Dave Winer disagrees with my position (as he hops into an airplane). I'm about to go dark for several hours as I travel back up to Seattle.

I'm outta here, gonna spend the afternoon with Patrick in Sacramento. Thanks to all for the interesting conversation. If you need me, my cell phone is always on my weblog. I'm giving a speech tomorrow to a PR association. I wonder how this weekend's events will come up with PR types? I imagine a whole raft of people in business are now saying "we could never allow blogging at OUR company."

I'll be spending this afternoon thinking about that.

Update: I put several other people's posts on the conversation up on my link blog, including a couple who thought I was wrong to publicly disagree with our CEO.

How has our world changed? Johnnie Moore just posted a Snapcast about me. A few guys on three continents talking about the public debate we're now having.

"We wanted to discuss Robert Scoble's recent challenge to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer over the company's attitude to some anti-discrimination legislation.

We kick around what we think about the way this debate is being played out in public and reflect on what it might mean. Rob and I think it may represent a step change in corporate blogging, whilst Tony is more sceptical and thinks shareholder interests may stifle the debate - and thinks the mainstream media may strongly shape how it plays.

It's an MP3 file and very interesting. The conversation continues...

Tim Bray (XML co-creator and one of Sun Microsystems' most visible bloggers): Scoble is demonstrating a remarkable combination of good sense and courage..

Thanks!

I'm left thinking a lot about Doc Searls and his famous "markets are conversations" quote. The past few hours have been a remarkable conversation -- one I never would have predicted back when I started blogging.

Thanks to everyone who's been brave enough to put their thoughts down here, whether or not you agree with me or not.

So, last night I had an interesting experience: I met someone I've known for three years for the first time. Chris Coulter. It's interesting when you meet someone face-to-face for the first time that you know pretty well -- I've spent hundreds of hours talking with Chris over the past five years.

It's remarkable that you can build a good friendship without even meeting. Chris is very passionate about technology. He's one of the guys who emails me cool information and news (and gives great advice). I appreciate that a lot. I wish he'd start a blog, he has a lot to say about the tech industry.

Today I'm taking Patrick around Sacramento before heading home. It's been a fun weekend just driving around California.

Vic Gundotra: A private discussion in the public square.

I far prefer the uncomfortableness of the public gaze to the corruption that other companies have gone through in the past.

But, I've always said this is a messy business. A majority of Americans don't agree with my politics.

Getting more eyes on decisions and processes just improves them. At least that's my thesis.

What do you think?

Alan Coopersmith, who works at Sun Microsystems, about how Microsoft's blogs are changing his opinion of his competitor: "Maybe they're not so different from us..."

I like how he calls me "the one who Pubsub's" and his tip for getting the Tablet PC more exposure is good. Now I gotta learn something about Solaris and see if I can continue this positive ping-pong match.

If any Sun employees visit Seattle, drop me a line.

Information Week: Microsoft to Launch 64-bit Windows Monday.

Yeah, the countdown clocks are going on campus.

I'll be at Winhec on Tuesday. I think we're gonna try to get a little blogger thing going on Tuesday night.

Johnnie Moore: "this could be a telling moment. My own feeling is that by accepting this degree of open dissent, Microsoft becomes stronger not weaker - and raises the bar for the rest of the corporate world."

Rockford Lhotka is one of the Visual Basic experts I keep up on (he was one of my favorite speakers at the VBITS conferences in the 1990s). He linked to the new Refactoring tool for VB 2005. I got a demo of this too and it's awesome. I should have the video ready in about a week, but it helps you make your code smaller, faster, and more readable. Free tool too.

Paul Chaney elected me president of the blogosphere. Um, that's quite an honor, but there are a lot better bloggers than me out there.

The fact that you're trying to put a hierarchy onto this is sorta funny. Here's the real truth: a blogger with two readers is just as important as one with 10,000. It took me a while to realize that but if someone has a hot story they'll get discovered no matter what.

It's why I've focused a lot less on trying to be at the center of the hub. That wasn't sustainable. Although I have been adding things to my link blog here and there.

Instead, I'm going to go back and just be myself. That seems to be better for my health and happiness. Although it makes discovering new blogs a bit harder.

So, the lesson is, we're all president of the blogosphere. It's a decentralized world now.

Adam Barr, another Microsoft employee: "there is a suspicious part in Ballmer's memo."

Many of my readers don't follow my comments, but there have been dozens of passionate comments in reaction to my post earlier this evening and I wanted to make sure everyone got a chance to see them (some news aggregators don't display my comments, for instance). So, here's the main thread.

One other thing, my comments get filled up after about 110 comments. I expect this thread to get filled up sometime in the next 12 hours. If that happens, I'll start another thread (or you can use the thread on this post).

Gary Cornell, co-founder of APress book publishers reacts: "Steve if you are going to say you personally talk the talk, how 'bout personally walking the walk?"