I’m not at Web 2.0 (nor do I want to be, although I have field agents there), but I am intrigued with Microsoft Popfly. I got a preview of it recently via Christopher Griffin at Microsoft and have been messing around with it a little (once we got past the badly formed email in the spam folder problem.) I especially like the way David Utter reports on how the name came to be:

Last night I attended the Boulder 2007 Esprit Entrepreneur Awards where I was honored to receive the Rob Planchard Award. I shared the stage with two good friends – Tim Miller and Ryan Martens from Rally Software who won the Entrepreneur of the Year award. To highlight the evening – Bill Perry of Softbridge Advisors won the Lifetime Achievement Award. When I moved to Boulder in 1995, Amy and I only knew one person and he moved away six months later. I had no expectations of doing any meaningful amount of business in Boulder – I moved here to live in a beautiful place that was between the two coasts (Boston and the Bay Area) that I was traveling between on a weekly basis.

I’ve declared my SharePoint fanboy status in the past – most recently in my post titled SharePoint Magic*.* Gone are the years where I’d tease my friends at Microsoft about giving away SharePoint by including it in EA contracts – the thing has evolved into a critical piece of software for me and my organization (oh – and a really big piece of business for Microsoft.) Today, NewsGator and Microsoft announced a partnership around SharePoint. As part of this, NewsGator announced general availability of the new NewsGator Social Sites product. NewsGator Social Sites is tightly integrated with both SharePoint and NewsGator Enterprise Server (which you can also buy as a hosted product – ala NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand.)

I’m just testing all the little pieces of Feld Thoughts to make sure that our upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 worked properly. So far I’m very pleased with the upgrade – the UI of MT is 31,415x better.

Wallstrip turned one yesterday. Howard Lindzon – the founder – celebrated by playing with guns. I’ve found Howard (and Lindsey) to be consistently hysterically funny and a good excuse to use words that end in the letter y. As part of the official press release, Howard suggested in his forecast for the next year: “Over time, guns, booze, gambling, Internet and sex will continue their out performance. It may not be fair and may not seem right, but those that invest in these themes will be continually rewarded.”

Last Thursday, I shared the stage at the CSIA DEMOgala 2007 with Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. During his speech, Governor Ritter announced the formation of the Colorado Innovation Council. I’m one of three co-chairs, along with Juan Rodriguez (co-founder of StorageTek and Exabyte) and Phil Weiser (professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a national telecommunications policy expert.) Phil and I have been working with Governor Ritter and his staff to form this since the beginning of the year. One of our goals was to create an organization that could have real impact, rather than just a collection of people who’s names would go on a web site and letterhead somewhere. We spent plenty of time talking to various folks both in and out of government who have been involved in things like this in the past and, as a result of our research, are hopeful that we’ve created an organization of “doers” vs. either “figureheads” or “pontificators.”

If you go deep into the Feld Thoughts archive bin – way back to December 5, 2005 – I wrote a post called It’s The Trust, Stupid. I still like that post, especially since it shows off my yoda like haiku writing non-ability. It’s the trust, stupid Pay attention people Relevance it is “Attention” has continued to be an abstract concept that is frequently talked about by a subset of the tech crowd. Due to the short attention span nature of our industry, it has largely been supplanted by talk about Facebook, which seems to have most of the current attention (pun intended.) However, for those of you that have forgotten, there is still this thing called the Web out there that has a lot of interesting data – much of which is a mess.

The best thing I read in the paper (or on the Internet, or in my email, or on the side of a building) today was I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!). I rarely watch The Colbert Report (or The Daily Show) – I have enough friends that email me links to the funny bits. There were so many “best lines” that it’s hard to pick one. Seth’s was (when Colbert was referring to a potentially new entrant in the 2008, or 2012, or 2016 election):

Before I call it quits on the damp Sunday night in Colorado, I thought I’d leave you with a thought that came up in a conversation last week: “Know What You Suck At.” While my We Suck Less meme has had its day in the sun, I don’t hear people talk enough about what they aren’t good at. First meetings are peppered with “I’ve done this”, “I’ve done that”, “I’m good at this”, “I’m experienced at that.” However, rarely does someone volunteer that they suck at something. I’m often amused by the pregnant pause that comes after I ask “so – tell me something that you are lousy at.”