Last night on the plane ride home I sat next to Microsoft's Regional Vice President Matt Pease. He's a manager of sales people. I learned a lot about what's going on in the real world. Stuff that I wouldn't expect.

But what was really funny was he was reading Matt Raible's blog. Someone had RSS'd it and emailed it around to the sales staff.

Shows how information moves off of blogs and into email at Microsoft.

Oh, Matt told me that sales of small business-oriented servers are going nuts. So, what do I do with that information? Go over to Pubsub.com and do searches on "small business" and "servers."

He also says he's to watch the ERP and CRM spaces over the next year. So I built Pubsub feeds for those as well.

His region? The Western United States, so a pretty good economic base there. Every developer (and evangelist) should meet a sales guy like Matt. He knows what the customers are actually buying and what the objections customers are coming up with.

In all the AJAX debates no one has mentioned the Outlook Web Access client. It's one of the best uses of AJAX technology in the industry. You might not have seen it unless your company uses Exchange. But it is very cool.

Ask Jeeves (and with it, Bloglines) sold for $1.85 billion. Whew.

This space is getting very interesting!

I'm thinking of doing a camping trip this summer with my son.

No wifi. No blogging. Just get away from these little boxes.

Sometime in June or July. Right before Gnomedex. Probably in Mount Rainier park (about two hours from Seattle).

I was talking with a few friends about this and there's already some interest in doing a campout like this. If I do one, it'll be open to everyone. Yes, this idea was inspired by Tim O'Reilly's annual campout (although because he does it on O'Reilly's headquarters he can't let more than about 300 people into his event).

Whadda ya think? Doing it right before Gnomedex will give us time to chill out and unplug. It'll make that conference much better.

Congrats to Marc Canter and team on getting Our Media.

Unfortunately it's slow. Marc has the details.

I'll link to Our Media after they get their server problems taken care of.

Our Media is a place to share your life.

Tim Marman: "Sorry Robert, you're wrong."

OK, are five bloggers who want total control of their content gonna ruin it for everyone?

No.

Instead, anyone who wants out can have out. Just send me email. Leave the rest of us alone.

Rocketboom is now how I start everyday.

If I had real talent (and looks) I'd be Amanda Congdon. Just be happy I'm only doing text here.

Cristian Vidmar: Scoble's linkblog is not fair.

One of his main points is that it's too easy to do a link blog and get traffic off of someone else. Oh yeah? You try. Go ahead. Try. It takes three to six hours every night for me to read 3,500 posts.

Every night.

I WISH someone else would do this for me. Then I could go do something else.

So, Cristian, do you not want to be included on my linkblog? Just email me (or post on your blog) that you don't want to be included. I'll unsubscribe and you won't be there anymore.

Other rebloggers don't give me that choice and reprint EVERYTHING on my blog. I don't do that. I only give people a taste.

MSNBC: Here come the vlogs.