Want a mind bender? A customer, Ken Fine, just loaded a very nice report of Macromedia's Flash Forward conference over on Channel 9. Why is that a mind bender? Well, the customers are in charge of our Web site. Enjoy the new marketing. We're not in control anymore. Personally I like it that way.

Oh, and Ken Fine is the webmaster for the administration of the University of Washington's Seattle campus. Thanks Ken!

Disclaimer: the ideas in this post are mine and mine alone and should not be taken as any statement of Microsoft's future product or service directions. It's just me trying to get some conversation going about mapping and where the industry might go in the future.

There's a community being built around Google's Maps. Very cool I'm jealous.

Now, I've seen Microsoft's future mapping strategy and I've been sworn to secrecy. Don't count us out yet. After all, we have TerraServer and a few other things that work well on maps.

For instance, here's the front of the building I work at on TerraServer. Here's approximately the same thing on Google Maps.

Now, what's possibly next from Google (or MSN or Yahoo)? Use your imagination. What would you like to put on top of that map? Er, image? I got a few things. How about a sushi icon? Huh? Click the sushi icon and it takes you to all the nearest sushi restaurants. How about a camera icon? Click on that and it takes you to all the nearby photo opportunities. How about a Hospital icon? Click that and it takes you to the closest hospital. How about a blog icon?

How about a Flickr icon? A McDonalds icon? A Starbucks icon? A Sears icon? A Scobleizer icon?

Now do you see how Google (and MSN and Yahoo) will make money with maps?

Oh, and you should go over and talk to Jim Gray about mapping. He's the guy who lead the Terraserver effort back in the late 90s. And last year he helped out with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (very cool map of the universe, at least the part that our telescopes can see).

Imagine a virtual universe (the Sloan thing already brings it to us). Oh, by the way, am I the only one who plays around with Google Maps and imagines the Flight Simulator possibilities? Hmmm. I wonder what Flight Simulator 2016 will look like.

Oh, and remember to check into our WWMX research project, which shows some of our early thinking on photo integration, presence data, and maps.

I wonder what Yahoo is up to? Flickr, Flickr, Flickr, where art thou tags going?

Ahh, here they are, on MetaFilter: Memory Maps.

What happens when you mix Google Maps with Craig's List? Paul Rademacher shows us.

This is a cautionary tale for Microsoft: them who has the best API's will get used in the most interesting new ways.

Like Ballmer says: developers, developers, developers, developers, developers...

Steve Rubel learns that someone else is making money off of his content and decides not to care.

Me neither -- there are a variety of sites that are republishing my content. Some with my permission, some without. I don't mind. Even though I own the copyright here I'm not gonna call in the lawyers cause I think there's more benefits to loosening up a bit than there are downsides.

Along these lines, if you search Martin Schwimmer on Google you'll see that my link to Russell Beattie is #3 on the list. This demonstrates some downsides of having a bunch of bloggers link to you on a hot issue (there were dozens of in-bound links to my page after Martin Schwimmer asked Bloglines not to display his RSS feed). One, if the blogger has a lot of Google PageRank they can inject themselves into results pages for your name. Two, Google can pick a comment that might not make you seem smart (either the person linking, or the person being linked to). Three, we have no control of this. Four, if bloggers want to gang up on someone, we could and there's not much you could do about it -- the cumulative effects of blogger's PageRank would get what they want about you to appear pretty high on search engines (MSN and Yahoo work pretty much the same way too -- although I like the quote that MSN Search picked for Martin Schwimmer's query more than I like the one that Google picked).

Anyway, that's another downside of the in-bound-linking-algorithm that modern search engines use.

Mike Hall has a bunch of podcasts up, including an interview with Ford Davidson, a product manager in the Windows Mobile Team.

Hey, Mike, you should have asked Ford which phone will be the next "ScoblePhone!"

We get out of the hospital tomorrow. Yeah! My patient is doing a lot better today. Another Microsoftie's wife has moved in down the hall. Man, they should just open up a conference room here: we all could have a meeting! Of course, now that we have Wifi, we can IM our boredom away.

Dave Kingston, on the other hand, says: "Scoble can come visit the hospital I work at any time. If he shows up, I'll take him to see the following [list of cool IT investments]."

It's interesting, there is a lot of tech in the hospital I'm at too. But reading my comments sounds like other hospitals are far ahead of the one I'm at in some places.

Narendra Rocherolle, one of the founders of Webshots, replies to the comparison of Webshots to Flickr and the debate therein.

As someone who has watched and helped Webshots grow from a single web server to portal class, I wanted to clarify/make a few points. First, we are fans of Flickr!