I’m a small investor in Shelfari. I read a ton and thought it would be fun to play along with them at home and both a user and an investor. About a month ago I started noticing increasing chatter about Shelfari spam during the invite process in my RSS search feeds on “Shelfari.” I regularly passed them on to Josh Hug, the CEO of Shelfari. I hate spam. I’ve been an investor in two companies that are aimed at making email safer for humanity – Postini and Return Path. While I’m a small investor in Shelfari, the increasing noise level around Shelfari invite spam bothered me, and I told Josh.

The last time I took a Select A Candidate Quiz, I ended up supporting Dennis Kucinch. I got a note from Ian Manheimer, the founder of Glassbooth.org, who suggested I take his Election 2008 quiz. I thought his quiz was a little more interesting. This time around I support Mike Gravel. A little digging informed me that he’s a democrat from Alaska (go figure) who was a Senator from 1969 to 1981. I also like Joseph Biden and Bill Richardson.

My railing against software patents shouldn’t be new to you, dear reader. Recently, this tilting at windmills has generated some attention. Among other things, a new group of interesting people is forming a coalition named End Software Patents. This group is being spearheaded by several very smart people, including Ben Klemens – a guest scholar at The Brookings Institution. Ben is also the author of Math You Can’t Use, a fascinating exploration of patents, copyrights, and software that I’ll review in depth at some point.

I love blog comments – I think of them as the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere. I haven’t been able to get an accurate count of the total number of comments floating around – my guess is that there are somewhere between 1 billion and 10 billion. That’s a lot of comments. I’ve also talked about The 80-19-1 Rule in the past. In blogging, the 1% are the bloggers, the 19% are the commenters, and the 80% are the readers. However, up to this point, the tools for the 19% suck. 

While terrorists couldn’t seem to bring down Jack Bauer, the writer’s strike seems to have nailed him. Oh well – at least there’s a back to the future version of 24 titled 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot that demonstrates an excellent use of AOL 3.0.

The ClosedPrivate Initiative made an appearance on Techmeme last week. Look for the release of the API in the next week or so. Many interesting people have collaborated on it, but we can’t tell you who they are.

I woke up this morning to Northeastern sues Google over patent. Northeasten University and Jarg Corp have sued Google over a patent granted Professor Kenneth Baclawski in 1997. According to the Boston Globe article: “The patent covers a method for chopping up database queries into multiple portions and having each part processed by a different computer. This allows for much faster searching of huge databases, like Google’s vast index of Web pages on the Internet.”

You hear a lot about successful companies on most VC blogs. It’s a lot easier to talk about success than it is to talk about failure. Several weeks ago, The Enthusiast Group (a company I have an angel investment in) decided to call it a day. They are in the process of selling off their properties (such as YourRunning, YourMTB, YourCycling, YourClimbing, and YourHorseSports.) If you have any interest in them, give them a shout.

Even though I thought Season 6 of 24 was a dud, I am still devastated by the news that 24 is on hold this season due to the writers strike. I guess Kiefer Sutherland can go do his jail time now.