Congats to Dave Sifry and Technorati for indexing more than three million weblogs (they passed that number last night). Tons of info and graphs are on Dave's blog to commemorate the moment too.

I was in CompUSA today and saw the most amazing thing in the front of the store. Three LCD monitors displaying life-like graphic images. They were displaying images drawn by Matrox's new Parhelia graphics card. $750 for the card. Whoa. Surround gaming. I wanna see Longhorn running on this sucker!

I don't know how this compares to other graphics cards in the over $500 price range, but I'd never seen anything like it before, so they deserve credit for getting CompUSA to setup a display.

Chris Garrett takes on Seth Godin's point that search engine optimization doesn't matter. I actually agree with Chris. But, both miss the real point: your company/group could get around the SEO problem by making products that are remarkable.

What do I mean? Well, if your product is remarkable, people will remark about it. Er, talk about it. Blog about it. IM about it. E-mail about it.

Here's a hint: get three bloggers with a PageRank of seven or higher to link to you and you'll almost always get listed on the first page of Google results. Is that hard to do? Not really. Just start an interesting blog! Or have an interesting product. Look at how many mentions of Google's Gmail have happened on blogs lately. Or, how many people talk about their Apple iPods. For my own blog, I'll always be happy to link to interesting stuff.

And that won't even cost you thousands of dollars in SEO fees.

John Fuller joins both the "I hate Robert Scoble" and "I love Robert Scoble" clubs within his first few posts. Heh. Yes, I do answer my email. Although I'm way behind. For some reason I get a lot of email. :-)

There might be one or two of my readers who don't know who Doc Searls is. He's one of the four co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and is famous for penning the quote "markets are conversations."

Today he pointed out Mark Cuban, and agreed with me, that Mark's airing of his dirty laundry is amazing.

Remember rule #10 in my own corporate weblogger's manifesto? Heh.

Oh, oh, Eric Harrison compares a Windows Media Center to a Tivo and finds the experience wanting. One caveat. What's excited me is the next version of Windows Media Center. That hasn't been released yet. So, let's revisit this in the fall when the Media Center gets released. It'll be interesting to compare the two then (and compare my experience to Eric's).

I'm also trying to get an interview with folks over on the Windows Media Center team and get a demo for our Channel 9 audience. More to come on that front.

Since I don't have a Windows Media Center (yet) I'd like to hear opinions of those who have gotten one. What do you think?

Congratulations to the French team, who won the Imagine Cup! This is an amazing competition with teams of students from all over the world. If you think our future isn't in good hands, go and look at some of the work these kids did. Amazing stuff.

The Spoke has posted some videos from the competition.

Next year's contest finals will be held in Yokohama, Japan.

ComputerWeekly.com: Security statistics show suprising finds.

Again, it's an industry problem. I'm hearing stories from interns coming out of college that they never had a class on how to recognize buffer overruns in their code, or how to write secure code. Is this true? Amazing, given the focus in the industry lately.

Eric Norlin talks about Gartner's latest report on iPods and identity (Gartner wasn't kind to the iPod).

Yeah, Eric, I feel a renewed industry around Internet technologies. It goes way beyond the Web, though. I'd rather that Tim O'Reilly called his conference Net 2.0 instead of Web 2.0. Why? Because most people think of the Web as the thing they can view using a browser like Opera, Mozilla, or IE. But, RSS isn't limited to that. Is RSS the Web 2.0? I don't think so. Are music services like Napster the Web 2.0? I don't think so. Are connected applications like Skype the Web 2.0? I don't think so.

Yasser, Elliot, and Matt have posted "New Features for Web Service Developers in Beta 1 of the .NET Framework 2.0." Exciting reading for those of you who care about Web services and where they are headed next year.

Hmmm, is it chat season at Microsoft? The IT Community team is also hosting a chat on July 21 at noon Pacific Standard Time. They want feedback about what you'd expect on a community site for IT professionals. Sign up for the chat here.

Eric Mack: Can you outsource passion and loyalty?

It's even worse than that. What am I building here? A relationship network. Can you outsource that? Well, word would get around fast that the relationship had changed.

Translation: no.

The Internet Explorer team is hosting a chat on Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. Add the chat to your calendar. Or, get more information.

This should be an interesting one, given recent events.

How do you know you have a hot product before it's even out? When your customers start buying license plates with your product's code name on them. Thanks, Mike, those would really be a hot ticket around Redmond.

My managers and coworkers know how to torture me. It starts with four little words: "you can't blog this." :-)

Today was an interesting day. First of all it started this morning when I first turned on my computer and saw an email from Steve Ballmer. Oh, oh. Am I in trouble? Sorry, nothing so exciting. He sent email to the entire company.

But at 11:30 I went back over to Microsoft Research to get some more interviews. This time I got to meet the inventor of the laser printer, Gary Starkweather. Of course we'll get that up on Channel 9 soon.

Speaking of Channel 9, today we put up a video of Robert Green, of the Visual Basic team. He demos the new data features in the next version. Cool stuff. I've been noticing a trend that our viewers seem to like demos and tours. So, I'll try to get more of those up.

That reminds me, would it be interesting for the five guys on the Channel 9 team to give you a walking tour of Microsoft's main campus?

Why should you be nice to every single blogger? Heck, every single person? Because one day one of them might write an article that will get read by hundreds of thousands of people.

Paul Boutin has been on my subscription list since the very beginning.

I love Paul's theory about why he's not in trouble for recommending Mozilla over IE on a Microsoft-owned site.