If you follow the Boulder entrepreneurship scene, Jerry Lewis – the editor-in-chief of the Boulder County Business Report – has a video interview series up on the web titled Entrepreneur BizCast. This week he interviewed Lijit Networks and has interviews up with Collective Intellect, me.dium, and TechStars. They are quick – and good. You can also follow along in your RSS reader on the BoulderNews.Info blog.

Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books of all time (right up there with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values.) While I’m not a hard core mega-Objectivist, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead both spoke loudly to me at critical points in my life and have had a hand in shaping the way I think about the world. Atlas Shrugged just turned 50 and I expect there will be plenty of chatter about it. There’s an update on the continued effort to make a movie about it and an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Brian Doherty titled Rand and the Right*.* It’s short, pointed, and ends strong:

Today’s Rocky Mountain News has an article titled Is dot.corn honeymoon over? As someone in the middle of the dot.com thing (and I hated hated hated the label dot.com – or dotcom as it evolved), I found this completely hysterical (and appropriate.)

Frank Shorter has an excellent essay in the NY Times titled Running Into Trouble. If you are a long distance runner, you are probably aware that last week’s Chicago Marathon was halted after three hours after dozens of people were hospitalized and one runner actually died. I ran Chicago in 2003 and it was my PR by at least 20 minutes (4:05) and an awesome experience. It’s a great race for first time marathoners which makes the experience last Sunday even more devastating as anyone that has trained for a marathon for the first time knows how emotionally important it is to finish.

This one has all the trappings of a potential debacle. Patent holding company targets Linux, files lawsuits against Red Hat and Novell. A patent dating back to 1987 describing a “user interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects.” A firm that appears to exist only to be a patent troll. Suspicious links to various companies. Our “friends” in East Marshall, Texas. As some superhero once said, “there are evil forces at large in the world.” Where is Super-No-Software-Patent-Man when we need him?

In his post 30 Thoughts At 30,000 feet, Fred Wilson referred to Alex Iskold as “a freak of nature.” Fred supports this by saying “He writes code, runs a company, and does amazing blog posts for Read Write Web that are better than most Gartner research reports. I’d ask how he finds the time to do all of that, but I know the answer. Full disclosure – Alex’ company, Adaptive Blue, is a Union Square Ventures portfolio company.”

The really cool thing about having friends like Paul Berberian is that I can act out my desire to participate in a real life equivalent of Being John Malkovich. Paul has a fascinating new company that is launching at the end of the year. His product is both physical and virtual; the physical part of it (nicknamed “the bong” by me) is manufactured in China. I don’t really have any desire to go on an eight day business trip to a factory in Qingdao, but it’s awesome to read Paul’s description of it in his post China visit – nothing is as it seems. Now – the conclusion (signaled by the title) is no surprise, but my voyeristic view of Paul’s week was satisfying this early morning in Boulder.

BusinessWeek has a fun article about my buddies Jesse and Joe from J-Squared Media titled Who wants to be a Facebook millionaire? Jesse and Joe were founders of one of the TechStars teams this summer – when they showed up their original idea was to create a sharing tools that would distribute links to your networks of friends (not in Facebook – on the web.) The Facebook Platform launched shortly after TechStars started and Jesse and Joe got all over it – today they have two very popular apps on Facebook (Sticky Notes and GlitterBox) and are generating over $45,000 / month of revenue (wow – not bad for two dudes in a basement on $10,000 of investment.)

Scoble has a 20 minute interview up with Eric Norlin discussing Defrag and other conferences that Eric has helped start. If you haven’t heard of Defrag, it’s a new conference being organized by Eric taking place in Denver on November 5 – 6. The sound bite overview is: Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the “aha” moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, “social” networking, collaboration and business intelligence. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.