Chris Holland is looking forward to the day when he can get me to switch to a Macintosh. Ahh, an optimist! That's a must to be a good evangelist. I have the same disease. I am looking forward to the day when Chris gets a Tablet PC. :-)

But, Chris says a whole bunch of nice things about the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft that I visited this week.

On that note, I'm going to bed. In the morning I'm going to be attending the 2004 TopCoder Open in Santa Clara. If you're there, come by and say hi. I'll be handing out Nine Guys and shooting video.

I'll have my cell phone with me too. My number is 425-205-1921.

One last thing. On Saturday evening we'll have a geek dinner in Mountain View at 7 p.m. Hope you can make it.

I wonder if Dave Winer ever thought the world's best-selling video game would use RSS? Thanks to Scott Hanselman for the writeup.

Michael Gall writes that "Scoble has lost a lot of credibility with me today."

That got my attention.

Why?

Because I didn't link to Firefox.

Oh, geez, here's EXACTLY the kind of thing I was talking about yesterday.

Right, your cause is entitled to a link on my blog. Damn, did you see the right side of my blog? There's a link to Firefox EVERY SINGLE DAY (well, until right now, I just removed it because I hate it when people think they are entitled to tell me what to write about or link to). Why is release day any different?

I didn't make a big deal about it cause every other weblog under the face of the sun already linked to it. And, I +did+ put several links on my link blog.

You know, I love the Firefox guys. They just sent me a couple of nice T-shirts. But this is just over the top. What will happen if I link to people who are having bad experiences with Firefox? They are out there too.

Michael, please unsubscribe. I don't want readers who feel they are entitled to get links to their causes or products. I don't take that kind of c++p from Microsoft product groups, either (some have tried). No one gets linked here because they think they are entitled to it. Even the guys who pay my paychecks have to play nice to get linked here.

Geez.

Engadget: how Microsoft's Media Center will save television.

I gotta get one of these things.

JY found the most original resume I've ever seen. I immediately forwarded it around the company. If he ends up getting hired, I'll let you know. But it sure did get attention!

Hint: try something original and do it on your blog.

I was just reading the blogs over at Sun Microsystems and Jeff Solof says that his doctor is MAKING HIM BLOG. Now that's a good excuse. Hey, Jeff, can you get me a note from your doctor too? That way I can tell Maryam "I'm just following the doctor's orders."

Steven Levy, of Newsweek, interviewed me yesterday. Don't worry, Waggener Edstrom knew about it. But one of the questions stuck with me. He asked something like "doesn't it matter if you're on the A-list?"

I told him it doesn't matter if you don't have traffic today. I agree with Fredrik Wackå that you can start a blog, and if it's interesting, get discovered and quite quickly be seen as among the most influential bloggers that are out there.

I also told Levy that I read my referer links from the bottom up. Why? How do I add value to the blogosphere? By linking to the same stuff that Dave Winer does? No way. I need to find new bloggers. New tools. New cool stuff to talk about.

So, I look for bloggers who don't already have traffic. I am doing a LOT of PubSub and Feedster and Technorati searches.

I told him about Steve Rubel. How many people knew who he was before this year? How about Charlene Li? Or Joe Wilcox? Yet in my mind these folks are doing really great blogging. And, look at my link blog. Is that only showing off some small list of "A list" bloggers? Personally, they are all on my "A list." All 957 of them.

I'm looking to expand my list. Are you writing a great tech blog? Well, tell us about it! Who knows, maybe soon Levy will be calling you up and asking "how did you get more traffic than Scoble?" It all starts with a link.

MSN just turned on new search functionality (Chris Pirillo has a list of all the MSN URL's). Try it out and let us know what you think of it.

Oh, and the team is blogging it.

I'm watching the blogosphere for reaction and Loren Heiny has the first tip/review that I've seen.

I just did a feed read and dropped a lot of stuff onto my link blog.

Dan Gillmor says Microsoft hasn't changed.

Marc Canter says it has.

Dan says it's worse than it appears: "Microsoft continues to run roughshod over its customers, "partners" and competitors."

I know you all don't believe my pro-Microsoft hype, but I have seen a TON of changes internally here at Microsoft. We have hundreds of ISV buddies now (I'm helping a group of companies myself). We have Dan'l Lewin, co-founder of NeXT helping partner with companies in Silicon Valley. Among other things. And, even I have gotten a bunch of training on how to deal with our partners, competitors, and customers to avoid both legal trouble, and to make Microsoft a better entity to deal with. More than 1,000 employees are now blogging, and I haven't heard complaints that these employees are hard to deal with. If I'm wrong, please do let us know.

Anyway, it's very easy to bring trouble spots out in the open now. Just leave a comment on this blog. Make it anonymous if you fear retribution (at a past job I was almost fired because of trouble I had with Microsoft, so I understand these fears). I don't delete comments (even the people who call me a corporate troll, or just a plain old idiot, don't get deleted).

Or, send me email and I'll personally work to help you out.

How do I prove that Dan's wrong? Give me a chance. I have friends across the company who have already helped me make our competitor's, partners, and customers' lives better. I wish I could talk about some of the stories, but often when competitors are working with us they'd rather that their name be kept off of the blog.