When IE 7 and Firefox 2 came out, they both added a lot of RSS-related functionality. As part of this, they both implemented their version of “smart landing” pages for when a user clicks on an RSS feed link. While this is a nice idea, it broke cardinal rule number one of being “publisher friendly” – they both override any custom landing pages that a publisher (e.g. me – my blog) has put together. 

My dad just wrote a great review of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. We were both reading it at about the same time and had a couple of interesting conversations about it. When Rumsfeld got fired, I moved on to another book (I had about 100 pages left) – I figure Woodward had accomplished his mission. But – I never wrote a review of the book. Now that my dad has done it, I don’t have to.

I’m playing around with “extreme sync” these days – exercising as many platforms as I can simultaneously just for fun. My central mail / calendar / contacts / tasks live on our Exchange server. I’ve got sync working well across all my Windows devices (Office 2003 and Office 2007) along with my new Dash Windows Mobile PDA. My Macs “mostly work” – everything is doing great (via Entourage) except “tasks.” I’m a heavy Outlook / Exchange Task user so this is a critical one for me. Anyone out there solve this?

Amy and I love to sit around and make up names for bands. Etiquette of Suicide was tonight’s band name. It’s not our all time best, but I expect it to show up as a band name on MySpace any day now.

My partner Ryan pointed me to Mark Morford’s incredible review of the new MacBook Pro on SFGate. Actually – in Mark’s words – it’s not really a MacBook Pro – it’s a “brand new lick-ready smooth-as-love Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo Super Orgasm Deluxe Ultrahard Modern Computing Device Designed by God Herself Somewhere in the Deep Moist Vulva of Cupertino Yes Yes Don’t Stop Oh My God Yes.” Um, yeah – that’s not exactly how I felt when I got my new Levono T60 with Vista on it the other day. At least mine works, compared to Ryan’s.

On Tuesday night, I hung out in LA with my long time friends and frat brothers John Underkoffler and Kevin Parent, co-founders of Oblong along with Kwin Kramer and Tom Wiley. I hadn’t seen John and Kevin in a while, so it was fun to catch up with them. More fun, however, was seeing and playing with the amazing stuff they are creating. In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character John Anderton is shown interacting with a computer on a wall using a futuristic user interface in which he uses hand gestures to manipulate images and video. Underkoffler created that – including the beginnings of a new UI paradigm and a language for describing it.

David Cohen (who I have done a few angel deals with – including ClickCaster and Solidware) recently spent a couple of weeks building a cool new tool called earFeeder. earFeeder scans your music collection and automatically creates a single RSS newsfeed containing news about your favorite artists including new releases on iTunes, concert dates and ticket availability, Rolling Stone articles, etc. He got a graphics designer (Brad Searle) to do the look and feel in exchange for a share of the company. Then David introduced earFeeder for the first time in public at the New Tech Meetup on October 3rd and opened it up to a public beta on that day. He told me that he really built it for himself but since some of his friends (including me) had given him good feedback on it, he decided to throw it out there and see what people thought and then improve it from there.

Many companies strive to be TechCrunched (I got an email this morning asking me to introduce someone to TechCrunch and GigaOm – as if that would have any real impact.) If you’re a nerd, however, you want to be Ajaxianed. Ajaxian – who’s goal is to “generate more hype than Rails” has a nice showcase article up on Me.dium along with some invite codes. It’s a very good explanation of what Me.dium is trying to do and why it matters, along with some techy stuff.

Fred Wilson has a superb post up today titled How To Build A Good Board. If you run a company and have a board, or sit on a board, go read it now.