On the other hand, John Dowell of Macromedia finds a certain similarity to my recent writings and Gates' comments yesterday.

I know some Microsoft execs read here often. I wonder if Bill's speech writers are reading here too. Hmm. Gotta try some more meme injections and see if they stick.

Randy Morin: "Microsoft is great and Gates reports to Scoble."

Dude, I don't think so! Nice dream, though.

Loren continues to do more for the Tablet PC than anyone else. I wonder why the Tablet PC team doesn't just hire Loren and pay him to crank out cool little apps like his math practice one. I wish I could hire people.

Ever wonder how Technorati works? Here's an answer from the guy (Dave Sifry) who invented it. Thanks to Lilia Efimova, who asked the question. Read more on Dave Sifry's weblog.

TechED is in Australia now, and so are the TechED bloggers.

Hmm, which conference will have more bloggers at it? BloggerCon or Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC)?

Dave, why don't you have a blogroll? We're keeping one for the PDC (Jeff's blog exposes it).

Chris Pirillo, owner of Lockergnome, makes the point, once again, that RSS will replace email as the way publishers will deliver content that their readers want to read.

He's the man. He had, at one point, 200,000 subscribers to his email newsletters. I'm sure he'll have more than that to his RSS feeds pretty soon.

One last thing before going to bed. That Vice President I talked with today, from one of the largest title insurance companies in the world, told me "we are making big investments in digital technology." He told me it's starting to pay off.

"A few years back, we lost a lot of employees who didn't like being computerized," he said. "They didn't like having to learn a new system, and instead went to work for a competitor who said they'd keep doing things 'the old way' and not make them learn something new."

This VP said his company is having the last laugh, now, though. Now his competition is starting to computerize, but in the meantime, is losing market share to his company (which is #2 right now).

Now he's having no trouble recruiting. Why? Word has gotten around that at the computerized company, employees can look up far more reports, and have to do far less work (and can work at home, which they can't do at the competitive company).

Also, because of the cost savings that the computerized company has achieved (hey, partly because of shipping developers to India) they will lay off fewer workers in the next few months. Also, they have been able to diversify to new markets, because they have information stores that their competition doesn't have.

What's the biggest barrier to computerizing the entire mortgage industry? Governments, who still want everything on paper. How's this VP dealing with that? Computerizing anyway and working with governments to try to get them to computerize.

That's my kind of evangelist!

Why don't I name this guy? For one, I don't want our competition to have any clue about who this guy is. He loves Microsoft stuff and he controls thousands of seats.

For two, he was extremely candid with me. I doubt he'd be that candid if he knew all his comments would end up on a weblog in the morning.

For three, his company is publicly traded, so I don't wanna get him in trouble for admitting to me that mortgage refinance business is dropping through the floor.

Hint: his stock price is gonna drop through the floor too. He told me to buy it in January or February after the market figures out how bad the refinance business is gonna get.

Translation: I just gave you a stock tip. If you own stock in anything that has to do with refinancing, watch it closely. The last quarter they saw record profits. Don't be fooled. The next quarter is gonna be bloody if interest rates continue to rise (and Hillary Clinton said they will, cause the Federal Government is sucking up cash as fast as it can to pay for our war and for our various unemployment problems).

Oh, is this journalism? I guess so. It sure isn't any kind of journalism you'll see in mainstream press anywhere.

James Robertson, on the other hand, says that he'd rather have a pad of paper than a Tablet PC.

OK, but now email that pad of paper to me, OK? Oh, and call me up on NetMeeting and let's work collaboratively on screen? Oh, and when you have 200 filled notebooks, I want you to search through all of them to find all the documents you've handwritten that mention me, OK? (Did you know that the Tablet PC automatically lets you search your handwritten documents?)

Oh, and, I want you to take a picture of Hillary Clinton, print it out, glue it on your paper notebook, and then get her to sign it, all before she leaves the building. That's precisely what I did. Why do you think she reacted so well to it? When I showed her my Tablet, it had her picture on it (one that I had taken just minutes before). She signed her own digital picture.

Tom Regan, of the Christian Science Monitor, says he's addicted to his Tablet.

I hate to say it, but Tony Perkins' Always-On Network is becoming more and more interesting every week. His newsletter (I can't really call it a blog, although I think he likes being associated with the blog world) has interesting articles. Tony used to run Red Herring magazine. That heritage shows through on this new project of his.

My friend Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords, is blogging up a storm again. Nice blog Buzz! Keep it going this time.

Robert McLaws: "I tell you what, [Scoble] is awesome."

Whew, someone came to my defense while I was away. Heh. Looking forward to a fun week.

Robert Hurlbut is making a commitment to his career.