Mark Pincus has finally put up a blog (ok – he had one at Blogger – but it’s just his bio.) Mark’s been a successful entrepreneur for a number of years. Mark’s latest company – Tribe – is squarely in the middle of all the Web 2.0 stuff going on. Mark has a history of successful companies – we were investors in two of them (Freeloader – bought by Individual in 1996 and SupportSoft – currently public.) 

I heard on NPR today during their series this week on income taxes that according to IRS calculations, American’s spend 6.6 billion hours doing their taxes each year. We apparently also waste 6.6 billion gallons of gas annually while waiting in traffic, there is a 6.6 billion pound gap in AIDS funding, mail volume dropped by 6.6 million pieces in the month following the terrorist attacks in 2001, and the Pak Mun Dam cost 6.6 billion Baht (actually 6.507 billion, but the budget was 6.6 billion.)

I created some custom M&M’s for Amy and surprised her with them when I was in Paris a week ago. While they aren’t cheap, they were worth it (you get to choose your own colors and two different messages of two lines by eight letters.) In my continued effort to spread romance throughout the world, I highly recommend this as a gift from a chocolate lover to his/her significant other that is also a chocolate lover.

I’ve gotten plenty of humorous feedback on my post about abolishing the words traction, space, and thrilling from my vocabulary. Someone asked why I was so mean to words – although this was someone who prefaces each major point he makes with “to tell you the truth” (no, please don’t tell me the truth – lie to me.) The best note so far was from Ryan Sabga, the CEO of RideonTime.com who donated a really cool scooter to the Boulder Philharmonic Fundraiser we had on Saturday. He said:

Today is my periodic Fred Wilson blog love fest. Fred’s characterization of the Internet Axis of Evil, which currently consists of Phishing, Click Fraud, DNS Hacking, Comment Spam/Link Spam, Adware/Spyware, Spam, and Viruses is awesome. In sympathy with Fred and in an effort to help reign down terror on these evil fuckers, I’ve created a new category in my blog called Internet Axis of Evil. As I a went through my daily early morning ritual of feeding the dogs, drinking some tea, reading various papers on line, and deleting trackback spam (who really responds to “poor credit loans” and “military cash loans”) I came across an article in the Denver Post on Scott Richter, the CEO of the spam firm OptInRealBig.com. Scott’s making a ton of money spamming people ($19.6m in revenue in 2004; Scott took down $1.2m last year), but the company filed for bankruptcy to help protect itself against a variety of law suits, including one from Microsoft / Hotmail. C’mon guys, the company is “absolutely profitable” (Scott’s dad and lawyer Steven’s words), but y’all go bankrupt to protect against lawsuits – could it be that you are actually concerned that the lawsuits are legit?

Fred – I’ll see you and raise you two. Fred Wilson had a delightful post on the word “traction” today as part of his VC Cliche of the Week series. In it, Fred suggests that he’d like to hear the word traction used less in our business. I’ll go a step further. I’ll never mention the word traction again. It has become so overused as to mean nothing (since it’s used to refer to everything and is a placeholder for “we are making progress, whatever the hell progress is.”)

As I watched 24 last night, I kept thinking to myself “Why the fuck does Jack have his cell phone ringer on – hasn’t he ever heard of vibrate?” immediately after his cell phone rang but right before he got shot at because the bad guys now knew where he was. I had a parallel thought this morning – “Why do we make all this term sheet stuff so long, verbose, and tedious.” The answer – word processers. If we had to type all this crap on a typewriter (or write it out by hand) it’d be a lot shorter. In both cases, technology is working against us. But – then again, we wouldn’t have blogs (and I can hear a few of you (and I know who you are) saying “and that would be a bad thing because?”)

Fred Wilson calls it one of the members of the Internet Axis of Evil. You know it as spam. Several of our companies (Return Path and Postini) are hard at work every day eliminating it from our inboxes. Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Return Path made a pre-announcement on his blog today about Return Path’s acquisition of the Bonded Sender Program from IronPort. While this is huge weapon in Return Path’s arsenal, it’s also another big step forward in the war on spam. Rather than repeat what Matt said, I’ll simply refer you to his excellent post on why this matters and how it works.

I live in the mountains outside of Boulder. Once a year, every spring, for the last 10 years (since I moved here in 1995), I get snowed in for one to four days (the four day snow in included complete loss of power for three days, no water (since everything in our house is electric), no heat (electric), and no fridge / freezer (fortunately we had tons of snow to serve as our natural icebox.)