I'm going to take a blog vacation. Why now? Because I have other stuff to do. I'm way behind on work and home life.

Plus Microsoft just opened a really cool blog portal. The MS Community blog covers most of the important pieces.

Dave Winer also wrote about it today.

So, when will I be back? In a few days, maybe a week.

What, you gonna miss me? Well, listen to Carl Franklin's band. Or read "WatchingMicrosoftLikeAHawk." Or, come over to Channel 9. There's a few things happening there (we just put up a demo of the threat modeling tool).

Other places to visit while Scoble gets some sleep and catches up on email? Chris Sells. Mary Jo Foley. Weblogs.asp.net. Microsoft Monitor. Seattle PI's Microsoft Weblog.

What, you don't want to read about Microsoft? Then head over to Dave Winer's site. Or, even better, why don't you buy yourself a Maytag Skybox? Who said an old-school appliance company couldn't do a weblog? Gary Peterson deserves credit for that.

Oh, I see that Terry Storch, CTO for the Fellowship Church, is blogging (remember them? That's the fifth largest church in the USA and they use tech all over the place). I'm not into church (I'm a technology evangelist, not a religious one), but Terry's done some interesting things with IT, so you might learn something from him, religious or not.

And, if you really get bored, go over and check out Technorati, Feedster, or Pubsub. Technorati alone is tracking more than three million blogs now. Whew.

If that's not enough, my friend Zane Thomas is trying to start a new operating system.

One last thing. If I've never linked to you from my blog, please leave your URL in my comments field here. I'm looking for new blogs, and would like to check yours out.

Reuters: Analysts positive on Microsoft cost-cutting plans.

"This is very encouraging from a shareholder perspective. Microsoft has needed to do cost-cutting for a while. They've never been diligent about expenses," said Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brendan Barnicle, who owns Microsoft stock.

Mary Jo Foley: 'Kooky Buddy' gets the Channel 9 treatment.

Just had to link to that before I go to work (getting up at 4 a.m. to meet deadlines, got a ton of great videos coming next week).

You know, this is really great that we got to share a little bit of our internal humor with everyone. Usually we don't get permission to put our fun videos up on the external Web.