Zane Thomas and I were talking the other night. He started his blog just a little more than a week ago. On Friday he said he got 1000 visits. That's just freaking amazing. Open a weblog and get instant traffic. It also shows I have a few more than 18 people reading here. Ever get a feeling that a few thousand people are looking over your shoulder?

By the way, I owe a great deal of my writing style to Zane. For more than six years Zane would beat me up in debates ranging from religion to the death penalty. That mental exercise prepared me for where I am now. I really missed having great debates with Zane (I haven't been in DevX's off.ramp for months cause it just turned lame and the blogosphere just became far more interesting). Today he's saying that .NET isn't a good solution for shareware authors because of its 20MB runtime (and because he perceives that Microsoft has not done a good job of getting the .NET runtime on every machine out there).

Ahh, the good old "reach" argument. It's a problem, that's for sure. But, it's a common misperception that Microsoft has the power to get people to install software on their machines. Not true wasabi!

People install software when there's a compelling reason to do so. Right now .NET is only marginally compelling (my mom or dad wouldn't install it). But, that's starting to change and it's changing very quickly.

There are some really compelling applications coming (and many, like News Gator) are already out there.

I'd write some Longhorn hype here too, but you will get enough of that on October 27. ;-)

One last point: everytime Microsoft brings out a big platform people complain about the size. When DOS came out, it was bloated over CPM. When Windows came out it took a new machine to run it. When Windows 95 came out it was much larger than Windows 3.1 and took tons more RAM and hard drive space. And so on. In 2000 a 20MB download looked obscene. Today, in between MP3s and photos that are 4MB each (some of the new digital cameras take RAW images that are 30MB each) 20MB doesn't look like that big a deal. In the Longhorn timeframe (2005 or later) 20MB will be nothing. In fact, .NET will be built into Longhorn (and Longhorn itself needs .NET to be there).

The reality is, Microsoft always bets on the ecosystem catching up to the increased requirements. Guess what? For the past 25 years that bet has proven to be the right one.

Zane: shareware in .NET? Go for it. If you come to the PDC you'll see just why that's a good idea even though today it seems like a really stupid one.

Allen Bauer is blogging. He's the IDE architect for Borland's Delphi and C# builder. He's already become a must-read on my list. Subscribed!

What is New has tons of info on a new Acer Tablet PC. This really looks cool. Can Acer PR give me one for a while to compare to my Toshiba? Let me tell you what I already did for Acer. I emailed this page to about 3000 Microsoft employees (on three email aliases that exist internally). Within a few hours Lora tells me they got about 500 visits. Now you know the power of corporate blogging. Problem is that inside Microsoft we use email the way we should be using blogs. But, that'll change someday. Weblogs with RSS with News Gator is superior to email -- when corporations figure that out, the blogging tools market will become profitable.

First Madonna and Britney do it. Now Chris Sells and Don Box are doing it. Who's next?

Wow, Kevin and Drew have really done something nice. The PDC Blogger site has a ton of new features and a new look.

But, there's something everyone (not just PDC attendees) should participate in: the Q&A Panel discussions. Here you can submit a question for the panelists to answer on Thursday at the PDC.

Jeff Sandquist is running a little "write a caption" deal for a funny photo.

Like, "where did my dog go?"

Carl Franklin is blogging. OK, now weblogging is definitely no longer a fad. Carl's the guy who did the first VB Web site and has been doing Internet stuff for almost as long as, well, Al Gore. Heh.

Of course, he's also the guy who does Best of Clementine so your mileage may vary!

Tomorrow my son and I have been invited to a secret campout somewhere in Northern California. I'm going to make my son the official photographer of the event -- let's talk next week. I'm honored to have been invited, but it'll make my weekend a blog free zone (although some news of the event might leak out here and there).

While over at Joi Ito's weblog I see that Ben and Mena were on CNN talking about TypePad. Congrats!

Mary Jo Foley is blogging the Microsoft Partner Conference. Ahh, we did announce a new security initiative (as part of XP service pack 2) and other things.

I'm sure we'll see tons of news from this come up on WatchingMicrosoftLikeAHawk today. By the way, I've seen a few sites write about the Hawk site, saying they believe it's biased (against Microsoft). I do not see that bias at all. Do you?

Jupiter Research Analyst Michael Gartenberg: "Diversity to lower security costs or risk does not make sense."

Yesterday Apple announced it's shipping a new OS, and asked us an implied question: when is Microsoft going to ship Longhorn? I think that's the wrong question, so over on my Longhorn blog I wrote up a list of questions I would be asking if I were in the industry. I'm gonna get Microsoft's answers to these at the PDC. How about you? Do you have a series of questions you'd like to get answered by the industry leaders?