Channel 9 just added Tablet PC support to its forums: welcome to the "inkernet!"

Microsoft Monitor: Tiger roars at Longhorn.

Yup, Tiger is pretty sweet! You should see it on a 17-inch PowerBook. Wowza!

Hey, Dare, see, no Microsoft spin! :-)

Why do I put my cell phone up on my home page? Cause sometimes I meet interesting people. Joan and her husband Bernard Booms, just called me and wanted to know how to start blogging. They were looking for books, or sites, that would help a blog neophyte get started. I said "just visit Blogger or MSN Spaces and start posting." Why make this more complicated than that? I probably should have included Yahoo 360 and others, but, sorry, when I'm on the phone I try to simplify it down (and Yahoo 360 requires an invite to get in anyway). Because Joan just wanted a personal blog and didn't seem to be confident about geeky stuff, I just wanted to point her to the free services that are easy to use and likely to stick around for a while.

Now, if you want readers, that's a whole nother discussion. Or if you want to have a business blog, that's a whole different one. Or if you want to customize your blog, we could spend days talking about that.

But getting started with a personal blog doesn't need to be any more complicated than that, does it?

What advice would you have for someone who is just starting out?

One piece of advice? Put your email address on your blog's home page so we can contact you. I have. I don't get that much spam, even though I have a fairly popular blog. But, I just tried to give some business to some bloggers and if I couldn't find an email address or a contact link I gave up and took the business elsewhere. Of course, if you don't care about getting invited to cool things then don't do that.

One piece of advice I'd give people: post and post often and let's see where it goes.

The other funny thing is that I only get a few calls a week.

Ahh, it feels so good to be surrounded by bloggers. What does your neighblog look like?

On the other hand, Steve Gillmor encourages us to all join the Syndisphere. Er, vote with your feed.

Kevin Schofield (he plays a key role at Microsoft Research in getting tech out of research and into our products): "Read the last paragraph on page 1. The NCAA has decided that computer science is not acceptable for credit towards fulfilling the course requirements."

That's outrageous. Our academic standards are falling again, just to serve our sports teams.

It's amazing. Every team I'm meeting lately is looking for great programmers. And American schools are lowering standards.

We deserve what we get when other countries kick our behind in technology.

Has blogging tipped? Oh, yeah. MSN Spaces, Mike Torres told me, has signed up more people in the past few days than existed in the first five years of the blogosphere.

That's just amazing (he asked me to keep the numbers confidential for now). It's partly due to the new MSN Messenger client (spaces users who also use MSN Messenger get an icon next to their name when they update their space). I was really skeptical of the new MSN Messenger, but my friends who I've gotten to upgrade to the latest version really love it. After using it for a week I agree. It's really fun and I love the new icons and other features. Nice!

I've noticed something. I haven't been reading my feeds very regularly for the past couple of weeks. I feel more ignorant. But I'm happier. The neat thing is that my aggregator continues to gather weblog posts and whenever I have time, I can read a feed or two.

But not putting the pressure on myself to read 1,300+ feeds every night sure is making life more enjoyable.

What am I doing with that extra time?

Spending more with Maryam. Trying to (and failing) catch up on email. Working a bit on the book. Trying more software. And working on finding a new video workflow so that we can support new features.

Oh, and increasing the pace of videos on Channel 9. It used to be that we'd do two or three interviews a week. Now we're putting up five or so a week. Whew.

Dave released an interesting new feature today: Clicktracking. This will help bubble popular podcasts up to the top. Discovering good podcasts and videoblogs is going to be much tougher than it was with blogs because it's far harder to consume audio and video content.

Thanks Dave!

ActiveX gets beaten up a lot, so it's good to show off what's good about that technology. Look at how the Virtual Server team used ActiveX to let you host various OS's right in a Web page or in a PowerPoint.

I keep forgetting that Jeff Sandquist is one of the best judges of what's cool in software that I know. Lately he's been IM'ing me telling me "you've gotta try the new Office Communicator." I kept ignoring him. I was too busy playing with Google Maps. Which are cool!

I figured that Office couldn't possibly do something cool.

But, eventually Jeff just camped in my office and forced me to install it (not quite, but it ain't far from the truth).

Wow.

Already this thing has radically changed how I work.

I think I'll do a video about it. From their Web page it looks really boring, but this thing makes using the telephone system here (and my IM's) a real pleasure. Thanks to the Office team!

Hey, anyone over on that team wanna come on Channel 9?

And sorry Jeff for ignoring your recommendations. I won't anymore.