One of the things that I like about reading blogs is the same thing that I have always liked about wandering around a library. While you may go into a library looking for a particular book, it is always the books in and around that book that are the most interesting and rewarding to find. With libraries, however, proximity is always based upon subject matter (thanks to our friend Melvil Dewey) and, therefore, tends not to take very big leaps from one book to the next. With blogs, link proximity may have to do with subject matter proximity (I tend to link to other blogs about venture capital) but it may also have to do with temporal proximity (VentureBlog is about venture capital but it is also about technology, management, team building, etc.). It is this temporal proximity that I believe makes blogs as interesting and useful as they are. Wandering around blogs can lead you to really interesting stuff that might otherwise have appeared really far afield.

I am a big fan of Nelson Minar's Link Blog because it is as eclectic and interesting as is he. Without blogs like Nelson's I would not likely find my way to this beautiful clock or this frightening pet hyena. And while I might eventually have found my way to Aaron's tongue-in-cheek draft RSS 3.0 Spec, it would likely have been an old joke by then (update: check out the Road to RSS 3.0).

The RSS 3.0 spec is being "spearheaded" by Aaron Swartz. I met Aaron a couple of summers ago at the Internet Law Program at Stanford, where Aaron is now an undergrad. I decided to see what else Aaron was up to and spent some time wandering around his website and blog. What I found was a link to the Y Combinator Summer Founders Program. I had recently read about the Summer Founders Program in a post by Marc Hedlund on O'Reilly's Radar. Marc's post even referenced the fact that Aaron was working on a startup through the Summer Founders Program but I had not put two and two together. With that I dug in more closely to the Summer Founders Program, which was started by Paul Graham, the founder of Viaweb (I played a very small, tangential role in Paul starting the Summer Founders Program — I was one of Yahoo's lawyers on the Viaweb acquisition and gave it a legal clean bill of health — the rest is history).

The Summer Founders Program is really interesting and I look forward to writing more about it soon. I would not likely have come upon it through a search engine except by pure happenstance. But as a result of wandering around the web at the guidance of folks like Marc Hedlund and Nelson Minar (the former dynamic duo of Popular Power), I was able to find very interesting and very relevant information. That is the power of blogging and it is why I spend as many hours as I do wandering around the blog "library." Moreover, it is precisely why so many smart people are focused upon the hard question of how to abstract that temporal proximity from the blogs themselves. I am convinced startups will solve this problem, not the Googles and Yahoos of this world, and look forward to seeing (and perhaps funding) the different approaches that emerge.