You wanna know what my goal is as a Longhorn evangelist?

1) Have thousands of passionate people waiting in line in cold Tokyo to buy Longhorn like these folks did just to visit the new Apple store.

2) Have passionate customers who love us so much that they'll put videos up on their servers at their own expense.

And, who said there isn't vigorous competition in the computer industry? Every one of these thousands of people on that video are saying that competition is back!

Live Journal turned on Atom support. More than a million Live Journal sites now have Atom feeds you can subscribe to.

One more: Feedster has come out with a web based aggregator. Scott is doing some interesting stuff over there. I track what all the blogs are saying about various things (like Longhorn, or Linux) through Feedster. Why? Because I can perform a search, and Feedster will make that search into an RSS feed that I can subscribe to. You know how you felt when you first saw a killer application? (For me, it was Pagemaker). This is a killer service. The idea that a search term can then be a syndication feed is going to change the world. You watch, if Google and MSN are smart, they'll do that for all search terms.

Feedster has dramatically changed search for me. Has it for you yet?

Chuq von Rospach "This is something people who don't write professionally don't understand: writing is hard work. Just because you sit at a keyboard moving your fingers doesn't mean it's not hard work, tiring, exhausting, or stressful. Don't mistake informal writing (like blogging, email, etc) for real writing, either."

I've done real writing. Actually, doing a blog that has implications for a multi-billion dollar company and industry has its own stresses as well. Even if it isn't part of my day job. Speaking of which, I gotta go to work.

If I don't see the rest of you before Christmas, have a very happy holidays. Remember to make sure your friends and family's computers are patched. Memorize this site: microsoft.com/protect. Run that on every Windows computer you touch this holiday season. Together we can make the world a better place.

I wish all of you a happy and safe holidays. Even those of you working on Linux or Macintosh software!

May Santa bring all of you lots of geek toys.

Heh, Ray Slakinski writes "Scoble's in my brain." (He says I've brainwashed him). Tonight I fly down to Silicon Valley -- I'll be down there until January 3. Anyone want to get together for a geek lunch or dinner? See ya on the other side.

Business Week has an excellent video interview with Steve Ballmer up.

Update: I fixed the link.

Over on Always-On, IBM Executive Rod Atkins speculates as to the real reason that Linux is keeping Bill Gates up at night (actually, it keeps all of us Microsofties up at night -- the idea that software should be free means all of us need to constantly add new value. If we stop adding value (translate that marketing speak into: do a better job for our customers), our jobs will be commoditized. That certainly keeps me up at night).

Ben McConnell (who writes the inspiring "Church of the Customer" weblog) asks "is this any way to sell a car?" (About Chrysler's participation in the Lingerie Bowl: "But being outrageous is rooted in a belief system of defying expectations by exceeding them, not pandering to the carnal-curious. Pandering works well for the porn industry, though. Maybe Julie Roehm has a new opportunity there)."

I'm speaking at RSS Winterfest. The cool thing is, neither me, nor the other participants (or you, if you sign up) need to leave our desks.

So, ask again, why do we need another Internet conference?

We have teams of researchers all over the world working on Longhorn. Here's an article about a group working in the UK.

The more I learn about just what we're doing with Longhorn, the more I'm impressed by the sheer scale of the development process here.

This guy really doesn't like some IT people. Found this over on Mike McBride's weblog (he's one of those IT guys).

Canon will ship 20 new digital cameras in the next year, Gizmodo says. Isn't that a mistake? Focus, focus, focus!

Joe Wilcox: "Cooperating with governments against spam is smart business and good policy."

Dana Blankenhorn agrees with John Dvorak, saying in effect, Longhorn and Microsoft's plans are evil. "I need a new PC. My old machine is five years old and becoming obsolete. But I'm not going to click "yes" to this kind of regime."

I wonder, when cars moved out of the Model-T age did people complain so violently about getting electronic starters so they didn't need to turn a crank to get them started?

We're trying to make a computer that people like using and one that stays up to date. Why? Because software is simply human ideas embodied in a machine. Over time human ideas evolve and improve. If you're using Windows 98, you are using a machine that ignores five years of human experiences and learning. Am I evil for wanting you to have a machine that is up to date? Hint: this isn't a Microsoft thing, either. All software developers I've met want you to use their latest stuff.

And, yes, most people want a computer that's an appliance. Do we see massive protests when Tivo automatically upgrades the software in their machine? No. Why not? Because generally things get better. Same on the Microsoft side of the fence.

But, it's my job as an evangelist to get people over their fears of new software. I have not yet done a good enough job. No matter what platform you're on, the new stuff is usually better than the old stuff. Just today I saw Linus Torvalds talking about how great the new Linux kernel is. Go and talk to Steve Jobs and try to point out that you like OS9 better than OSX and see what he says.

Personally, I can't wait until Longhorn gets here. Even in today's buggy, half-finished state, Longhorn is proving to be a more productive, nicer environment. Every week I install a new build (they compile a new build every few days right now). Every week something new shows up that makes me more productive. Yes, it's a pain to stay up to date with the latest. But, if you do that, you get a lot of goodness too.

And, yes, we appreciate getting paid for coming up with a more secure, more productive, nicer to use, product. We're spending billions per year on R&D. Windows costs, what, $200? And you keep that, for what, five years? Not too bad. Especially in a world where my Verizon cell phone bill is $100 a month and my Comcast cable bill is $60 a month and my Tivo bill is $13 a month.

Alan Meckler has announced a new show named Internet Planet. Another kitchen-sink show. I probably won't attend. Why? Because I will probably only get a budget to go to a couple of conferences in 2004 and I am going to spend my money on going to highly-focused, niche conferences where I'll actually learn something in depth.

How can one show cover everything there is on the Internet? Those kinds of shows just aren't interesting anymore. Why? Because we have the Internet. Want to get a 15-minute overview on everything on the Internet? Just read 600 blogs a day (or read the Scobleizer -- cause I read 600 blogs a day). :-)

I'm far more likely, for instance, to go to Meckler's Search Engine Strategies conference. What are some other good conferences to invest in? Smart & Rich Clients (ala Flash or Longhorn's Avalon). RSS. Cell-phone development (what we gonna do with all those new camera and smartphones?)

Here's an interesting article on the Iraqi bloggers. Found, where else, but on Instapundit. My favorite political blogger.

I dropped in on Chris Anderson yesterday and he asked me "how come you never point out anything bad about Microsoft anymore?" He's not the only one asking. Several of my readers have been asking -- and many of my coworkers at Microsoft rib me that I shouldn't become another PR person on Microsoft's payroll. Another friend told me "your value is when you take the user's point of view."

I don't have an answer to that. I've been at Microsoft now for seven months and definitely haven't done as good a job as I should have for my readers. We'll start stepping it up, OK?

While I'm snoozing, though, others are taking up the slack. Look at Loren, who isn't happy with GotDotNet's search engine.

Kevin Werbach announces another Supernova conference. I hope I can get to this one. The previous ones got me jealous of not being there.

There's a new weblog tracking Iranian censorship. Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for passing that along.

Michael Gartenberg asks the question: "Is Google the new Microsoft?"

Bryan Flamig: Wherefore art thou, C++. "I currently code exclusively in Visual C++. However, I see the train at the end of the tunnel fast approaching."

Rory Blyth is one of my favorite bloggers. Here he wrote a must read tome on coding standards.

Ever wonder who came up with the guy who wrote Ctrl-Alt-Del? Here's a video of him, Dave Bradley (he's an engineer at IBM) on stage with Bill Gates. Hey, on that page the Real Networks choice is above the Microsoft one. How the heck did that happen? I thought Real wasn't able to compete against us? So, why is CNET putting them on top? Just a question to ponder this Friday. Here's more on Dave Bradley.

My coworker Charles Torre has started a blog, and his first post was to the fun to play with Picasso Head. Keep bringing me to cool sites Charles, and you'll soon have an audience of thousands. :-)

Nick Bradbury has shipped FeedDemon 1.0, an awesome news aggregator. That rocks!

I thought the fact that it was darker lately was due to me moving to Seattle, which is far rainier than California. Not true, says the BBC. Things are getting dimmer overall.

Brad Graham wrote the corny 12 Days of Blogging. On the first day of blogging, Scobleizer brought to me...

Oh, sorry, I can't get that out of my head now.

Sam Ruby over at IBM is writing some C# code to call the Atom API via WSDL. Alright, fire up Visual Studio!

Dori Smith is depressed by Biz Stone's rant on "how to get a book deal with your blog." By the way, Biz is right. So far I've gotten a few book deals offered to me because of my blog. I think that's mostly because they want people they know have an audience. Book publishers need to sell about 10,000 books to start making a profit. When they see someone who has an audience of 2000 or so people a day, they start salivating. The problem is, for me to write a book, I'd need to give up the blog for a while and if you do that, the audience on your blog will largely go away. Not to mention that I have a day job and I squeeze a life with Maryam in there too.

Keith Curtis, who works here, saw my comment about Howard Dean's RSS news aggregator, that was written in .NET. He pointed out to me that George Bush's website is written using ASP.NET.

InfoWorld: Linux 2.6.0 kernel released. Congrats to Linus and friends.

Don Norman, the design God, is looking for examples of things that have great design.

Omar Shahine is raving about SlickRun, a utility that helps you run things in Windows.

It's amazing what some people are doing with DirectX 9. Here's a site that shows off some cool examples of RTHDRIBL. You know, real-time high dynamic range image-based lighting.

Mary Jo Foley is tracking XPSP2 news and where it's available. So far she can't find it on MSDN either.

On other security news, Microsoft's top security guy, Michael Howard, now has a blog and he wrote about his efforts to reduce the attack surface of Microsoft's OS and apps.

A bunch of people have IM'ed me saying they've gotten the new XP Service Pack Two Beta (aka "springboard" aka "XPSP2"). CRN says it was released on MSDN. I haven't seen it there yet. Wonder where they are looking.

Anyone wanna have a geek lunch near Fresno, CA on December 30? I'm going to get a tour of the US's largest pistachio processing plant. .NET developers Richard Caetano and Rob Fahrni have invited me.

I went on a walking tour of the campus this afternoon. Boy was the weather spectacular. Should have taken pictures. I happened upon the Virtual PC 2004 Launch Party. Got a nice demo and got a T-Shirt. Heh, the posters listed all the OS's that could be run on the new version, including Linux and Longhorn.

Don Box explains why he doesn't use Visual Studio.