I missed this earlier (thanks again go to Dan Shafer for catching this one and bringing it to our attention). Seems that Simon Phipps spoke at the recent ".NET Nirvana Geek Cruise." Seems he talked about Java. Seems that made other speakers mad. Seems they wanted him kicked off of their panel discussion. Seems they over reacted and recanted.

End of story, right? Well, I've seen this behavior too. One of my friends in this industry told me "you're either for Microsoft, or you're against Microsoft." This was after I was pretty bold and attacking Microsoft's SmartTag technology.

Listen Microsoft fans (and, I count myself as one of Microsoft's enthusiasts). You only do Microsoft a diservice if you try to ban any so-called "anti-Microsoft" speech.

When I go to conferences, I want to hear both sides of the story. I guess Geek Cruises is another one of those shows where you better expect to only hear one side of the story.

Dan Shafer points us to Jeffery Veen, who is keeping us up to date on OSX and points us to useful resources for OSX developers.

Hey, you could win a Microsoft TabletPC. (US only, sorry).

Ahh, the guy planning Comdex has a weblog too.

Wow, I must have missed the latest revision of "decoding Microsoft speak" or something. Joshua Allen is up to something. I just don't know what.

Joel Spolsky talks about communities and the effect our technology has on them. Speaking of which, I'm seriously thinking of turning off my comments. Why? Well, I find I'm wasting too much time looking at them. I'd rather people comment on my rants on their own weblogs anyway. Plus, that whole system is safer than having yet another third-party involved. Oh, and that way I don't have people posting advertising, or ad hominem attacks in them.

I'm sure Alan Meckler and Jack Powers are waiting with bated breath to see what we'll all say about his "Comdex Crushing Program." Here it is, you ready?

Yawn.

Your program sucks. It is simply the old "let's throw everything in and the kitchen sink" approach that Comdex and all the other tradeshows ever took on anything.

What is new here? How is your show going to change the world?

Geesh, didn't you learn the "Jim Fawcette's Enterprise Conference lesson" yet? (He kept trying to do kitchen-sink Enterprise shows and kept failing).

The future of conferences is OWNING NICHES. Ever wonder why the Flash Forward conference had more attendees than Comdex's editorial offerings ever did? One track. One topic. 2000 attendees.

But, no, you don't seem to want to take an innovative approach to doing a conference. You don't seem to want to come and really understand the weblog movement. You seem to just want to pop your mouth off and call your competitors "losers." Well, guess what? They are, and your program is too.

I won't be coming. No focus. No innovation. No imagination. No differentiation over what those losers over at Comdex are gonna do.

Nah, I get where you're going. You're doing the "low-cost" approach. Your overhead is going to be lower than Comdex. So, you're just going to go to every vendor and say "we can get you into Vegas for 25% less than if you go with Comdex" and you just want to have a full-featured show to offer them. Yawn.

I was hoping for so much more. I was hoping to see someone with some showmanship. Some life. Some real ideas. But, no, what we get is the usual IT boring geek crap. "Application Developers; 3. Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers; 4. Web Services & Distributed Applications; 5. Open Source; 8. Mobile Computing; 11. Policy." Oh please.

OK, let's try a weblog approach, shall we?

First, let's have some fun, damn it! We all hate Comdex cause it was boring. No fun. No games. Just standing in two-hour-taxi-lines. So, instead of boring stupid titles, let's get some groove on, can we?

Let's develop a track for "Geeks and Nerds," can we? You know, developers, to use your language.

What do Geeks want? Code. Code. Code. Code. OK, they also need strategy, architecture, futures, and the usual "world-according-to-Bill-Gates,-Linus-Torvalds,-Scott-McNealy,-and-some-jerk-from-IBM" panel discussion. Pies and rotten fruit distributed at the door, right?

So, why not have contests? Coders like to show off that they can kick ass. Particularly those open source types who "are not motivated by hatred of Microsoft but are motivated by developing kickass code for freedom loving people everywhere."

Why not have in-depth sessions on .NET, Java, and the rest of the programming world still left standing in November 2003?

Your analysts will soon know that Microsoft has some major freaking big announcements coming. You gotta know developers are gonna be interested in whether or not Scoble is telling the truth about that. (I am, by the way).

Stop the "kitchen sink approach." Pick one persona and serve him/her well. If you only have an hour on mobile computing, that tells me there will be only a cursory overview of the topic. Not enough of a reason to send my top geeks.

Anyway, I have a lot more to say. I might say more, but I'm just bored. Bored. Bored. Come on Alan, give us the beef! You guys have to focus and add some fun into this.

Update: my wife just read this and said "whenever my professors ripped me a new one, I always liked hearing something good that I did too, don't you like anything about Alan's program?" To which I answered: well, he did a good list of all the technologies in the industry, but a good list doesn't make a good conference. If it did, Jim Fawcette would have had about four great Enterprise conferences now.

Alan Meckler is starting a weblog business conference. WTF? Does anyone know a weblogger that was involved in this? I sure don't and my contact list is getting wider and wider. Do they think that Microsoft is gonna come in this space? Do they think anyone has any money? Even with Google buying Blogger, I think it's way too early to do a conference on the topic. This seems so 1999: "let's take a hype word and do a conference for it." I was hoping I wouldn't see those days return. I guess they have. Listen: at NEC there's something like 115,000 employees. I am the only NEC weblogger. Not to mention that I wouldn't come to a conference. Why? No business reason to. None of us weblogger types are hearing from our bosses: "you better learn how to weblog better."

Now, because CEO's are wondering about weblogs and how to use them, maybe there's a conference for managers about how to handle the webloggers that are working for you. I'd be interested in working on such a conference.

Jason posted pictures from Joi's party yesterday. Jason's photos are so much better than mine. I want a DSLR. Kazuya posted some more (see me with the Tablet) -- Kazuya had an awesome freaky small Sony 2megapixel camera. Dang are cameras getting cool. Maryam wants one.

As you all might know, I'm a cross between a Marketing Guy (er, Evangelist). Geek. Sales guy. Journalist, and Economist. So, I'm always looking for ways to mix these five things up.

Doc Searls pointed me to the new "Flogging on a Blog" thing that's been going around since Dr. Pepper is attempting to get grass roots to push product.

This effort will fail.

First, I wish it wouldn't. I, because of who I am, and because I work for (and represent) companies that'd love to increase their sales and brand awareness, am constantly looking for ways to get the word out about my products.

Everytime I try to push a product here, it falls on deaf ears. Why? Because weblogs are closer to personal conversations than they are to one-way media like a newspaper report, or a TV show.

Has anyone ever had a multi-level-marketing person in their family trying to push their product during Thanksgiving dinner? Isn't that annoying?

Well, that's why these efforts will fail on weblogs. What Dr. Pepper is hoping we'll all do is that we'll start talking about Dr. Pepper in our weblogs.

So, what's the right way to market your stuff on weblogs? Start a conversation. Make your CEO available for "weblog conversations." I'd love to interview the CEO that runs the company that owns Dr. Pepper. I'd probably even blog it here. Hey, why not put a webcam on the CEO and then have a contest for who can guess just how many cans of his own product he consumes? (Course, that's assuming he drinks the stuff in the first place).

Marketers sense there's something happening in the weblogging space, but they haven't yet tried and failed here yet. Remember, I floated a trial balloon -- I know a company (DevConnections) that's willing to pay for referals from weblogs that turn into paying customers. But, not a single person even asked about the program. Webloggers aren't doing this for some "business reason." (If we were, we'd have links to Amazon and other retailers, not to mention ads). We're doing this for fun and cause we love to do it. If marketers figure THAT out, then we can really have an interesting conversation. Until then, their efforts are gonna sound a lot like that friend who keeps pitching you on Amway everytime you see him.

Doc says we're the antidote to viral marketing. Um, but networks of conversations are a huge opportunity for marketers. They just are clueless about how to start a conversation.

Rob Howard, of the Web.Net team (or whatever they call the team that used to be ASP.NET) is weblogging now and I am finding his blog fascinating as an insight into the team. I wonder what the next step is? Hey, why not show us screen captures of the prototypes and ask for help developing and improving certain features? One way to get us all addicted to your stuff is to let us have a say (even a little one) in its future. Either way, keep it up Rob, this is great stuff!

Dave is asking how he'd stay in touch across the US. I'd probably go the Sprint Cell Modem route. They charge something like $300 for the modem, and then $99 a month for unlimited access. Personally, Dave has enough money that this is a very minor hindrance for him, and he'll appreciate having the choice of using 802.11 or using the cell network. All our sales guys use these modems and they work very well. You get somewhere around 20kbps, which is more than enough to blog and surf. Plus, if you're around a hotspot, you can always switch to the faster 802.11 stuff.

Dare Obasanjo's RSS Bandit is now on MSDN. This is a neat RSS aggregator that you can run in Visual Studio.NET. Very cool and I even see my name on his list of feeds.

Oh, Don Box will be at the SF Bay Area .NET Users' Group Wednesday night. I gotta take my son to see Don.

Michael Gartenberg (Jupiter Analyst): "My advice to Redmond, Linux may give you a run for your money in some of the server markets but it's a non-starter at the desktop."

STOCK ALERT: Microsoft is hosting analysts this week. Watch Microsoft's stock price rise by 5% to 15% (depending on war news) as the analysts get out of their "indoctrination" (Dave Winer's definition) and they call all their friends and say "buy." Even better, watch for the stock price to rise at 10 a.m. Pacific Time and noon Pacific Time. Why? Cause that's when they'll break and they can call all their rich friends. Heh. If the stock price goes down, don't blame me.

Oh, another bit of insight into Longhorn (next version of Windows). Chris Anderson is working on it -- specifically the user interface technologies and he says his work is overlapping that stuff that Don Box is doing. Let's see if you can predict what that means!

Oh, this "Linux switcher parody" is funny!

"Microsoft should not worry," James Avery says, "about the open source movement, it will only be really be a source for media hype and overexposure."