I was in an Oxlo board meeting recently and Todd Vernon (Raindance CTO who is on the Oxlo board) said “I’ve subscribed to your del.icio.us tag feed – I like it more than your blog because it tells me what you are thinking about. I was mulling this over when a few days later I saw Jason Calacanis’ Wired & Tired post where he called out “subscribing to Fred’s blog” as Tired but “subscribing to Fred’s del.icio.us feed” as Wired. Jason used almost the same phrase as Todd – “I prefer to read what Fred is *considering* blogging about.”

As an investor in a number of companies that do stuff with RSS (NewsGator, FeedBurner, Technorati, and Judy’s Book) and fan and active user of others (e.g. del.icio.us, FeedBlitz, SixApart) I’ve been seeing a lot of “this sucks, that’s great, that sucks, this is great” blog posts lately, but rarely do I see anyone decompose what’s actually bad or great and explaining why. Occasionally there’s some stuff from an end-user perspective (especially whenever Google rolls something out), but I’ve been surprised by the general lack of technical depth and public debate. Ok – maybe I’m reading the wrong feeds – but I’m trying.

In my last post in the Business Plan series, you discovered that my first company was a “software company.” What kind? Even in 1987, the software industry covered a wide variety of things. As I mentioned before, the Introduction section of a business plan should start with a general overview (“microcomputer software”) and then get specific (“database stuff”). By the end of this section, the market segment you are targeting (in this case – “semi-custom software”) should be defined.

Kimbal Musk just put up a blog about his brother Elon’s rocket launch that is scheduled for tomorrow on Kwajalein Atoll. I wrote about it yesterday – Kimbal has a lot more pictures up and I expect he’ll be reporting live (or hopefully simply “alive”) from the scene tomorrow.

Jim Collins has an outstanding short essay titled “Lessons From A Student Of Life” as a tribute to Peter Drucker in the 11/28/05 Business Week.

Stephen Wolfram has accomplished some remarkable things in his life, including creating Mathematica, a very successful private company called Wolfram Research, a set of amazing mathematics web sites including The Wolfram Integrator, and an overwhelming tome called A New Kind of Science which I intended to read last summer but instead just stared at it each day. Now Wolfram brings us Ringtones (well – WolframTones). If you ever wondered about the math behind ringtones, now is your chance to play around and create your own ringtones using “simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, music theory, and Mathemetica algorithms.” 

In my last post in the Business Plan series, I promised to tell you about “The Industry”. This is an important early section of a business plan that frames the overall industry the company is part of. It’s important to keep this section short (if I want to learn the history of an industry, I’ll read a history book, not a business plan.) The first part (or first few paragraphs) should describe the industry generally and then become more specific about the segment of the industry that the company is going to address.

Think back to 1992. “It’s the economy, stupid!” Amy and I watched The War Room tonight, the brilliant documentary of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and the organization behind it, spearheaded by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. Carville’s quote was actually “the economy, stupid” and was part of a haiku that Carville came up with. Change vs. more of the same The economy, stupid Don’t forget health care. Carville is an absolute genius and unbelievably entertaining as a special bonus feature. I’d team up with that dude any day just for the laughs. Stephanopoulos reminded me of Sam Seaborn which – it turns out – was intentional.

If you haven’t used Technorati for a while because of either performance or accuracy issues, try it again. Dave Sifry – Technorati’s CEO – has a post up describing their performance improvements. As a Technorati investor, I’ve given Dave and team lots of steady feedback and have watched with happiness as the performance, relevance, and accuracy has steadily improved as they’ve continued to scale up and tune their infrastructure to handle the massive number of blogs that they are indexing. Oh – and they’ve added a bunch of cool new features along the way. Dave and his team listen – if you have issues after trying it again, email me and I’ll pass it on or give them feedback directly.