And now for something completely different. No – this isn’t going to be yet another blog post on how you, the entrepreneur, should react to the credit crisis. That’s later today. Instead, this is my extreme fanboy blog post for my friends at Harmonix and their amazing new version of Rock Band (very creatively named Rock Band 2). In addition to being a magnificent video game (and a great example of what we are looking for in our HCI theme), the Harmonix story is a fabulous entrepreneurial tale. Don Steinberg wrote a long article titled Just Play that’s in this month’s Inc. Magazine. Yours truly makes a very small appearance in the story which is a testament to both the brilliance of Alex Rigopolus and Eran Egozy as well as their incredible perseverance (the story, not my appearance in it.) Forget about “macro issues” – these guys show what it’s like to spend a decade where they are weeks (and days) away from going out of business before waking up one day to a blockbuster success.

Fred has a fantastic blog up titled Capital Efficiency Finds It’s Moment. It – combined with his posts My Thoughts On “Startup Depression” – are full of suggestions that entrepreneurs should be thinking about and taking action on right now. They are both completely consistent with my post Ok Entrepreneurs, Time to Step Up. I’m not into Gloom and Doom. I love the Warren Buffett quote that goes something like “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.” Part of the brilliance of this is to be harshly rational and evaluate the current situation through a realistic lens at all times.

If you are interested in Social Computing in the Enterprise, NewsGator has just put up a Social Computing Best Practices & Resources on their web site. In addition to a bunch of NewsGator generated content, it has useful links to some of the key blogs on Social Computing in the Enterprise as well as the analysts who cover this area. NewsGator and Burton Group are also doing a webinar series on IT Best Practices for Enterprise Social Networking – check it out if you are into this stuff.

I just got off the phone with a bank that I work with on a number of companies we have an investment in. They are in the category of banks that aren’t really impacted (at least not yet) by the current incarnation of the credit crisis because of where in the banking layer they play. One of the things that came up was how I feel the macroeconomic issues impact things with certain companies. I told them I have no real clue and am paying attention to sales trends, but that I’m not getting worked up about it. As I saw the Q3 performance numbers roll in for our portfolio companies they looked how I generally expected them to; some of our companies blew away their numbers on the upside (hard to do in Q3 since it’s later in the yearly budget cycle), some missed, and some came in around where we expected them to. There weren’t any huge surprises either direction since we are deeply involved in our companies and tend to have significant granularity on how they are doing. 

Of all the macro events happening in the world, there are two occurring in the US right now that seem to be dominating most people’s thinking: (1) the US election and (2) the credit crisis (or whatever it’s being called today). While I don’t watch TV news (and therefore get to miss out on all the talking heads on CNBC and CNN) I do read extensively online, especially about startups, software / Internet technology, and venture capital. Most of my general business news is either via headlines (once a day in the morning when I scan several newspapers), alerts (whatever WSJ, CNN, and NYT alerts send out during the day or tidbits my friends put on twitter), and business magazines (Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek). The business magazines are usually already two weeks old by the time I get to them (in the bathroom) and they lag the actual events by another week or two.

Where is James Carville when you need him? Finally, Obama is taking a line from Clinton’s playbook.

As part of Automattic’s acquisition of Intense Debate, I committed to convert all of my blogs over to WordPress. The process has begun and should be done soon. In the mean time, I’m on a quest for all the great WordPress plugins. I’ve already got the Lijit Search, FeedBurner, and MyBloglog plugins queued up. If you’ve got other recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

I love charts like the following – so many pretty colors and funny names. Matt Galligan, the co-founder of SocialThing (now part of AOL) is giving a talk on Social Networking: Using Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn at the ATLAS Institute (on the CU Boulder campus) on October 13th from 6pm to 8pm. This event is co-sponsored by my friends at The Van Heyst Group and Silicon Flatirons. Matt’s an entertaining speaker who was part of the inaugural TechStars program in 2007 – he’s got plenty of great stories and has been living in the social networking world for the past few years.

Earlier this week, Gnip put v2.0 of their service into production. TechCrunch has a nice post up titled Gnip 2.0 Launches, With A Business Model. Gnip 2.0 has four big new features. Full data is now available. Filters are now available (and are a super set of “collections”). Data producers can now publish to Gnip via ATOM, REST, or XMPP. Data consumers can now get activities via REST and XMPP. If none of that means anything to you, that’s ok. Shane Pearson, Gnip’s new VP of Products translates it into “more English” in his post titled What we are up to at Gnip.