George Bush recently had some deep and insightful thoughts on global warming. “We just need to get nature to cooperate with us. We don’t need to listen to nature. Nature needs to listen to us.”

Tom Evslin’s brilliant blook hackoff.com is grinding through the April 1, 2000 – June 30, 2000 time frame. If you were an executive at a company during Q200 you’ve got to read Chapter 9 as part of a sick, twisted reminder of what was going on. Today’s (and yesterday’s) episodes are the first of the “exec meetings from hell” where the public company realizes it is going to miss it’s numbers in Q200.

Next week is Syndicate. As a result, you are going to see a bunch of bullshit press releases for a wide variety of companies announcing nothing (I’ve already seen a few – how’s that for “embargoed press releases”.) Anyone that knows me knows that I general dislike the “broadly defined” discipline of marketing (I much prefer its skinny and much more powerful sibling “demand generation.”) However – I’m not from the school of “press releases are useless – just blog about it” as I think press releases can serve a purpose especially in conjunction with additional active outreach (e.g. blogs).

This product is going to really clean up. It’s way more interesting than an Ajax Reader. I can’t wait to get one. It’ll go perfectly with my craptop.

In the past, I’ve written about several of my CTO friends who are bloggers. Niel Robertson, the CTO / co-founder of Newmerix – now joins their ranks with his new blog titled Parallax: Calculating Technology’s Future. I first met Niel in 1995 in Cambridge, MA. He was an early employee of net.Genesis (I was the chairman, Raj Bhargava was the CEO / co-founder.) A year or so after Raj left net.Genesis, he connected with Niel and started working on a new idea. They cooked up the business that became Service Metrics, which I helped fund in 1998 and was then acquired by Exodus for $280 million in 1999. I fondly recall Niel bitching about having to move to Boulder from Boston (“Boston is so much better”) – Raj said the same type of thing; they both happily live in Boulder now (although they each occasionally go visit Boston to play and presumably get stuck in traffic.)

I wrote yesterday about Quova “becoming a company.” Return Path – which celebrates its six birthday today – also became “a company” this year. I’m incredibly proud of the team at Return Path – we invested in 2000 in a company (actually, “a product”) called Veripost which merged after a year with Return Path when both companies were pursuing their Series B financing. Each company was chasing the same market (ECOA – Email Change of Address), were ahead of their time, were really only “a product”, and had the potential to vanish when the Internet bubble burst. 

There are three words I’m starting to see regularly in the recursive world of blogs (blogs about blogs) and user-generate content (yes – there is an awful lot of user-generated content about user-generated content, including this blog post.) Trust Attention Relevance Unfortunately for my title to be cute, pithy, and remind us of a president who actually had a clue even though he couldn’t manage to keep his zipper up (oops, did I say that), I could only use one of the words. So – how about a haiku since when I get older I want to be like Yoda.

As you may know, I’m the chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). NCWIT’s mission is straightforward – to ensure that women are fully represented in the influential world of information technology and computing. NCWIT has had an awesome fall, including accomplishing the following. Hosting a superb national meeting at Carnegie Mellon University. Establishing a partnership with Cisco on an awareness campaign that leverages Cisco’s national educator’s network to reach students, teachers and parents. Creating an entrepreneurial alliance in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation. Creating a K-12 alliance. Adding several new members to the Executive Advisory Council, including Linda Dillman (EVP & CIO Wal-Mart Stores), Charlie Feld (EVP of Portfolio Management, EDS), and Ruth Bruch (SVP and CIO, Lucent Technologies). It’s been an honor to work with Lucy Sanders, the CEO of NCWIT, and her team on year three of this incredibly vibrant organization.

Best Haiku of the Day (thanks Dave) terabyte disk drives software a mature market and Brad is forty Best Photo of the Day (thanks Chris) Best Introspective Thought of the Day (thanks Scott) I was watching Alaskan animals play around on Discovery channel while sitting in pizza place a few hours ago. Animals really know how to have fun. In spite of the fact that they always have to be on the lookout for predators, they run and wrestle with each other like it’s nobody’s business. I think, in that respect, our superior brain power is a liability. I hope you’ll have a really fun 2006.