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.

I just gone done with my quarterly week off the grid. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays – Amy and I spent it chilling out in Keystone. I had a little trouble disconnecting – finally shutting off all of my computers on Wednesday morning. Even though lots of folks took the long weekend off, a few of my portfolio companies pushed out some neat new stuff. NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand: NewsGator just went beta with their new Enterprise On-Demand RSS product. Enterprise RSS – but via a SaaS model. Its code name was NGOD, but apparently my marketing friends decided to be non-religious and call it NGEOD. Lijit Identities: At our last board meeting, we spent a lot of time talking about people, identities, and content linked to a particular user. Since many web services are now republishing user information via RSS, I speculated that it would be nice to have a simple UI for associating content in different services with me. Voila. Remember my post on Sync vs. Slurp vs. Spew? This would be a good example of Slurp. Judy’s Book Store Pages: Wanna see some Apple deals? Or Gap deals? While I’m near the outlet stores in Silverthorne, I’d rather shop on-line. There were a couple of others (FeedBurner in Russia anyone) but those were the ones that caught my attention as I got caught up from my self-imposed electronic exile.

David Cohen has a great post up about the failure of one of his startup – iContact. Even though iContact failed, David and his partners still managed to return 78% of the investment to their investors. His two lessons: (1) control the distribution of your product and (2) start small and prove something before you start to scale up.

Scott Converse has an extensive post about his second board meeting. I’m a couple of months into my investment in ClickCaster and I’m very pleased with the progress Scott and crew have made. I’m particularly happy with how effectively Scott listens, processes feedback, and acts on it.