Jay Dedman just sent this one to the videoblogging mailing list I'm a part of. His friend, Ivettza, started video blogging recently and her father had a bad motorcycle accident that put him in a coma. She made a short video about it. Welcome to the long tail of video. I bet she never expected to have more than a few family and friends watching in on her personal hell. By sharing herself with all of us she's done something more gripping than any TV show I can think of. Unlike the Apprentice this is real reality TV.

You know, spending a week in a hospital makes you more emphathetic toward those who are going through a tough time. I met a Microsoft employee whos wife had a hysterectomy due to a tumor. They are waiting to find out if it's cancerous or not. I don't believe in God, but I'm praying for a good outcome for his family.

Lots of waiting in hospitals like the one I'm writing to you from. Waiting. Waiting. Then some terrifying moments shatter the silence. Mostly of doctors telling you more surgery is needed. Or worse. Thankfully I'm not hearing those bad words like cancer or, worse, "don't know." I hear Peter Jennings just found out that he has lung cancer. A friend of mine died of that in the 1980s. But others are hearing those horrible words all around me. In my room it's not cakewalk. There's constant intrusions. Blood pressure checks. Blood workups. Flowers! Bathroom walks. New IV's. Phone calls. Beeping machines. Even some running Windows! (Can't they make nicer sounding beeps?) Room-mates making weird noises. No privacy for some things that otherwise are very private.

But, at least there's wifi. It's the thing keeping me sane. That, and all my friends who keep emailing me and IM'ing me. Appreciate all of that very much.

No cause for alarm for me personally. The one I'm watching over is doing well. Hopefully that story can be told someday too.

Thanks Ivettza. Hope your dad recovers quickly. Thanks for your tale from the Long Tail.

Who said videoblogging is only going to be used for porn? Certainly not anyone who's visited the videoblogging mailing list.

Nick Denton just opened up a new Drudge Report competitor today: Sploid.

Heh, tabloid journalism comes to the Web and RSS.

Back before we signed our book contract in February I told Wiley that they needed to blog if they wanted us to sign with them. Joe Wikert took us up on that challenge.

If you search Google for "Average Joe" you'll see he's already the sixth "Average Joe" (out of 573,000 "Average Joes").

Why is that? Well, his blog is good. He's authoritative and passionate (he's the publisher at one of the world's largest book publishers).

Frank Boosman, who is on Flickr's board of directors, responds to my earlier post.

"So with all due respect to Robert, this is why the Flickr acquisition is far more important."

Michael Earls: Goodbye Scoble.

Hmmm, I don't unsubscribe from people who don't read me. Heck, if I did that I probably wouldn't have anything to read! Or talk about.

This is what I love about blogs, though. The reader is in control. Of everything.

All I can try to do is be interesting enough to get people to read. Looks like I'm failing there.

Congrats to James Park. He's president of Windup Labs. That's the company that did HeyPix and they just sold to CNET.

This might just be a bigger photo deal than Flickr going to Yahoo. Here's why.

It's joining Webshots. Now, don't know about Webshots? I didn't either until recently. But Webshots has 23 million members (Flickr has less than a million). and they get 750,000 uploads a day. More uploads in five days than Flickr has had in all of its existence. And HeyPix's team is going to add on some killer new technology to Webshots, James tells me. (He showed me his app at a geek dinner earlier in the year and we've kept in touch since then).

One other thing? HeyPix is a .NET app. So, nice to see .NET developers doing well in the marketplace.

The digital photography space continues to heat up. Who's next?

Michael Gartenberg points to another exec who calls blogging a fad. Yeah, it's a pet rock. But one that makes you friends. Helps you start a scalable conversation with customers (and enemies too). It's the best way I've found to get better Google PageRank. Not to mention, where else can you do something for an hour a day and have thousands of people listening in?

I wonder: is talking on stage a fad? Writing articles a fad? Going on TV a fad? Putting on conferences a fad?

See, if you're an exec at a big company you have to convince other people that your product is worth buying. Seems to me that blogging is a pretty decent tool for doing that. And it only costs, what, $40 a year? To talk to thousands of people every morning?

Oh, and even if you're only a CTO, you still need to keep up to date on the latest stuff. The best blogging attribute is the conversation that happens with your readers. My readers regularly tell me about cool things that I might be able to use.

This CTO is less competitive because he doesn't have a blog and doesn't have a conversation with some of the most technical people around. Someday look through my comments and see who shows up here. CEOs. VCs. Journalists. Analysts. Developers. Etc.

Just the kinds of people who know the latest stuff. Too bad this CTO thinks they aren't worth having a conversation with. But, that's OK. If everyone were blogging already then there wouldn't be hype. After all, do we hype up water?

Steve Rubel: Feeds might be Google's greatest enemy.

It's Channel 9's first birthday today. I've done now more than 100 interviews, but the five up there today are quite good. Bill Hill's walk through Microsoft campus is already on my favorites list. Even the weather cooperated.

Don't miss Dave Probert's interview, either. He's an architect on the kernel team here and covers tons of ground about operating systems. Despite being one of the most technical people Microsoft has, I found he explains everything in a way that most people passionate about computers will be able to follow along with. He's an ex Unix geek too, so covers all sorts of different OS's. Don't know what the kernel is? That's the piece of software that sits at the heart of the OS. It's something we know very little about, but use 100% of the time when we're on our computers.

The other videos up today? Scott Guthrie talking about the Web Editions of Visual Studio 2005 (this is the one where he talks about Web Standards support in Visual Studio). Anders Hejlsberg (the guy who headed the Borland Delphi and Turbo Pascal teams, and now the C# team) talks about C#. Rico Mariani, architect on the .NET CLR team talks about .NET performance. The Cleartype Team discusses the development of new fonts and font rendering technologies in Longhorn. That's almost four hours of new content loaded up in one day. Whew.