Ah – it’s spring time and all of the writers who crank out summer mental floss books are seeing their books hit the stores now. Stuart Woods new Stone Barrington novel – Two Dollar Bill – is out. Stone is my hero – an ex-cop turned “legal problem solver” (e.g. the law firm he’s associated with gives him the weird shit they don’t want to deal with) who gets laid constantly by the female protagonists but always manages to get involved in something that messes up his relationships. In the middle of the mess that is his personal life, he takes endless rafts of shit from his ex-cop-partner Dino (who is the son-in-law of a big time mafioso and – try as hard as he can to not end up being pegged for a cop – wears black rubber shoes, white socks, and eats donuts on stake outs.) Oh – and each book has a bad guy problem that Stone and Dino get mixed up in and inevitably have to solve through lots of car chases, stake outs, explosions, kidnapings, random killings, and eventually a complex plot twist. 

While Amy and I are involved in and support a number of non-profits, I limit the number of non-profit boards I sit on at any one time to a total of three as I’ve seen way too many “passive non-profit board members.” While this might be good for the person’s resume, ego, or the non-profit’s external perception of involvement from meaningful people in the community, it’s just not my way – if I’m going to sit on a board, I take it seriously and give it the energy, time, and attention it deserves.

Google Ads have started appearing in select RSS feeds on a trial basis. This has been long anticipated, is a completely logical extension of Google AdSense, and – while some people may fight ads in RSS – it’s an inevitable part of the RSS ecosystem. Feedburner announced today that they support Google AdSense in feeds. Feedburner already supports Yahoo! Search Marketing (fka Overture Advertising) and Amazon Associates as part of their “commerce services” – it was straightforward for Feedburner to incorporate Google AdSense into this. While the publisher (e.g. you, me) needs to set up Google AdSense and be invited into their Google AdSense for RSS program, once your Google AdSense ID is approved for RSS, you will be able to immediately turn this capability on in Feedburner with minimal configuration.

Last week, NewsGator announced that they had raised a new round led by Masthead Venture Partners. This brings the total amount raised by NewsGator to over $10 million. David Beisel – an associate at Masthead who worked on the deal – has an extensive post on why they decided to make the investment. Rather than repeat what David said here, check out his post on why he likes Masthead’s NewsGator investment.

A few months ago I bitched about my experience with the TSA at the San Jose Airport. Today, I got to see a picture of two penguins being ushered through security by the TSA folks at DIA. Brilliant.

Last summer, I decided to read all of Stephen Frey’s books. Most were good, a few were not so good, but it was clear that Frey was becoming a better mental floss writer with every book. His books are about Wall Street, power, intrigue, finance, and most recently private equity. As a managing director at a private equity firm, he speaks from experience. Thanks to Stephanie Miller from Return Path who sent me a copy of Frey’s latest book, The Chairman, as a gift. I thought it was his best one yet and a great start to the “summer reading extravaganza” that’s in front of me.

I’m thrilled excited about the progress StillSecure has been making. Raj Bhargava – the CEO – and I have done five companies together in the last decade (going back to our first one – NetGenesis) and I love working with the guy. StillSecure had an awesome year last year, but Raj saw an opportunity to meaningfully expand StillSecure’s footprint by building out a “security management platform”, rather than a series of “security point solution products.” StillSecure is starting from a position of having several of the best and hottest products in the segments they play in, so expanding the footprint to be more of a platform is a logical step.

Feedburner announced a partnership with 20six to incorporate Feedburner’s feed statistics and syndication capabilities for the 20six blogging community. This will immediately add an additional 50,000 feeds to Feedburner’s “feeds under management” and is the first implementation of the Feedburner partner API. I think that one of the key drivers of success these days with web-based services is to quickly build out a robust published API to generate real partner activity – John Zagula and Rich Tong at Ignition Partners explain this as part of the “platform play” that they successfully executed at Microsoft as well as other companies they’ve been involved in. It’s the right metaphor and this is a first visible step in that strategy.

I miss my wife Amy – she’s been in Paris since mid-March learning French, enjoying the Parisian lifestyle (she’s was born in Paris in another life), and wandering around one of the best spring time cities in the world. Oh – and she’s eating amazing meals – she put up a detailed post on two of them as well as her top 10 list – especially aimed at foodies and people who like to live vicariously. Yum.