While we were recouperating at home from spending six days in the hospital my brother-in-law (the one who works at Apple) and I watched the golf classic the Masters. Hole 16 saw one of the most incredible golf shots I've ever seen (Tiger Woods hit it and went on to win the Masters in a sudden-death playoff, just in case you've been away from all the media today).

Already people are turning it into a citizen-produced Nike commercial. That one was produced by marketing blogger Joseph Jaffe. Thanks to Steve Rubel (who continues doing one of my favorite blogs) for the link.

If I were in charge of Nike's Golf Ball division tonight (his name is Rock Ishii) I'd be celebrating big time. I can't imagine a golf ball company getting better exposure. If you haven't seen the video, watch it and you'll see why.

As penance for my pro-Microsoft sins I'm using a 17" Macintosh Powerbook on my Red Couch. My brother-in-law is visiting and brought it along. I gotta tell ya, that huge screen just calls to me. Says "don't you want me?" Yes, I do! Yes, I do!

Chandu Thota's BlogMap now has APIs. Chandu is one of my favorite Microsoft employees. He doesn't bitch. He doesn't whine. He doesn't complain about spin or FUD or corporate red tape or anything else. He doesn't explain to me why he can't ship. Or tell me that a competitor is gonna beat him to market.

He just adds APIs to his stuff and lets it talk for itself.

You know, in the old days when information presented by a company came up short, what could you do about it? Nothing, that's what. When marketers made a movie look better than it really was, or when financial analysts made a stock seem better than it really was, your only choice was to run the other way.

Last night I posted a defense of Hotmail that wasn't well thought out. My readers called me on it.

I'm sorry about that. Thanks to my readers for stepping up.

Oh, and note Dare Obasanjo is a Microsoft employee too. And he asks: "Is anyone other reader of Scoble's blog irritated by the fact that he can't point to anything on the Web without throwing some Microsoft spin on it?"

A note to Google News: why are some sites, that look an awful lot like opinion blogs, on Google News, but other bloggers like, say, Dave Winer's Scripting.com aren't (thanks to Jason Calacanis who just pointed that out to me again)?

Hey, Dave, can you give me a guest blog spot on Scripting News? Just for one day a year (did Google give you a minimum requirement)? That way you can say that multiple people write your blog and you can get listed on Google News too. In fact, Dave, why don't we switch blogs for a day? Heh! Then we both can get listed.

James Kew: Google, Maps, Mail, and Microsoft.

He makes the point that several others did in response to my Hotmail taunt: that the number of users on email systems doesn't matter to him.

Ahh, wasabi, but you aren't thinking it through.

Google is a business, right?

How are they going to pay for the costs of keeping your email account up and running? Advertising, right?

Well, here's a little hint. Advertisers go to where the audience is. Hotmail right now has more than 100 million ACTIVE users. That's an audience advertisers want to get in front of.

Size of audience matters a LOT to advertisers. Ever hear of TV ratings? Why does Nielsen do that? Because advertisers care.

See, when you provide a free service you've gotta start seeing a return on that someday and advertising is the only way I can see how to do that. This is especially true when you're a public company.

So, you SHOULD care about how many users are on the system you've chosen. If there aren't enough users then the system won't get invested in.

Also, what happens when email systems combine with P2P systems like Bittorrent? If that ever happens then the number of users on a system actually increases the quality levels. Not saying that'll happen with email, but certainly will happen with video. I just recorded a 200MB video. There's no way I could email that to my friends and family. But I could easily send that through Bittorrent or another P2P system.

Also, we already know that Gmail isn't scalable. Ask Chris Uhlik. He runs the Gmail team. I did at O'Reilly's Foocamp last year. Ask him why they limit the number of invites you can send out. Chris told me it wasn't done for marketing reasons, but because they couldn't keep the quality of service up without limiting the number of users on the system.

It's unusual for me to post videos on Channel 9 on Sunday morning, but then, the folks I work with are passionate about these two topics: Indigo and Service Oriented Architectures so wanted to get the video up there so that developers and architects would have something else to talk about on Monday other than the pope's funeral or Prince Charles' wedding. Nothing worse than being stuck in a hospital room watching CNN lately.

Steve Millet, architect on the Indigo team covers "what is Indigo?"

Steve Swartz, another architect on the Indigo team, covers "what isn't a service oriented architecture?"

Update: Kavita Kamani says that you can join her (and the two Steves) on the Indigo team since they have some jobs open.

Speaking of jobs, Don Box, who used to be an architect on the Indigo team, has moved to something new that he and Chris Sells are working on and are looking for new coworkers (if you remember the tour he gave of the Indigo team, he said that the fourth floor of building 42 is saved for the secret stuff. Well, he revealed on his blog that he and Chris now are located on that fourth floor. Interesting!

Update 2: MSDN TV has Steve Swartz giving an intro to Indigo.

NPR's All Things Considered (Bob Garfield): An Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media.

"What's more powerful the network CNN owns or the network that no one owns?"

I think that quote was thanks to Jeff Jarvis. It's weird hearing people I know quoted on NPR. My life is weird. How about yours? Heck, put it up on Ourmedia and let us decide!