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.)

Matt Blumberg pointed me to a post about the Boulderites recent decision to raise taxes on themselves by passing a carbon tax. The feds can’t seem to get around to doing it, so the Bouder locals just took it on themselves as an effort to fill the federal governments gap on climate policy.

I’ve become obsessed with “Networks” – I’ve learned an enormous amount from coordinating the FeedBurner Venture Capital Network and the Colorado Entrepreneurs and Technology Network. Look for lots of interesting things to come to this in the next few months, including some “Intelligence Amplification” stuff that my friends at FeedBurner aren’t even aware of yet (heheh.) While the FeedBurner Network concept is a “user-organized” network approach (although in this case the “user” is a single publisher coordinating a network of other topically similar publishers), there are now many other well known blog networks that are being driven by commercial publishers. Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis started this off with Gawker and Weblogsinc respectively, Mike Arrington and Om Malik followed with highly visible “new tech networks” TechCrunch and GigaOm, and many others have joined in the fun.

A few months ago NewsGator released a Windows Mobile feed reader called NewsGator Go! I’ve been using it on my T-Mobile Dash and it’s fantastic. Today, NewsGator Go! for J2ME just went Beta. If you have a Blackberry, Palm Treo or Tungsten, Sony Ericsson (P800, P900, P910), Nokia, Motorola (V400, V551, V600, RAZR), Samsung, LG, or other Java phone, you can now run the NewsGator on it. It automagically syncs with your NewsGator Online account (and any other NewsGator products you are using.) Kevin Cawley – one of the big brains behind much of the NewsGator mobile stuff – has a nice post up about it.