David Cohen has been appropriately nudging me to write my counterpoint to his Big of Bullshit: Widgets post. Lots has been said about widgets over the past six months, including the ultimate counterindicator article The Year of the Widget? from Newsweek (nothing against Newsweek, but whenever something like this shows up it often means we’ve hit the apex of the phenomenon.) Lest you think Widgets are new, let’s take a short walk back in history. Do you remember Active Desktop? Yup – a nice Windows feature dating back to IE 4.0 that never caught on. I bet Microsoft has a patent floating around somewhere for this, even though it would be a bogus one because of prior art. How about DoDots (The Web without a browser) – one of our failed investments. Similar time frame, incredible technology, clearly ahead of its time, and misunderstood (e.g. a random quote I found in an old usenet archive when poking around – “I never understood their business plan. DoDots was creating software that allowed people to embed internet-based applications on the desktop — sorry, but isn’t that a web browser?”) Oh – and in case you happen to think Microsoft invented this – think again – they were floating around MIT / Project Athena when I was there in the mid-1980’s (anyone remember “Widget Athena Front End”?)

The blog “She Dreams in Digital” has an excellent, short article titled Me.dium Takes Social Bookmarketing One Step Further that does a nice job of explaining Me.dium. As my friends list continues to grow, the power of Me.dium grows with it (it’s a quiet Saturday morning – Amy is on Netflix, probably rearranging her queue, Kimbal is on Google searching for nebuchadnezzar (Kimbal – please tell me you are watching The Matrix), and Seth is on the Pepsi site seeing how fast he can type.) If you want to take it for a spin, use my invite code.

I got a note from David Cohen earlier this week that we’ve just passed through the 100 applicant mark for the TechStars program this summer in Boulder. Our goal was 100 so we’re delighted. If you are interested, there’s still plenty of time to apply (applications close on March 31.)

The New York Times had a great article early this week titled Fine Dining With a Hippie Past. It highlights the recent revolution in the Boulder fine dining scene. When I moved here in 1995, the casual dining scene was outstanding (think Santa Monica, but more casual) but there were only really two “serious” restaurants – Flagstaff House and Q’s. In the last few years, a number of new great ones have popped up including The Kitchen (owned by Me.dium CEO Kimbal Musk), Frasca, and Mateo. Earlier this week I had breakfast at Radda Trattoria. Yum.

NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop and it radically changed the way I read my RSS feeds – again. NewsGator Desktop came out of requirements from one of the NewsGator Enterprise Server customers who needed a rich desktop notifier as part of their implementation. Voila – generalize an enterprise based feature to an app that spans all the NewsGator consumer and enterprise products. Iterate quickly, add some stuff like Keyboard Shortcuts (duh), and you’ve got something pretty amazing.

One of the great things about the exponential growth of web-based content (both professional and user generated) is that it enables you to quickly get deep insights from amazing people that were previously hard to find. Two examples beat me over the head this morning. I wrote about Lijit search yesterday – today Stan James (Lijit’s CTO) keeps the rhythm going with his Not All Links Are Created Equal post.

I love stats (I guess the “official” software term for it is “analytics.”) My very first angel investment was in a company called NetGenesis which was one of the first web analytics companies (back in 1994). It’s a regular theme in my investing – either directly in companies like NetGenesis and Service Metrics (where analytics is the product), or indirectly in companies like FeedBurner (where analytics is a byproduct and a core part of the value.)

Business 2.0 has a good article titled A startup’s best friend? Failure. on how to succeed by paying attention and responding to failure. Dogster, Google, and Riya (Like.com) are profiled. I got plenty of chuckles after I made an investment in Dogster. I look forward to the day when I can say “look who’s barking now.”

I owe David Cohen a cross-post on widgets in our Big or Bullshit series. This isn’t it – I’ll get to it. But – my hint is that while they are big, it’s more bullshit than big (think application packaging – we’ll talk more later.) In the meantime, a number of my companies continue to crank out stuff in and around the world of widgets. FeedBurner just integrated their Headline Animator widget into their publisher engagement metrics (stats for us nerds.) Lijit just started crawling blogrolls while Bijan simultaneously noticed that the Lijit Wijit (er “widget”) just started reporting some interesting stats on what people were searching on his blog. Todd Vernon reminds us how important measuring everything is and put up a screenshot of a huge Raindance milestone from Monday when Raindance crossed the 5 million / day of audioconferencing minutes (I remember how excited we were when this metric crossed 100,000 / day. Finally, Eric Lunt of FeedBurner spent some time having fun with User-Agents, once again showing how hard it actually can be to accurately measure stuff.