Not those Broncos, these Broncos - the Santa Clara University Women’s Soccer team, who defeated North Carolina 1-0 last weekend.

For those of you who don’t follow women’s college soccer, the North Carolina Tar Heels are the soccer equivalent of John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins - back to back. In the previous 22 years of the NCAA tournament; the Tar Heels have won 17 championships, have an overall record of 81-5, and have played the final weekend of every year. Every year except this one, because the Broncos knocked off the undefeated #1 Tar Heels in the round of 16.

I began following the Broncos in the mid-90’s, courtesy of my friend and colleague Mike Wooding. At the time, the Broncos were one of the best and most entertaining teams in college women’s soccer. Unfortunately, the Tar Heels were their post season nemesis - eliminating the Broncos in 95, 96 and 97. So it was fitting that the Broncos defeated the Tar Heels to win their first championship in 2001.

Congratulations to the Broncos and good luck in the quarter-finals.

Another thought about the role of RSS in the Enterprise.

Part of effective time management is differentiating between the important and urgent, the important not urgent, the urgent not important and the neither important nor urgent. Email tends to make every communication seem both important and urgent. How much more productive would you be if your company used RSS for all Important not Urgent communication?

I used to integrate my RSS and email archives with NewsGator. I didn’t understand one of the core differences between email and RSS. When you delete an email it is gone forever. But when you delete an RSS item, you’ve only deleted your local copy.

Saving RSS items is not an effective information management strategy. When you save an item, your folder hierarchy is your metadata. But when you link to an item from your weblog, then your entire post is metadata.

When you save RSS to your hard drive, you’re on your own for search and retrieval. But when you save to your weblog, every other blogger is a potential colleague. If an item is truly significant, then you will have company in linking to it.

It was an epiphany when I realized that I didn’t need to archive RSS. Link analysis and internet search progress faster than local metadata and desktop search.

With a 6-3 record at the bye week, I give the MasterMind a solid B+ for the season. I have never doubted the MasterMind’s ability as an offensive coordinator and a head coach. But Denver’s record since John Elway’s retirement has been a disappointment. And much of that disappointment comes via the MasterMind.s personnel decisions.

The big personnel news for this season was the trade of Clinton Portis for Champ Bailey. Portis was made expendible by Denver’s ability to develop quality running backs with mid-round draft picks. I had little doubt that Denver could find an adequate replacement for Portis. And the addition of Bailey has stabilized the secondary. But I still have doubts about the salary cap implications of Bailey’s $63 Million contract.

The Denver defense has withstood the loss of John Mobley to a neck injury and Ian Gold to free agency this off season. Although defense is not the MasterMind’s strong suit, I believe that most of this year’s defensive problems are a result of Trevor Pryce’s injury. So full marks to the MasterMind on this side of the ball.

Ashley Lelie is finally showing signs of becoming a quality receiver. The MasterMind’s inability to adequately replace Sharp and McCaffery has been a concern - especially since receiver is probably the easiest skill position to develop. And Plummer still lacks the mental maturity needed by a post season QB. A downcheck for the MasterMind’s receiver developement woes and inability to speed the maturation of Plummer.

Finally, the team seemed unprepared for the Cincinati game. I place that loss at the feet of the MasterMind. Perhaps he deserves better than a B+. He has the remainder of the year to show it.

I think that the inner nature of RSS is that it is like email except:

• Pull not Push
• Anonymous Broadcast not Targeted Narrowcast
• Maintains History (most recent facets of a permanent store)

So it perturbs me to see the Enterprise RSS weblog tout several RSS ideas that strike me as better suited for email. If a feed is targeted for an individual, then the only advantage that RSS has over email is that it is pull not push. And I submit that is not a compelling advantage - especially within the enterprise.

Enterprise RSS is better suited for feeds that are of interest to groups not individuals. Where the ease of subscription reduces the overhead associated with people who want to be cc’ed on everything. And where the history implicit within an RSS feed becomes a tool to bring newcomers up to speed.

Instead of a Lead Generation feed targeted at an individual, how about a Sales Status feed for the team. Have sales discuss what is and isn’t working at accounts. And have marketing monitor, correct, and reinforce marketing messages.

Or how about an system deployment feed where professional services covers how customers are using the system, what they’re integrating to and how they’re doing the integration. Let sales and marketing listen in on what the product is doing in the real world. And let product marketing hear from the front lines.

Instead of a report/data mining feed for an individual, how about a report/data mining feed for an expert where others are allowed to eavesdrop. Institutionalize a mentality where the team learns from the best.

RSS is too often viewed as an alternative to email. That under estimates the worth of email and discounts the relationship of RSS to a permanent store. RSS is not just the most current message. It’s also a pointer back to a historical store of knowledge. It’s much easier to transfer knowledge by reviewing a weblog than by forwarding email.

Consider scenarios where you want periodic monitoring from one group and close interaction from another (forest - trees). In some of the situations that I listed above, you might not want marketing involved day to day. But a once or twice a month review would be valuable.

I’ve been thinking about the process of innovation for the past month (since Matthew Homann posted his request for an Innovation Assistant). Some of my current thinking on how innovation goes wrong:

Lack of Clarity

Ideas die from confusion about what they really accomplish. Sometimes it is because we don’t understand what is new and unique and sometimes it is because we are unable to articulate what is new and unique. Because it is easy to dismiss what is new, it is important to uncover the inner nature of an idea before pronouncing judgement.

Lack of Applicability

Technology is littered with solutions in search of a problem. Ideas die when we don’t understand the who, how, and how much of how they apply to the real world. Unfortunately, there is a big difference between how we think the world works and how it really works.

Lack of a Prototype

Whether it’s a paper prototype or something more substantial, seeing is believing. We often need a more concrete representation of the idea in action before we can accept it.

And of course, sometimes the ideas are just bad.

Steve Kirks reports that Userland is actively developing some countermeasures to the spam problem. Been there, done that. Here’s what is included in my current package:

Link Moderation

Good idea, bad result. I thought that moderating links rather than comments would allow comment threads to progress while preventing spam. Unfortunately, the spam-master didn’t seem to care about not getting links.

Link Blacklist

I reject comments that link to sites on my blacklist. This has been very effective, but it requires periodic blacklist maintenance (I really need to add support for the MT-Blacklist blacklist).

Link counts

I reject comments with more than three links. This has been in place for the past week. I haven’t had any comment spam in that time, but I don’t know whether the blacklist or the link count is responsible.

Ideas that I discarded after studying my log files:

IP Blacklist

My comment spam came from dynamically allocated ISP addresses. I wasn’t willing to blacklist the entire network block.

Duplicate Rejection

My comment spam had minor changes from spam to spam. It was obvious to the eye that they had the same source, but the primary point of similarity was the sites they linked to.

IP Throttle

My comment spam came from multiple sources in rotation. While I might be getting one per minute, it could be as much as 20 or 30 minutes between spam from an individual IP address.

Captcha

My comment spam appeared to be manually submitted. A weblog page would be retrieved, then the comment form, and finally the comment would be submitted (rather than directly submitting to the comment server).

In the market for SCP software, it could be argued that the market leader is not i2, Manugistics, or SAP, but Microsoft Excel. Many companies never look at the leading SCP vendors, finding that it’s much simpler, easier, and certainly less expensive to simply create an Excel model to plan short term production around one or two key constraints.

If you spend some time with Financial Analysis Software vendors, then I think that you’ll find their toughest competition is existing excel spreadsheets in the hands of financial analysts. The counter argument is often not the accuracy of the spreadsheet, but rather the transparency, consistency and provenance of the spreadsheet:

1. Who developed the spreadsheet?
2. What assumptions are built into the spreadsheet?
3. Are the formulae used to evaluate B the same as those used by a colleague to evalulate A last week?
4. Did the analyst [intentionally or otherwise] tweak one of the underlying assumptions for this analysis?

I suspect that there is a market for an excel specific version control system. One that could open up the spreadsheet and highlight both formulaic and data differences. Then analysis could be tied to a specific version of a specific spreadsheet variant.

As a Stanford fan, I usually view Cal’s regular season with an air of detached indifference. This year is different. With two games left in the regular season, ranked fourth in the BCS, Cal is on the brink of a special season. And with Stanford ineligible for a bowl game, I’m almost pulling for a Cal victory in the Big Game.

This has happened before. Several weeks into the 1991 season, Cal was undefeated and ranked in the top 10. My friend Kal and I came up with a hare brained scheme to buy season tickets to insure priority for a potential Rose Bowl bid. Unable to buy season tickets, we purchased tickets for Washington and USC.

Cal - UDub was perhaps the best college game that I have attended. Memorial Stadium was packed and I still remember the roar of the crowd when Lindsay Chapman broke off a long TD run to tie the score at 17-17. The Bears lost 24-17 that day, but they were game to the end.

But 1991 is a cautionary tale for Cal as well. Cal would lose to an Aloha Bowl bound Stanford in the Big Game. An incompetent AD would let Bruce Snyder go to ASU; where he would take the Sun Devils to national prominence, not the Bears.

The pieces are in place again. Coach Jeff Tedford has a $500,000 buyout clause in his contract if there is no progress towards renovating Memorial Stadium. A loss to Stanford in the Big Game would drop Cal out of the BCS.

The Big Game will be on at the East Side Cafe in Norwalk. I think that I’ll stay away this year. It can be a bit rocky when your heart and your head can’t agree on who you want to win.

PS In my years as a Stanford season ticker holder, I may have seen better games than ‘91 Cal-UDub. But fans surround the field at Memorial Stadium where a track intervenes at Stanford. When Memorial Stadium is rocking you can feel it in your bones.

It’s a bit tricky to judge a piece of exercise equipment when you have no concrete workout goals. I have no weight loss target; I take no body fat measurements; I simply try to get three or four 30 minute workouts a week. Anything that keeps me going is a success and anything that bores me is a failure.

The WaterRower has been an unqualified success. It is quiet enough to workout while watching time-shifted primetime TV. It provides the whole body workout that I’ve been neglecting. And most importantly, it has enabled me to meet my workout goal.

With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I’d still buy it.