Reuters: Tablet PCs starting to take off after slow start.

Now that Summer is over, the Nikon forum has been collecting "the Proudest Photos of the summer."

Sam Gentile is a C++-coding-machine and he has a list of new and notable sites.

There's a Blogger Forum, which is a place to learn more about weblogging. Nice to see people helping others learn.

BlogPulse is another Weblog popularity service, from a company called Intelliseek that does business intelligence analysis for marketers. (via Kevin Werbach via Biz Stone).

Peter takes on the idea that Tablet PCs aren't real computers.

Ed Kaim: Blogging is Overhyped.

Duh!

But, that doesn't take away from the fact that it HAS already changed my world.

Wesner Moise: What's this Avalon?

Team XBox: XBox market share grows. Dang, they noticed I bought one!

By the way, most geeks who have XBox's are totally missing out. I have a surround sound receiver. It has a digital connection for audio. Problem is, the XBox doesn't come with a digital connector. If you get the extra cable and connector the audio gets wwwaaaaayyyyyy better. DTS surround. XBox. Nothing like it.

Personal Computer World: Windows Plans Get Put on Hold.

Ahh, the game of guessing Longhorn's ship date continues.

Lora's WhatIsNew site is sporting a new design too. Very nice.

DonXML wants to get a blogger party going at the PDC. I'm SO there!

The thing about it is, I've been giving a lot of weblogger parties and they are quite strange. First of all, webloggers generally don't drink that much (I like good whiskey, though). Second of all, if a beautiful woman walks nearby, most of us won't even look up from our computers. Third of all, if you have the latest gadget, you must show it to everyone and give a good demo of all its features.

I can't wait for the PDC.

I'm listening to Chris Putnam, 17-year-old, practice the piano. What an amazing kid. What an amazing world. He lets me listen to him practice via a Web service that uses Windows Media 9. How many other people have custom, live, music piped into their homes for free?

Fumiaki Yoshimatsu reminds us that what we learn at the PDC won't really be important for a while longer. Well, that depends on what kind of developer you are. We're already working with some key developers to build apps for Longhorn, even though Longhorn won't be here until 2005. Why? It takes "big name" companies 18 to 24 months to build new apps with major new functionality. Think, for example about Adobe Photoshop.

Jason Kottke points us to this non-profit weblogging job.

Microsoft Monitor takes Microsoft to task for charging for chat.

Microsoft Research has been busy, check out the World-Wide Media eXchange. The WWMX, short for the World-Wide Media eXchange, is an experimental research project run by the Interactive Visual Media Group at Microsoft Research. The goal is to explore what can done with a gazillion photos on a single database indexed by their location.

This is very cool!

MSN Messenger users, look at the cool emoticon graphic pictures.

Microsoft has redesigned its support site to be easier to use.

Chris Anderson (one of the architects on Avalon and one of Microsoft's upcoming developer stars): "One of the coolest things about this PDC - almost all of the demos (including the keynotes!) will be using real production code..."

Hmmm, Julien has an interesting point over on Russell Beattie's site. You might not be able to see it, though, cause Russell is playing a little game of "keep Scoble's links from working."

I heard about a new three letter acronymn tonight. If someone says "DRE" on a report it means "Direct Rectal Extraction." Or, "I pulled these figures out of you know where."

I wonder who first used this TLA?

PC Magazine: RSS News Aggregators Browse for You.

I wonder why they left Radio UserLand off? I still like its all-in-one-page approach. But, I must admit, I'm using NewsGator about 90% of the time lately.

Note to the Longhorn team here at Microsoft: take Marc Canter's slide here, take out "next generation calendar event aggregator" and put in "WinFS." I think that'll do wonderfully for one of our Longhorn keynote decks.

Note to Marc Canter: your thinking is interesting, but, you should think bigger. Come to the PDC to expand your mind.

See, I can have fun with Marc the same way he has fun with me! :-)

J. Scott Johnson (the guy who wrote Feedster) wrote an interesting rant yesterday titled "The GUI desktop: saveable or just plain obsolete???"

I know you're getting sick of hearing about this, but let's talk after the PDC on this topic.

MSDN Magazine: Design your own weblog application from scratch using ASP.NET, JavaScript, and OLE DB.

Dare Obasanjo on MSDN: Revamping the RSS Bandit Application.

Omri Gazitt talks about proposed Binary XML Standards.

OK, let's go back over this one again. HTML won because it was text, not binary. (For mom, text looks like this "abc." Binary looks like this "00001000.") Why is text better? Cause humans can read it and understand it.

Funny, but it's my belief that text-based systems lead to greater interop because of this fact.

Binary folks will point out to me that binary is smaller and faster. I say "so?" Assembly is smaller and faster than C#, but does that really matter anymore except in really weird situations?

Do we need to fight this fight again? Let's just stick with systems that humans have a chance of understanding. The technology world should be getting more human compatible, not more machine compatible.

Joshua Hoover asks "Does Scoble need to take the reality distortion glasses off?"

No, those are Apple inventions. At Microsoft we drink Talking Rain (and you all thought it was the Kool Aid). Well, I did, until I visited my dentist last Friday night and he showed me how carbonated drinks were leeching minerals from my teeth. Not a good thing.

Anyway, the question he should have asked is "Does Scoble need to stop drinking the Talking Rain?" The answer to that is "yes."

But, to get to the point of his rant. He seems to believe that one must believe in God to get any meaning from life. I have some co-workers who believe that. I am a "bright." I know that most of you do believe in God. Recent surveys show that 60+% of you do.

But, no matter what you believe, hear me here: I get great joy out of my work and I believe it does indeed matter. I believe that technology improves our lives. I've seen it improve mine.

What do I gain from my toiling? For one, great readers. I have met many of them, and had unbelieveable experiences with them. Absolutely totally interesting. For two, great friends. For three, I get to see the future (and, in a very small way, help design it). For four, I get to talk with people around the world about technology and beliefs and tons of other stuff. For five, I get to tell everyone in the world what I think (that would have been pretty impossible for someone in my position even 20 years ago).

For six, I get to know that at the end of my life, I spent my working hours doing something that was enjoyable, that was changing the world, that helped people in their lives, that helped put people to work, that had a minimum of negative effects, and that will live on after my death (just try to get me to disappear from Google anytime soon).

And I haven't even gotten started yet, but will stop cause I've gotten too boring.

Leo Laporte of Tech TV says Text America rocks.

Over on Text America I see Alan Reiter is comparing Camera Phones.

Did you see that Camera Phones are now outselling regular old cell phones?

Alan has an excellent weblog on wireless stuff too.

Microsoft-hater Ru$$ell Beattie says "M$ SmartPhones Catching Up."

Heh, maybe I should change my name to $cobleizer.

Update: Russell doesn't want me linking to his site anymore, so he's redirecting my site to a different place. You'll have to enter his URL into your browser by hand. Ahh, the fun.

It is: http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1004334.html

WiFiFreeSpot.com is just what its name implies.

Tatung has a new Tablet PC that's thin and light. I'm glad I'm not working at NEC right now trying to sell against the stampede of new Tablets coming out. Acer announced something today too. For good Tablet info, head on over to TabletPCBuzz or TabletPCTalk.

Wow, is there money in social software? The Register reports that there is! $11 million of VC goes to Friendster. Whew. You know what I could have done with that kind of money at UserLand? I can't talk about UserLand's business, but I could have funded quite a few years of development (correct that, decades) with that kind of money.

Heck, I know a lot of projects at Microsoft that haven't gotten funded with that kind of money.

Oh, cool, I see that the PDC weblogger BOF got approved. Awesome. I learned that BOFs are supposed to be organized by and participated in by community members, so I'll be in the audience in this one. It's just one way we want to "put the audience on stage."

Robert McLaws said "but you're the blogging star, why can't an exception be made?" I said "cause how will more stars be made if I'm up there hogging the spotlight?"

I can't wait to see what Robert and team put together.

Trend of webloggers getting fired, being muzzled, or having bloggers getting them fired.

And people wonder why I'm careful about what I write? The knives webloggers play with DO have sharp edges. Juggle carefully!

Henry Burgess gave me some tips just in case I ever have to go head-to-head with Bill Gates. I'll always remember the 20 minutes I spent alone with Bill at Spring Comdex/Windows World in 1994.

Geek dinner alert. Next Thursday night. 6:30 p.m. At the Crossroads, near Microsoft. Everyone is invited. Occassion? Jeff Julian is on campus for the Guided Design Summit (which looks very interesting, by the way) and he wanted to be the guest of honor at one of these dinners. Chris Kinsman says he'll come too.