger for more than just dynamic information – I love the social stuff that makes me a publisher that can connect with my actual community of readers.  I got excited about TypePad’s widget implementation, fell in love with MyBlogLog, was psyched about everything FeedBurner did with widgets, and even was intrigued with Widgetbox.

I knew I was in trouble when I started getting notes from entrepreneurs saying “we are going to be the FeedBurner of widgets.”  Then – in a matter of two weeks, I got about a half dozen emails / executive summaries of things that looked like Widgetbox (yes – a couple of them got funded.)  Then – suddenly, everything I saw led with “widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets.”

Enough history – so in David’s words, “is this widget thing big or bullshit?”  This time around, it’s clearly big as an “application container for publishers” but it’s not so clear that all of the derivative businesses make sense.  If you create any web-based services, you need to provide a “widget-like” application container.  Fortunately, this is trivial (in general) although it’s still much harder than it needs to be to incorporate these into all the different types of publisher sites (e.g. just try to integrate your widgets into Microsoft Spaces.) The problem here is one of standards – or lack there of (ad-hoc or otherwise) – right now it is chaos and some folks are trying to tame this.  However, the monetization strategy for taming this is thin, especially given the half-life of the vast majority of widgets (e.g. very short) combined with the overall utility of most widgets (e.g. very small.)

As an investor, I’ve looked at and decided not to invest in “widget management systems.”  However, all of the companies I’ve invested in that provide web services to publishers (including NewsGator, FeedBurner, Lijit, ClickCaster, and Me.dium) are “widgetizing” their services.  FeedBurner is an obvious platform in my universe for this (given their broad relationship with over 350,000 publishers) as they have demonstrated with their integration of Headline Animator with Stats, SpringWidgets, and Lijit Search.

While there might be room for one or two “widget management systems”, there certainly isn’t the need for 23 of them.  In addition, the ability to actually build a real business based on a packaging and distribution system around the application container widget is unclear to me.  So: widget=big; widget-derivative-business=probably-bullshit.

Nick Harris – the author of NewsGator’s Inbox product – has a detailed post up explaining the boundary condition he just ran into that forced him to do a quick release (2.6.7) of NewsGator Inbox.  If you didn’t guess already, it has something to do with 2^31.

Hema Oza at TheStreet.com wrote an article after an email interview with me titled Tech Tips for Small Business.  She captured the interview well – my current favorites are my T-Mobile Dash, Lenovo X60 Laptop with Vista and EVDO, FeedDemon, Trillian/Skype, and Firefox.  Of course, I have a much longer list of things use all the time – including some non-business ones (e.g. my Slingbox and Guitar Hero), but these seemed like the current “if I am running a small business and I wanted to get some new toys (hardware and software please), which ones would I get.” 

My partner Jason just told me about a Google Local search experience he and Ryan McIntyre just had. They were out last weekend guitar shopping. Jason is looking for a custom shop Gibson ES-335 and can’t find one anywhere. (If you know where to find one, please email me.) They had planned a day of hitting every guitar store in Denver. On Google local, they found a listing for Cadillac Guitars. It was near the Denver Guitar Center, so they decided to visit it.

They went to the address, but instead of a guitar shop, they found Rupps Drums. They figured that they must have made a mistake, because clearly this store had been around a while. After driving around the block and checking the web again, they were clueless and decided to go into the drum store. They asked about Cadillac Guitars and were informed that they moved out over 15 years ago.

15 years ago? Bad data – oops. Now – I can’t bash Google because Judy’s Book shows the same listing, as does Yahoo, as does Yelp, as does …  Someone needs to run a dedupe algorithm on addresses – oh – and fix the underlying data that everyone is using to seed their databases.

Email addicts now have a 12 step process to help them.

My dad (Stan Feld) has been talking about the electronic medical record for as long as I can remember (probably 30+ years.)  As a kid, some of my early computer projects were trying to write a program that had some semblance of addressing this – well before I had any grounding in (or understanding of) databases, user-centric data entry (um – the “web” anyone?), or distributed data (um – the “Internet” anyone?)

When I finally learned what a relational database was (about 24 years ago – Btrieve was the first database that I mastered – yes – I’m old enough to have started with an ISAM instead of an RDBMS.) I got excited about the idea of building an electronic medical record.  I’m sure part of this was to please my dad – but part of it was because it seemed like such an obviously useful thing.

Over the last 24 years, I’ve watched numerous people and companies fail miserably at this.  In my first company, we did some consulting to a few larger health care organizations (really “multi-group medical practices and a few hospitals) around this but nothing really emerged, other than a couple of customer patient management systems that really had very little to do with the patient’s medical record.

30 years later Stan is still talking about it.   His post yesterday titled Electronic Health Record Part 2 continues a theme he’s been on for most of his career.  I’m sure there are plenty of other doctors out there that say something like “I believe a patient should be responsible for his / her medical history”, but I know my dad has been saying this to his patients since the day he started his medical practice.  My dad tells you how to solve the Personal Medical Record side of this equation today for $15 but goes much further by detailing the issues around The Complexity of the EMR Issue.

Over the last dozen years, I’ve seen many entrepreneuers and many business plans that proport to create a universal electronic medical record.  I still don’t have one and I know there isn’t a ubiquitous approach for this.  You’d think that with all the money that’s spent (and wasted) in our health care system, we’d be closer to a solution. 

If you are an entrepreneur that is working on this problem and you want to hear the issues from the belly of the beast, I’m sure Stan would be happy to talk to you.

Chris Anderson notes that The Innovation In Gaming Isn’t On The Screen.  Having just benefited from the incredible success of Harmonix / Guitar Hero and and having become fascinated with the Wiimote, I’m starting to search for the input jack on the back of my head.

I’ve been investing in Internet-related email stuff since 1995.  I still remember when I got my first Internet email address (brad@id.wing.net) back in 1994 – shortly before I figured out I could set up email on brad@feld.com.  Email has evolved in some amazing ways over the last 12 years while at the same time standing still in others (thanks Mr. SMTP – both directions.)

In 2000, I started noticing spam again.  I think the first time I heard “spam” was in college – one of the guys in my fraternity (John Underkoffler) loved to do all kinds of bizarre things with spam (except eat it) – at some point in the mid 1980’s I learned what email spam was.  Between 1995 and 2000 I occasionally got some spam, but it usually just pointed me to an online porn site which was still a novelty at that point in time.

I can’t remember what eventually slapped me in the face, but one day I woke up and realized that spam was going to be a huge problem.  A gang of us got together (me, Chris, Ryan) – all who had done lots of things with email – and we ended up making two investments – Return Path and Postini – that addressed different parts of the spam issue (and have both been extremely successful, exciting, and well run companies that I’m proud of.)

When I started blogging in 2004, it was obvious to me that comment and trackback spam would be a problem.  So far almost all the solutions to “blam” (my word for “blog spam”) have been weak and similar to several of the early and not particularly durable solutions to email spam.  Akismet moved things up a level, but still has its share of issues, especially when faced with a new type of attack.  Oh – and the attacks so far are very unsophisticated (although getting more so quickly.)

Today, I noticed Rick Klau’s (from FeedBurner) post on Salesforce.com spam.  It’s great and has a lot of details about the issues he is facing in his Salesforce.com fight with spam along with details about his current solution.  It’s a little surprising that Salesforce.com doesn’t view this as “their problem”, but then again Microsoft said spam would be gone by 2004.

The endless war against the Internet Axis of Evil continues.  Where is Jack Bauer when you need him?