I’ve been talking about, dealing with (in a “user-generated content context”), and thinking about spam a lot lately. As an investor in email related companies going back to the mid-1990’s, I started experiencing spam as a real problem around 2000. Chris, Ryan, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it and ended up investing in two companies – Return Path and Postini – which have both been very successful companies on the good side of the war against spam.

A reader pointed me at this good, short post describing the shutdown of a service. Failure is a part of the entrepreneurial experience and it’s even more valuable (although not necessarily fun) if you can learn a lesson from it. The lesson here – well articulated by the author – is that he failed to address a point of pain.

Minus 3. By the time I got to Keystone it was minus 8. Colorado is having a sucky winter. At least I’m home.

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.