I’m going back and reposting some articles from the now-defunct Startupping blog. This was my first set of startup commandments: Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more. Stealth startups suck. You’re not working on the Manhattan Project, Einstein. Get something out as quickly as possible and promote the hell out of it.

Wingedpig.com is the home page for Mark Fletcher. Mark is an Internet entrepreneur, software developer and investor. He currently sits on the board of Techdirt. In 2003, Mark started Bloglines, a free web-based news aggregation service. Using Bloglines, users can search, subscribe to, share and publish blogs and RSS feeds. Bloglines was named one of Time Magazine’s Top 50 Web Sites for 2004, and was named the Best Blog/Feed Search Engine by the Search Engine Watch Awards in 2005.

Well, not really, but I am quoted in this article on straight, single men who own cats. It’s a silly piece, which the author Abby Ellin fully admitted when we talked. And actually, I think I laughed through the entire interview, which I’m sure didn’t make me a good interview subject. Having never, you know, been interviewed about my cats before, it was an interesting experience. I can’t say that I necessarily agree that it’s only now becoming socially acceptable for a straight single man to own a cat (or two).

The concept of aggregation is increasingly important on the Internet, as the sheer number of information resources increases. The average user wants to track more and more things on the Internet; an aggregator quickly becomes necessary as one’s bookmark list grows to infinity. The first aggregators, what I call ‘general purpose’ aggregators, like Bloglines, Google Reader, and Newsgator, are focused on tracking blogs and news feeds, making it easy to subscribe to whatever blogs the user came across.

I recently ordered a “Big Boy” Rocket Lamp from Cool Rockets. Just doing my part to support the lagging economy. Well, it arrived today. It’s every bit as cool as I had hoped. After unboxing it, however, I noticed that someone had written on the side of the box: It’s difficult to see in the picture, but it also looks like someone has taken a pen or other small, sharp object, and stabbed the box many times.

I missed this by a couple of days, but it was 10 years ago when I launched ONElist (now Yahoo Groups). It was a Saturday night, January 24, 1998, and I had just completed three months of coding the site, by working nights and weekends. I had never created a web site before and one of the reasons I started ONElist was because I wanted to learn how to do so.

For those ONElisters and eGroupies (and anyone else who knew Michael) who might see this and haven’t already gotten the Evite, we’re having a reunion this Wednesday, January 16th at Tres Agaves in San Francisco at 7pm, in honor of Mike Klein. Tres Agaves 130 Townsend St San Francisco, CA 650-303-8260 As Rikk says in the Evite, we “know that Mike would have wanted this to be fun, wild, and happy event.

When I brought Scott Shambarger in as the first person to help run ONElist back in 1998, we made a bet. If we ever sold the company for a decent amount of money, we’d shave our heads. A little more than two years after that, the company threw a party on a boat on San Francisco bay to celebrate the closing of the Yahoo acquisition of (the now called) eGroups. Michael Klein was instrumental in making that happen.

The title says it all. Reports are that Mike Klein, who I hired as CEO of ONElist and who later oversaw the acquisition of (the renamed) eGroups to Yahoo, is missing after a plane crash on Sunday in Panama. Mike owns a resort off the coast of Panama, and the reports say he was flying with his daughter, a friend, and the pilot. Their destination was the Chiriqui volcano, but they never made it.

I just wrote a new post over on Startupping about two items related to databases and Internet services. I talk about SSDs and the launch of Amazon’s new SimpleDB, which I think is a very big deal.