Tonight must be the night that I’m pointing to new blogs from friends of mine. The guys at Collective Intellect have started a corporate blog titled New Media Intelligence. Two of Collective Intellect’s execs already have blogs (Tim Wolters and Darren Kelly) – this will be a nice add to our collective intellect. I worked closely with Tim and his partner Don Springer (Collective Intellect’s CEO) at their previous company (Dante Group – acquired by webMethods) – these are super smart dudes worth paying attention to. They are part of my Intelligence Amplification theme, even though they are not fans of the label.

My long time friend Tom Higley has started a blog called Back in the Saddle. Tom recently came out of retirement to become CEO of Vault Alliance, a Boulder-based startup that I’m an investor in. Tom was one of the first people I met when I moved to Boulder. He was running a company he’d started called NetDelivery. I introduced Tom / NetDelivery to Charley Lax at Softbank (at the time I was an affiliate of Softbank – this was prior to us starting Softbank Venture Capital) who passed on investing, but I got to know Tom anyway. NetDelivery struggled and Tom eventually left. In 1997, as I was working with Raj Bhargava and Niel Robertson to start up Service Metrics, I introduced Tom to Raj and Niel. Tom became a co-founder / CEO of Service Metrics, which we funded. Eighteen months later, Exodus bought Service Metrics for $280 million and everyone involved was very happy. 

I’ve received a lot of great comments and emails in response to my “Reflections on Mentors” post. One of them was a note from my mom with a letter attached that I sent to my dad in 1988. My dad was my first real mentor (and continues to have a huge impact on me.) I wrote this when I was 23 – when my dad was 50. One last piece of “mentor advice” – make sure you let your mentors know they are being helpful to you.

I’m on the IT Transition Team for Colorado’s new governor – Bill Ritter. One of the primary roles of the transition team is to recommend to Governor-Elect Ritter a pool of candidates for the position of State CIO (Chief Information Officer). This position is a direct-report to the Governor and will run the Colorado Office of Information Technology. The current CIO salary is in the $120,000 range, however if a candidate comes from outside the state, the salary will probably be negotiated in consultation with the Governor’s Office. We are looking for experienced CIO’s that are willing to take a moderate paying CIO-job in exchange for the ability to have real impact on the state of Colorado.

Matt Blumberg has a very important marketing insight about clickstreams that he just wrote about.

This was just too good to pass up. Click through to see a bigger version on Wikipedia (along with all the copyright noise about this.) Amy and I were both Reagan youth before becoming liberal weenies.

Ben Casnocha is hard at work at his book titled “My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley”; which Jossey-Bass (part of John Wiley & Sons) is publishing this spring. I read a draft over Thanksgiving and I predict this book will end up becoming a New York Times bestseller – it is extraordinary (just like Ben.) Ben has asked a number of his friends to write short essays (called “Braintrusts”) to include in the book. I was honored that he asked me to write one on Mentors. Following is my “Reflections on Mentors” which hopefully will make it into the book when it’s published this spring. 

As chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, I’m enjoyed observing the regular evolution of how we describe the organization. My friends Larry and Pat Nelson just interviewed Lucy Sanders – the CEO of NCWIT – and I think Lucy did a particularly crisp job of describing what NCWIT is about and why it’s important.

Om Malik has a great post up titled Alexa can be injurious to your wealth that describes a number of flaws with Alexa as a ranking of a web-based service. I have never taken Alexa data very seriously – while Om points out some flaws there are lots of others that anyone with a basic understanding of web analytics will be able to determine quickly. While it’s potentially useful for either long term trends or very rapid variance effects (e.g. The First 25,000 Users Are Irrelevant problem or – as Josh Kopelman more succinctly put it – 53,651) I’m always very careful about how I interpret the data (and I usually don’t give it much weight.)