Hotlinks. Interesting way to find new blogs.

Meg Whitman and her team, over at eBay, did something really interesting. She built a community of people who hate eBay, and invited them up to eBay to learn from them (and learn they did, it was a brilliant move).

I'm trying to put that to use in my own life. So, now, I'm watching Feedster, Pubsub, Technorati, for the following phrases:

"I hate Scoble."

"I hate Microsoft."

"I hate Longhorn."

Can search engines build communities? You just watch.

Do you learn the most from people who are critical of you?

I find I do, and so did eBay. In fact, the leaders I like the most surround themselves with people who aren't like them (and probably don't like them). It's why I really appreciate having people like Jeremy Allison reading me. Keeps me honest and tells me where there are opportunities for personal improvement. I wish I had more people like him around me.

Brian Bailey (the guy who invited me to take a tour of the church) has been "all-Scoble-all-the-time" this week. But, he added comments, and I like his writing style.

He has a ton of interesting stuff he's learned from his work. I can't wait to see if he starts sharing it.

Oh, and get that 15-year-old C# phenom, James Reggio, to start a blog. He's building some real interesting apps and I'd love to hear his perspective on the industry. The kids usually see stuff that the rest of us miss.

Anyway, I am always looking to meet people who are doing interesting things with technology. Please do let me know if you are doing something interesting.

Stuff like using .NET to run the largest pistachio processing plant in America.

By the way, learning about this stuff is my hobby. Microsoft didn't pay a dime for me to visit the Dallas church on Monday. I was on vacation. Same for the processing plant.

I love meeting geeks and seeing what they do. I can't wait for the geek dinner next Wednesday night because there's a ton of interesting people coming.

Ed Brill: Email vs. RSS.

One of the things that's frustrating about life lately is there just isn't enough time to talk about everything I want to talk about. Look at my link blog. I loaded about 100 new things in there last night. All of them are worth reading. I wish I could take the time to tell you why each of them are worth reading, but I can't. I only can blog for a couple of hours every day now. My job is getting more demanding. My home life is getting more demanding. My blogging time is getting squeezed. It's why I really love what Kunal Das has done with his Outlook "drag-something-to-a-folder-and-blog-it" technology. At least you can see what catches my eye out of 1400 blogs. He made me dramatically more productive. That's what we need from software authors: more productivity enhancements.

While we're on lack of time, I've been getting more and more email. It's getting harder and harder to answer that. Especially since I took two vacation days this past week, and was off at an offsite this week (and next week will be off the network for three days to attend a conference).

If you've sent me email, I'll try to get to it, but it might be two weeks before I give it the attention it deserves.

A lot of people have been writing me with tech support, or relationship with Microsoft questions. I try to answer each one of those, but actually I've found that you'll get a better response if you write a note in the Channel9 forums, or if you blog it on your own blog (if I link to your blog from my blog you'll get far more attention from Microsoft than you would if I only emailed one person).

Translation: don't count on one person to be the gatekeeper into a company of 56,000 employees. Blog it and then there's a chance other employees can jump in and help you out.

The amount of innovation taking place in the news aggregator space is high and going up. Another datapoint. Recently released is BlogMatrix Jäger 1.2.

What's new? From the author: "- there's a "favorites" list, which let's you narrow down the blog you really like to read (as opposed to occasionally like to read)

- there's much better support for reading newspapers that don't have syndication feeds. Just drag the links of any newspapers or columnists you like to read and Jaeger will figure out the rest.

It's getting to be that you need a weblog just to keep track of what's happening in the RSS/Atom space. Chris Pirillo has an excellent RSS Newsletter over at Lockergnome. I'm subscribed and every day there's something new about syndication there.

Last night I posted a bunch of stuff up to my aggregator blog, but this one caught my eye. Someone from the Tablet PC team, Evan Feldman is blogging. One of his first posts "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated".

Update: Evan used to be on the Tablet PC team, now he's on the Mobile PC Client Business Team which is closely aligned with the Tablet PC team. Nitpicky, yes, just wanted to correct that.

Steve Rubel interviews Buzz Bruggeman. Title? Buzz, the master of blog buzz. I think Buzz first pitched me within a few weeks of starting my blog 3.5 years ago and we've been friends ever since. Can't wait to see him next week at Jupiter Media's Internet Planet.

Jason Haley called me a few weeks back and asked me what the secrets are to having a good geek dinner (he talked about the tips I gave him on his weblog). I told him that I noticed that if I had three big names (other than me) that more than 20 people would show up. If I only had two, five to 20 would show up.

This has remained pretty constant for years. Including next week's geek dinner in New York (which now has about 30 people coming to it).

Here's the details: June 16th. 6:30 p.m. At the original Mendy's (across from the Empire State Building). If you are coming, please RSVP by sending me email to robertscoble@hotmail.com.

On Monday, before I visited the church, I had lunch at Bone Daddy's with Stuart Watson. Stuart has a very interesting idea. He believes there are people out there who want to subscribe to email mailing lists (er, advertising, and newsletters) from companies and other sources, but that they don't want to give the company their email address.

So, he's subscribing for you, and translating that information into RSS 2.0. He has an interesting business model (he'll make money off of referrals, and advertising of his own).

His site? RealSimpleShopping.

Plus, he's looking to add value through search technology, and some other things. Imagine that you are going to buy a tent in the next few months, wouldn't you want to watch Eddie Bauer and REI's newsletters to see if there's a sale on a tent coming up? My wife is gonna be all over this thing.