We haven't talked about this for a while, but there are a ton of new Microsoft employees and community bloggers over at weblogs.asp.net.

I wonder what you all thought of the blogs there. What would you like to see more of? Less of?

Personally it's getting hard to keep up. There are almost 1000 bloggers there and the flow is getting fast. If you don't watch this a few times a day (or subscribe in an RSS News Aggregator like I do) you'll miss something there.

Blankbaby: Apple plays it coy.

The blog's point is that Apple is messing with the rumor sites.

Oh, there's plenty to still come on the next iMac. How do I know this? Because my brother-in-law who works at Apple says that the team that's working on it won't even let HIM see it. Whenever he goes into the lab where it is being worked on, it's behind a black curtain.

And if you think THAT is being coy, you should hear how secretive the new iPod division is. They won't even admit that they are working on new iPods.

Personally, this is a great way to build hype for an upcoming product. Great use of secrecy. Steve Jobs doesn't even need to hype it up and now everyone's waiting for the new iMac.

It's the fourth of July weekend. For Americans that means parties, picnics, fireworks. We're celebrating the birthday of our country.

Maryam and I thought we'd get started early, so today we threw a family picnic at Lake Vasona Park in Los Gatos. 50 people came.

There's a whole process to throwing a great picnic. My brother-in-law and I (the one who works for Apple) woke up before 7 a.m. and were at the park by 7:30 a.m. to save a bunch of tables.

For a good look at how Silicon Valley has changed in the past 20 years all you'd need to do is look at our party and the one next to us. The party next to us was predominantly Indonesian (families there were from Jakarta). At ours we had 65% Iranian (some of whom don't speak English) and my family, which has English/Scottish/Welsh/German background.

Add to the cultural diversity the economic diversity. At our party were employees of Intel, Microsoft, Apple, LSI Logic, Cisco, and many others.

Family picnics are great networking events. I learned a few things about the semiconductor business (LSI Logic is seeing better business this year than last) that Apple had their annual employee party on Thursday evening (1500 employees partied in Cupertino) and that Intel is putting Sharepoint in corporate wide.

As I travel around the world I ask myself whether Silicon Valley could have happened anywhere else. I doubt it. You need both the cultural and economic diversity to spur on the ideas that drive where new companies and new businesses come from.

Anyway, hope you are having a great weekend. The party has moved back to my brother-in-law's house now, where we're preparing to watch fireworks at Great America (Silicon Valley's theme park).