Tim Bray, who works at Sun Microsystems, urges Microsoft to join the Liberty Alliance. I'll ask around to get our official stance -- Kim Cameron, do you know?

Update: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's COO, talks about the Sun/Microsoft news.

Rick Segal: "With respect, I think the jury is out on Scoble's impact in or out of Microsoft."

And:

"I'm much more interested in knowing that every Office product uses F7 for spell check, Ctl-B for bolding something, etc, vs. the internal saga on whatever."

Sounds like Rick should subscribe to Channel 9 instead of maybe reading my blog here. I always try to learn some insight into our technology when we're shooting those videos (although videos that are marked as including a "demo" have more of that kind of stuff than, say, the interview with Jim Allchin, where we just talked about things).

What's my impact? All of my impact comes from other people (if I've had any impact at all). It comes from the people who've invited me over with my camcorder for an interview. It comes from the thousands of people who've linked to me.

The fact that you're even debating this is very weird. Five years ago very few of you outside of the Visual Basic world even knew that I existed. I never expected blogging to become such a big deal. I never thought I'd be walking around one of the world's best companies with a camcorder. I never thought I'd be on the top 100 list of blogs.

All I do is type on this little keyboard what I'm thinking about and reading. I tell my friends that this is a weird world. It's a world that's very small and a world where the word-of-mouth networks are incredibly efficient.

I agree with Rick that the You Software site is one of the better ones. It's amazing how hard most Web sites make it to find basic information.

Here, I stayed at New York, New York in Las Vegas. Visit its Website and tell me where they are located.

It took me a long time to find the location. Hint, it's under "Contact Us/FAQ." Why is "our location" under "contact us?" Does that make sense?

Why isn't it on the home page?

Why did this matter? I was looking on my cell phone for their darn address and couldn't find it so had to punt and call the hotel.

It's a nice place to stay, though. At least now you can find it. Heh.

Brandon Paddock says he's been impressed with how MSN listened to him and the other Search Champs members.

I'm studying the MSN Search Champs program in preparation for the Team 99 and other Longhorn customer interaction efforts (Team 99 isn't the only one, there's TONS of stuff underway).

Russell Beattie, who works at Yahoo, says Yahoo's dependence on Microsoft technology is bad.

"Y! is making more forays into Hollywood, but we're basing our services on Microsoft's techology! That's insane!"

Russell, is there anything we can do to help reduce your fear? What would you like to see Microsoft change? Yahoo is one of our most important customers and we only win if you do.

The new MSN Search Toolbar is now up (it officially gets released tomorrow).

While over on News.com, a couple more things caught my eye. Tomorrow Microsoft will ship version 1.0 of desktop search, aka MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search.

But, Charles Cooper's question "Do we owe it all to the hippies?" makes an interesting point -- one that rings true with me, but I'm not gonna tell any stories along these lines! Heh.

The hippie attitude still shows up in our industry all over the place. Have you seen it?

CNET News.com: Gates sees big dollars in little devices.

David Allen has setup a line of gear for work and life with the Levenger catalog.

What's funny, though, is Royal Randolph went into a Chicago store to buy some David Allen gear and while in line, he turned around to see none other than David Allen. Of course, David blogged it.

I'm really going to work hard to get back on David's program. The problem is, how do you get back on when you are so far off? Do you just select all email and delete and promise to live life on the David Allen program from then on? I'm VERY tempted!

Aside: more proof I can keep my trap shut. David Allen told me about this deal back when he sat on my Red Couch back in January.

The Boston Herald: Branding with blogs.

Sorry to the author, Andrew Manuse, for not being available to be interviewed. My schedule has been absolutely nutty lately. I'm still not answering all my email either. Sorry, if you are trying to get ahold of me, and you haven't heard back, it's a good idea to try again.

Tomorrow I have a booked schedule then am gonna be on the red eye to New York for the Syndicate conference, which is looking really good.

By the way, anyone want to share a hotel room in New York? I haven't booked my hotel room yet.

David Singer works at IBM and now he's adding a disclaimer to his blog. I'm hearing that employees of IBM helped craft a set of blogging guidelines by putting the guidelines up on a Wiki and letting everyone edit them. That's a GREAT use of a Wiki. For those people who don't know what a Wiki is, it's a Web page that anyone who visits that page can add or edit the content there. Great for group projects.

By the way, Shel and I would love to get a copy of IBM's guidelines to use in our new book. Anyone know someone on the PR team over there?

By the way, David Singer has been doing his blog for more than six years now and is still using UserLand Manila for his blog.

Fred, A VC, is doing a family podcast.

I'm listening now, but what's cool about these kinds of podcasts isn't that they'll get a big audience (they won't) but that this is yet another way to share your lives with friends and family around the world.

I'm more partial to video for that, though, since a lot of the charm is to see how the kids are doing, how big they are getting, etc. I also don't know that you would need to do these every week, but rather only when something major happens. Like a school play, a graduation, a promotion, a wedding. Family eventcasts could be quite fun.

Alfredo Octavio notes that Wired rated Apple #1 and Microsoft #28 and then asks "what does that say, Scoble?"

To me, it says, Microsoft's cup is half full with room for more.

Yeah, that's spin, but really I'm just going to work hard to make our customers happy and let the popularity lists play out. I'd rather make sure that Steve Wynn keeps buying more XP machines for his casinos -- that's the real popularity list that matters to me.

I was reading more of Sun Microsystems' employee blogs tonight and realized that blogs are excellent ways to build bridges across organizations. Why? Cause we can read each other, find something in common, and start a conversation.

MaryMary, for instance, continues the conversation on Friday's news.

I was thinking back to Hugh Macleod's point last week that corporate blogging punches holes in the porous membrane. This is yet another way it does just that. Now a few people seven levels down to the CEO have a way to start a conversation without relying on the CEOs to build a relationship with us.

Thanks to Volker Will for linking us to the BBC's report on 100 years of history of Las Vegas.

We're finally home from a weekend of fun in the sun. Sorry, no salacious stories. Like they say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Heh!

But, anytime I can walk out of a Steve Wynn resort with my shirt is a good one! Last night we were there until the wee hours of the morning. Getting in there is a chore -- all the parking lots were full. Shows that Las Vegas still loves a new resort.

Anyway, back to reality now. Gotta work on the book.

Slashdot: McNealy and Ballmer smiling together.

Pat Patterson, who worked on this effort at Sun Microsystems, writes more on his blog.

Fred G looks a little further into Gmail and RSS and security when using RSS News Aggregators.

Seth Godin: Geek makeovers!

Should be titled: geeks who listen to their wives. Heh. Why do you think I wear black at conferences now?

I seriously doubt there's an image consultant at Microsoft going around dressing up executives, though. I'll ask when I'm back in the office on Monday. Heck, if that's true THAT would make a funny Channel 9 video!

Richard Silverstein had a commenter leave some hate speech on his blog and he's writing about what happened when he tried to get his blog provider to remove it. Don't visit these links if you aren't ready to see some profanity and/or hate speech cause he reprints the actual post that was left in his comments. Today he asks Hate Speech: Is there ever a limit for blog services?

That's a really tough one for me. Here on my personal blog I don't mind leaving up such speech but I will make sure any such speech is replied to with a personal reply from me. I'm a believer in not hiding that kind of stuff.

But, I haven't really been tested yet on that belief. As to Microsoft's sites? I'd pull it down as soon as I saw it.

Why the different standard? Well, this is my personal blog. I can take more risks here. If something goes wrong, the only one this should hurt is myself. Over on a Microsoft property, though, there's a team involved, at minimum, and anything that happens there affects all of Microsoft's employees.

How would you handle it?