I guess someone on the XBox team is bummed out tonight since Electronic Arts has decided to shun its XBox Live system. Here's another lesson for Microsoft: make sure that your third parties can win on your platforms. If you don't leave them a compelling business reason, then you'll continue getting avoided by third parties. One of the things that Microsoft did so well is to get third-party software developers building on top of its platforms. I remember in the 1990s that Microsoft would never have lost business like this.

Scott Guthrie has a riveting story about how Microsoft tracks down bugs. Oh, and it shows that MSN is, indeed, eating their dogfood.

Ahh, Roogle has been renamed to Feedster. I love this search engine.

Gnomedex 3.0: Fellowship of the Geeks. OK, there are two shows I wanna go to this year. Gnomedex and PDC. How can I afford them? That's the big question. My wife continues to look for work, so travel budget is slashed for now.

Joi Ito continues the conversation about emergent democracy. He says that his whitepaper already answers my concerns.

He also asks "was Woz an expert?"

That's an interesting question. I even asked Woz a bit about this myself in my first interview with him almost 15 years ago (has it already been that long? Dang).

I asked Woz "how could another Apple happen" (ie, how would an entrepreneur get another big company off the ground). He said something very interesting. I'm paraphrasing here, but it's close to what he said. "An Apple can happen every decade or so. Only when the existing business elite or intelligence ignores a new category." Then he told me about how he developed a new kind of personal computer and showed it to his bosses at Hewlett Packard and Apple and how they decided that it wasn't a good idea for their business to try.

You know the rest of the story. He sold his HP calculator to start Apple.

He WAS (and still is) an expert on personal computers. The problem was, back then no one valued his expertise. As more and more people came around to Woz's vision of the world, yes, his expertise became more valueable.

He laughed at people who try to get rich. He says he didn't develop the Apple I with any thoughts of becoming wildly rich. He just wanted a personal computer. So he built one. He thought it was something other people would want too. It's as simple as that.

Which touches on the themes of the day. 1) I'm doing my weblog cause I love to, not because someday I'm expecting a big payoff. That's quite unlike the gold diggers who do weblogs only to try to make money. 2) Great new ideas are pushed through by single people or small groups, often working against the needs of the majority. Really what Woz (and the other guys who did early PCs like the Altair) did was a revolution. Our political system is great cause it allows for revolutions. Imagine if you went back 200 years in time and told the average citizen "oh, in 200 years abortion will be legal, it'll be illegal to own slaves, everyone will own the equivilent of a printing press for $40 a year or less, and it'll be illegal to smoke in bars and restaurants." You'd be run out of town as a heretic.

The real problem with Internet-based democracy? The fact that the technology allows us to be anonymous. That's starting to change, but most chat rooms, most newsgroups, most email, is sent by folks you don't know (and you don't know what skin they have in the game). If you look at the negative parts of what's out there on the Internet, it's because you can post while being anonymous. Of course, that's also what makes it so exciting too (and, even, lawless).

You know, one thing I like about weblogging is that the process of writing requires me to think. And think hard. This is what disturbs me about Alan Cooper's comments about weblogging. I think I'm gonna call him up and ask him for more insight about why he thinks that he couldn't add something to the weblogging space.

Oh, boy, I can make money with my blog. If that's why you're here, you're missing the whole point. Yeah, you can do that. Been there, done that, have the T-shirt. Now what?

Marc Canter asks "I wonder what Microsoft will do -- once they've got .NET baked into Longhorn? Will MSN and Microsoft.com be the exemplary showcase of what's possible? I sure hope so!"

My comment? I'd rather Microsoft work with outside software experts to showcase Longhorn. For instance, if Microsoft had an evangelist team, I wouldn't worry about evangelizing MSN and Microsoft.com -- after all, if everyone at Microsoft isn't already getting on the .NET and Longhorn bandwagons, they probably will be fired, right? Instead, I'd be working with Moveable Type, UserLand, Pyra (er Google), Broadband Mechanics, AudBlog, and quite a few of the other small-today-but-doing-interesting-things type of entrepreneurial firms. If I were an evangelist for Microsoft, I'd make sure you had at least one Tablet loaded up with Longhorn and Visual Studio.NET and I'd visit regularly to make sure you're up to date.

MSN just ain't gonna be the place where we see real innovation come out of. Imagine if Microsoft would help the innovators showcase their stuff on Longhorn?

But first they gotta do the dirty work. They gotta show that they care about the small software companies and rebuilding the farm system that once existed in this industry.

By the way, I see that Marc links to Jahshaka. This is another example of a company that should be being courted by Microsoft. There's tons of small little companies that no one has ever heard of that are doing interesting things.

How can Microsoft outrun the open source community? By evangelizing their stuff to the small, interesting, ISVs.

But, visit Jahshaka's site. What do you see? The Linux community has done more for them than Microsoft has. Hey, Steve Ballmer, you see this? Remember when I said you'd die a death of a thousand paper cuts? Well, you got 999 to go.

Joshua Allen is talking about cheating in college. I totally agree with Joshua. A good interview washes out cheaters really fast. Personally, I think folks who hire based on degrees suck anyway. Just what does a piece of paper mean? Does it mean I will make your company money? No. Does it mean I'll be better than the next guy? No. Does it mean I'll be the next Bill Gates? No. (Reminder: he didn't graduate and that fact sure hasn't seemed to hold him back).

Another Longhorn team member weblogging? Looks like Ari Pernick is weblogging. Gives us a little insight too!

John Lam tells us about two important technology trends/products that will be causing him sleepless nights for a while (well, he also admits his new dog is keeping him up too). Yeah, you can guess, they are from Microsoft. Not the dog, dummy!

One knock against webloggers is that we're incestuous and don't get out into other subcultures. Why is that? Well, we hang around each other. I noticed this growing up. I lived on the "West site" of Silicon Valley (translation: the snobby rich side). It wasn't until I moved out of my parents house that I lived on the "East side." Now I'm living directly in the middle. You know, the part by the sewage treatment plant. Well, OK, Cisco's headquarters are a mile away too.

One nice thing about marrying an Iranian is that you are forced to visit other subcultures that standard old white geeks might not otherwise visit.

Today, my son and I were dragged into the Milpitas Golfland Arcade. What an experience!

If you haven't been to an arcade lately, you really should go. The video games are changing from things that only have screens and buttons to things where you can play the drums, learn to play the guitar, or learn to dance.

On this Saturday afternoon the arcade was packed! Don't blame it on the weather, either. It was an awesome afternoon in the valley.

You might not realize, but many of the valleys' best technologists are video gamers. You know, if Woz and Jobs hadn't started Apple computer, they would still have been famous for developing the game "Breakout." It only made $60 million for Atari.

Today's games are much more compeling than those early Pong games that I played in my youth. Let's take a tour around the arcade, shall we?

OK, past the front door, over on the left, is a Sega Derby Owners Club game. The geeks are putting quarters into this thing as fast as they can. No prizes. No gambling. "We do it just for fun" one player tells me (he has notes printed from the Internet that helps him with horse racing strategy). I have a sense he's lying. Turns out there are sights on the Internet that let you trade horses. Damn. What a viral strategy for getting people to come and stick tons of money into one game.

Further into the arcade over on the right you'll find a Dance Dance Revolution game. When I passed by, two teenagers were competing against each other. Damn, it's a joy watching someone who really is good at dancing. Their feet move so fast!

Another hot game that is drawing crowds is Guitar Freaks. This game teaches you to play a guitar. After a while, you are so damn good you could take Bruce Springsteen on. Don't believe me? You should have seen the kids I saw playing this game. I'm totally convinced that our next rock star will have been trained by video games.

Right next to the guitar game was a drum game. I saw a kid who was almost a professional musician. He hit every drum just on time. Amazing.

Behind the drum machines were a variety of driving games. I won't bother with those, cause they match what I've seen on the XBox or PS2, albeit with big screens and nice seats.

The centerpiece of the arcade, though, was one the World Combat game. Two huge and very detailed screens. Realistic guns. And, oh so bloody. Shoot them ups sure have gotten to be like Hollywood movies.

Anyway, my point is that there are whole technology subcultures that are being underreported on weblogs. I'd love to meet some of the folks who invent these games.

I'm reading Joi's "emergent democracy" paper. Instead of thinking about his ideas in a political context, I am thinking of them in a business context.

Imagine what the world would look like if all new products needed to be voted on by existing customers. We would never get any innovations.

Innovations require leadership. Require coming up with something that no one knows they want.

Go back to Woz. Remember the Apple I? Remember the Altair? How many people wanted those things in 1977? I can tell you: not many. Woz offered the Apple I to his bosses at Atari and Hewlett Packard and was turned away.

So, this is what I don't get about "pure democracy." If we had pure democracy, we would never have banned smoking here in California. It took some smart people to do something new. To take a new approach.

I will never live in a place that allows smoking indoors again. That idea radically changed life for the better here. Has it affected property values? Yes. Since the smoking ban began housing prices have continually gone up (even after the dotcom bust).

Next time I see Joi, I'm going to ask him how his emergent democracy idea will help get radical new ideas into political life. Letting the masses run things is OK, but you don't get the radical innovations that only a small wacky minority sees at first.

Remember, 50 years ago most Americans thought it was OK to discriminate against blacks. It took a radical minority to push the idea through that that wasn't OK.

JD has the Pentagon's new rules for media covering the war in Iraq. I just had an insight: We would not attack any country that had more than 100,000 webloggers.

Think about it. Weblogging is like owning a nuclear weapon. Maybe even better. I doubt that Bush would want to go after any country where the results of war would be on the Internet for anyone to see.

If I were a small, powerless country, I'd invest in getting at least a percentage of my people into weblogs. Sounds better than trying to build a nuclear bomb.

Dylan Greene asked Alan Cooper why he doesn't do a weblog and he said "Weblogs don't really foster the kind of writing discipline that I consider necessary."

You know, I've written for all sorts of different media. My words have been in newspapers, TV, Web sites, magazines, wedding invitations, and other places. I don't get what Alan is saying here. Oh, you mean it's too easy to publish anything you want? So, Alan, why don't you start a weblog where you apply your own standards of discipline? It seems like this was Alan's way of saying "I think weblogs are stupid." Well, OK, but why not just come out and say that?