Shortly after reading an article in the NY Times this morning by Bob Morris titled Global Yawning I received the following email from a reader of this blog: I’ve noticed that I am skipping your blog posts with increasing frequency. The reason is that the “What a great team! What a great product!” posts about your portfolio companies seem to be an increasing proportion of the total (it may not be true – I haven’t run the numbers – but “perception is reality” anyway). At this point you may write a post that says that Newsgator is a crappy company but all I will see is “Newsgator” and I will move on. As an entrepreneur, I would love to have such a dedicated, high-profile investor-evangelist. However, as a reader I feel that the “advertorial” content is starting to chip away at the foundation of your otherwise excellent blog.

If you are a blogger, it’s time to consider implementing Lijit for your blog search. Matt Blumberg jumped on board last week and Fred Wilson tossed it up on his blog a few weeks ago. I’ve enabled all the features. At the top is a search box. Just type in your search terms. If you don’t want to take up a lot of sidebar space, you can just surface the search box, but I like all the functionality to be front and center.

If you are a NewsGator user, you might know about some of the neat add-on tools that build on the NewsGator Online reader. They were hard to find on the old NewsGator web site – the version released last week makes it a lot easier to find them. They include: Toolbar: one click subscribe and feed discovery FeedStation: download podcasts and synchronize with your iPod Screensaver: show your RSS feeds on your screensaver Desktop: popup notifier for new feeds Yahoo! Messenger: RSS integration with Yahoo! Messenger If you are an active reader of RSS and feed and are not using at least Toolbar and Desktop you are missing out. All of these automagically integrate and synchronize with your existing NewsGator Online setup and dramatically enhance the overall feed reading experience. And – as a special bonus – they are free.

Amy and I love art. My mom is an artist and I grew up with art, galleries, collectors, and museums. Amy and I have been collecting since we started dating and I still remember agonizing over our first purchase greater than $1,000. We are both patrons of the Wellesley Davis Museum. As a result, we get to go on an annual trip somewhere in the country to look at art. This year’s trip was to New York City. I felt like hiding from the world for a couple of days to take a break so I tagged along with Amy and 30 other Wellesley women.

The nice folks at PodTech interviewed me and David Cohen about TechStars. In David’s words: “It’s another fantastic way to waste 9 minutes of your life before you get back to working on your startup (or whatever).” Plus there’s a neat Theresa Chong painting in the background.

Metzger Associates is hosting Denver’s Second Annual New Media Summit on May 31st at 5:30pm at the Denver Press Club. Doyle Albee from Metzger is our moderator. I participated in this last year and thought it was loads of fun and very relevant. This years panel includes me, Phil Weiser (CU Law School / head of Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications program), Veronica Belmont (Associate Editor at CNET.com), and JB Holston (CEO of NewsGator.) 

I did very well on the math part of the SAT but not as well on the verbal part (I did ok, but I was definitely more MIT than (or is it “then”) Harvard.) Since the phrase “unique” crosses over nicely between the math and verbal sections it belongs in my Pet Peeves universe. Today I was in a meeting where someone mocked the phrase “very unique.” I smiled since I’ve heard this one so many times. His next statement was “unique means one of a kind – that means something can’t be ‘very’ unique.”

Maybe there are. But I thought it was a catchy title for a post. There are plenty of dogs, cats, and 400,000 people on Dogster as of today. One of my all time favorite New Yorker cartoons (hanging on the wall of my office) is “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Well – they might.

Registration for the Defrag Conference is open. My friend Eric Norlin (who I’ve still never met in person – I love this cyberspace thing) is doing an amazing job getting the conference up and running. Great sponsors, a blog full of crazy ideas, cool advisors, and a fascinating agenda emerging. What more could you want from a conference? November 5th and 6th at the Hyatt Regency in Denver, Colorado. Be there or be square.