It eventually happens to all bloggers that become popular. I’ve had several of these moments – you get feedback that causes you to take a step back and re-evaluate what you are doing an how you are doing. My friend Alan Shimel had one of these the other day and has written a very thoughtful post on it. If you know Alan, you can almost hear him saying this to you – that’s how lucid his self-reflection is. His conclusion is 100% Alan.

In August, I talked about a new feature that FeedBurner had created called “Networks”. As part of this, I set up one of the first FeedBurner Networks – the Venture Capital Network. It’s been really cool to watch how the network has evolved and grown – it now has 52 VC bloggers with a daily reach of 114k subscribers across the network. FeedBurner has continued to roll new features into the network, including a detailed network landing page, ability to subscribe to the entire network or simply feeds in the network, and an OPML link for the network. Look for more fun stuff soon.

The snow is finally sticking in Homer – what a beautiful day. I’m looking at my web cam in Homer, AK from Keystone, CO where it’s also been snowing. Winter (and ski season) is here.

My friend Stuart Chapman – a partner at Esprit Capital Partners in the UK – sent me a note about his new portfolio company WAYN (Where Are You Now?) which is a self-proclaimed “Web 2.0 Travel Site.” It’s become very popular in Europe and – according to Stuart – is profitable and fantastically run. WAYN’s core audience of Europeans regularly travel outside their own borders. They are trying to determine how this maps to the US market where travel outside the country borders is much less prevalent. While there’s a logical “outside the state mapping” (especially among adjacent red and blue states), it seems like the metaphor might be different . 

David Cohen has a nice summary of what happened at BarCamp Boulder up on the ColoradoStartups blog. I didn’t attend (I needed to sit at home for the day and ponder the universe with Amy while petting my dogs). There’s a nice BarCamp / Tech MeetUp thing developing in Boulder/Denver – the attendee list is has some really interesting folks on it.

I had my second opera experience last night at Opera Colorado’s Season Opening Gala performance of The Magic Flute. I was blown away by my first opera experience in May and had high expectations for last night. Even though I was completely exhausted from the week, I had a great time. We arrived at about 5:30 with my folks, Dave Jilk and Maureen Amundson, Wendy Lea and Chris Byrne. Wendy and Chris have become major opera fanatics in the past year (e.g. weekend in NY where they saw four operas in 30 hours), Dave and Maureen lost their opera virginity with us in May, and my dad will use any excuse to wear his tuxedo (“Brad – can I wear my tux to the basketball game?”) Entertainingly, both Chris and I had brand new tuxes for the event which just happened to be exactly the same make and cut.

Ryan reminded me that we get to experience 11:11:11 twice today – which happens to be 11/11. I’m looking forward to 2011.

Dion Hinchcliffe has an interesting post up on ZDNet titled Is IBM making enterprise mashups respectable? Dion enumerates five styles of mashups: presentation, client-side data, client-side software, server-side software, and server-side data. It’s a good segmentation and useful framework for describing integration layers between web services.

I’ve invested in over 50 angel deals in the past 12 years. Several have been big winners for me, a few have done ok, and some have failed. Many are still active – including several that I did before I started making venture capital investments in 1996. Recently – a company I invested in 11 years ago – Harmonix Music Systems – was acquired by Viacom / MTV for $175 million. The deal closed last week and the money has been flowing to the Harmonix shareholders. And – it’s plenty – as Harmonix only raised $10 million over the life of the company. The reactions from a few of the angels I helped recruit to the deal included “incredible outcome – I had forgotten I had shares in the company”, “Brad, are you sure you got the decimal point in the right place”, and simply “holy shit.”