OK, now, the little secret about Yahoo buying Flickr has been out for weeks (as Jason Calacanis says it was all over SXSW. So much so that I asked Caterina about it when she was on stage last weekend). Now the new secret that I'm watching my blogs for? How much Yahoo paid.

Flickr's customers react and interact with Flickr's management.

Doc tracks how Flickr news is spreading. Anyone doing more scientific tracking? It's my thesis that the word-of-mouth networks are far more efficient today than they were even a year ago. But I don't have the numbers to back it up.

Thinking of quitting your coding job to become a bike messenger? You might read Frank Duff's post first.

Julie Leung: "One of the best reasons to be a speaker at a conference, I've decided, is to meet new bloggers."

Actually, Julie, it wasn't until I heard you speak that I understood what blogging was all about. It also wasn't until I heard you speak that I started appreciating Julie's blog.

Johannes Ernst: Where have all the visionaries gone?

Fred, at A VC, says: "Microsoft is the poster child for a "they" company."

If there's something that gets me mad it's when I hear this. Becoming a "we" company is very important. It means we're not perceived to be looking for a win/win. That doesn't match my perception inside Microsoft. We want to empower our customers to win and win massively. I keep thinking back to Paramount Farms. They've used technology to become the number one pistachio processor in the United States and probably the world. Hint: they won massively by using technology.

If we take an "us only" approach then more and more companies and people will take their business elsewhere to companies that have a more inclusive set of offerings.

I heard that over and over last week. I look at Flickr. Why did they win? Because they got along with Technorati and Del.icio.us to build tags which made putting photos on the Flickr system more useful.

There's a big hint there for Microsoft: start getting along with others or others will route around you and build their own systems.

Lots of work ahead. Luckily we have something going for us: more than 1,500 bloggers. Now you can at least talk to us efficiently. Now it's time to turn what we're hearing into new kinds of products and services: ones that everyone can participate in.

Jeremy Zawodny talks about why he's excited by Flickr (he blogs for Yahoo and I bet he played no small part in getting Yahoo's management excited enough to get this done).

Dave Winer was just talking with me about how the technology industry is interesting again due to competition.

I totally agree. It's fun to be in the industry again. What a turnaround over 1999/2002.

And, yes, Jeremy, I'm jealous. I wish Flickr were coming to Redmond instead of going to Silicon Valley.

That said, I'm really into tagging. Flickr/Technorati/Del.icio.us have started something that is making my Web experiences better.

How can we work together to bring tagging to everything? How can we build tagging systems that are gonna be adverse to spam attacks? Let's continue the conversation that Flickr started!

Rocketboom covers the SXSW conference in video.

Of particular interest is the "Art of the Videoblog" panel discussion.

Congrats to Stewart and Caterina and the Ludicorp team for selling Flickr to Yahoo!

Dana Epp, who is a security expert, has been jumping up and down in Skype to me asking "why haven't you made a big deal about Microsoft's publishing of its security development lifecycle?"

I answered back: that's cause you already have and you're the one everyone listens to on security issues.

Dimitri Glazkov: "What can you do, Microsoft dudes? You just don't know how to coin cool four-letter acronyms."

That's right Dimitri. We leave that work to consultants who need to look cool by dropping four-letter-words on the table that none of the corporate types have heard of. Heh!

By the way, I wonder what Diego thinks of Bloglines, Technorati, Pubsub, and Feedster. All of those republish blog posts.

Here's the deal. If you don't want me to republish your RSS feed, why don't you make your feed partial content only? That way I won't be able to republish the full feed.

By publishing RSS as full text you're buying into a system where your words will be republished in a variety of ways.

Diego doesn't want me to republish his blog posts. So far he's the third person to ask me to stop doing that on my linkblog. What do I do? Simply unsubscribe so that I don't see their posts anymore and am not tempted to link to them.

I used to do just headlines but, personally, that format is useless.

Why do I do my linkblog? For several reasons:

1) New readers need a way to find new blogs. I don't quote every post from someone's blog, just the most interesting ones to me. Out of 3,500 posts I usually put 100 on my link blog.

2) As a store for me to do my own searches later on. If I only had headlines in my RSS feed this would be useless. Instead, now, I have a way for me to find things that I found interesting months later.

3) As a way to get traffic and search engine juice to the people I find interesting. One link from this blog is worth quite a bit of Page Rank. Why? Because a lot of people link to it. Because of my publishing tool (Kunal Das wrote the tool, named OutlookMT).

4) It's pretty clear after reading my linkblog for a while that everything there came from someplace else and every item links back to its original owner.

5) I'm doing this for people who are overloaded with information and want to keep up to date on what the tech blogosphere is doing. It's a lot easier to read 100 items a day than 3,500.

How do I do this blog? I read all my feeds and anything I find interesting I drag over to a folder named "Blog This." That item is automatically placed on my link blog.

I also greatly appreciate Matt Mullenweg. He's donating the hosting and the back-end technology (it's running on WordPress).

I do find it interesting that Diego finds my linkblog interesting to read. It's interesting BECAUSE it has full-text reprints. If you want pure headline link blogs you can check those out on del.icio.us or bloglines. They simply aren't as useful.

Dave Winer has been getting on me lately for being too much of an insider. He's right. But I think it goes deeper than that. Here's something he said today that's really deep: "Ross, you don't have to do a podcast, and neither do I, but the people who make products for podcasters do, if they don't will have failed products."

In one sentence he nailed what I love about a certain type of geek. The ones who are doing it for the love of it. Every once in a while I'll meet someone like that. Jim Gray, who is up on Channel 9, is one. He helped do the Terra Service. You know, a terrabyte of photos of the earth's service. Just for fun. He's now helping out astronomers and kids. Just for fun. Hint: when he hits a block, SQL Server gets better.

Steve Wozniak is another one. He just wanted his own personal computer. So he built one. JP Stewart is another one. He wanted his own computer in his car. So he built one. Chandu Thota is another one. He wanted his own blog map so he built one.

Anyway, we can all tell when someone is in it for just the money. They don't use their own products and aren't excited about demonstrating them to you.

Oh, and Dave, the whole blogosphere is an insider's club. How can you tell that? Well, when I got to blogger conferences I see about 70% Macintoshes, but when I fly on airplanes I see only about 5% Macs. That tells me that we're self selecting and different than the general population.

Translation: if we don't get a more diverse set of people doing blogs we'll make mistakes if we only listen to bloggers. It's even worse if you listen to only those types who have the money or the time to go to conferences.

So, yes, Dave, keep after me to stop listening to only the insiders. I appreciate that very much.

Jim Gray, database guru, is on Channel 9 now. Charles and I interviewed him for more than an hour. Here's the first part of the interview. For more information on who Jim Gray is, or the role he's played in the development of a range of major database services and products in the industry, check out this bio page on Microsoft Research.

I agree with Frank Arr. Chandu Thota has been rocking. Chandu came over and showed me some stuff this week. That guy is amazing. Hey, Microsofties, we should support Chandu and his team in a big way.

Yesterday Chandu released "Feedmap" which is the latest iteration of his BlogMap project.

Everyone, get your blog listed on the map!

Here's my map: