Bob Wyman, founder of Pubsub (my favorite RSS search engine): Microsoft to dominate Blogging sooner than expected.

One correction. He implies that we have a "clear antipathy" toward the Atom format. That might be the common decision, but there has been no central decision making that I know of. A number of Microsoft employees continue to evaluate Atom to see if it'll be something we should support. But, keep in mind that's all on the content creation side of the fence.

On the aggregator side of the fence a team would have to be nuts not to consume Atom format since so many sites (including all the Blogger and Google Groups' sites) use Atom.

If we don't read in all the formats we'll be ignored by the marketplace.

I don't know of any plans to come up with a "Microsoft specific" format. If I learn about such I'll be the first to scream up and down. That said, we might add on extensions to RSS 2.0, which is allowable under the spec.

By the way, I know about most of the RSS investments Microsoft is making. If you are worried about Microsoft's entry into a market, I'd be happy to put you in touch with the various teams. So far we've been transparent with competitors and partners about where we're investing ourselves. Hint: we aren't doing everything.

Robert Hess, of Microsoft (yes, that Robert Hess, the same one that does the .NET Show) played a key role in the opening of a museum all about cocktails. Here's a radio report from KOMO AM radio here in Seattle.

Hey, Dave Winer, just in case my photo above doesn't make it obvious: I'm a fat white guy.

I am trying to work on the fat part, though. Got an exercise machine now and I even set it up.

Dang, now I know someone looks at my photo blog. I caught a "Low Disk Space" error on one of the screens at Houston's International Airport (they have banks of cool plasma screens) and Robert Gale pointed it out.

By the way, they had dozens of banks, each with 16 screens. Very cool. Out of all those computers only one sign had the low-disk space message.

This has to be the funniest Halo 2 video I've ever seen. Nick Whittome pointed me to this. It's of a guy who fell asleep during a Halo 2 game and the folks playing with him have a little fun.

Slashdot is talking about some IE 7 details that Mary Jo Foley reported on.

I gotta go see the IE 7 team and get the scoop. I've been ignoring doing that so that I wouldn't be tempted to leak. Looks like someone else was.

This week Microsoft is having a competitive influentials summit. Matt Raible is one of the attendees and is blogging it.

Why bring folks who are into Java or Linux to Microsoft? To learn. To listen. To start a conversation. Matt and others are encouraged to blog openly about the summit.

Stay tuned to Matt's blog tomorrow to see what kind of shirt I wear.

I'm loading about 115 items to the linkblog right now. I am planning to also explain why GreaseMonkey isn't the same as SmartTags or Autolink, since I see a few people are having quite a fun time pointing out that there's an inconsistency in my views.

What you didn't see behind the scenes is last week I was on an IT Conversations show (the audio isn't up yet) where I was arguing with Cory Doctorow about the topic. It was intense.

Also, I've had dozens of conversations with people, including some from Google, about the topic over the past week.

So, I'm finding my views changing. Slightly. Mostly to not be anti-user. So, I'll put together my new views and explain those soon. In the meantime, continue having fun with my inconsistent inconsistencies!

In the meantime, there's 115 new things to read. Lots of interesting writing going on out there.

Brian Tucker has done an excellent blogcast repository. What's there? Videos of various community members showing you how to use various Microsoft technologies. I'm subscribed!

Oh, you can create your own. Details on the site.