Yesterday, I wrote about the new VC Blogger Network powered by Lijit. A handful of VCs emailed me asking to be added to the network (which has been done). There’s no time limit so if you are a VC and want to join, just email me. In the mean time, I neglected to mention a super cool site called Venture Maven. Greg Galant and several others put this together – it’s a great aggregation of VCs who tweet – both individually and by firm (quick – name all the firms that have 100% of the partners tweeting). If you are a VCtweeter and are not on the list, wander over now and add yourself.

I’ve long been fascinated by venture capitalists who blog. I’ve also spent a lot of time in and around various blog networks, as a participant, as an investor, and as an technology supplier. A few months ago Lijit rolled out their “Blogger Network” service and I created a new version of the VC Bloggers Network that I have been managing for a while. On the right hand side is a blogroll of all of the VCs in the network (if you are a VC blogger and you aren’t on the list, just email me and I’ll get you added.) All of the other bloggy stuff is here (the site is powered by WordPress) including an RSS feed for all the aggregated content, archives, tags, and the recent content.

The meme of “Free” is one again making the rounds. I expect it reignited when Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available on Amazon for $17.81) quickly followed by Malcolm Gladwell’s semi-scathing review in the New Yorker titled “Priced to Sell. Is Free the future?” (I kind of feel like Gladwell wimped out on the review, even though I like Anderson’s point of view better than Gladwell’s.) This then created a predictable tussle in the blogosphere, the kind of which I find tedious and dull, so I avoided the rest of it.

Amy and I are huge fans and collectors of Rick Dula. We’ve got a number of pieces of his art of the construction of the new Denver Art Museum hanging in my office at Foundry Group that we bought from the William Havu Gallery in Denver. Our anniversary was June 21st and neither of us managed to get the other one a gift. So – on June 21st we went trolling around the web for a piece of art to buy. We each bought one and then decided to buy two more for our life dinner gifts on July 1st. The two that we bought on our anniversary were Rick Dula’s – the first is R.I.P. Rocky Mountain News Building.

One of the most satisfying parts of what I do is getting to work with people over a long period of time, starting early in their careers. It’s one of the things I love about TechStars, but it’s not limited to that as I have many other relationships with young and first time entrepreneurs. Last night, at Ignite Boulder 5, I had a permagrin on my face as I thought about the amazing job Andrew Hyde was doing. I first met Andrew a few years ago when we started TechStars – he basically volunteered to hang out with a video camera for free all summer to film stuff and learn. He was so hugely helpful that it was easy to bring him on board the TechStars team in year two as the community manager.

Yesterday I posted that Trada is looking for a Test Engineer. Gnip is also looking for software developers – three in fact: Senior Software Developer Senior System Adminstrator Senior Web Developer If you are Boulder-based and fit the qualifications, email Jenny-Lynne Elledge.

Trada, one of our portfolio companies in Boulder, is looking to hire. They’re looking for a tech-skilled individual who thinks they can do just about everything, because they might be asked to. Primary role is testing their online advertising app but there’s a huge opportunity to contribute much more. There’s dev work; cloud systems admin; operations tasks; end-user support; and customer facing account management tasks that can be added to the mix for the properly skilled (and properly motivated) individual. While still in stealth these guys are already rocking. Interested – contact Michael Lawless at mlawless@trada.com.

If I told you that I had just filed a patent for “a system to sell equity in domain names”, I’d expect you to laugh at me. I haven’t ranted and raved against software (and business method) patents for a while because I got bored of doing it. The PTO has gotten so far behind on responding to patent applications that the whole notion of a four year cycle to get a software patent approved just underscores how ridiculous the whole thing is given the pace of innovation in software.

I’ve been a delighted iPhone user since they upgraded the software to have mail / contact / calendar sync with Exchange. With the 3.0 version of the software, I’m even more delighted. I’ve had an iPhone 3GS since the day they came out (thanks Ross for standing in the non-line at the AT&T store for me) and – with the exception of the crappy AT&T 3G network – I find new little magic happy things every single day.