Jeff Jarvis has a superb post up called New News: Deconstructing the newspaper. A week ago I spoke at a the Metzger Associates First Annual New Media Summit – a great example of a “local” event (local = Boulder). It was moderated by Matt Branaugh – the Business Editor of the Daily Camera (our local paper.) Fortunately, Matt is a good humored soul so when I asked the audience the question “how many of you read the stock tables in the newspaper” and not a single hand went up, Matt didn’t throw me out of the room when I looked at him and asked “why the fuck do you guys still print those things?”

Finally, someone in the AGILEAMY crowd has done a meaningful strategic deal. Google announced that they acquired dMarc Broadcasting today for $102 million cash and up to $1.1 billion of contingent cash payments over the next three years. Thank god someone finally did something more than acquire a few engineers, some technology, or a minor add-on to something they already did, but not so well. I was getting tired of hearing about all the sub $30 million “flip” deals that were “about to happen” and the new, exciting, and trendy prediction that “a crash of Web 2.0 companies is coming.”

Amy and I spent as much of the summer as we can at our house in Alaska. Today, Mt. Augustine, located about 75 miles southwest of our home in Homer, erupted. Amy has more links and information on her blog if you are interested.

The FeedDemon 2.0 Beta is officially up and ready for action. As a special bonus, I got the alpha of NewsGator Outlook Edition 2.6 today (2.6.1.129) loaded with new features and appearing to be very stable. I’ve got FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 1 syncing with NewsGator Online syncing with NewsGator Outlook 2.6 Alpha – all my read / unread states are being synced perfectly, I can modify a feed on one and have it ripple through, and all the platforms are running very quickly right now. 

One of my favorite entrepreneurial lines is “man – that was worse than going to the proctologist.” It you need to understand this concept more graphically, my good friend Renee Berberian has a solid explanation.

I love it when I stumble upon new uses for features from companies that I’m an investor in. This just happened with Technorati Mini. While it’s a relatively new feature, I’ve known about it since inception and have played with it some. However, I never really dug it until last week when my friends at FeedBurner say that they have it up on their screens all day when they make an announcement to see how it spreads throughout the blogosphere. 

I got a note from an entrepreneur (Steven Livingstone) who is pondering polyphasic sleep and asked the question: I’ve just blogged something looking for advice from successful people on sleeping patterns as an entrepreneur. I haven’t read much (if anything) on this and wondered whether you have an opinion on it. Being clueless on what polyphasic sleep meant, I was fortunately that Wikipedia exists. Stephen’s post pointed me to Steve Pavlina’s site where he’s 80+ days into a polyphasic sleep experiment. I was immediately intrigued because I’ve always been fascinated by sleep. Pavlina has a bunch of great writing on this – start on his Day 60 post and go to the older diary posts. Wacky.

Following is a question that I got from a reader of this blog on Friday. “I have wondered about the dynamics of a restart company and how it affects employees, options and the dynamics between existing money and new money. My company took about 30MM during the boom years, did not get anywhere, and there was a restart financing round for a new product/market. However, I feel a “bad” history has an overhang even in a company’s new life. “

I heard there was a performance by a legendary band called Full Ratchet in Atherton last week. Can you identify the members of the band? They were joined (or maybe they joined) Thomas Dolby who has been practicing ferociously for his upcoming tour. Have you been Blinded by Science lately?