Very sweet – nice job Dave and team. Great new UI, tags – tags – tags, advanced search, better watchlists, RSS feeds from lots of stuff, new indexing, deduping of results, link sidebar, tighter search, and lots more. Go play and give the Technorati crew feedback so they can keep improving it.

Over the weekend, I wrote about the top 10 bathrooms in the world according to Wallpaper* magazine. A similarly obsessed reader pointed me to Urinal.net’s list of the top 100 urinals in the world. Both of the lists left off my personal favorite, which until this point has remained incognito. Pictures follow: In addition, the toilet paper has the following Non-Disclosure Agreement printed on it (which is – like many non-disclosure agreements – worth the paper it’s printed on.)

I’ve been trying to figure out how to invest in Podcasting. I have a bunch of exposure to it via my investments in FeedBurner and NewsGator (hint – coming soon – maybe even this week). However, I don’t listen to Podcasts much because I’m a reader, I’ve never been a talk radio guy, and I couldn’t figure out when to listen to them. Until recently, I was a running purist – no music on my runs (I found my iPod too bulky and I thought I should just enjoy nature.) Well – on a long run – after about an hour – I’ve had enough of nature, all the random thoughts have cycled through my brain, and I’m ready for some music (or talk radio). So – I’ve started running with my iPod Shuffle recently (quickly becoming an indispensable running tool). I started with music, but figured I’d try listening to Podcasts to try to understand both the phenomenon and the dynamic.

When Jason and I last wrote about term sheets, Jack was still trying to save the world (surprise – he did) and we dealt with a meaty and important issue – vesting. For completeness (and because all good “series” deserve to be finished off), we’re tackling the terms that rarely matter in the next couple of posts. Today we’re starting with Information Rights and Registration Rights. You might ask, “If these terms rarely matter, why bother?” Well – you’ll end up having to deal with them in a VC term sheet, so you might as well (a) be exposed to them and (b) hear that they don’t matter much. Of course, from a VC perspective, “doesn’t matter much” means “Mr. Entrepreneur, please don’t pay much attention to these terms – just accept them as is.” Specifically, if one of these terms is being hotly negotiated by an investor or company, that time (and lawyer money) is most likely being wasted.

My traveling – which was pretty intense the past few months – has slowed down. Correspondingly, my reading has picked up again. Not surprisingly I’ve got a huge pile of books stacked up (and now in boxes about to be shipped to Alaska). I’ve read three great books in a row – all covering different things – that I thought I’d share with you. First up is The Professor, The Banker, and the Suicide King. This is the incredible story of Andy Beal – a Texas billionaire (owner of Beal Bank) – who is obsessed with beating the best poker players in the world at their game. I’ve been playing a monthly-or-so Texas Hold’em tournament style game with some of my Colorado CEO/CTO friends for the past eighteen months. We shifted to tournament style because there was such a wide range in betting tolerances and – as a result – bluffing didn’t work (someone was always willing to toss in $X just to see what you had). Beal’s strategy was to shift the poker greats outside of their financial comfort zone which he did by upping the games ultimately to $100,000 – $200,000 Texas Hold’em where there was $40 million on the table. The book is extraordinarily well written and engrossing – about the characters involved, the actual games played, and the overall super-high-stakes poker scene. A must read if you are into the current poker craze.

On my run this morning I was grooving to the Positively 10th Street podcast from the Wilson family. Josh and Emily were psyched it was summer, Josh was farting, and Fred and Emily started riffing on “School’s Out for the Summer.” School’s actually on for me in the summer. Amy and I are about to head up to Alaska where I dramatically change my rhythm for a couple of months. I’m still working full time – probably more effective then usual – since I eliminate face to face meetings (especially the random ones), eliminate travel, and compress stuff down to things that matter. But – the pace changes.

I love a good bathroom. When I look at office space, the bathroom is one of the first places I check out, as it can tell you all kinds of things about the place you are at. I’ve been trying for over five years to get a bathroom at MIT named after me in exchange for a financial donation (some people name buildings – my aspirations are much more (im)modest.)

Fred Wilson calls it EZ Pass for Email. It’s the best metaphor for what Return Path’s Bonded Sender Program does and Matt Blumberg – the CEO of Return Path – explains it very clearly on his blog. We had high hopes for Bonded Sender when we acquired it from IronPort Systems in April of 2005. Now that we’ve had several months of experience with Bonded Sender, our expectations – based on what we are seeing – have been exceeded. 

The Paris Hilton Carl’s Jr. ad has gotten plenty of play this month. But the much better ad is Accolo’s Paris Hilton Spoof Ad.