Dan Shafer calls us "nimrods" for turning off his IM client. Well, the way I look at it is we're still a business. Our bandwidth costs us money. Our servers, and their upkeep, costs us money. My salary costs Microsoft money. Our shareholders demand that we return a profit (so much so that one shareholder recently asked us to stop giving money to charity -- I'll come back to that in a minute).

Plus, we're making our service more secure and it does more now than it ever did before and now we'd like to start selling our IM infrastructure to third parties. Seems to me that's fair. Dan, do you work for free? How about you send me your latest books for free? Or, even better yet, what would your publisher say if I went to Borders, bought a book of yours, then retyped it and put it onto the Internet for all my readers to use for free?

As to charity, one of our shareholders wants us to be forbidden to spend any money on charity. That's just plain bad business. Why? Because it makes me feel good as a Microsoft employee that Microsoft is one of the world's largest charitable givers -- it's a major reason that Microsoft has one of industry's lowest turnover rates. It also improves our brand's reputation (which does need all the help it can get). It also lets us invest in growing areas like education that can't afford the latest technology. That lets us learn best practices that we can incorporate into our products.

eWeek: Virus masquerades as a Microsoft email.

MSNBC: Bill Gates keeps top spot on America's richest list.

That is just an unbelieveable amount of money. What's funny is that despite all that money, we both have to drive the same freeway to work.

Sometimes I joke that I'd just like an hour's worth of interest on that money. It used to be that if Microsoft's stock price went up $1, Gates would make about a Billion. Well, how do we get our economy going again? Convince these 10 guys to spend 10% more this year on creating new companies and/or new jobs than they did last year. That wouldn't cost that much, but the benefits would ripple throughout our society.

Congrats to my mentor Jeff Sandquist for making it at Microsoft for six years. How did I know that? Well, he has been supplying our team with M&M's all week long. It's a tradition to buy a pound of M&Ms for each year you've been at Microsoft and leave them by your door on your anniversary date.

Since we're on a book theme, did you know there's a site that tracks all the .NET Books out there?

Slashdot talks about new digital ink billboards. It's about time new display technology comes along.

Dan Appleman, one of the co-founders of APress, talks about eBooks on Scott's weblog.

Julian wants to get another weblogger dinner going at the Crossroads at the end of the month.

One great thing about Microsoft is there's a never-ending stream of people who come to visit the campus for various events.

Christian Nagel says that there's a good article about Web Services and the services oriented architecture over on MSDN.

Microsoft Watch: Since when is integration innovation?

Benjamin J. J. Voigt: "All this Longhorn enthusiasm is so pathetic."

Oh, you just wait Ben, you just wait! ;-)

Text America has a storm moblog going. I am fascinated by how camera phones are changing photo journalism. Reuters brags about how they have journalists in every region of the world. Well, soon every cell phone will be a photojournalistic device. What happens when everyone has a camera?

CNET: Adobe e-doc format under seige.

CNN: Microsoft gives away $250 million to fund education.

Rob Enderle: the battle for belief. Read the comments at the end.

Got a camera phone? Going to the PDC? Text America has put up a PDC Moblog. Just email your pictures from your phone to: pdc2003.msdn@tamw.com and they'll show up on http://pdc2003.textamerica.com/.

O'Reilly is publishing Tivo hacks.

Microsoft Monitor: "where's the buzz over the latest Longhorn leak?"

What, we should get all excited over something leaked several months ago? Not to mention, my policy is not to link to stuff that wasn't officially leaked. The execs tell me (I asked Charles Fitzgerald this afternoon) that the only leaks made were done in the PDC schedules. There's so many code-names leaked there I can't even keep track.

InfoWorld: a kinder, gentler, Microsoft.

Omri Gazitt gets PDC Fever.

Are you a mobile devices developer, well Smartphone Thoughts has the latest on all the new stuff Microsoft just shipped.

David Isenberg has a weblog. I met him at the O'Reilly conference a while back and he impressed me as someone far smarter than I am. His weblog has been delivering too.

I was over at Beth Goza's blog and see they participated in some sort of Segway fest where Steve Wozniak spoke. If that didn't make me jealous enough, did you see Beth's husband's new Tablet robot? Awesome.

I should be an equal-opportunity discloser here. O'Reilly paid for parking last night and APress bought me ice cream on Monday night. Hey, book publishers are fun people! No need to do expensive shindigs to hang out with cool people.

Werner Vogels: "presenting with a Tablet PC."

Adam Cartwright has a PDC 2003 Survival Guide.

Alan Meckler is "hitting them hard" in an attempt to get people to come to the CDexpo in Las Vegas in November. Do you think the PDC hangover will be gone by then?

Pictures from the first anniversary of the first Indian .NET user group. Wish they had captions.

The guy who runs the group, Anand M., has flairs for the TechED coming up in India too. Yes, TechED India has webloggers too!

Sean Alexander, along with having a cute baby moblog, points at a new gadget site. Will it give gizmodo a run for its money?

Alan Cooper: the last gasp.

Rumor told to me last night: seems some people believe I got my job because Steve Ballmer told the execs to hire me to help turn around Microsoft's reputation. Sounds like a fun story, but I checked it out with Vic Gundotra today and he tells me it's totally not true.

Another guy at the party last night asked "so, what's it like hanging with Allchin and Ballmer and Gates all day long?" Now that had me laughing.

But, it shows that weblogging distorts reality.

Weblogging is getting noticed, though. I talked with Bill Evjen of Reuters (he's also the guy who runs INETA) and he was asking some tough questions about weblogging. Not sure Reuters is ready for webloggers the way Microsoft was.

Then, this morning, Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks contacts me and says his readership is triple what it was just a few weeks ago. He ran an ad in MSDN magazine and his thesis was that was where all the new traffic was coming from. Problem was, it's coming from webloggers. We're outpulling the magazines and we don't even charge him an advertising fee.

Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Activewords confirms that too. He says that webloggers give Activewords more traffic than any of the big national newspapers.

By the way, Carl's bandwith is overwhelmed. He's looking for donations or any ideas on how to keep up with the growing traffic. His audio show had more than 15,000 downloads this week. He's doing it for free and that traffic is overwhelming his resources and he's trying to figure out how to deal with it. He has some good ideas that he'll announce soon, but if you like his shows and can throw some resources his way, he'd appreciate it.

Back to the distortion of reality. There are tens of thousands of Microsoft employees who do their jobs without getting recognized anywhere. I wonder how I can help give them some of the public recognition? I wish all the employees wrote weblogs, although I wonder how Newsgator would handle 55,000 RSS feeds?