Oh, Sam Gentile moved his weblog to a new place that's running on top of .NET technology. Lots of .NET-centric insight.

Are you looking for a new place to host your weblog? Brad Wilson recommends Blog-o-Mania.

Two of my friends (and former speakers) Chris Kinsman and Keith Pleas put together a new .NET Architecture Summit for .NET developers who want to get the latest on using design patterns in their .NET-centric system architecture. Heavily Microsoft supported.

Dave Winer is taking on Tom Matrullo, who is wondering why the world needs RSS. I'm with Dave on this one -- RSS is becoming more and more important to me. The reasons I use RSS are:

1) I get a minority viewpoint. The mainstream news will cover the big stories. But, what about the little stories? The ones going on in average people's lives? For instance, where else can you learn the viewpoint of the guy who's writing the rendering engine for IE on the Mac?

2) It saves me time. No longer do I need to click on 300 sites to visit all my favorite sites. Now my news aggregator builds an all-in-one newspaper for me out of those sites.

3) I am now using a Tablet to read news. The Tablet isn't perfect for entering URLs. With my news aggregator, I don't need to enter URLs. It makes the Tablet the ultimate reading machine.

It gets even worse. Kynn takes on Live Journal for shutting down his site. "These guys are pretty awful with their customer service, in my opinion."

Wow, I was just over at Dori Smith's Backup Brain and saw a link to this rant by Kynn Bartlett about the events that killed the HTML Writers' Guild. Amazing story of alleged embezzlement, etc. By the way, both Dori and Kynn were speakers at the CNET Builder.com Live conference that Dan Shafer ran (and that I helped plan/run).

Alan Reiter has been writing about a WiFi sniffer that sounds like exactly what I need -- you know, a little device that you can walk around with that shows you if there's 802.11 available. Alan also has an excellent rant on why Kodak is totally clueless about the new world of photography. Last weekend when I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium I noticed that at least half of the tourists had digital cameras. This is a HUGE change from three years ago. I didn't see a single Kodak camera among them. Yeah, Kodak's Ofoto is an OK site (personally it's lame since I can't link to my photos from public sites easily), but since they charge $.49 per 4x6 print, consumers like me are gonna start looking for cheaper alternatives. I hear Walmart is doing digital prints for about half the price of Ofoto.

Scott Rosenberg over at Salon does the math on the President's tax cut proposals. Yeah, lame. This economy won't get rocking by giving us our money back anyway. That was tried a year ago and didn't work. The way out of this thing is to get VC's to spend more money. Of course, the president knows that if he just looks like he's doing something, eventually the economy will turn around on its own accord, and he'll get the credit. Grrr.

While over at Scott's, I was reminded that there's a new version of the Opera browser out now. A friend has been playing with it and says it's "f###ing fast." I gotta try it out myself.

Hey, you .NET types who are looking for a developer conference to attend this year? This one is the best: Devconnections.

I really hate saying that, too, since they were my competition for so long back when I was planning a different Visual Studio event.

But, I gotta say, this conference series, planned by Shirley Brothers, has outclassed the rest of the field.

The other day Shirley asked me "how do we get our conference listed on every weblog and website out there?"

That's an interesting question and one that other conference teams have tried to answer by giving webloggers free tickets to their events. Shirley can't afford to do that, she says. She's one of the few conferences that's paying her speakers "I pay our speakers when they arrive on site, other conferences don't pay for months afterward."

I'll let you in on a little secret: one of the biggest costs in putting an event on (DevConnections will get more than 1000 attendees at their upcoming event) is marketing. I know the company I used to work for would spend $200,000 or more on marketing.

What if we could put on an event and get 1000 people in the seats without spending money on brochures and mailing?

It'd result in a much better event (or a cheaper event) for you.

So, what can DevConnections do for webloggers?

1) She can offer you a $20 reward for anyone who signs up for conference after visiting a link on your weblog or:

2) She can let you offer a discount to your readers.

I think that's pretty interesting. This could be the start of a way that webloggers could make money off of their efforts, much like Google is making money off of advertising there.

Details will come soon.

What are some other things that conference teams can do to promote their events in the blogosphere? I'm sure that O'Reilly and other conference teams are reading my weblog and would be interested in your ideas.

By the way, why do I say that DevConnections is the best Microsoft-centric developer conference series out there (they have conferences on Visual Studio, ASP.NET, and SQL Server)? Easy. Speaker quality. Three years ago DevConnections couldn't get my best speakers. Folks like Jeff Prosise, Aaron Skonnard, Rockford Lhotka, Mike Amundsen. I religiously watched the evaluation forms and these folks would always get the highest ratings in the business.

Now, the tables have turned. Shirley has out-executed the rest of the business. She's hired the best speakers. Why? Cause she treated them great and word got around.

One of my best speakers told me "I get paid and get treated great at DevConnections, which is why I'm only speaking there this year."

Oh, one other thing, look at the price and you'll see another reason I like DevConnections. For $1395 you get three conferences -- all with world-class speakers. All with MSDN Magazine sponsorship. Now, compare to the competition, who is charging $2695 to attend a similar package.