Finally- not only can I get wifi access at Peet’s Coffee now, but it’s actually free - you get a code from the register for 2 hours of free access. Neat stuff. Yet another reason to go to Peet’s (where available of course) instead of Starbucks…

Wow, planning a trip to Denver and checking an Avis corporate discount rate vs. Hotwire, $100 more for 4 days! We ended up getting Avis through the Hotwire process — unreal! Sometimes I really wonder about this travel stuff… car rentals seem very expensive this summer.

No wonder things are not going well at Yahoo! I just experienced a Yahoo! outage across multiple business unit sites, both consumer and business-focused — at least 10 minutes. I also checked via my Blackberry so it wasn’t just my ISP or computer…

Ouch. DDos?

I have been trying to get to Yahoo.com but have been getting a network timeout… server taking too long to respond. Ouch, as if Yahoo! didn’t have enough problems… what’s going on?

Thought this was an interesting post from LeadCritic about exclusive leads.

Of course, I am not spending all my time thinking about lead generation topics, but from time to time I do like to revisit these fun things. I don’t have much time to blog these days - things are very very busy right now, so apologies to all with whom I’ve not been in touch as frequently. More news will be forthcoming soon!

Sprint truly sucks. Now for some reason my bill suddenly went from $75 or so to about $186. Wow, that’s kind of nuts considering at the same time my usage went DOWN to close to zero since I’m actually now using Blackberry service from AT&T. The most amazing part is (I can’t believe it’s true but…) I’ve been a Sprint customer since 1997. Yikes! That and 25c will get you 6 minutes of parking in San Francisco. Cheers!

I heard news from someone today that LinkedIn is about to announce that it is being acquired… but I have been unable to find any information out from a source closer to the company currently. I’ve asked a few people who work there now, but nothing all around. So I have no clue if this is a reliable rumor. But I guess if Adify is worth $300mm then LinkedIn must be worth A LOT.

Update: Matt Marshall has a story about this in Venture Beat this morning.

Just got back from 2 1/2 weeks in Fiji. Wow. What amazing, beautiful people we met there - the Fijian people are truly something special!

Internet service was pretty good where we were for the most part - so the email deluge isn’t too bad; though there are a bunch of deferred items for me to catch up on. The main things I didn’t read while I was away were all the gossip columns, Techcrunch and so on… and I didn’t really miss them that much to be honest. Got a lot to do now though - March month-end! Back to work!!

I am not drinking a lot of coffee, funnily enough - but I’ve happened to go to three Peet’s Coffee’s today. I stopped off at the one in San Mateo (next to Whole Foods), then happened to go to the one on University Ave in Palo Alto to use the wifi (which didn’t work) and now am at the one on Castro Street in Mountain View. The nice thing about the one here is that the wifi- as supplied by Google via Meraki Networks, actually works pretty well. I also saw Josh Elman here (former LinkedIn colleague) randomly.

Oh and I’m a stockholder in Peet’s … fun stuff.

comScore and Sears came in for a bit of criticism for this “community installation” of the comScore panel tool - by most reports it seems pretty deceptive. comScore has built an amazing business off of offering one thing (web accelerator software in the early days) and then of course using the data they collect to track users and provide research to companies. I wonder if these users know they have hundreds of gigabytes of data on each of them in exchange for the benefits they have received. Ah, they probably don’t care, consent aside Ben.

More creative misspelling perhaps? Check out the Techcrunch ad for “Pansonsonic HDTVs”.

I am starting a new company with a cofounder, and will thus be going dark on this blog for a while, mostly because I just have so much less time. Look for me to start a new company blog soon though; I’ll post news of that here when it’s ready. For now we’re very much in development mode!

If closed is the new open, then I guess I can see that small is the new big.

I ran my first timed track mile on the 23rd. It was fun: not ever having run a timed mile before on the track and of course not yet being in great shape, I ran out a bit too quickly doing the first lap in 1:20. Anyway, I got quite tired and ran the rest of it a lot more slowly! My time was 06:35 … so I have 11 and a bit months to shave off just over one and a half minutes!

My brother-in-law gave my wife and I a Nintendo Wii for Christmas yesterday! Totally unexpected; he got it a while ago by standing in line at Target at 6am in Phoenix, AZ to be the 74th out of 125 people that got one of them apparently. It’s a very fun system… we may have to get one for the new office in 2008 (location still TBD… stay tuned dear readers, all 75 to 120 of you!).

I have a couple of domain names that I am open to selling:

analystblog.com

wherewire.com

Analystblog gets about 400 or so uniques per month, and wherewire.com sees over 7000 according to the records I have from Sedo.com — would appear to have a bit of value for someone looking for an interesting domain. If you are interested, drop me an email with your price at rob at leathern.com.

Thanks, Greg, for pointing me to this post from Murthy Nukala, CEO of Adchemy, about company values. Murthy is one of the savvier minds in online advertising, and I always enjoy immensely our conversations. Building a company is about so much more than just getting the products right or even getting the smartest people on board, it’s about motivation, culture and being able to really act and think like a team without falling into the “groupthink” trap. There are many examples out there of getting it horribly wrong, or getting it right and then letting it fall apart. Taking some time to think about what your personal and professional values are is well worth it. In my opinion, weaving those into the framework of the organization you are building is essential.

I have given myself 12 months to run a marathon (preferably attached to a fundraising effort) as well as to run a mile in under 5 minutes. I still have to come up with a time that will make the marathon goal a bigger challenge, though of course just finishing a marathon is a big achievement in itself. I’ve never run more than 10 miles… but I find myself enjoying running a lot more than I used to. Perhaps it’s the music and the GPS/heart-rate monitor gadgetry.

I was reading a bit about training methods, and keeping your target heart-rate in a very narrow zone. So when I ran today, for the first time I really paid close attention to varying my pace in order to keep the heart rate fairly steady. Interesting - lots more research for me to do here. Today was 5.47 miles at a relatively slow 9:13 per mile, or 50:27. I hadn’t had any chance to run for the past week while I was out of town, so it felt pretty good!

I recall with fondness doing a lot of advertising on AOL in 2004-2005. AOL placed a lot of additional creative and technical restrictions on advertisers. One of the most annoying of these not just on AOL but on a variety of platforms was with respect to the version of Flash that Flash ads were published in. It caused endless strain because while everywhere else pretty much accepted Flash 6, AOL still required ads to be in Flash 5 format. Pain. Some things just weren’t possible in earlier versions, or when you had painstakingly had your designers make sure the ad was under 30kb in size, doing it in the older version now made it > 30kb etc. etc. You get the idea.

 I was reminded of this when I saw the message below on Facebook’s ad platform. This is just for the display of the dashboard graphic, mind you, that shows you clicks and fans and so on (in general I find 90% of these types of dashboards useless, but that’s a topic for a different, much longer conversation). This is certainly not requiring me to change the Flash version of all of my ads and is really a minor annoyance, but seriously, you’re making me upgrade from Flash 9.0.45 to 9.0.47? Sheesh, what’s up with that?!