I spent a little time tonight tracking down blogs from Seattle area Venture Captialists and I’ve posted the list as an OPML file suitable for importing in to at least some RSS readers. At this point, most (or is it all) of the blogs are for VCs at Ignition Partners since they actually have links from their site bios. Their might be VC bloggers at some of the other area firms, but its going to take a bit more work to track them down.

As a half-step in that direction, NW Venture Voice is a group blog which includes contributions by Martin Tobias, John Zagula and Rich Tong of Ignition, along with Kevin Cable of Cascadia Capital and Dave Chen of Olympic Venture Partners (OVP).

John and Rich (no, we aren’t on a first name basis, I’m just too lazy to type their last names again) also have a group blog called Geekfishing.

At this point, I haven’t actually done much more than add the feeds for these blogs to my aggregator, so some or all of them could suck. I’m planning on updating the list as I have the time. I’ll add new blogs I find and will plan to sort any sucky blogs into an innocuously named sub heading called “also of possible interest,” so as not to offend anyone.

Please let me know if you have any additions.

Page 3 – Model Propaganda: The Sun, The Girls, The Truth

It’s popular among left-leaning Americans who fancy themselves intellectuals to lament the stupidity of the “average” American.

I’m sure they’d feel much better in England, where some of the girls who appear bare breasted on the third page of finer news tabloids have decided to break their long silence, and share their rather right-wing views via thoughtful comments on current events.

via BoingBoing

Nelson’s Weblog: tech / bad / msieBugs

Nelson lists his top 3 MSIE bugs and I thought I’d pitch in, though I just have one:

MSIE Can’t print for shit!! It chops off text off the right size of pages that it can flow properly in narrow brower window. If I try to get around that little problem by printing to an 11×17 sheet, it will insist on putting footer text on a second page, even though there is 8 inches of whitespace at the bottom of the first page. It will also arbitrarily truncate long pages for no reason at ~4 sheets of paper. It’s been this way for a couple of years now.

Boing Boing: Formaldehyde find

“the lot includes 48 pickled organisms of an unknown vintage”

The really great thing about formaldehyde is that vintage doesn’t really matter.

Back when news first surfaced about Microsoft’s plans for creating a “trusted platform” which effectively provided DRM support at the hardware level, I wrote somewhere, probably slashdot, that such a thing was doomed to fail because any time you try to make something people want to do difficult, you create a black market that seeks to satisfy their demand. When that black market could potentially amount to a significant portion of the market for consumer PCs, there is a lot of money at stake, enough that it could become a big business to buck Microsoft and any hardware partners it managed to line up, like Intel and AMD. My guess was that this would be just the sort of thing that China could exploit to give its hardware industry a big boost (they already have a state-sponsored x86 clone chip, though it isn’t exactly fast, yet.)

I’d say that this story provides a pretty strong endorsement of my thesis:

It was doomed to fail

Boing Boing: Super-correcting DVD players make pirated discs watchable

Jiangsu Shinco Electronic Group is a Chinese company that manufactures “super-correcting” DVD players that automatically correct for the low quality of pirated DVD discs (though the article doesn’t say whether this corrects for bad pressing or bad recordings, I suspect it’s the former). They get some of their parts from Sony!

In this great clip from the Daily Show Jon looks at how the repetition of “talking points” shapes public perception of candidates.”

They illustrate how GOP spokespeople all repeat the same little sound bites, reinforcing the concept they’ve been instructed to convey. This isn’t anything new, which, I guess is why it takes a cable comedy show to help remind us that “these people are spewing nothing but propaganda,,” while the broadcast news and print media just pass on the BS without interpretation or context.