Alright, Ourmedia has a new upload tool. Most awesome. Now I can torture you all with lame tourist video of Seattle. Bwaaaahhhhaaahahhhhaaaa!

That was shot with the new Panasonic PV-GS150 that I ended up buying instead of the JVC I was playing with last week.

The steadicam isn't as good as the JVC, but the image quality sure is better.

Anyway, that's my first Ourmedia video. Very cool. The experience is a lot better. Not perfect, yes, but we're in the very early days.

One thing I'd like? I wanna put up video just for my family members to view. That's not possible on OurMedia that I can tell.

By the way, I put this video into the public domain.

So, what are you waiting for? Torture me back with YOUR lame tourist videos!

Raanan Avidor sent me this one. It's a Visual Studio addin that adds an RSS reader to Visual Studio. Cool.

Speaking of Avalon and Indigo, Chris Anderson (he works on the Avalon team) posted that both Avalon and Indigo are now available for everyone to download and try out.

Since both are pre-beta, the usual disclaimers apply. Not for use on production machines, etc. We'll have some videos up on Channel 9 over the next couple of weeks on both Indigo and Avalon to give you a preview of what's cool about both.

Michael Jones asks What Makes Microsoft So 'Evil'?

Michael sees a lot of confusion and mixed messages coming out of Redmond lately. Particularly with IE and Longhorn, but also concerning DRM and Xbox.

I wish teams could talk about our plans in all these areas, but I've learned to just keep quiet about future plans until you have betas to play with. Avalon and Indigo previews just came out last week for public looks. So, things are starting to loosen up.

Michael: let's talk again when we get you a real beta of these various things to play with. You're making a lot of assumptions based on rumors or things you've heard in the press. I want you to be harsh and critical of us, but not based on anything but the real product choices we've made. So, let's meet again later this year after IE7, Longhorn, the new Xbox, and our DRM strategy comes out.

Believe it or not, we do listen to customer feedback (yeah, sometimes that loop is far from perfect). In fact, the reason you saw some confusing stuff come out of the Longhorn team is DIRECTLY attributable to customer feedback.

As for being hard to use, I complain about that stuff all the time. Keep up the heat. I'm finding that most teams do listen and are working on improving their products. It's a bit frustrating at times waiting for improvements to ship, though, and we're working internally a lot about how to improve that cycle as well.

Along these lines, I'm to blame for some of the confusion as well. Howso? Well, recently I said that Aero (the new UI in Longhorn) doesn't rely on Avalon (the new graphic APIs). Pablo Fernicola, the guy who runs the Avalon team, told me that isn't quite true.

The confusing thing is, if I explained all this I'd need to show you Longhorn and explain its architecture to you to really keep from confusing the issue even further. I can't do that in public yet (and even if I could, I'd screw it up. It's far better to have someone who really understands Avalon, like Chris Anderson, or the Avalon team, do that). So, instead of trying, let's meet up later this year when we can really have an open and transparent conversation about all this stuff. It won't be too much longer before we can really talk about what the product teams are doing.

Well, the library was closed. So we walked down to the Pike Street market. Most of that was closed up. So, now we're stealing Wifi from an open network (there are about 20 Wifi networks, half of which are open here) at a local Tully's. Shot some lame tourist video. Might post that anyway just to prove I'm not that good a videographer. Later. Gotta work more on the book.

Yesterday when we were at a Starbucks in Seattle I met Kyril Faenov. He told me not to miss the Supercomputing Conference in November.

And he sent me a link to the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites through history. Cool list.

But why did he send me those? Hmmm. Well, he is the Director of High Performance Computing in the Windows Server group.

The people I meet by accident. That's one cool thing about living near Microsoft's headquarters. The chances you're sitting next to a geek in a coffee shop are extremely high.

It hasn't even been out a week and already there's a site showing you how to do PSPcasts. Videos to your PlayStationPortable.

Video is about to go through a breakthrough. The forces are just too strong to ignore. Cheap (and very high quality) camcorders. Increasing broadband adoption. Cheaper storage. Decent low-cost display devices (and as the PSP shows us, more to come).

Just a few things need to align. OurMedia is damn close to making magic happen.

To those who say there isn't a business here, pox on you. They said that about Google in 1996 too. You're missing the point.

The Long Tail is about to bring us millions of video channels. Already I'm seeing hundreds of new videos put on blogs every week. It's interesting to see what people are doing with their camcorders.

Watch guys like Chuck Olsen. He handed me a DVD at the SXSW conference with his "blogumentary" on it. I watched it for the first time last night. Really great stuff. I can't wait until he finishes it and puts it up for you all to watch.

A full documentary film with dozens of interviews. All done by one guy with a camcorder. Just as good a quality as the main stream media TV stations do. In fact, better quality than they do in almost all the markets except for maybe New York and California.

One guy (or girl, for that matter). With a camcorder. With one viewer. That's how markets change. Long tail style.

I just can't wait to see what happens next.

Yahoo is letting us search Creative Commons stuff now. Cool.

It's videoblogging week, so Maryam and I are gonna go to the new Seattle Library and we'll bring our camcorder so you can follow along.

Got any cool video of your own?

Yesterday we had dinner with the Griggs. Elizabeth and Nathan. Nathan wrote and performed the music for the just-released videogame "Matrix Online." Here's an interview with him.

Anyway, what did we talk about? The fact that Kirkland is becoming quite a hot software-development city. That's where his employer, Monolith, is located. Google recently opened an office there. And now the folks who produced Halo, Bungie, are moving there too.

Kirkland is a beautiful town, right on the water here. Since I live 10 minutes away I like this trend. Housing prices are gonna move higher.

Speaking of housing prices my brother-in-law is selling his house in Silicon Valley. It went on the market yesterday. He said that he had about 50 people come through to see the house on the first day. Price for a four-bedroom house with almost no yard? $745,000.

Whew. The housing prices are just nuts in Silicon Valley.

Noah Brier: Another blog that wasn't.

Ahh, the marketers are starting blogs without realizing why blogs have power.

To really understand this you need to go back to the depression days of 2001. The days when Evan Williams (co-founder of Pyra, the guys who started Blogger.com) was broke and looking like he'd go bankrupt. The days when UserLand was quickly running out of money (and did, under my watch). The days back when Ben and Mena Trott couldn't get a job. No one had any use for a cute couple who could write Perl scripts.

Other factors? Corporate scandals were rocking the land. Worldcom. Tyco. The bubble had burst and had exposed folks who were taking advantage of the system.

So, what do out-of-work web designers and developers do? They built systems to let them spout off. And then they used those systems to do just that and fight back.

Remember the site we all used to read every day to find out which companies were gonna lay off more people? Yeah, it has a vulgar name but 2001 was a vulgar time.

Another factor? The ascendancy of Google. Google's algorithm used inbound links. They treat inbound links as so important that my NetMeeting site is still listed two years after being turned off.

What's the best way to get inbound links? You guessed it right: change your content often. What's the best way to change your content often? Blog, baby, blog.

Blogging and Google were made for each other.

Another factor? The ascendancy of RSS. Why was RSS important? It let connectors watch a large number of sites. It let people have relationships with sites ON THEIR TERMS. No more email mailing lists. No more writing rules to stick newsletters into folders. No more giving our email addresses to marketers who'd then turn around and sell our addresses for 8 cents a name. No more spam. (Seriously, I still get spam from email newsletters I signed up for in 1998 because they make a lot of money selling email addresses to other companies).

But it goes back to those dark days of 2001. We were gonna take back the world from corporations. From mainstream media. From the government. We were gonna tell the world what we thought.

So, today, we've evolved a few "best practices" out of those dark days. No comments? Lame. That tells us you don't think we're important enough to listen to. No RSS? Lame. That tells us you don't want connectors/sneezers/influentials to talk about you and you don't want anyone to have a relationship with you on THEIR TERMS. No real human author? That tells us that you aren't passionate or authoritative about your product and you aren't willing to get over your fear of talking with real customers.

So, go ahead. Be lame. Make my day. At least we'll get another vulgar Gapingvoid cartoon out of it.

I used to have a NetMeeting site. It's the reason I still have a warm spot in my heart for Google. I was just telling some people about why Google has a better brand name in my mind than other search engines. Google linked to it as #1 from almost the first day I used Google back six years ago.

Let's go back to 1996.

I had one of the two top NetMeeting sites. Brian Sullivan had and still has the other. My site had tons of information for NetMeeting users. Had hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.

Anyway, Yahoo didn't link to it for at least the first few years it was up. Despite monthly attempts to get it listed.

Altavista linked to it, but Altavista also linked to a bunch of porn sites that had spammed that engine.

Google always had it as either #1 or #2 from the very first day.

So, whenever I had a chance I told people to use Google. I +knew+ it was the better engine.

Now comes the interesting part.

That site no longer exists. DevX took the site down a couple of years ago and redirected the pages to a C# page.

So, no search engine should link to it anymore. Right?

But, Google has it as their #2 link.

MSN has it as their #9 link. Much better, because that's on the second page. Very few searchers will click through to the second page of a search result.

On Yahoo this link didn't appear anywhere on the first 10 pages of results.

I was thinking about that when I read Om Malik's report on how Yahoo is getting its Mojo back.

I'll report the bad result to MSN tomorrow. Maybe they can figure out a way to sense when a page no longer displays the expected content.

PS, let me link to Brian Sullivan's site again so his site will get linked better on Google: netmeeting. The words you use to link to a site will help get it linked higher on that search term.