Speaking of Tim Oren, his "Metadata: Promises and Perils" article is pretty interesting.

Alec Saunders points to and comments on "Oren's Laws of Microsoft." Law #1: you always see Microsoft coming.

PCPro: Xbox creator slams industry.

Chris Sells calls this the coolest site he's ever seen. It's pretty damn cool, for sure. I've been listening to the music on my Etymotics and it's awesome.

I'm missing Fry's opening because I'll be in San Francisco. Hey, Dave Winer has a weblogging dinner going. I'll try to be there.

John Porcaro just posted a link to "you are my friend" that is precious. This link will be real useful right before I get reviewed. Here, check it out. Jeff Sandquist is my friend. Dave Winer is my friend. Yeah, John, you're my friend too. Ahh, this takes butt kissing to a whole new level! :-)

Hey, I'm not gonna list everyone who's my friend. I have too many.

Joshua Hoover keyed in on the fact that I use ants as a metaphor.

He and others have been asking "you gonna comment about the guitar-string maker who fired Microsoft from his life?"

There's a lot of angles I can come at this story. The problem is, I don't know the entire story. I have Sterling Ball's half of the story, but I don't have Microsoft's part of the story. Or, the BSA's, for that part (the BSA and Microsoft are not the same thing).

One thing this shows to me is that Microsoft does not have a "traditional" monopoly. If you look back at the "traditional" monopolies, like the 1870s railroads, consumers had no choice at all -- they only had one choice. Sterling Ball proves you can run a business without using Microsoft stuff at all. It's what motivates me and most other Microsoft employees. We know we can be fired.

Hmm, Brian Lyttle reports there's a GoogleBar extension available for the Firebird browser. You can find other Firebird extensions here.

SitePoint: "Well Behaved DHTML: A Case Study" starts out "It’s no secret that over the last few years DHTML has been used almost exclusively for evil purposes."

That's called a "hook lead" cause it hooks you right into the article.

Thanks to Danny Boyd for linking me there.

I've been falling behind lately on checking all the other Microsoft bloggers, so I missed when Sean Alexander pointed to the Morisoft WMP Mixer.

Hey, Jeff Sandquist, looks like Sasha has copied the little PDC flair we did (for DevDays in Europe).

FREE FOOD

Did I get your attention yet?

Come to the weblogger dinner on Tuesday evening.

Text America is buying any weblogger who shows up dinner.

Details: Tuesday night. 7 p.m. at the Crossroads in Bellevue (in the food court inside).

Of course, since it's Text America (they do those cool moblogs that folks do with their camera phones) they'll have a moblog of the dinner at http://dinner.textamerica.com

They are also going to be doing one of their trip to Seattle here: http://roadtrip.textamerica.com

The PDC Birds of a Feather idea has been getting more interesting lately. Tons of interesting ideas.

Alan Cooper: "The Origin of Personas."

All you have to do is walk around one of Microsoft's buildings to see how important personas are to developing software here.

Damn, I'm gonna miss the opening of the newest Fry's. It opens Labor Day weekend. Go and get your free hotdog and Coke. Look for a guy in a suit at the entrance. It just might be John Fry. He was there at the Sunnyvale store opening.

Are you looking to keep up to date on the news on a specific topic, for instance "Microsoft Longhorn?"

Google News Alerts offers a great way to do it. I've subscribed to several for the past few weeks and they've been useful.

Ian Fogg, another Jupiter blogger, gives Microsoft some good ideas of things it can do for new users to make them more secure.

I agree: our OOBE (out of box experience) gets worse and worse as Windows ages. Why? Because you have to download dozens of megabytes of patches and fixes. Our OOBE should get better over time, not worse.

I know a few people who are in the magazine business read my weblog, so this is for them: here's David Card, another Jupiter Media analyst (those guys have good stuff on their blogs -- I wish all analysts wrote blogs) talking about how to get more subscribers.

Jupiter Media's Michael Gartenberg: "It's time we started calling the people who perpetrate these senseless and malicious actions just what they are; criminals and terrorists."

Someone asks "is Scoble Microsoft's 'Glove Girl'?"

Sorry for the email troubles Dave. I've switched all my personal email to Hotmail and it stayed up with no troubles through all the virus troubles during the last week. Despite putting my email address everywhere on my weblog -- robertscoble@hotmail.com -- I only got a couple of the virus-related ones, and they had their attachments stripped. Server-side email cleaning is the only way to go. It's also why I use a few instant messenging programs -- in case everything email goes down, people can still get ahold of me with IM.

Seattle PI: "Put yourself at helm of the Wright Flyer."

Last weekend we took my son to the Boeing museum. It's a must see when you come to Seattle.