Thanks to Hanan Cohen, who sent me the tip about Jeremy. Funny enough, Hanan proudly displays a link to his rant about "why I don't write a weblog." Ahh, contrarians. You gotta love them!

Jeremy Zawdony says that he got a sneak peak at some stuff Inktomi was working on, and he says Inktomi knows "stuff" about weblogs. Intriguing. Can't wait to see what they are thinking.

Dan Gillmor, of the San Jose Mercury News, is writing a book on the intersection of journalism and weblogging, and wants your help.

Dang comments are down again. I can't really complain. After all, the commenting system I'm using -- from Haloscan -- is someone's hobby and I'm not paying for it. So, you just gotta put up with it until I decide to pay for it.

An open source developer "leaves his hobby hanging." This is something I've noticed again and again in human endeavors. Hobbies are only fun for a short time. Say a year. Then, they become work. If they aren't producing income (or some other payback, like a good source of free beer, or ...), they easily get thrown aside. Now, how many people will rush to take his place? I'm not so sure that anyone can. After you write hundreds of thousands of lines of code, having someone come in and maintain that, or add features, is a real pain in the behind. Certainly not a hobby kind of thing.

On the other hand, Chris Anderson (one of the smartest guys inside Microsoft, although I love how the smartest guys play the dumbest) is asking "why is [weblogging] catching on? Why should we care?"

Then he goes on to compare weblogging to FrontPage and other Microsoft products.

In 1996 Microsoft named me one of the top five users of FrontPage. How is it different? Let me count the ways.

1) Weblogs let me publish fast.

2) Weblogs report to weblogs.com, so Google (and others) learn that I've updated.

3) Weblogs publish an RSS/XML file, so that folks who want to use a news aggregator can read me.

4) Weblogs are easier to use. I type, I click on "post to weblog." FrontPage requires much much more knowledge to get a similar site built.

What's the big deal? I think Chris gets it a whole lot more than he's letting onto.

If the FrontPage team wants some consulting, you know where to find me.

Mike Sax predicts that Alan Meckler will be sued because of his weblog. He says that if that happens, it'll cause a chilling effect on the blog world.

Chris Pirillo just announced that Google will be a sponsor of Gnomedex. Dang, in three short years Chris has taken Gnomedex from a little event held in the middle of nowhere to something that the biggest companies in the world are sponsoring (yeah, Microsoft is a sponsor too). Hey, Alan Meckler, you paying attention? Your competition isn't Comdex. It's Gnomedex. I'm not going to your show, but I'm going to Iowa! Plus, no freaking gambling machines. Hey Alan, stop being boring and I'll link to you again!

My friends are wondering about all the noise from Microsoft's CE team lately. Yesterday a research firm said that within a few years Windows CE will outsell Windows. Well, this sounds like a little "playing with the statistics." Yeah, there might be more UNITS sold, but is a cell phone as important as one desktop running XP? I'd argue that one desktop sold is more important than 20 cell phones.

OK, Sean Alexander's weblog is the one to watch for cool links to awesome Windows Media file clips. Sean links to a surround sound audio from the movie (done by Andy Hunter, named "Go.") Worth a listen to if you have Windows Media and a surround sound system. Thanks to Chris Pirillo, by the way, for giving me his old system.

I spent a lot of time talking with Scott over at Feedster.com tonight. If Google or MSN or Yahoo were smart, they'd buy him right now before he gets too expensive. He groks human relationships and I bet that his search engine will -- within a year -- be as important to me as Google is now.

For those of you who don't understand what's special about Feedster, it's a search engine that looks only at RSS/XML feeds, not HTML. Why is that important? Well, most weblogs are published via RSS. RSS is where much of the innovation in publishing technology is going on right now. Did anyone miss that there were two or three new RSS news aggregators released in the past 80 hours?

Hey, a Chinese weblog linked to me. Hey, what we need are some better translation tools. Hey, Yahoo and MSN, you gonna help webloggers here?

I'm going to make all attempts to get to Gnomedex this year. I am very proud to say that I spoke at the first one and it was a freaking blast. I even paid my own way (none of the speakers got paid that year). Going to Iowa is a bit weird for a technology conference, but it actually is really great. You don't have many distractions, so the whole experience is like one long user group meeting. I learned a lot and made some life-long friendships there that persist to this day.

Jeremy Zawodny threatens to add my NetMeeting site to Yahoo's index. Um, that might have helped six years ago when I started that site, but it's a little late now.

So, what am I doing today and does Yahoo list any of that stuff? How about looking for cool weblogs. Oh, wait a minute, I'm not listed on Yahoo. Despite having 600 incoming links. Look here for Yahoo's weblog listings. I guess I gotta be Doc Searls to get listed here.

How about cool RSS feeds? Oh, Yahoo doesn't keep a directory of those.

Yeah, I know, the Yahoo search engine does pull in Google for all this stuff, but why should I look at Yahoo when Google is the one providing the info?

But, if Jeremy can get a site added to Yahoo's index, that'd be a pretty impressive feat. Do you realize that I wrote Yahoo at least 50 emails trying to get listed? Do you realize I've made fun of Yahoo countless times in countless places on the Web for not listing that NetMeeting site?

And people wonder why I love Google...

Speaking of which, I sold that site three years ago to DevX.com and it hasn't been updated since. So, I wouldn't add it now anyway.

A far better site to add to the index is Brian Sullivan's "Meeting by Wire" site. Which, by the way, also is not listed in Yahoo's directory. Despite being the longest-running NetMeeting site around.

See, if Yahoo can't get the basics right, why would they expect to beat Google?

Hey, at least MSN listed all these sites (mine and Brian's). But, MSN is slow. Gotta do better engineering work there MSN. Or buy a few of those new NEC servers. Heh.