Blake Borgeson, in blog form

If you have been following my friendfeed, you may have noticed I decided sharing my delicious links there was overkill, so I stopped.  Instead, I’m going to try summing up a few interesting blog posts I’ve read and websites I’ve seen this past week.  I may stick to this, I may do it more often, I may stop completely.  I’ll try to keep it to things you may not have seen, and I’ll also try to stay away from really timely stuff, since I probably should have already twittered or posted that if I was going to.  I’ll also probably pull out and post separately for topics that seem worth discussion beyond just “that’s cool.”  So what’s left for this post?  Let’s find out…

+ Launched 6 weeks ago, but I just heard about it: zembly.  Coming out of Sun Microsystems, zembly is an online social simple software development platform, for creating facebook apps, meebo apps, widgets, and iphone web apps.  To explain, you can go to their website (if you can get into the beta, which is somewhere in between private and public I think), see the top apps created so far, copy one over into your account, modify it and publish it to facebook right there, on the spot.  They host the apps for you.  Its functionality is definitely limited so far, but it seems incredibly promising.  We need easier ways for more people to develop and share better software to use all over the place, and the web as a true software platform (level 3 in Marc Andreessen’s world) is a big step in that direction.

+ More VCs, and more people in general, should publish their ideas openly like this: YCombinator: Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund.  Paul Graham, point man and founder at YCombinator, writes essays about startups and whatever else he thinks is important, and they’re almost all phenomenal.  A few of my recent favorites:

• Lies we tell kids – unlearning the lies we’re told growing up is hard–are they worth the protection they provide?
• The future of web startups – web startups are easier to get going than any startups ever have been–what does that mean for their future and the future of the internet?
• How to disagree – to-the-point guide to constructive argumentation.

+ Writing a postmortem on a failed startup is incredibly valuable to the community, and I’m sure it takes guts.  They often contain excellent insights better shared than kept close, and this is no exception: Monitor110: A Post Mortem.  If you follow fred wilson or brad feld, you’ve seen this already.  If not, here’s the author’s list of the “7 deadly sins” that he believes together prevented the company’s success:

1. The lack of a single, “the buck stops here” leader until too late in the game
2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
3. Too much PR, too early
4. Too much money
5. Not close enough to the customer
6. Slow to adapt to market reality
7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board