I love my readers. I learn a lot from them. Today they taught me that the Volvo ad I linked to last night was a farce. Oh, that really sucks. Now I feel sucker punched. I promise you if I ever do an advertisement it'll be honest. If I put a customer on video tape it'll be a real customer and won't be an actor.

HackingNetFlix: I think most companies don’t get blogs yet.

Agreed. Most people don't understand the power of word-of-mouth networks. They see that only 1000 people read a blog and write it off.

The funny thing is they don't see how many press people read blogs.

Marc Canter worries that Chris Pirillo's Gnomdex conference might turn out to be "normal." I'll be there. Marc will be there. Steve Wozniak will be there. Definitely not gonna be a normal kind of conference.

I do think it was the right thing to do to tone down the focus on partying. It's hard to get bosses to pay for a conference where the main benefit was going to be an open bar.

Listen, it's Lake Tahoe. I got married in the hotel where the conference is being held. There are lots of, um, distractions in this place (both beautiful outside, and inside there's a casino).

I spoke at the first Gnomedex and it was one conference that felt like an old-time Silicon Valley user group. I hope THAT is the main benefit of this conference.

A Bothell Blogger Bash? Damn, that sounds like the average evening at my house (I live in Bothell). I'm in Garrett!

Dana Epp writes up his review of what he saw last night in the "late night with the Burton team" demo. "from what Tom and Jason have just shown me I think Microsoft just might have done it right."

On the other side of the coin, however, Eric Sink writes from the heart about being a competitor of Microsoft (he has a product that competes with Visual Studio Team System).

How do you start a heated debate about Microsoft's marketing strategies? Sponsor a Formula One race team and watch the fur fly. Whew. There's one email mailing list inside Microsoft where the pro and con is just going hot and heavy.

A major goal of marketing should be to get people talking. This decision has already wildly succeeded internally. It'll be interesting to see if the marketing team can get the same thing to happen externally.

Personally I'm ecstatic that we're doing this kind of marketing. We should be doing more to get our products in front of everyday people, not less.

Volvo has an interesting car advertisement that's making the word-of-mouth network rounds.

This is close to what I want to do with Microsoft's advertising. Put real people up front. Have customers explain the benefits of our products.

My boss, Lenn Pryor, is writing up my first employee review tomorrow.

What if we had our customers write our reviews?

I see Brad Abrams is asking the same thing.

What would you like me (or Microsoft) to improve over the next year?

Kevin Schofield talks about Microsoft Research's recent redesign (and addition of three new RSS feeds).

Olivier Ribet has a writeup of David's speech on Microsoft's community blog.

Anyone else? I didn't attend the talk, gotta watch the video later this week. Just been busy. Like I said, there's big stuff coming next week.

David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, was doing the speaking tour here at Microsoft's headquarters today. So, I went over with my tiny Channel9 camcorder and recorded an interview between Shawn Morrissey, of MSDN, and David. We did it in front of a sizeable chunk of the former Berlin Wall. Not sure what the symbolism is there, but we were talking about changing corporate cultures and other deep revolutionary thoughts.

We've been having some real interesting speakers on campus lately. Tamara Pesik has really been doing a great job on that front.

Last week's speech by Cory has continued to be discussed all over campus (and at geek dinners and such). Think one person giving one speech can't change a culture? Can't move a company? You're so wrong. Start a weblog. You never know where that journey will lead.

In the .NET show Jeff Sandquist says that the days of the quiet launch on the blogosphere are probably over. Oh yeah?

There's some really cool stuff coming next week that hasn't been leaked yet. It's really shocking that Microsoft can still keep a secret. But my fingers are itching. Twitching. Convulsing.

Damn, it's hard to keep a secret. Especially this one (I've been keeping it for a couple of months under threat of career ruin). No, it's not about blogging or RSS either. Well, see ya next week.

Quiet launch? Oh, sure, just between me and my closest friends. Get the Slashdot-compliant server ready. :-)

Jeff Sandquist: Everything I know about community I learnt tending bar.

Jeff is also a guest on the .NET Show (check out the Somebody@Microsoft segment). Talks about behind the scenes at Channel9.

Alright! Maryam, my wife, got a job today. She'll be working for a Microsoft Vendor doing Web Casts. She'll have a "v-dash" email alias. Cool. It's been a year and a half of being out of work for her, so she's excited to get back into things.

Mark Bernstein makes a good case for getting rid of comments and trackbacks.

The Office Weblog: IE Storm Watch.

Oh, did I kick up a storm? Yeah, yesterday was the highest traffic day we've had on Channel9 since the second day we opened for business. Nothing like a little Slashdotting.

Jeff Atwood sent me a link-whore email: "link to me, I'm cool." Well, sorry Jeff, not sure if you really measure up on the coolness scale (the Engadget guys have you beat there) but I'm jealous of anyone who has three monitors on their desk and writes knowledgeably about the benefits of such.

You should see my neighbor (David Weller) at work. At last count he had nine computers in his office. The team he's on has been putting in lots of late nights lately. That seems to be a theme lately around Microsoft (who said a big company can't motivate people to work hard?)

Decision Cast is holding an RSS Weekly webcast.

Thursday at 10 a.m. -- Jeff Jarvis will be among the participants. I believe it's free. Audio.

The Geek Dinner last night was over the top.

First, Raymond Chen was there. Anytime the leader of an entire camp at Microsoft shows up you know something interesting will happen.

Second, there were a few members of the "you must put Nunit features in all versions of Visual Studio" camp there. Well, two guys from the Visual Studio Team System were there and an interesting discussion ensued. So interesting that the team invited everyone at dinner to go back to Microsoft to get a demo of Visual Studio Team System (code-named Burton).

Steve Maine was one of the non-Microsoft employees who went along (Todd Bishop, journalist for the Seattle PI newspaper was there too). He writes much better than I can about the experience. The Burton team has been giddy all day long about this quote from Steve's blog: "Now, having seen the Burton tools in action with my own eyes, I can confidently say Burton is cool. Like mind-blowingly, oh-my-god-I-can’t-wait-to-use-this cool. And by “cool” I mean “solves a ton of problems that I definitely have right now."

Some other reports on what happened:

Steve Maine's second blog about it.

Gretchen Ledgard.

Dana Epp (the dinner was thrown in his honor since he was visiting from Vancouver).

Anita Rowland (who was knitting with Raymond).

Randy Holloway. (Notes on Burton demo).

By the way, I got the entire Burton demo on video. Two hours of it. I'll get it up on Channel9 soon.

One note, when we got to building 41's parking lot at 9 p.m. the place was packed. Lots of Microsoft employees are working late to finish off the beta of Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005).