Michael Herman says "Blogging is inherently neither two-way nor conversational. Rather blogging is a high-tech version of bathroom grafitti that enables a person to: a)Scan (and optionally read) thousands of cubicle walls with little or no effort, and b) During a moment of contemplation, add a few new scribbles to their stall wall."

Of course now Michael has answered me and I've answered him. Isn't that a conversation? How many times do we need to ping back and forth before it is? Did Michael just write on my wall? No. He wrote on his own and he linked his graffiti to mine.

He also claims this is just a reengineering of NNTP newsgroups. Well, OK, but who the hell cares? Older community technologies don't show up in Google, Feedster, Technorati, DayPop. So, I really don't care anymore about this argument. Here's a quarter, call someone who cares...

Dave Sifry is sitting behind me and blogs why his a Demo 2004 search page on Technorati is different. I'm not gonna blog this conference point by point. Doc Searls is doing a good job of that and between the Technorati Demo page, and the Feedster Demo page, I think you'll be overloaded with Demo news.

Feedster's Scott Rafer is on stage. He's using me as an example during his demo. Heh, I have my very own echo chamber. They also just demoed a Demo Paper site. Very nice news on stuff being seen here at Demo.

This is my first Demo. Even before arriving at the conference this morning I knew it was a different kind of conference. Why? Walt Mossberg was on the elevator. "Hi Walt, I've been reading you for years." He answered back "you on the blogging panel this morning?" Whoa. Oh, wait, I was wearing my "I'm blogging this" T-Shirt. Who knows, though. Maybe he really does read my blog.

The conversation continues at Demo. Just got off stage. I see that Doc Searls has already blogged it. He's sitting right behind me. Did we win over the skeptics? I told the audience that if they take one thing away they should hear that RSS is something they should use on their sites to build strong relationships with their customers.

Greg Robinson doesn't like all the Longhorn coverage: "I am disappointed that all of the .NET technical magazines we subscribe to are now 80% + Longhorn articles."

I used to be a magazine associate editor (at what is now known as Visual Studio Magazine), so I'll come to their defense. Magazines have lead times of three months. They all owe their readers a good look at what was discussed at the PDC. Guess what, that was three months ago. Look for Longhorn coverage to fall back down to a trickle until beta one ships (not gonna happen for a while).

I used to get this complaint everytime we covered something new. The problem was this type of complaint also came while a TON of new subscriptions came in. Why is that? Because people want to read about new stuff. And it catches their eyes on the news stand.

Also, you are looking at it wrong. Longhorn is big. It will take you a while to learn it (unless you're some super programming guru like Sam Gentile or Dan Appleman, and even those two guys work very hard at learning new stuff). It's good to have a few years warning about trends before they happen. That way you can learn slowly and carefully and if you really want to have some impact on where things are going you can have quite a bit.

Extreme Tech: iTunes bad. WMA good. "After immersing myself in audio codecs (as research for a future article) and re-ripping most of my own collection, I've come to the conclusion that I really like WMA -- and I really don't like the whole iTunes/iPod thing."

Jason Nadal has built a little Longhorn app that translates languages. Very nice! Source code included.

Don Browning says that Tablet PCs "freaking rock" for developers. Wait until you get the new 2004 software. That makes using a Tablet PC a whole new experience.

The Washington Post asks "Will Google get steamrolled like Netscape?"

No.

Next question?

Seriously, I'm a Microsoft employee. I haven't yet stopped using Google. Why? Cause I keep trying MSN search and I don't like it as much.

I've only been a Microsoft employee for, what, nine months? Back in the Netscape days I switched to Internet Explorer 2.0 (I was an early switcher), not because it was integrated with the OS, but because it had a better object model than Netscape did. By the time IE 4 rolled around there wasn't any real choice.

The thing to watch is the quality of the results.

Speaking of which, I'm using Technorati and Feedster for more and more of my searching. Now THAT is a trend worth watching!

While you all are watching for MSN to steamroll Google, maybe the steamrolling will come from left field? Feedster is on stage at Demo today. Last week at ETCon Technorati and Dave Sifry were the stars of the show. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Are more blog ads coming our way? Well, look at how well they are working for Ben Chandler, who is running for Congress. Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

Matthew Mastracci tells us all to switch to the new Mozilla Firefox.

Mary Hodder reports on a topic we discussed at dinner the other night: does writing make you more literate?

In my case, I believe it does. Writing every day forces me to learn about new things so that I will have something tomorrow interesting to write about.

There's another conference going on this week. The Intel Developer's Conference. Microsoft will have a bit of news coming at this event too (sorry, can't talk about it until Tuesday).

Anyway, there's an RSS Feed so you can stay up to date.

Maryam's relatives came over on Saturday for a party. What's on their minds? Offshoring. People are really freaked about this trend. Politically, there is going to be a lot of pressure to do something. But, what can be done for programmers, IT folks, and service folks? Tariffs? Yeah, I'd like to see you put in place a tariff for programmers. Not unless you're going to shut down the Internet and FedEX. It's easy to tariff something like steel, but not so easy when it's just bits traveling across the Internet.

Anyway, Rajesh Jain's weblog points to the New York Times analysis. Do we really need to analyze this? Let's see. Average Chinese worker gets paid about $1000 a year. Yes, that's right. In Bejing the number goes up to $2500 per year. How much are you paid? I am paid a lot more than that. Is there pressure to send my job over to China? You betcha there is.

Watch out, the politicians will probably start making promises (and accusations) on this issue that will astound. Offshoring could become THE US election issue this year.

Pixology has announced, says Digital Photography Review, that they are working on a system to remove red-eye from digital photographs when a photo is taken. That's cool.

Dana Epp, a security expert who is expert with Linux and Windows, compares and contrasts open source and Microsoft security. I don't know of many people doing better thinking on security than Dana. I don't know of many who are expert on the Linux platform and the Windows platform (when I first met him he was almost exclusively programming on Linux and today he's expert in Windows' internals).

His weblog is among the most interesting of the 1300 I read. I learn a lot from Dana and for that my hat's off to him.

One thing I definitely want to check out this week at Demo is "Akimbo." It's written in .NET. The Website claims to deliver over 10,000 hours of high quality video-on-demand over the Internet straight to your TV.

They will demo at Demo on Tuesday.

Is word-of-mouth a powerful market force? Ask Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Or, just check out the "Church of the Customer" weblog. 71% of car buyers said that word of mouth influenced what they bought. Only 17% cited TV advertising.

That matches what I saw in the 1980s at the camera store.

It matches what I see today in the weblog world.

Heh, Alex Moskalyuk thinks the industry should do a "Geek Apprentice" show. You know, like that Donald Trump show where the Donald says "you're fired" at the end of every show to one of the contestants.

Alex suggests I do the voiceovers. Hmmm. If only I had a good voice. Or a TV-friendly face.

Everytime I watch the show, though, I think that Trump's interviewing process is easier than Microsoft's. Not to mention that Trump pays more. Well, this is TV. ;-)

I think that could be a fun way to promote .NET development, though. Have a series of interviews to pick out the best programmer. Have Bill Gates say "that's random" at the end to the loser. Have the winner get a bunch of money and a job. I'd be up for that.

My wife got me a cute valentines' day card.

It said on the outside:

"Treat me like the Internet..."

And on the inside it said:

"Spend all day with me."

Ouch.

The hype from Demo has already started. You'll hear a lot over the next few days from this conference in the Arizona desert. Here's one thing we'll see tomorrow: another competitor to Microsoft Office (thanks to San Jose Mercury News' Dan Gillmor for that article).

If you're here, make sure you come and say hi! I'll be wearing my "I'm blogging this" PDC shirt.