Simon Phipps: should companies fire bloggers?

Yes, that's another $5 for Tsunami relief. $45 for those of you keeping track at home.

Like I said in the comments on the site that Simon references. We have more than 1300 bloggers at Microsoft now and no direct Microsoft employee has been fired that I know about. We have a blogging policy, by the way. It's simply "be smart."

And, yes, Sun's blogs are good too. I subscribe to those and watch them every day.

Michael Hyatt: Mac Envy.

He's a Tablet PC fan, but is considering switching from Windows to a Mac because of Apple's presentation software.

One thing he complains about is type quality. Michael, make sure you turn on ClearType and tune it. That makes a dramatic difference on my machines.

Oh, regarding killer presentation package, check out Ventuz. It blows me away everytime I see it used. Check out the presentation they did for Microsoft at CeBit. They are promising a beta soon. When I get it I'll give a report.

I have a feeling that this won't be the last "Mac envy" post I see this week. :-)

Maybe a few more people will join the Macintosh Business Unit here at Microsoft? We'll see. Just in case you missed the tour of the Mac BU, though, I'm putting it here again.

Adrian Sutton: I don't get Technorati.

This post is gonna cost me $5. Up to $40 now.

Technorati is different than Google (or MSN or Yahoo). Technorati, for one, only searches sites with RSS feeds (translation: mostly blogs).

Technorati is also about researching linking behavior between blogs.

For instance, I Technorati the new General Motors blog and I get to see everyone who links to the GM blog.

Why do that? Well, I find that corporate blogs only give you one side of the story and I wanna find the people who are giving the other side of the story. I also want to figure out if there are blogs on the topics of cars that I should listen to. That's actually how I was reminded about the Autoblog, for instance, which I linked to yesterday.

Also, Technorati works a LOT faster than Google. It only takes minutes now for things to get into Technorati.

That said, Technorati is far from perfect. It has a bunch of noise in search results and Jeff and I are watching it in comparison to Pubsub and we're not seeing as good a result come back for just straight searches.

I am seeing improvements, though, and watched the team a week ago redeploy the engine a couple of times in a few hours so expect to see more improvements over the next month.

I like their NewsTalk page, though, which shows the world's news based on linking behavior. Translation the more bloggers talk about a story the higher it goes.

Finally, it'll be interesting to see what Dave Sifry, Technorati's founder, says in response. Watch his blog.

Update, Dave Sifry already responded. See the comments on this post.