I just saw this over at Dan Gillmor's weblog: Mac addicts catch counterfeiter. Wow. I can just smell the next "switcher" ad.

Ahh, the weblog tool makers have forked APIs. Blogger went one way while everyone else (er, Radio Userland and Moveable Type) went the other. Here's Dave's response to Ev's posting of why Blogger doesn't support the MetaWeblog API.

Another trend to watch? 802.11a. The industry hasn't started making a big deal about this yet. But, expect 802.11a and b to be built into all new portables starting in 2003. For the uninitiated, 802.11a gives you something like 50mbit, vs. the 11 in 802.11b. "A" also has a shorter range, due to it running at 5GHz, but it also means that your portable telephone and microwave oven won't interfere with your 802.11a devices.

Oh, several of my friends have started whispering: if you're looking for an Apple desktop system, start saving your pennies for mid-2003. I can't tell you what I've learned (it's all hush-hush secret NDA kinda stuff), but there's some hot systems coming. Maybe it'll be time for me to try OSX.

You know, I've been following the TabletPC space very closely (my favorite weblog is tabletpctalk.com.) Customers are having a hard time getting them. I think the PC makers were (and are) being VERY cautious about how many they buy. I think the hottest TabletPCs will be very hard to find until next June, particularly if word-of-mouth starts working in their favor. But, analysts will probably pick up on the low unit sales and say that the Tablets were a failure. So funny. What'll make them a success isn't 2002 sales, but 2004. Very few people have them. Until you see one, how can you get hyped up on them? I have a friend who's looking to buy a new laptop: my advice? Wait until February and take a look at the market then. Intel is about to announce new stuff. These new computers will knock your socks off.

Tivo has announced new features for PC users so that you can display JPG's and play MP3s. Sounds interesting. So, if I know someone's Tivo address, could I send him some pictures to display?

I've been thinking a lot about the blogger dinner we had on Monday night. It was great and I'll remember it for the rest of my life. It had that kind of impact. Mostly cause how often do you get to see Dave Winer sitting in the same room with Marc Canter and Bob Frankston? I've been a friend of Dave's for about two years and this was the first time I've seen the three in the same room. But, I digress. My regrets from the evening is that I couldn't sit in on each conversation.

See, there were 30 people there. When we arrived, we naturally split up into groups of four. I should get a Tablet here and start drawing up some algorithms for how people sit down to eat dinner at an event like this. I found that I could only actively participate with three to five people. The guy sitting directly across from me, the two people sitting next to me, and occassionally the two people sitting diagonally across from me.

Wouldn't it be cool if we could have a dinner like that and then sit in on all of the conversations all at one time? Hey, it'd be like blogging, wouldn't it?

Which gets me to where I'm at right now. How do we record all those conversations and get them onto the Web? One idea I had is to get everyone Tablet computers so that we could doodle on them, take notes, and then post them to our blogs.

It's a scenario played out everyday in business. Today I was sitting with my boss at lunch talking about ideas. How many lunchtime notes do we have that just get lost. I can't wait to get a Tablet to try it out for such a use.

In the meantime, I keep wondering: who had the most interesting conversation at that dinner? Was it the group around Bob Frankston? Dave Winer? Marc Canter (I was at that one)? Or another group?

Also, does everyone have those feelings of insecurity that you're missing out on something fun at some other table? Hell, I now wish Marc and I had plotted to make everyone think they were missing out on something. We gotta plot that for the Weblogger Event that Dave's thinking about. How about an exclusive Tshirt for only the five people who sit with me at dinner? Hmmm, or maybe a shot glass and we'll share a really good bottle of whiskey.

Continuing on the FrontPage vein: have we seen any major new site startup in the past year that uses FrontPage? FrontPage, yes, is used in quite a few intranets, but watch out! In intranets the disruptive technology (weblogs) is eating up FrontPage market share. If I want to share information with my coworkers, using a weblog makes a hell of a lot more sense than using FrontPage's "1994-website-done-right" style. It's not 1994 anymore. Having a content-management-style website is the way things are going. Could anyone imagine updating every few hours in FrontPage? I was a FrontPage enthusiast for many years and even I can't.

Weblogs as Disruptive Technology. This article, from June of this year, nails it. You know, Microsoft, in 1996, named me one of the top five users of FrontPage. I have the latest beta sitting here and I'm supposed to be testing it, but I just don't have the heart. Radio UserLand does what I want and FrontPage isn't standards based (even the beta still doesn't do things "the Zeldman way"). See, this is where Microsoft is killing innovation. The FrontPage team hasn't attended any Web design conferences that I know of. They have lost touch with the Web. They assume that simply because they are included with Office that they'll remain relevant. Well, being in Office does guarantee a bit of that, I guess, but FrontPage could be so much more. Of course, if Microsoft really had a clue then products like Radio UserLand, Blogger, and Moveable Type wouldn't exist, would they?

Office 11 stuff for developers, from MSDN. Office 11, so far, is not that big a deal for me, but Outlook 11 rocks. That alone will make the upgrade package worth the price for me. More to come when my freaking NDAs end.