I answer my own phone. I always have. If I’m sitting at my desk working on something and my phone rings I’ll usually pick it up, even if I don’t recognize the phone number. I know this doesn’t fit the “be hyper-productive” method of life, but I like the randomness of it. A few minutes ago I got a random phone call from a guy in Oklahoma. He was calling (I have no idea how he found me) to raise some money for his business. He started off by saying that he needed $150k, thought he had it raised, but was looking for some venture capital. Before I had a chance to say anything he launched into a description of his business.

Me.dium announced today that they have closed a $15 million financing and have decided to stay in Boulder instead of split for Rio. Me.dium is one of the most ambitious projects I’ve been involved in. Alex Iskold – the founder of AdaptiveBlue (another exciting company) – has written an excellent overview at Read/WriteWeb where he describes Me.dium as “the dawn of collaborative browsing.” Alex nails the goal and vision of Me.dium and Phil Butler over at Profy gives another useful explanation.

It was inevitable that, with the endless crush of the upcoming elections, I’d start writing the occasional post on politics. I’ve decided to ignore the primary elections for the presidential elections, but there are some local Colorado candidates that I am putting some effort for in the primaries. One of them is my long time friend Jared Polis. Jared was one of the first people that I met when I moved to Colorado (I think we met in early 1996 via my first business partner Dave Jilk.) We’ve been involved in a number of things together, including a company called Net.Capitol, TechStars, Young Entrepreneurs Organization, and a bunch of non-profit stuff. Jared has had remarkable entrepreneurial success at both BlueMountainArts.com (acquired by Excite@Home) and Provide Commerce (IPO, then acquired by Liberty Media.)

If you’ve been following along at home, you know that Amy and I disconnect once a quarter for a week (we call this “Qx vacation.”) Usually we go away – someplace warm when it’s cold in Colorado and someplace in Europe the rest of the time. For Q2 vacation, we decided to hang out at our place in Keystone. That’s the view from our living room. I left the big 40’ pine trees in the picture just for perspective. While we had a nice week, it was more of a “break” than an “off the grid disconnect.” For some reason I had difficulty completely disconnecting (maybe it was because there were too many fun things going on in my world last week.) I did get some amazing runs in – that little white dot below is me heading off into the mountains.

I’ve got a large stamp collection that I’m considering selling. The obvious – but relatively labor intensive – way to do this is on eBay. I poked around looking for some other options, but didn’t come up with anything particularly credible. Any stamp collectors out there willing to give me a clue?

I love my mother – she’s the best mother I’ve ever had. One of her most endearing traits is that she is a jewish mother. If you don’t know what I mean, here are some examples from history. MONA LISA’S JEWISH MOTHER: “After all the money your father and I spent on braces, this you call a smile?” CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS’ JEWISH MOTHER: “I don’t care what you’ve discovered, you didn’t call, you didn’t write.”

Timothy Lee of the Cato Institute has an outstanding Op-Ed in the New York Times today titled A Patent Lie. He makes an assertion that I strongly share: “But don’t software companies need patent protection? In fact, companies, especially those that are focused on innovation, don’t: software is already protected by copyright law, and there’s no reason any industry needs both types of protection. The rules of copyright are simpler and protection is available to everyone at very low cost. In contrast, the patent system is cumbersome and expensive. Applying for patents and conducting patent searches can cost tens of thousands of dollars. That is not a huge burden for large companies like Microsoft, but it can be a serious burden for the small start-up firms that produce some of the most important software innovations.”

Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder/CTO – has a post up describing in detail how he thinks about the NewsGator Syndication Services line of products. This part of NewsGator’s business is growing at an extraordinary rate and is great reinforcement in the value of creating the NewsGator core online platform. Some stats – from Greg’s post – that give you a sense of today’s scale of the thing called “core.” This is a significant beast – it has about 1.5 billion articles indexed, sees about 7 million new articles per day, sustains around 650 new articles per second at peak times during the day, and supports about 15 million API calls per day from customers and our own clients. It also collects usage metadata, which can be used to calculate relevance information (more on this another day).

Bill Gates gave the commencement speech at Harvard today. He also received an honorary degree, finally making him a college graduate. His speech is fantastic and worth reading. His call to action is clear: In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them. Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.