With friends like these...

My friends make me look like a slacker. Here’s what a few have been up to lately:

• Fellow Acton-Boxboro alumnus and rekindled friend Tim Coyne got himself on TV recently, which landed him a bed for the first time in something like 7 years, and a new lease on his relationship (which, if I’m counting right, is veering close into Hannah Swift territory). Fueling awesome. (Listen to the “unkempt” episodes for an explanation.)


• Longtime buddy Ross Fishman took the wraps off his new website, with all kinds of great material. Any consultants out there looking for examples of how to build a great site, check out what Ross has done. Tons of materials, good sample videos of what he knows and how he speaks, and a great voice. Points off for the shocking lack of an RSS feed (oh, how my friends can stick a knife in my back), but nobody’s perfect. Ross: get yourself a feed (through FeedBurner, thank you very much) and I’ll explain the Matrix for you after all these years. Promise.


• Mitch Ratcliffe, who I first got to know while at Socialtext, recently brought his latest project out of private beta — BuzzLogic (more discussion at their blog), a neat tool that Mitch told me about at Gnomedex. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I played a small part in the private beta, when I wrote about my ThinkPad problems this spring: BuzzLogic beta tester (and yet another friend) David Churbuck found my comments and was able to quickly act on them with the help of the BuzzLogic tool.


• Betsy Smith, aka “the funny half of Croncast“ (I kid, I kid), recently launched Resale Queen, a site all about her hobby obsession profession addicition to acquiring used stuff and selling it for obscene profits. Truly, this woman should be famous. And I don’t mean Naperville famous, I mean famous famous. She’s hilarious. Hunting Good Will as an olympic sport? A pun and a crack on current events? I’m sold.


• Jeremy Wright went and raised a few million for b5Media, which gives him a great foundation to build on. This is good news, because I can now explain that subscription to Lohan Groupie in my aggregator as “customer service”. ;)


• Chris IM’d me today to tell me he had “big news”, then wouldn’t tell me what it was. (My guesses: 1) He traded in his new Acura for a Honda, because he heard the iPod integration was so good 2) he’s leaving Vista for Linux because GUIs are overrated, or 3) He’s starting a site to compete with Betsy to detail his yard sale tabloid site at tagrag.com. Apparently I’m way off; who knew?). You know, Chris, if I thought you’d be mortified by it, I’d post that picture of you on the cruise. But somehow I think you’d actually enjoy that, so I’m back to just waiting for whatever your news is.


• Ben Stanfield, who I got to know during the Dean campaign, just started DraftObama.org. (Yes, I hope to God he runs, and will do whatever I can to get him elected. More on that later.) The next frontier for presidential politics will be marshalling the 18-24 crowd through some of the social networking sites, and the fact that Ben’s already got a MySpace page and a Facebook group tells me that he could be getting a jumpstart for ’08.

My friends have had a hell of a month!