Marie Alexander, the CEO of Quova (our Internet geolocation company), was part of a USA Today article from a Churchill Club panel including Marc Andreesen (Opsware, Netscape), John Chambers (Cisco), Steve Jurvetson (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), Ed Zander (Motorola, Sun), and John Thompson (Symantec, IBM). It was illustrious company and Marie nicely held her own. All the panelists were optimistic about the future of the Internet (Chambers: “You haven’t seen anything yet”).

Amy and I had dinner at Thalassa in Tribeca with Fred Wilson, Joanne Wilson, Matt Blumberg and his wife Mariquita. No – we didn’t spend the whole night talking about blogs, but we did connect the dots on a bunch of people from Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (Fred, Mariquita, and I went to MIT, Fred and Joanne met there when they were sophomores, and Amy dated a guy in the poker ring,and Matt’s dad was an MIT grad).

I spent a couple of hours hanging out with Jeff Jarvis today. I was originally introduced to Jeff by Fred Wilson a few weeks ago and have been enjoying his blog ever since. My goal for my meeting with Jeff was pretty simple – I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the Blogsphere (although this phrase appears to have been hijacked, so I guess I’ll have to call it something else). Jeff’s been a media guy for a long time and has a widely read blog. As a software / tools / data guy rather than a media / advertising guy, the more smart folks I talk to, the more of a clue I get.

I was in Grand Central Station yesterday admiring the shiny food court (I hadn’t been there since leaving town on 9/11). I bought a decaf latte at the Italian coffee place in the middle (I can’t remember the name). My cup came wrapped with a coffee sleeve with an ad on it that said “Starch Away – Blocks Carbs by Reducing Calories from Starchy Foods!” I turned to my wife Amy and said – “look at this – can people be this stupid?”

World’s Leading Java Developer’s Portal Chooses GeoPoint’s Patented Technology MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 1 /PRNewswire/ — Quova, Inc., the world’s leading provider and developer of Web geography services and technologies, today announced that TheServerSide.com, the world’s largest community for enterprise Java architects and developers, has chosen Quova’s patented GeoPoint to provide state and country-level geolocation for its website, which serves over 500,000 unique visitors per month. TheServerSide.com provides news, feature articles, product reviews, case studies and a discussion forum for Java software developers worldwide, and is widely considered the voice of the Java development community. The site has deployed GeoPoint to analyze geographic traffic patterns and detect users operating under aliases, as well as automatically pre-populating the country and state dropdowns on the site’s registration page. TheServerSide is also an advertising business, and has ambitious plans to leverage GeoPoint to provide innovative online marketing solutions to vendors of enterprise tools and services.

A good friend of mine – Jenny Lawton – just started a blog called As Yet Unpublished. Jenny is a retired technology executive and fanatical reader (and writer) who decided a few years ago to buy a bookstore in Connecticut called Just Books. Given her entrepreneurial compulsions – one store wasn’t enough – so now she has two. I get all of my books (and many book suggestions) from Jenny. I expect her book reviews to be prolific, varied, and entertaining. If you are a reader, this is a blog for you.

The NY Times redeems itself (after the lousy blogging article) with And for His Next Feat, a Billionaire Sets Sights on Bush – a good profile on George Soros. I have been fascinated with Soros for a while and found his recent book The Bubble of American Supremacy very thought provoking. Soros’s activity and character has been aggressively attacked by the Republican National Committee which confirms that he’s risen about the noise level.

The New York Times article on blogging (5/27) titled “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops” is predictably shallow. Remember 1994 – 1995 and the NYT publishes an article a day on Al Gore’s Information Superhighway until it reaches the point even my mother asks me about it (“Brad, when did they stop publishing news in the newspaper?”). My philosopher wife’s comment on the article was, with disgust, “I’m tired of the word addiction being diluted to mean something that you really like to do – addiction has an element of compulsion, not simply a strong preference for the activity.”

Or New Jack City as my partner Rex calls it. My wife Amy and I had a fabulous day. We spent the morning with Theresa Chong, an artist who Amy went to high school in Alaska with. While hanging out in Teresa’s studio, Amy noticed The Death Artist by Jonathan Santlofer. It turns out that Jonathan’s studio is adjacent to Teresa’s and he was there working on his third book (he proudly showed us the galley proof of Color Blind, his second book). Only in Gotham – two hours, full immersion with two artists – one of which is also a best selling author who Amy randomly read recently.