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. 

Thanks to Micah Baldwin, a bunch of Colorado bloggers (including me) are putting up DonorsChoose widgets on their blogs. Our goal in Colorado is to displace Fred Wilson as king of last years DonorsChoose technology blog category. We’ve already got a bunch of great Colorado projects up on the DonorsChoose website. To start things off on my blog, I just gave $200 to the Return To Technology project for Ms. E’s Classroom. Look for the sidebar on the right of my main page or click through on the DonorsChoose website link. Any amount helps – give up Starbucks for a week and join in with $25.

My mom must be cleaning out her attic. She just sent me a pile of “old stuff” including a bunch of photos, my bar mitzvah speech, and some more stamps from my never ending stamp collection. Me at age 8.75. Note the excellent glasses (probably the same size as the ones I wear today) and my lack of tie. Age 12. I was an SVAA basketball star. Man – that basketball is bigger than my head. I was wearing contact lens (which I’ve since abandoned) by this point in time in my effort to look more sexy. Pretty hard for a 12 year old.

The CSIA’s annual event – DEMOgala – is happening tomorrow (10/2) all day at the Grand Hyatt, Denver (1750 Welton Street). There is a long list of companies involved, including the 20 DEMOgala Innovation Showcase companies. ARC Science Simulations BeatPort Brightkite ColoradoFirst Robotics EarthvisionZ EffectiveUI Efficient Forms Envysion Fuser HiveLive Home and Abroad iggli Ignighter IOU Note LifePics me.dium Orchestr8 Quark Techstars Travelfli If you are in town, go check it out.