Tuesday night the Boston Celtics won the NBA World
Championship (4-2) by beating the Los Angelels Lakers by 39 points in game six
at Boston Gardens.

The Celtics won only 24 games last year, but this year
experienced the single biggest turnabout in NBA history, after Danny Ainge
orchestrated two major trades last summer, bringing Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen
to Boston.

Danny Ainge is my favorite basketball player/coach/general
manager of all time. While most people will agree with me that Michael Jordan
is the greatest NBA player in history, and it is popular to say, “I want to be
like Mike,” personally, I’d rather be like Danny.

This morning at a very small press conference in Kansas City at the National Genealogical Society annual conference we made a very large announcement.

In fact, we announced something that I have personally hoped for and dreamed of for more than a decade.

Today we announced a partnership between FamilySearch and FamilyLink.com to publish the Family History Library Catalog -- the largest single database of genealogy sources in the world -- in Web 2.0 fashion.

This means that individual genealogists, librarians, archivists, and others from around the world will be able, when the Catalog 2.0 comes online in the coming months, to enhance and extend the value of the catalog. Users will be able to add new sources that are currently in the library catalog, and thus extend its scope of coverage. They will be able to improve the source descriptions, and even rate and review sources as to their usefulness.

Yesterday we set two traffic records. WorldVitalRecords.com had more than 36,000 unique visitors--6,000 higher than our two previous best days, earlier in April. And We're Related on Facebook had more than 105,000 daily active users.

One of the best parts about being an internet entrepreneur is how immediately your actions translate into measureable results. Our team members are working hard on search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing campaigns, and improving our affiliate marketing program. As each channel improves, the overall cumulative results are exciting.

Great companies don't start out that way.

Great web sites don't necessarily seem great at the beginning.

Josh Porter, Bokardo.com has blogged about social design for 7-8
years. Is lead designer for Chi.mp, a next generation social network.
In August he started his own design company to design interfaces that
focus on enabling people to talk to each other. Main issues: how do
you get people to engage with your site. How do you get them to sign
up? He's had clients who got Techcrunched, had a spike, and then over
time they all leak out. How to provide value over the long term?

Five principles:
1. The Del.icio.us Lesson. Delicious let you have bookmarks and access
them everywhere. You could tag bookmarks, adding your own comments.
Tagging was new back then. Designers talked about subverting
hierarchical structures and folksonomies. But people were just saving
bookmarks for later. I tell all my clients: "Personal value precedes
network value" or social value. These are great tools even if your
friends don't use them. I ask: is your service/software valueable even

I'm looking forward to hearing keynotes from Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook and Jim Benedetto, VP Technology at MySpace, as well as from 20 or so panelists who are succeeding with their social networking applications and investments. My last major dose of social networking content from industry insiders came at CES in January where I attended (and then bought mp3 recordings) of virtually every session on widgets and social networking. When I went to order my mp3 recordings, they just copied all the ones I wanted onto a thumb drive and gave them to me. It was the first conference where I have purchased the audio that way--very cool.

Last week I listened for the third time to Marissa Mayer's amazing
talk at Stanford about Google's culture of innovation. (I can't link
to it right now. I'm blogging from my blackberry.) She lists the top 9
reasons that Google is innovative.

One of them, of course, is that every Google engineer gets to work on
their own pet project for 20% of the time. Marissa says that in the
second half of 2005, 50% of the products Google introduced came from
20% time.

Another was that "ideas come from everywhere," including customers,
employees, senior management, and through acquisitions.

Clearly Google folks are encouraged not only to have ideas but to
share them and to pursue them.

That is a very different culture from most companies I've ever seen,
where few people are energized with new ideas, and those that have
great ideas are often frustrated by politics or lack of resources to
the point where they have no hope that their ideas will be heard or

I'm at the Beaver Creek Resort in Avon, Colorado today for the Venture
Capital in the Rockies event.

20 startup and growth companies, including 14 from Colorado and 4 from
Utah are here to present business plans to 200-300 venture capitalists
from 8 states. Our company, FamilyLink.com, was selected as a
presenter. We each get 15 minutes and then 5-10 minutes of Q&A.

Here is a brief rundown of the presenters:

- Albeo Technologies (Colorado) markets solid-state lighting systems
based on white light-emitted diode (LED) technology. Lighting accounts
for 40% of all electricity consumption in the commercial market. Have
raised $1.55 million in two rounds of funding.

- Altela (New Mexico) has raised $10 million to develop a new
energy-reuse water desalination product that operates at remote
locations such as oil and gas wells.

- AVA Solar (Colorado) was spun out of Colorado State University. They

I keep a Google doc called Blog Ideas. I have added a few dozen ideas to it in the last few months, and haven't gotten around to blogging about very many of them. Right now, I'm looking at the Google doc on my new iphone (Google applications work beautifully on the iphone). Here are some of the blog ideas that I would have blogged about if I had more time:

I love basketball. But my career pretty much ended in 9th grade when I was 5'2" tall and had glasses--and though a pretty good shooter, I got cut from my junior high basketball team.

Finally I got my growth spurt, and was about 5'10" as a senior where I tried out for my high school team. I made first and second cuts, but was the final person cut from the team and I've never fully recovered.