If you like homemade blues music, RSS, or just want to start your day off with something musically different, check out Leland Rucker’s (an eclectic part of the NewsGator gang) new song “The RSS Blues.” Among other things, Leland is NewsGator’s online content manager and maintains the NewsGator Editor’s Choice feed.

Tom Evslin has launched his newest project – hackoff.com. It’s a blook (an online book distributed as a blog). I’ve been watching this evolve and occassionally helping with some of the tech ideas from the sidelines. In addition to being awesome content (this is the book that every entrepreneur from 1997 – 2001 wanted to write), Tom is using (as well as inventing) lots of blog / Web 2.0 publishing technology into the experience.

One of my all time favorite New Yorker cartoons is the one with two dogs sitting in front of a computer where one says to the other “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Seth just posted a new one that’s right up there – “I had my own blog for while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.”

I’m often wrong (but never in doubt) and – after spending the day at PDC and an evening with a number of the project leads for various Vista technologies – it feels like 2006 is going to be Microsoft’s year. Microsoft has been kicked around plenty the last few years by the likes of Google, Yahoo, the press, and many participants in the software industry. However, during this time, the Microsoft money machine has continued to generate cash at a prodigious rate. The home of “build it cheap and stack it high” is about to have two major project releases (Vista and Office 12) that will be relevant to over 500 million computers during the next few years. Vista, Office 12, and all the supporting technology, dev tools, platform layers, and web services equate to a massive force of change which – if history is a guide – will result in a huge amount of money flowing to Microsoft and many of the members of the Microsoft ecosystem.

I’m gearing up for the New York Marathon at the beginning of November (yes – I have a number – thanks Jack). I’m running it with Matt Blumberg (unless he decides to run for time and try to break four hours – then he’s on his own) so I’ve been logging some serious miles. This was my first week on the road since I got back from Alaska. My travel rhythm is completely bunged up and – as a result, I’ve been unable to get out of bed early enough the last two days to get my runs in before the day starts (yes – it’s dark at 5am in Atherton these days). I ended up in LA this afternoon at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference and – after sitting through the one session I was really interested in (Windows Vista: Building RSS Enabled Applications) decided to squeeze in a run before dinner.

Coming off the high of a manic Monday in the tech business, Jason and I have decided to follow our Term Sheet series with a new series scintillatingly called “Letter of Intent.” Deals like eBay / Skype (wow – what a deal – congrats to DFJ, Bessemer, Index, and especially the Skype guys) have to start somewhere, and often the first real “document” that gets negotiated after the foreplay turns serious is the infamous “letter of intent.”

Don Dodge – one of the guys at Microsoft on the Emerging Business Development Team – has a nice post up on why he loves NewsGator and how it fits into the Microsoft ecosystem.

As RSS becomes more popular, it’s inevitable that people will begin talking about security and companies will release “secure RSS related products.” Before the feeding frenzy on RSS and security begins, it’s useful to step back and think about what is already in place and available. Greg Reinacker – the founder / CTO of NewsGator – takes a crack at this in his recent post titled “RSS ‘security’”.

I’ve written in the past about the importance of APIs in today’s “web application” world. Chris Law – an early employee of Tribe – has just created a Wiki that is a directory of the publicly available API / web services. There is a corresponding blog to help report updates and changes. Many of the expected APIs are already listed, but there are some good ones that are off the beaten path such as the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Pathway (cPath) Database and NOAA’s National Weather Service.