Last Thursday when I was in New York I swung by Steve Rubel’s office and hung out with him for an hour. We caught up on a bunch of stuff but managed to squeeze in a short riff about our first computers (yes – we were talking about how old we were – which is not that old, but it feels like it now that we have Facebook accounts.) That’s me – as a 40 year old – with my first computer – an Apple ][. The actual one – with some software that I wrote running on it (yes – those are five menu options, numbered “1. “ to “5. “) It cost about $3,000 total, which included two floppy drives, an Integer Card, memory (it had 64k), Pascal, Visicalc, and a couple of games.) I eventually got a copy of Beer Run to go with Choplifter.

We had a TechStars picnic at my house yesterday afternoon. Given that there were 30+ software nerds hanging around, a little teeny tiny bit of the conversation was about computer stuff. One of the conversations was about Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office with a big focus on Enterprise Gmail vs. Microsoft Exchange. I’m a heavy Exchange user (one of the things that prevents me from getting serious about using a Mac) but I’ve been paying a lot of attention to Google’s action around enterprise email on the heals of its acquisition of Postini. 

I am anti-software patents. Lest you think I’m simply a reactionary, I’ve been thinking about this since 1987 when I started studying sources of innovation under Eric von Hippel at MIT as my research in a Ph.D. program which I never completed. For the last 20 years, I’ve thought that copyright and trade secrets were adequate IP protection for software. Fred Wilson’s VC Cliche “patents are like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some” has been my business philosophy – until the nonsense around software patents gets resolved and disarmament begins, the weapons stockpiles will continue to grow unchecked.

I love companies with a clear mission in life. FeedBurner’s was “we will do all kinds of wonderful things for your feed.” Lijit’s is “we will do all kinds of wonderful things for search on your blog.” Lijit’s goal is simple: Replace with The new Lijit home page is up and it’s simpler and clearer than ever to add Lijit Search to your blog. Just enter your blog URL into the “Want a Wijit?” box and you’ll be up and running in a minute.

I’ve been fascinated with blog comments since I started blogging. The “blogging is a conversion meme” is a long standing one and the notion of engaging a real community around a blog is fascinating and a lot of fun. However, the blog commenting infrastructure sucks. While data entry is fine, authentication and identity are miserable (anyone can be anyone just by entering a name), conversations are generally impossible to manage, blog spam is pervasive, and tracking conversations is difficult. Oh – and comments are rarely indexed so they have become the dark matter of the blogosphere. While there were some early attempts like TypeKey, nothing really stuck.

At least this time it wasn’t me – it was my partner Seth Levine. In Seth’s post titled Setting the record straight he discusses a USA Today article in which he is quoted about TechStars and Y Combinator. When I read the article (I got several copies of it immediately after it came out via my search feeds on “Seth Levine” and “TechStars”) I burst out laughing. My first thought was “boy – Seth is going to be embarrassed and annoyed when he reads this.” I knew that the quote was wrong – in fact – it was about 180 degrees wrong.

I finally found a use for my iPhone – an iPhone Smoothie. Priceless. (Thanks Jason.)

Shelfari is running a great competition called Seven Days of Harry Potter. The grand prize is a signed first edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. First prize is five tickets to see Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix. Second prize is a broomstick. As you know from reading this blog I’m a huge reader. I tend not to be a trendy reader so it surprised even me that I’ve loved the Harry Potter books (as is Amy.) Today is the day it begins again. I’m pretty sure I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

Whenever I show up in a powerpoint slide next to Paris Hilton, I’ve got to wonder. Stan ponders whether Paris has too much attention. I ponder why I let them cut my hair so short. Entertainingly, this is not the most popular image in Google Image Search for “paris hilton term sheets.” For the historians out there, you can go back to the original source of the picture.