Interesting paper is now on microsoft.com: The Future Role of Trust in Work.

"It argues that outdated command and control management culture is causing managers to misuse technology, over-scrutinising worker performance. This means employees are reacting to communication from employers rather than interacting with customers - therefore ultimately damaging UK productivity."

Peter Torr: I love Slashdot.

Rory Blyth: "Shut it already! Scoble is *not* going to get fired!"

Rory cracks me up!

Jonathan Schwartz, COO at Sun Microsystems: "HP told [a CIO of a big company] that Sun was going out of business."

I love Jonathan's blog.

Loren races the keyboard with his stylus on his Tablet PC when entering strings.

Findory deserves an extra plug. The CEO, Greg Linden, was reading here, saw that I was writing about news sites, and that his product wasn't on the list. Sent me a quick note saying I should check it out and what it's main attributes were. The note was only one sentence long. Easy to read. No over hype. Included a URL so I could click on it and check it out.

Speaking of which, I'm way behind on email. David Allen's system has fallen apart for me. Goal for my vacation: get it back going. Translation: there are other company plugs waiting in my in box. Lesson? Don't rely on Scoble for your PR efforts. Get a few bloggers to link to you every day and eventually you'll get noticed.

Jade Ohlhauser desperately wants to buy a Toshiba M200 tablet like the one I use. The problem is Jade lives in Calgary, Canada, and no one will demonstrate it for Jade. Can anyone help?

Stephen O'Grady asks is Microsoft is crazy like a Firefox?

Ahh, I like the out-of-the-box thinking!

While we're talking about Memeorandum, there's some other news sites out there:

Ten by ten. News in pictures.

Findory. Learns your interests as you read and makes a better newspaper for you.

Newsmap. The bigger the square, the bigger the news.

Press Display. Links to tons of newspapers around the world.

Newspaper Direct. Tons of newspapers links too.

Yahoo Daily News.

MSNBC's Newsbot.

Google's News Page.

Where do you get your news?

Mary Jo Foley has an interesting chat with Microsoft's OEM chief, Rodrigo Costa. She says he's head of Microsoft's most powerful and profitable unit for the past two years and they chat about negotiation tactics, Linux, SP2, and other interesting issues.

There's a Technorati user group tonight. I'm trying to arrange my schedule to drop in -- gotta be in Santa Rosa at 8:30, though. Sigh.

OK, Michael Gartenberg sure knows how to tantalize us all. What in the heck did he hear about?

Chris Anderson, the guy who wrote the "Long Tail" article for Wired that got blogged all over the place is now blogging about writing a book on the same topic.

Memeorandum continues to impress me as a way to get the kind of news that I used to get from the front page of the newspaper. Today I read that the Washington Post is buying Slate. Look at the link on Memeorandum and see what some blogosphere voices are saying.

Alfredo Octavio: "The huge problem with Scoble is that he has stopped listening to the little people."

Really?

Well, that was an interesting two days. Lots of comments continue coming through my aggregator. I'm putting most of them up on my link blog so you can see the diversity of thinking that's going on out on the blogosphere.

One guy, though, over on Joel Spolsky's forum asked "is Scoble begging to be fired?"

Joel even came and defended me and explained something important about Microsoft's culture.

I gave a tour of the campus to a Russian employee recently. I took him to the courtyard in front of building 16. This is at the very heart of the campus. You can see Bill Gates' office from there.

What is important about it? There are hundreds of plaques embedded into the concrete. They have the product names of all of Microsoft's products. Some of which contain the names of the best businesses the world has ever known. Office. Windows. Etc.

But there are hundreds of product names that have since sunk into obscurity. They are Microsoft's failures. No one likes to talk about them, but they are an important part of our culture. Having them doesn't stop us from trying new things. New ideas.

Put it another way. Barry Bonds hits a lot of home runs. But he strikes out about 70% of the time. He's a failure 70% of the time.

I'm very fortunate to work for a company that encourages me to try things. In public. When humans try things occassionally they'll fail. That courtyard reminds us of that. And don't think Microsoft is alone. Silicon Valley is scattered with such courtyards. The failures. Oh, the failures! But out of those failures comes Apple. Comes Intel. Comes Google. Comes eBay. Comes Cisco. Comes Yahoo. Yeah, everyone knows the big successes, but really, it's the failures that teach us things.

Yes, my idea was wacky. Yes, it is a stupid, idiotic, naive idea. But I learned a lot. In all of the discussion there was more product feedback about music players turned over to the world than would have been gained from 20 customer feedback sessions.

So, the stupid idea got you all to talk. Is that a bad thing?