We've posted a ton of new stuff over on our book blog. Another new chapter and a couple of new interviews.

Very interesting. On Google I'm the #1 "robert." But on MSN, I'm #43. On Yahoo I'm #7.

Update: I have been updating this post, cause I messed up on my searches. Anyway, my thesis is that MSN isn't ranking bloggers as well as Google or Yahoo are. My friend Christopher Coulter says that's good cause blogs are adding too much noise to searches. Me? A lot of Google's great brand comes from what influential people in society say about it. What will influentials say about search engines that don't rank them well?

On other ego surfing topics, a Wall Street Journal Online column by Jeremy Wagstaff this week that said that I'm more famous online -- according to Google -- than Steve Ballmer. The article also notes that Steve has 150 times more mentions in the offline world, which makes sense since he's CEO and I'm just a lowly evangelist seven levels down in the organization.

I thought it was funny that Jeremy also gave me a promotion. He said I was an executive. Actually, I'm not.

Another fun ego tracking device? Intelliseek's BlogPulse. You can put your name in and compare mentions of your name on blogs versus other people. Here I compare my last name to that of Ballmer.

Seth Godin: the new Digitial Divide.

Tell me about it. Last weekend I spent 15 minutes on a blog post about Team 99 and less than a week later there are more than 20 news stories about Team 99.

Do blogs have amplification power? There's your proof. I didn't release a press release. I didn't have the corporate PR team do any work (they didn't even know about it before I blogged about it). Bill Gates didn't announce this on stage somewhere.

15 minutes. 20+ news stories. How many millions of impressions? PR folks everywhere should take notice.

At the geek dinners this week I kept hearing about Amanda Congdon. I keep hearing that geeks wanna hang out with Amanda. Heh, in Minneapolis I was interviewed for Rocketboom. I live in fear of what they'll do with that video. But, it's all for a good cause.

Ahh, my wife loves Volvos too! Damn, now I'm gonna have to let Maryam get a Volvo just so we can be in the cool crowd. Watch yesterday's Rocketboom to understand.

Last night I bought a Sirius satellite radio and had it installed in my car. I bought it from Car Toys. Installed and everything it cost about $400. I love it!

After I purchased it, I was talking with the car installer and he said he tried XM and Sirius and returned his XM radio because of reception problems. He was effusive with praise about Sirius.

I'll be honest. I bought it so I could listen to Adam Curry and friends.

A friend and coworker wrote me yesterday and said he's afraid that, as a Christian, he'll get discriminated against now inside Microsoft because of the changes that happened yesterday.

I don't think he understood my stance. I'm against ALL discrimination. If I hear that a Christian didn't get a job or a promotion just because of their faith I'm going to go freaking ballistic -- and any manager who behaves that way should live in fear of being exposed in public. Or, if I hear someone getting made fun of just because of their faith, I'm going to be quite harsh too. That said, I do reserve the right to debate this stuff openly without getting personal. I've been on both sides of the faith line (I was an evangelical Christian for more than 10 years before deciding to leave the church for a variety of reasons).

I want a society where employees are judged not on the color of their skin, not on whether they are male or female, not on what they do in their bedrooms, not on their politics, not on whether or not they go to church (or whether they go to the "right" church). But on the quality of what they do.

If I hear anyone in the hallways making jokes about another group of people I'm going to speak out. There's just NO PLACE for any of this inside our corporate walls anymore.

Any Microsoft employee who thinks he or she is being discriminated against for any reason, please let me know and we'll shine light on that problem together. It's just not acceptable.

Dwight Silverman, in the Houston Chronicle, writes: Microsoft MIA on RSS.

Ouch, but, yes, it's frustrating how long it takes to get new features added to our products.

That said, let's meetup again at the PDC in September and see if you still think we're missing in action.

But, there's another way to look at it. We've built a platform that lets developers add value. There are a TON of RSS news aggregators on Windows. Look at Onfolio 2.0, for instance. That works with Firefox and IE and is an awesome aggregator. Or, look at FeedDemon. That's a standalone application, developed in Borland's Delphi, that rocks too. RSS Bandit was developed, on .NET, by a Microsoft employee during his nights and weekends and it has a huge community around it (it's free too and now is being run as an open source project, so it's getting lots of new features added very quickly). Then you look at NewsGator (and their competitors IntraVnews and YouSoftware). Those plug into Outlook (I use NewsGator as my primary RSS News Aggregator).

So, Microsoft's platforms get credit for these innovative -- and quite different from each other -- approaches to RSS.

We need to remember that anything Microsoft does will affect the livelihoods of the developers who built these products (and took the business risk back when RSS didn't look important). They validated Microsoft's investment in development tools and platforms and for that I'm very grateful.