Danese Cooper talks about why she thinks executives don't blog. Yeah, I agree that they are busy. But, they also have other ways to talk to the marketplace. For instance, Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, can call up ActiveWin (or the New York Times) and give them an interview. For someone like that, what motivation is there to blog?

For the best answer we can look to Dallas Maverick's CEO, Mark Cuban, who keeps an interesting executive blog. He uses it to talk about stuff that the press wouldn't be interested in printing. Stuff like analysis of the referees in the NBA. Or discussion of behind-the-scenes stuff.

Seattle PI's Microsoft Blog covers the new Science Fiction museum in Seattle.

The reaction to Joel Spolsky's API Wars piece keeps coming in.

Prasenjeet Dutta: Right or wrong, Joel scored a slam dunk. ...It is not clear that soldiering on with the Raymond Chen approach1, with its 80s era design, would have solved anything.

Larry O'Brien: mciSendString("Wrong, Joel"). "That Microsoft APIs must now compete for favor with APIs from Palo Alto, SourceForge, or where-have-you is true, but that's vastly different than losing. The game is barely afoot.

Dotnetfinserv: One Run-time to Rule them all. "All things being equal, Joel makes some very articulate & valid points about the challenges & frustrations inherent in hitching one's wagon to Microsoft...I just think his crystal ball needs some Windex."

Dennis Hamilton: Rich Client, Poor Client, Smart Client, Web Client. "I have never considered substituting Hotmail and web-based distributed-learning applications for the fat-client Outlook and FirstClass on my desktop. I will be happier when I can operate my blogs from the desktop and not the browser."

Note to Microsoft management and employees: It's a major mistake to use our lawyers to try to silence our critics in this method detailed on Simon Phipps weblog. At least if the facts are as presented by Lawrence Lessig and Simon Phipps.

James Robertson: how not to be a linkblogger.

I agree that it's far less useful than it once was. But, it's still useful to me and Kunal is still working on the algorithms.

If someone wants a better link blog they can pay me to do it. I'm not gonna do one if it takes any more time than to just drag an item over to a folder.

My main blog (the one here) is the one where you get to know me. My link blog is where you get to see what I'm reading.

Jason Kottke reads Cory Doctorow's speech at (and to) Microsoft about how DRM sucks.

Seattle's geekiest geek, Phillip Torrone went to the museum too and wrote it up for Engadget.

Just took Maryam and Patrick to the grand opening of Seattle's new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

Wonderful way to spend an afternoon. Geeks who visit Seattle will definitely want to visit this.

My favorite things? The display screens. One was a huge ball that you could walk around. It'd display videos on all sides. Really futuristic.

There were a couple of movie-sized screens that had absolutely fantasic resolution. The images played on them looked almost 3D. I wonder what the technology is that they are using.

In front of one of these huge screens were a series of smaller touch screens. But they were screens I had never seen before. The images displayed had depth. I don't know how to explain it, but these were awesome to play with. My son hovered over one for several minutes manipulating different space ships with his fingers.

Very futuristic -- all running on Windows. It's Paul Allen's museum, after all (co-founder of Microsoft).

Over on Channel9 they are talking about their favorite RSS and Atom News Aggregators for Windows. What's yours?

Why use a news aggregator? Reading blogs in a news aggregator is 30 times more productive than reading them in a browser.

Anatoly Lubarsky tried Firefox .9 and didn't have a positive experience.

Oh, Dave Massy left the Longhorn Evangelism team to go back to the Internet Explorer team. And he's blogging the experience as he goes. For those who don't know Dave, he's one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet and smart too.

Olivier Travers has one of the better responses to Joel Spolsky's post: Microsoft lost the API War? Not so fast.

"maybe .NET is actually a good way to get web developers into Windows as well, so that they can create both web frontends and rich clients with a common code core. It's exactly what's happening, for instance, around the Outlook platform."

Simon Phipps at Sun Microsystems was IM'ing with me today (hey, our two companies are friendly with each other now, didn't ya hear?) and he was telling me about Rome, a syndication component for Java developers (parses Atom and RSS feeds).

Here's a cool .NET app: Sunfrog Film Scheduler. I guess the guy who wrote this app didn't get Joel's memo.

Paul Vick published his list of best Visual Basic bloggers.

Heh, Patrick Tisseghem's wife is gonna let him go to the Belgian Geek Dinner next Friday.

That reminds me, June 30th is Maryam's birthday. What does she want? Get this:

A booklet of coupons that say simply "this coupon entitles bearer to interupt her husband and get him off the computer to do one chore for at least half an hour."

Oh, oh. I guess I've overdone it.

You know, Google's Gmail marketing strategy is absolutely brilliant. They are in a quiet period right now for their IPO. So, they can't say anything on their weblogs or in public about their business. (Evan Williams was supposed to be on our panel on Wednesday, but backed out because of the quiet period).

So, what do you do if you can't talk? You let your marketing talk for you. Instead of just opening up Gmail and giving everyone all the email addresses they want all on one day, they are trickling them out to users to give away -- thereby making sure that people keep talking about Gmail.

I've watched this on all the blogs. Every few hours another blogger advertises that they have Gmail addresses to hand out. Paul Boutin is the latest.

Every Google employee should be taking the person or team of people who came up with this idea out to lunch.

Seen over on Jeff Dillon's Sun Microsoft weblog: fun picture of Sun's mascot (Duke) and Linux' mascot (Tux) fighting a bunch of paper clips.

InfoWorld: Microsoft's new rules of engagement.

"I am resolute in my belief that developers are not given a sufficient voice in shaping the tools they use.

Exactly why we're opening up and getting customers involved more deeply into nearly every area of our business.

BBC: How computing is changing the classroom.

"In fact, one of the most interesting things I saw in Max's new school was what I would call "ohp and talk" teaching: one of the classrooms has a projection system linked to the teacher's Tablet PC. She can walk around the class, looking at student's work while still going through a presentation or even writing on the screen."