A guy at Google, Chris DiBona, who I've met several times and has always been nice to me, and Greg Stein have opened up Code.Google.com.

New open source development effort. Congrats guys!

Now, wait a second. Isn't Google Microsoft's competitor? Doesn't Scoble work for Microsoft? Isn't it a bad bad bad thing to link to your competitor and work with them?

No. No. No.

This is a win for us all.

See, let's work to make things better for customers together. That's my vision for this new world.

Haarvard, over on the Opera Community (he works in Opera's QA department), responds to my post.

"Interestingly enough, much of Microsoft's success can be attributed to marketing, but I guess it doesn't feel good when you are on the receiving end."

No, I'm not saying that. But, I am saying that what'll get more people to switch browsers in the future is things like having better security (that's why most Firefox users tell me they switched from IE to Firefox). Having better RSS support. Having better tagging support. Having better tabs support. And so on.

I'm not saying that standards don't matter. They do.

But what about Dave Winer's request for a better editor?

Or my request for better inking support? Or, or, or, or.

Standards support is definitely one way to judge a browser and, yes, we will be judged against Opera and Firefox (and other browsers and add/ons like Maxthon or Optimal Access).

But I was just trying to point out that the Web Standards group appears to not be working with anyone other than Opera. So, shouldn't that relationship be explained on their home page?

Compare to how Google treated us with Nofollow. Google could have kept the PR to themselves. But, Google's employees emailed several of us, including me, to let us know a PR event would happen and wondered if we wanted to get on board. THAT IS what I was thinking the Web Standards Project was all about. After all, the WaSP home page says specifically "we work with browser companies." Well, so far I see that they are working with Opera. Who else?

Disclaimer. Two members of the WaSP have now been introduced to the Internet Explorer team and are now talking. So, this might be good for all involved.

I can't get to Loic Le Meur's Internet 2.0 conference in Paris at the end of April, but he's looking for some more speakers. How about Tim Bray or Jonathan Schwartz from Sun?

Tim gives a great speech. He keynoted at Northern Voice and was wonderful.

I really wanna go to Paris, though. Sigh. My schedule is too full and my travel budget is used up.

Lots of interesting people are speaking.

Steve Rubel says BUY THIS BOOK NOW when talking about Cliff Atkinson's new "Beyond Bullets" book about Powerpoint. I have to agree. I've only read a chapter so far but it's excellent. Glad to see another fellow blogger get a book deal partly because of the popularity of his blog, too.

I was just over on the Visual Basic team's blog and see that my boss's boss's boss's boss (Eric Rudder) will be giving a chat on Friday. I wonder if someone will ask him when he'll blog again?

Nah, they'll probably ask him about Microsoft's committment to Visual Basic. And they should. Although Rob Copeland, on the same blog, already answered that.

Thinking of doing your own podcast? Carl Franklin put together a "Podcasting Kit" which will help you get started doing your own professional MP3-based audio show.

Those of you who don't know Carl, he co-founded the first Visual Basic Web site and has been doing audio shows on the Internet for quite some time (he does the very excellent .NET Rocks podcast). He also has built a studio in his home, plays a mean bass guitar, and can sing "My Darling Clementine" in about 1,000 different flavors (one of the highlights of my life was listening to him sing that for hours on a bus tour I put together of Yosemite).

The Chief Blogging Officer. AKA Chris Locke. AKA guy who gets paid to not blog about HighBeam Research.

Oh, I forgot to link and explain what Chris is writing. Oh, yeah, he tells a story about one time when I linked to him and InfoWorld messed up the context and other things.

Here's the link: Winning through worst practices.

Ahh, that sounds like my life.

Several of the folks in my comments have told me that Microsoft's support of Web standards suck. Yes, I know. Why do you think I talk with Dean Hachamovitch, head of the IE team, so often?

That said, we're starting to see movement on our side of the fence. The Internet Explorer team is talking about Web standards in public. That's a huge change in just the past year.

Yes, it's just talk at this point. But, it +is+ movement.