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Bryce Roberts is co-founder of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and an investor worth paying attention to. Roberts is in the news this week because of his high-profile critique of Angellist, the hot new investment network Robert Scoble has called the new Silicon Valley hype machine.

Roberts celebrates 10 years in venture capital this month. He began as part of Salt Lake City's Wasatch Venture Fund (now Epic Ventures), an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in March of 2001. We thought readers might like to know more about this interesting player in the tech community.

Venture Capitalists have a big impact on the software that hits the web and the rest of us have been fortunate to get a good look into many of their minds thanks to the recent rise of the blogging VC. Some VCs love to share how they think about various technology issues on their blogs - but what do they really love?

VC Larry Cheng posted his 4th annual Venture Capitalist Blog Index today, listing and ranking 155 blogs written by venture capitalists. I discovered it when a feed we have in our team RSS reader tracking comments posted around the web by VC Fred Wilson delivered the link. I put the list into ITA Software's Needlebase, scraped a list of all the blogs, then put them in a Blekko custom search engine. I searched for the word "love" (as I always do in any new search opportunity) and found that these 155 blogging VCs have used the word love in exactly 15 blog posts so far this year. What do they love? Read on for an amusing survey of 15 things blogging VCs love in 2011.

Mary Meeker, probably the banking world's single best-known person in technology, has joined venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, backers of Google, Amazon, Zynga and many clean-tech companies in recent years.

Meeker analyzes technology trends and gives research-dense, high energy presentations at conferences like O'Reilly and TechWeb's Web 2.0 Summit. Last year she discussed research finding that use of the mobile web will surpass use of desktop browsers, globally, within 5 years. How prominent is Meeker? Sarah Lacy, who has covered the Silicon Valley VC market for years, puts it this way at TechCrunch this morning: "As an analyst, Mary Meeker was as famous in the dot com glory days as [Kleiner's John] Doerr was as a VC, so it's appropriate and seemingly a long time coming that the two would wind up as partners."

Mark Suster is one of those unique venture capitalists in that he has experience as an entrepreneur prior to joining the VC world (or the "dark side" as he calls it). Twice, in fact. That's why he calls his blog "Both Sides of the Table," because he has literally sat at both sides of the negotiating table. It's this experience as both an entrepreneur and a VC that provides him a fresh perspective on startups and the investment market, so what does Suster think are the most important factors to securing investment? Apparently, it comes down to four M's.

With the angst from the angels and venture capitalists debate still hanging in the air, and the thickening plot of "Angelgate," it's easy to forget that courteous, polite and gracious behavior can save your startup from easy pitfalls. In an industry that functions largely on connections, burning bridges is never a smart move, intentional or not. Here are a pair of examples from seasoned venture capitalists on how playing nice can go a long way.

Yesterday we went over some the ways entrepreneurs can set themselves up for success with VCs by building a relationship far before they ever need funding. Part of that strategy involves picking the right VCs based on experience, success and, yes, even how well you get along. There are several factors that should be considered when finding the right VCs for your startup, and Atlas Venture partner Fred Destin reminds us this morning of another significant one - how a VC manages reserves.

One of the big debates in the venture capital industry lately has been the growing argument between so-called "super angels" and traditional VCs - the former being prone to mention how they feel the latter "sucks." As one would expect, many voices in the industry have made themselves heard in the form of VC blog posts and passionate, profanity-laced shouting matches. But when the fog of war clears, what should startups take away from the debate? Should they seek investment from VCs or super angels? Or both? Thankfully, some level-headed perspectives have emerged that are aimed at helping young startups interpret the lessons to be learned.

You could have the greatest idea for a startup in the world. You could even have the best team working together to build a great product. That's all fine and dandy, but for first-time entrepreneurs, if you don't have traction, you're not going anywhere. Traction means having a measurable set of customers or users that serves to prove to a potential investor that your startup is "going places." The tricky part is actually gaining that traction and knowing when you have enough to approach potential investors, so here are a few tips that should help.

In the latest example of VC chatter - wherein multiple venture capitalists simultaneously blog about a hot issue - the topic du jour is the debate between convertible debt and equity rounds. The spark came from a Friday night tweet by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham (yes, he finally joined Twitter) that declared convertible notes victorious since each of this summer's YC class opted for them. This morning, several VCs have weighed in on the issue, so here's what entrepreneurs and early-stage startups need to know about the debate.

Net neutrality has been in a the news recently due to rumors, speculation and interpretation surrounding Google and Verizon's newly proposed legislative framework for the enforcement of net neutrality. The key principal behind net neutrality is ensuring service providers (like Verizon) cannot forge agreements with companies (like Google) to exclusively provide an unfair advantage by means of, say, increased bandwidth - thus maintaining neutrality. For startups and entrepreneurs, the debate is one to be monitored with a watchful eye, and some venture capitalists bloggers have begun to chime in once again on the issue.