My friends at the Enthusiast Group are about to launch a new series of sites over the next two months to add to their growing network of enthusiast web sites. YourCycling launched today and is edited by Enthusiast-in-Chief Whitey Debroux, a Boulder, Colorado-based professional road and cyclocross racer who is riding for Team Einstein this season. YourCycling joins YourRunning (check out my running blog – 50×50 if you care about such things – especially if you want to be amused by my challenges of maintaining any sort of base while traveling non-stop), YourClimbing (for rock climbers), and YourMTB (for mountain bikers.)

I’ve been pleased to see that the reaction to TechStars has generally been very positive. We’ve been pleasantly overwhelmed with quality applications for the program – over 75 to date for the 10 spots. There are still 52 days to apply, so if you are thinking about it, I encourage you to give it a shot. Of course, there has been some debate about whether or not TechStars is “worth” giving up 5% of your equity. I thought I’d take a crack at addressing this and further explaining what we are trying to do with TechStars.

While running on the treadmill this morning, I was flipping through the channels as I couldn’t manage to run while watching Billy Madison. Morning TV is such crap, but I’m in Cincinatti and the roads are covered with ice so I’m treadmill bound. I never stay on CNN or CNBC because watching news while running is possibly the most tedious thing I could imagine, but the CNN headline caught my eye. I can’t remember it exactly now, but the essence was “Ethanol Demand Up, Corn Supply Depleted.” I stopped and listened to the story which was a long and winding discussion where the main points were:

My friends Alan Shimel and Mitchell Ashley from StillSecure are at the annual RSA security show (“the” show for the security industry) and are reporting and podcasting from the front lines. In addition, Alan has a great rant about booth babes which the feminist in me wholeheartedly agrees with. If you are into security or anti-booth babes, check the posts out.

I’ve written about Discovering Work Life Balance in the past, but when I came across Jim Citrin’s article titled Tapping the Power of Your Morning Routine I realized that I left out an important part of the dynamics of work life balance for me. Some people are early birds; some people are night owls. I’ve always been an early bird. In Citrin’s article, he talks some of the common characterists of key CEOs that he admires. As a morning person, it was fascinating to see what people do when they get up.

My reading pace has been slower than usual lately. I digested a few books in January including Sweet and Low (the story of Sweet and Low and the fascinating machinations of a particularly complex family business), 24: Cat’s Claw (to deal with my 24 addiction prior to Day 6 starting), and Christopher Moore’s brilliant You Suck. Coming off of You Suck I needed something deep and thoughtful. So I settled on AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll – the history of my favorite heavy metal band. I was in high school during the Back in Back, Highway to Hell, and For Those About to Rock days and I loved Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, so I got some Bon Scott / Brian Johnson crossover. Of course, the real teenage boy fantasy was to be Angus or Malcolm Young.

Great video on the essence of the web today from Michael Wesch – an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. I love the title – The Machine is Us/ing Us. The neat question, of course, is where is the web going to be tomorrow? At the end, Michael suggests that we need to rethink a few things, including copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves. (Thanks Bruce for the pointer.)

I was trying to come up with a clever title for the superb week that Me.dium had, but I lamed out. Me.dium had their public launch this week at Demo (although they are still in a controlled user rollout as one of the extremely hard challenges in what they are trying to do is to infinitely scale the service.) Kimbal Musk – the CEO – gave a great demo at Demo.

Paul Kedrosky has a superb post up today titled Building the Perfect Board Package*.* The entire post is worth a slow and careful read as it’s “guidance on the subject from a sales-guru colleague to a company’s management on whose board he sits.” Buried deep near the end is the real gem – metrics for a “perfect enterprise software company” that would trade at 3x revenue (or significantly higher if a SaaS model).