I hate buzzwords.  They make me nauseous.  I just got an email to the link of The Office 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast which includes such beauties as search moptimization, wombagging, friendiligence, converstations, social mediation, we-bargaining, greenlashing, shamsparency, credlining, facelifting, blog groveling, world war 2.0, microtubing, and lipsmacking.  I'm going to go lipsmack about buzzwords after I go vomit in my carbon neutral bathroom.  (Thanks Greg.)

If you are a VC firm looking for a summer intern, or an MBA looking for a VC summer internship, Dan Primack and PEHub have put launched their 5th Annual Internship Rodeo.   We regularly get inbound emails asking how to land a job in venture capital.  If you have ever sent me a note like that or are looking for a job, this is one of the best ways to get in the mix.

There are currently 90 listings from around the world (mostly in the US) for summer internships.  If you are a VC or private equity firm that wants to get a listing up, email Dan Primack before the end of the week and he'll get you listed.  If you are an MBA and are looking for a summer job, sign up on the PE Hub MBA Forum.

There have been plenty of posts about how to get a job in the VC business.  I continue to think that the best one is from my partner Seth Levine titled How to become a venture capitalist.   Seth can now update this with #6 - sign up for the PE Hub MBA Forum and join the internship rodeo.  Thanks Dan, PE Hub, and Thomson for putting this together.  And - no - we aren't looking for a summer intern, but plenty of other folks are.

When 369 of something suddenly appears, I get excited about the opportunities to do something with it.  When I noticed the 370th new ad network, I realized there were probably a few opportunities to do some interesting things across them.  AdReady - a company I made an investment in a year ago - is seriously kicking ass (if you do any display advertising on Google, Yahoo/RightMedia, or AOL go take a look at them) and their early success reinforced this idea to me.

While I'll talk more about a new investment we've made in this area in a few weeks (yeah - that's what real journalists call "the tease" or something like that), when I was at Clickable a few weeks ago (not an investment of mine, but a really interesting one by Union Square Ventures and Pequot with the tagline "online advertising made simple") we were discussing the challenges of integrating with some of the existing ad networks through their weak to non-existent APIs.

As a horizontal thinker, the API is my friend.  APIs are hard and often take a long time to get right.  Anyone that has integrated with someone else's web service knows there are a whole series of things that "should" be part of the next version of the API.  Frustration abounds and the rationalization of "we'll do this thing that will massively drive user adoption and our services utility when company X finally puts it in their API."

To that, I say "manually automate your API."  Figure out what you want the workflow to be, hire a person, and have them do whatever the API should do, but do it by simply running the other system.  Way back in the land of DOS there used to be neat little script programs (anyone remember the Peter Norton, Paul Mace, or Dan Bricklin tools that did this) that automated your keystrokes.  Your manual API person can do the same thing today with the contemporary versions of these keystroke automation programs. 

By manually automating your API - or creating a manual version of the API you wished the other guy's web service had - you can immediately drive more value to your users while prototyping - with precision - what the integration points between the two systems need to be.  Yeah - you could get a developer to write a bunch of screen scraping code, but you don't have any extra developers laying around, plus it'll break in six days anyway when the other service does a new release.  Just hire a young smart person and give him the mission of figuring out how the puzzle pieces fit together.

As snowstorm #2 in Boulder the last week starts to diminish, I thought I'd offer up a picture of what it looks like in Homer, Alaska right now (at 10:30am Homer time.)

That dark stuff on the bottom 10% of the picture is land.  That lighter dark stuff at in the middle of the picture is the ocean.  The top half of the picture is probably dark, fog, and clouds.  That little dark stretch of land going to the left across the bottom of the picture is the Homer Spit.

Dark.

I went for a 5 mile run on the Boulder Creek Path this morning at 7:30am.  No one was out, the snow was coming down hard, and there was plenty of "cushion" (e.g. snow) on the ground.  It was stunning.  And light.

One of the hallmarks of a great entrepreneur is knowing what you suck at.  I suck at plenty of things - Paul Berberian's blog The Name Game reminded me of one of them - naming things.

I was an investor in Paul's last company - Raindance Communications - which went through five names to get there (Intellistat Media Research, Vstream, Evoke, Evoke Software, and finally Raindance Communications.)  At some point I suggested we change the name to Ekove (read Paul's story to learn why) but I was over-ruled - or rather, ignored.  Paul ends his story with the line "My Advice - don't do what I did" which should always be an enticement to read it.

My legacy of names for companies is long and troubled.  It starts back at the beginning with the name of my first real company - Feld Technologies.  Very creative.  My dad was proud of me, but I learned rule #7341 - don't name your company after yourself.

After moving to Boulder, I co-founded a company with Andrew Currie and Brian Makare.  The business created the first known (at least to me) email service providers.  At the time (1995) none of us knew what an email service provider was.  We struggled to name the company.  Over beers one night I asked "so - what do we do?"  One of Andrew or Brian (I can't remember) annoyingly looked over at me and said "We publish email."  Hence - the name of the company - Email Publishing.

Another company that I helped start at the time was an attempt to create one of the early consolidated web hosting companies.  At the time there were lots of companies doing web hosting with loads of creative names that typically included the words "web" or "communication" or "network" somewhere in their names.  We named our business "Web Hosting Organization" and then shortened it to WHO, which caused much amusement (and confusion) in the ensuing legal documents we used to acquire other companies.

Around 1999 I gave up naming things.  I realized that virtually every company I invested in was going through name changes and the marketing people were gleefully spending investor money "rebranding."  I put this in the "what a fucking waste" category and started being more aggressive about my current mantra - "pick a name and stick to it, but please don't ask me for my opinion on it."

Oh - and the name of this blog fits in that category also.  Feld Thoughts?  C'mon...  But I'm not changing it.