The guys at FeedBurner have had a busy week. Earlier this week – they announced that their FeedFlare service – which they announced in December – could now be incorporated directly into a blog with one line of javascript. As an example, let’s look how FeedFlare impacts the post “The Coming Irrelevance of My.Yahoo For Me.” If you get my feed, you’ve noticed the following in the footer: Now, you’ll notice the following on my blog:

After reading Fooled By Randomness, I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed by the information on My.Yahoo page. I’ve had My.Yahoo as my default home page since 1997 or so and probably have it refresh (deliberately or otherwise) at least 100 times a day (more than 300,000 page views during that time of just the main Yahoo page.) I use it primarily to track news on about 150 public companies that I follow regularly. If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have told you that I couldn’t live without it. I’ve tried to switch to other things (including My.MSN) but no dice – I’m just too used to My.Yahoo.

It’s always really exciting when a portfolio company hits its inflection point and has a year of extreme growth. All venture backed companies always predict their growth will follow a “hockey stick curve”, e.g. This of course is the exception, not the norm, for the vast majority of startups. Stratify had its hockey stick in 2005 – by the end of the year we’d had over 400% growth off of a multi-million dollar base revenue from 2004. While it’s easy to sit back and be delighted (or even a little stunned), there is no end in sight, which is a tribute to Ramana Venkata and his awesome team.

FeedBurner launched its Japanese site today with its Japanese partner GMO Affiliate. While I can’t read any of the Japanese on the site, I’m am assured that it says the same interesting things as the English FeedBurner site and does the same things, with some fun, exciting, and hot new Japanese features (that presumably I can’t read either.) There were around 350 feeds “FeedBurnered” in the first 12 hours. Yet another step in FeedBurner’s attempt to provide publishers like you and me help in taming all the world’s feeds that are out in the wild.

This beautiful web movie is the first thing in a long time that’s made me think of my old Honda Accord (owned circa 1990, vintage 1984, brown, four door). It didn’t really feel (or sound) like this, but memories age nicely. Thanks Chris (for the ad) and Eric (for the Honda.)

Amy’s making me watch March of the Penguins. So far, it’s been about these totally bizarre looking birds that can’t fly and have chosen to live in the Antarctic. It’s cold, windy, dark, cold, cold, dark, cold, and windy. There’s lots of walking to the same place to get food – oh – it’s 70 miles away, they don’t have cars, and they don’t walk especially well. There’s been a short romantic section that’s cute, followed by more cold, eventually some eggs, which occasionally break when they are transferred from mom to dad (since mom has to go get food again – yes – 70 miles away). Eventually the eggs hatch and the babies are born, but the mom’s are away getting food (and some of them are getting eaten by seals.) Did I say that it’s cold? The moms get back minutes before the babies starve, feed them, but then send the starving dads away to go get food (yup – 70 miles away.) Oh – some of the babies freeze to death (it’s cold), the mom’s get devastated (especially since they have to tell the dad, assuming the dad survives the seals), and try to kidnap other babies (unsuccessfully.) Seagulls make a special guest appearance and eat some of the babies. Over the next few months, the moms and dads keep alternating going to the grocery store (70 miles away) to get food, although the grocery store (the ocean) gets closer as winter draws to a close and the ice melts. Once summer arrives (in November!) and the babies turn into teenagers, the parents get divorced and the cycle begins again.

What Fred said. Absolutely spectacular and brilliant.

Ah – the sound of a fresh binding cracking open. Tom Evslin just signed 25 books for me. These are apparently the first copies of hackoff.com to be signed by the soon to be famous author. I thought I’d memorialize the experience. These are the publisher proof versions and – with Tom’s signature – are certain to become collectors editions. If you are a CEO of one of my portfolio companies, look for a special treat in the mail shortly.

Today, FeedBurner announced that USA Today is now using FeedBurner for managing over 100 feeds. I sure do love clicking on that orange XML button and seeing “syndicate content powered by FeedBurner.” At the same time, FeedBurner announced its new FeedFoundry product for publishers with multiple feeds. FeedFoundry lets you use all the FeedBurner features that you have come to know and love, including FeedFlare, while enabling you to use an new interface that understands the concept of “multiple feeds for a publisher.” If you are a multi-feed publisher, you can get more information (and sign up for a test drive) here.