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.

My partner Ryan McIntyre has a nice, detailed follow up post on Intelligence Amplification. Stan James – founder and CTO of Lijit (one of our investments in the Intelligence Amplification theme) – calls it the “Digital Cortex.”

Our friendly neighborhood Supreme Court is having some fun discussing the current legal definition of “patent obviousness.” It sounds like there were some entertaining snippets in the conversation as the Supreme Court considers rewriting it. A change here would have a wide ranging impact which – in my mind – based on my previously stated view on software patents – would be a hugely positive thing. At the minimum, it’s provocative to think about the potential impact. The best line of the day – offered apparently with complete ironic intent – appears to be Chief Justice Roberts asking an attorney: “Who do you get to be an expert to tell us something’s not obvious? The least insightful person you can find?”

I got a bunch of great suggestions on online chess from y’all – thanks! I’ve decided – at least for now – to play on Red Hot Pawn (my handle is bfeld) since I want correspondence style rather than real time. I hope I’ll be able to avoid the mate in one blunder that Vladimir Kramnik made against Deep Fritz yesterday (thanks to Craig Wilcox for pointing it out.)

I hate the phrase Web 3.0. I’ve never really liked the phrase Web 2.0 either, but I didn’t notice that I didn’t like it until after it had become used in almost every conversation I had with anyone about what they were working on. As I started making new investments in companies that tried to deal with the TAR problem (such as Me.dium, Lijit, Collective Intellect, and HiveLive), I realized I wanted a name for this. I came up with the lame name “dynamics of information” as a placeholder.

In the “if you can’t beat them, join them” category, following is a hilariously ironic story by Mark A. Stein from the 11/19/06 New York Times Openers section. “Tyson Foods, the world’s largest chicken producer and meat processing company, blamed high corn prices last week for its third consecutive quarterly loss. It said that the recent excitement over corn-based ethanol fuel sent the price of that grain soaring, raising feed costs and compounding the effect of a meat glut that depressed prices. “This is either corn for feed for corn for fuel,” Rich L. Bond, president and chief executive, lamented in a statement.

The Immortal Game inspired me to play some chess again. I was having trouble sleeping tonight so I hopped online to find an online chess game. Not surprisingly, I was completely overwhelmed by options. Any suggestions for good places to hang out and play online?

One of my favorite things about going dark for a week is that I get to consume a bunch of books. Since we’ve been back from Alaska, my reading pace has been slower than normal, so it was nice to have plenty of uninterrupted time to lay on a couch and read. I usually manage to read a book a day on vacation – this time I only gobbled down five. All but one was great.