At a BlogOn dinner/party on Thursday night I heard a rumor that Microsoft is going to buy the blogosphere. I just wanted to stop that rumor now before it gets out of control.

For the record, I had a shot of fine whisky from Scotland.

Heh, Doug Kenline thinks I'd be fired if I dared to put my political thoughts down on my blog. Nah, but that's not what I do here. Why? Cause about half of all Americans wouldn't agree with me.

That said, I'm leaning toward John Kerry in November. I still haven't made up my mind yet, though.

There are so many great political blogs, though, that I don't feel any need to jump into those waters.

I turned off trackbacks on this site, by the way, because I found that putting my referer page in public worked just as well (you can look at that page to see who is linking to me and how much traffic they are sending me).

Plus, it made the page weight here about 30% lighter, which made my pages load faster and kept the load down on UserLand's servers.

My blogging vacation continues this weekend. We're off to Vancouver. Won't be taking the computer. Will I survive? We'll see. My cell phone is 408-314-8233. Just in case something goes really wacky or you wanna meet up for dinner or breakfast tomorrow.

Sam Gentile and Dan Appleman are both guests at the geek dinner coming up on Thursday night. Sam writes about it here, he's a A-list C++/C# developer.

VARBusiness: Microsoft Blogs -- The Ogre's New Voice: Can Blogs Save Microsoft's Image?

Michele Leroux Bustamante had a meeting with Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, today, and writes about it on her blog.

LookOut is available again for download. If you use Outlook you should consider it.

I love this tool! (Microsoft acquired them about a week ago).

I did an audio blog for a Chinese weblog service. They have 100,000 webloggers on their service alone.

You know, there are tons of bloggers in Iran and China and Japan. Is anyone watching any of these markets and translating the good stuff to English?

On the plane tonight I met Doc Searls' son. I tell ya, I meet the coolest people on planes.

On the way down I sat next to a vice president from Costco (one of USA's largest retailers -- their stores are huge). I asked him why they don't do a "Costco tech" and he said that they can't buy a lot of tech toys because the manufacturers want to protect the profit margins of smaller retailers (who have salespeople who'll sell against your stuff if they can't make any money on it). Interesting to see that the world of retailing still hasn't changed that much since I was doing it in the 1980s (my store was able to sell several highly-profitable brands because we were a smaller store).

Tonight I was sitting next to couple of women who were using iPods. I asked one sitting next to me what prompted her to buy the iPod "my friends showed me theirs."

Word of mouth.

Oh, and she had the latest Newsweek, with Steven Levy's article about Apple and its iPod.

Hey, there's some controversy about our new Portable Media Center? Michael Gartenberg blames it on bad reporting.

By the way, on every plane ride I take from now on I'll do an inventory of the computers and media players I see on board. Most people were sleeping on this flight tonight, but I counted five Windows machines. One Mac. No Linux boxes. Four iPods.

Also on the plane were a couple of guys from Ignition Partners. Which is weird, cause I was reading a pre-release copy of "The Marketing Playbook" by two guys from Ignition Partners: John Zagula and Richard Tong. Two former execs from Microsoft. It lays out five marketing strategies that every company can use. Very interesting insights.

Dave Winer wonders if the attention will go to my head. It would if it were deserved. Unfortunately I am getting too much credit for changing Microsoft. Really that credit needs to be given to Joshua Allen, who blogged at Microsoft before anyone else (and, who, took tons of crud from both inside the company and from guys like me who would beat him up from outside the company).

Of course it's nice to see my boss get the credit he deserves for Channel 9.