Irving Wladawsky-Berger – IBM’s VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation (and one of the few “must-read” IBM employee blogs that I’m aware of) has a good post up summarizing Eric von Hippel’s work on Democratizing Innovation. Eric was my doctoral advisor at MIT (I didn’t finish) and has built 30 years of really important academic research (and a worldwide research community) on the idea he stated around 1978 that “innovation comes from users, not manufacturers.” Today we might say something like “yeah – uh huh”, but in 1978 this was a radical thought.

My long time friend (since 1984 – wow) and extremely experienced entrepreneur / CEO Will Herman has another great post up today – this time it’s about firing someone. Will’s advice – When Firing Someone, Focus on Those Who Remain – is important and well articulated.

The view from our living room window. Enough said.

As I sit in the Anchorage airport waiting for my flight to Homer, I was missing Colorado a little. Of course, it didn’t help that I’ve been sitting for the past hour in the middle of a romper room (I count 10 kids running around screaming at each other with parents who couldn’t appear to care less, except for the one yelling at his kid to “shut up and stop crying.”) As someone sitting next to us on our flight the other day from Denver to Seattle said after having a third bag dropped on his head “it’s a holiday weekend and the amateurs are out in force.”

As I sit in the Seattle airport waiting to board my delayed flight to Anchorage (Dear Alaska Airlines: Since it’s a “mechanical delay”, please feel free to delay it as long as you want until you are absolutely sure the airplane works), I was pondering a conversation I had at the very end of Gnomedex with an entrepreneur that I’d met for the first time. We had a good chat about his business (definitely interesting stuff) and then he asked me a few questions. One of them was something like “what are the characteristics of the best CEOs that you’ve worked with”?) This was in the context of him currently being a CEO, but feeling like he should ultimately be the CTO and was starting to think about bringing a CEO into the company.

In case you are really curious about what’s actually happening at Gnomedex, here’s Chris Pirillo thinking small*.*

I’ve been enjoying my 18 year-old friend Ben Casnocha’s blog about his travels around the world. I’ve also recently begun reading my Alaska neighbor Jessica Schallock’s blog. Jessica – like Ben – is a remarkably articulate teenager. Unlike a lot of other mediums in which I’ve watched teenagers write (such as MySpace), I’ve been delighted to see the thoughtful essays that Ben and Jessica are posting.

After my enthusiastic Gnomedex post about the first half of the first day, things started to go downhill and most of the afternoon was disappointing to me. I had a fun dinner last night with some folks from Yahoo (and their friends), went home, got a good night sleep, and came back refreshed. This morning has been great again – some rambling nonsense, but that’s part of the experience. Interestingly, there aren’t many deep insights surfacing (at least to me), rather lots of good examples about how people are applying and dealing with issues and ideas and that have been bouncing around the past year.

I generally hate conferences and do my best to avoid them. However I find myself thoroughly enjoying Gnomedex 6 (which Amy refers to as the “conference for short nerds” (Chris – she might be talking about you)) for the second year in a row. Chris Pirillo and his fiance Ponzi put on a high energy and very entertaining conference. It’s in what’s now becoming “classical unconference” format – rather than lots of presentations with commercial bents, people get up for 30 minutes and lead “conversations” of the audience of 400 or so people. Susan Mernit – now of Yahoo – just got up to talk about “sex and relationships” (instead of widgets and microformats.)