I can't wait for Xbox 2. Here's a video trailer for its coming out party on MTV on May 12.

Anyone notice how search engines are getting faster lately? Here, search for:

microsoft anti-discrimination (on Google)

microsoft anti-discrimination (on Yahoo)

microsoft anti-discrimination (on MSN Search).

Hey, looky there. MSN is more anti-blog than the other two engines. Heh, which is the most relevant result? With blog or without blog?

That gets me back to something else I've been thinking about. How do you rate search engine quality?

But, it is pretty interesting that all three engines have as a #1 result something I wrote on Saturday (although you'll see MSN biases against blogs). I remember the days back in 1996 when I tried for more than a year to get Yahoo to list a site of mine, and even Altavista used to take more than a month to list new information.

Our world is speeding up and it's having deep implications for all sorts of people and industries. Frank Shaw (vice president of Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's PR company) and I talked to PR folks from around the Western United States today and showed them how news articles now can go from small independent newspapers to blogs to the front page of the New York Times in just a few days.

How is this speed changing your business?

Thanks to my readers for continuing the conversation (even to those of you like John Hann, who wants my managers to fire me).

Catherine Helzerman makes her best pitch for IBM. She makes a good point that the technology industry's companies have a 100+-year history of social activism.

A coworker wrote me and said "whenever I think about these issues I think about the tragedy of Alan Turing."

Who is Alan Turing? The founder of computer science and a gay man.

The fact that Microsoft lets me speak out against the company's founders says a lot about Microsoft. I wonder if I would still have a job today if I worked at any other company in the industry. And, guess what, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates are directly responsible for putting in place that corporate culture. I'm sure it isn't all that comfortable for them at times to see their own employees griping in public.

And, yes, that transparency leads to articles like this one on News.com's own blog, where the author notes that Microsoft seems to be in a funk.

Oh, don't misplace the ranting of a few employees (including me). Instead, watch us take on the hard issues head on and change the world.

Heck, look at all the stuff we showed off today alone at the Winhec conference. More on that in the next few posts.