I don’t care whether you agree or disagree with Kurt Vonnegut – he’s still an amazing and provocative writer at age 81. His essay Cold Turkey was sent to me by one of my partners. He included a Bush Approval Rating Meter in his subtle email to me.

Remember Geocities? It was one of our very successful investments (thanks Jerry Colonna and Fred Wilson). Geocities is alive (and well?) at Yahoo!. Generally speaking, pretty scary looking stuff. But – the idea is the same as personal blogging – just v1.x (where blogging is probably up to 3.x). Interestingly, Yahoo! doesn’t appear to have anything set up on the blog front yet. There have been multiple rumors floating around since last fall including a Yahoo! Korea Blog section (since I don’t know Korean, this isn’t much help to me but the dog pictures that show up when I hit the site sure are weird). Yahoo! does have an Beta RSS feed up – you can subscribe to my feed through My Yahoo and I’ll be up top next to your Reuters and AP news (lucky you). It’s definitely beta still (it doesn’t refresh all that well) – but it shows an example of how everyone gets their own printing press.

Google weighed in on the Spyware problem with a recent Google-blog on the issue. While it’s obviously self-serving based on Google’s core advertising business being competitive with the revenue model for most Spyware companies (at least those that are not in the business of also selling Anti-Spyware software), it’s thoughtful and well articulated. John Battelle decomposed it effectively. Google references Lavasoft and Spybot. Given that I was in Spyware hell last night (fighting with my home machine for three hours – I learned way more than I wanted to about my Registry), I found Lavasoft’s freeware product Ad-Aware to be the most effective thing I’ve found so far.

Ok – it’s been out of control for a while. Spam continues at epidemic proportions. Spim (IM Spam) is starting to emerge. Blam (Blog Spam) has exploded on the scene. Spyware is everywhere. Anti-Spyware – which is supposed to eliminate Spyware – is being sold as a solution by the Spyware players. Blam is the first problem that’s bugging me today – fortunately I haven’t been nailed by it yet (although I’m sure I will as a result of this post). To see real pain from the recently blammed, take a look at Jeff Nolan’s post on comment spam. Jeff’s trying a homegrown IP blacklist, which won’t work (it didn’t work for Spam very well – it won’t work for Blam). Dave Sifry from Technorati wrote a good post on various approaches to Blam. I expect this area to evolve rapidly, especially as the email security folks (Brightmail, Postini, etc.) notice the problem.

George Soros has written an incredible book called The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power. It’s actually two books in one: Part 1 is A Critical View and Part 2 is A Constructive View. Soros starts of by clearly explaining the Bush Doctrine. “First, the United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy and, second, the United States arrogates the right to preemptive action. Taken together, these two pillars support two classes of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the United States, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations, and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the Bush doctrine. This is reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” (p.11).

I had lunch today with Gary Zeff who runs Boulder Open Studios. In addition to talking about Open Studios – which is a very cool thing for the local Boulder art community – we got into a long discussion about why my generation (Generation X – born between 1965 and 1980) is so light on the philanthropic scene. My wife Amy and I have been very active with our philanthropy for the past five years. At some point, we realized that – at least in our community (Boulder, CO) there was a surprising lack of philanthropic focus. This was even more ironic since Boulder County has a population of 300,000 yet purportedly has over 1,000 individual non-profits (or – one non-profit per 300 people).

I had an epiphany today while I was running about blog content. It’s taken me a few weeks of blogging, thinking about why I care, what right I have to consume incremental bits on the Internet, and why anyone else cares (or might / should care). One of the guys that works with me has a great quote – “blogging is like giving everyone a printing press – and NOT everyone deserves a printing press.” I’ve consistently countered that by saying “everyone should have a printing press – you just need tools to decide whether or not to read what they write.”

The trailer for the new Pixar movie The Incredibles is out. While we have to wait until Nov 5, 1994 for the movie, you can get a peak of it on the Pixar (and Disney , and other) sites. Check out the teaser also for an overweight (“maybe just a salad and some rice cakes”) and somewhat frustrated Mr. Incredible. It was such a brilliant move when Steve Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas for $10 million in 1986. Now that’s guts.

I’m sitting in a technical advisory board meeting for one of my companies (Rally Software Development). I’m moblonging from my Danger – pretty cool (at least to me). We’re having a great meeting. I’ve sat in on a bunch of these over the last 10 years since I started investing in (vs. running) software companies. Often, these meetings are a complete waste of time because of some disconnect between the goal of the meeting, the group of people in the room, the facilitated process – or worse – the complete dominance of one or two people.