After a brief email exchange today from an extremely smart and capable friend suggesting a potential feature for my blog, his response was “As usual, I’m nobody’s market.” He provided a humorous followup to the comment “that’s a great blog title” from one of the people on the email thread with “Ah, if only I didn’t have to suck up to the world, that would be a great title for my contrarian-curmudgeon blog.”

At dinner the other night with an old friend, we somehow ended up discussing TV shows. I don’t watch much TV beyond my obsession with 24 and my relatively new infatuation with Gray’s Anatomy. He was explaining several shows to me that he thought I would enjoy. In response to his suggestion that I would enjoy Monk, I responded that the one time I watched it I was so unbelievably anxious that I had to leave the room, wash my hands, and count to nine three times.

Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures has an important and thought provoking post up titled What’s next? Whenever Brad writes something, I read it carefully – not only because he has a fantastic first name – but because he usually nails something important. Brad’s description of the progression of the “central value proposition” in the computer system over time – from hardware, to systems software, to application software, to networks, and ultimately data is a great framework. He asserts that the next layer of value will come from governance.

If you are a Second Life dude and live in Boulder / Denver, there is now a local Meetup for you. The organizer – Richard Hackathorn – who is the president of Bolder Technology dropped me a note about it. Apparently Richard’s son Eric has created a NOAA Island as part of NOAA’s (the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration – which every Boulderite knows as the folks that have a building on the best real estate in town) education outreach program.

I’ve been flying a lot lately and – yes – it’s still frustrating to have to get undressed to go through security. I just found a neat online game called Airport Security that let’s me be simulate being a TSA agent. It’s both amusing and satisfying once you get the hang of it.

I haven’t written much on failure since December so I was delighted to see several really insightful posts on the benefits and chocolatey goodness of failing. It started with Jeremy Liew’s (a partner at Lightspeed) post titled Failure IS an option. James Hong (the cofounder of HOTorNOT) followed up with a post titled Do YOU have the balls to try? Part 1 and Robert Young finished it off with a guest column on GigaOm titled Bankruptcy: The Opportunity to Fail. Just remember – failure and success go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

I love books. I love cool things. I love when cool things and books collide. Some folks at Google have started a fantastically neat project. They are “mapping books” – think of the intersection of Google Maps, a book, the locations in the book, and some of the content at the various locations in the book. Here is an awesome example – The 9/11 Commission Report.

Last year, the meme of “you can start a company for minimal capital” made the rounds. This is still true. But – it’s not trivial to scale a company for minimal capital (it’s possible, but an exception, not the norm.) This meme is starting to make the rounds – Heather Green at BusinessWeek just wrote an article titled Make-or-Break Time For The Net Newbies. Heather interviewed me for the article. Since I only do interviews by email, I asked her if I could post our email exchange as further background to the article. She kindly agreed as long as I waited until the article came out. Here is the actual interview we did. The questions Helen asked me are in italics.

At the National Center for Women & Information Technology we are about to embark on a “heroes campaign” – a new project to highlight 20 successful women IT entrepreneurs via 15 minute podcast interviews accompanied by text transcriptions. We’ve got a great initial set of women that we’ll be interviewing but are casting our net far and wide to find interesting, amazing, and inspirational stories. If you fit the profile (female IT / software / Internet entrepreneurs) or know someone that does, please give me a shout.