Chris Pirillo has an interesting interview with Greg Reinacker, founder of NewsGator, and Nick Bradbury, founder of Bradbury Software.

Disclaimer: I use NewsGator and still love it. I have 1,366 feeds coming into it.

Now, while I love it, I'd love to see performance improvements, and a raft of new things. Nick Bradbury is a very talented developer and designer. His TopStyle and other programs are clean, fast, and have rabid followings.

It'll be interesting to watch what this new company does.

So, the big news that I hinted at has become public. NewsGator is buying FeedDemon. Steve Rubel has the details. It's amazing how fast the news is moving through the network. Dave Winer has a bunch of links and analysis.

Nick and Greg talked to me last week. This is a good move for both of them. It positions NewsGator as a network play, which is good for that. It positions FeedDemon as better than just a damn cool aggregator.

Now, the hard part: where are the customers? Is RSS going to get massive numbers of people using it, or is it just a niche technology that only connectors and news freaks use?

You know where I stand on RSS, though. This is going to be an interesting week!

My wife, Maryam, reads my blog in between doing webcasts for MSDN. She read my latest post, turned to me while I was getting dressed and said "a little self centered are we?"

Oh.

Then, without missing a beat, she says "how come there's always someone in one of my webcasts that knows you?"

I love my wife. Tears me down and builds me up all in 10 seconds.

Deadprogrammer: "[Scoble] is the Kibo of bloggers!"

Heh, caught me! Blame Pubsub. It brings me a folder of people who write the word "Scoble" on their blogs.

Will I start my own religion? Deadprogrammer calls it "Scobleology." Funny. Who is the deadprogrammer, by the way? I wish everyone would put their name on their blog and something about themselves.

By the way, Kibo is a guy who hung out in newsgroups who would get involved in any conversation about him. I wonder if he'll show up here?

Sam Ruby: "One of my early managers once shared with me the following piece of advice: if you don't get your hand slapped at least twice a year, you aren't pushing the boundaries hard enough."

I had a quote all picked out for the beginning of my book chapter, but this one might go there instead.

Dan Gillmor has opened up the Bayosphere, which hints at his citizen journalism initiatives that he left the San Jose Mercury News to work on.

But, today, he took a shot at Microsoft that I thought was unfair. Here, I'll wait while you go and check out his post.

"I would have written a different beginning to this story, roughly as follows:
In winning and sustaining its monopoly in the operating system and browser markets, Microsoft has exposed countless millions of people to woes from security holes that have become conduits for viruses, worms and spyware. Now the software giant is planning to charge its captive customers to clean up the mess it created."

Dan, we've done a TON of security work and distributed that to our customers for free (one of the largest operating system updates in our history, Windows XP Service Pack 2, was given away free). We've given away a beta of our AntiSpyware program for months now (after spending lots of money to buy the company that made it).

We're planning on making IE 7 freely available, which will have a ton of security work done on it.

It's ironic, too, but I seem to remember you saying back when you worked at the Mercury News that one part of being a responsible large company is not tying products into Windows that would destroy competition in the marketplace. Dan, what would happen to all the anti-virus companies if Microsoft bundled in its own anti-virus software? Is that what you're now asking us to do?

But, I'm trying to get an interview setup with the OneCare team to get their side of the story.

This Spencer the Katt cartoon in eWeek is funny. Spencer the Katt is an anonymous column in eWeek. Lots of gossip and other stuff. I haven't read it regularly for years, but in the 90s I used to look forward to seeing that. What changed? Blogs. After all, now we can get gossip and rumors 24 hours a day, not just once a week when a print mag comes out.

Want a rumor? Come back tonight. I hear that one news aggregator company is acquiring another and tonight I'll have the details. It's going to be a big week for syndication.

WebTalkRadio's Rob Greenlee: Is Podcasting Becoming Just Radio Again?

Rob should know something about this. He's been doing radio on the Internet since the late 1990s.

Speaking of Channel 9. The guys over there are trying to get more Microsoft employees to get involved in the forums there. So Jamie did a few advertising posters that are quite fun!

If you're a Microsoft employee, it'd be fun for you to post and say that you're hanging out there.

Exclusive: world to end. IE 7 has tabs.

Heh.

There's a thread on this topic over on Channel 9.

Reel Reviews, a podcast about movies, is turned down by Netflix for its affiliate program and writes about it.

I've been subscribed to Reel Reviews for a while now and it's good stuff for movie buffs.

James Snell, who works at IBM, just sent me IBM's Blogging Guidelines.

Sounds good, although I've broken at least three of these in the past two years and now many teams at Microsoft use blogs to communicate news with the outside world, which doesn't seem to be allowed by these guidelines. I guess my style of blogging wouldn't be welcome at IBM.

But, I understand that not every company can blog the way Microsoft's employees and teams are doing. Since I've talked with dozens of employees of different corporations in the past few weeks I know that every corporate culture is different.

IBM also has decided, for now, not to have a centralized resource for employee blogs (like what Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are doing -- see http://blogs.msdn.com and http://blogs.technet.com for Microsoft's employee blogs).

I also know of at least one IBM blog (that I won't name, cause it's one of my favorites to read) that has broken at least one of these guidelines. I wonder what kind of conflict that'll cause over time?

What blog rules would you enact at your company? What do you think about IBM's?

Rafe answers back and asks how bloggers can have a better cross-domain conversation?

One way would be if I turned on trackback technology, but I've decided not to use that on this blog.

But, that's the weak point of blogs. If you wanna have a rapid-fire conversation it's often better to drop into a Web forum. The advantage of having loosely-coupled conversations, like we're doing here, is the signal-to-noise ratio remains high.

I just put a bunch of stuff up on the link blog, including a photo of Bill Gates on the cover of Time this week.

Joey, the Accordion Guy, cracks me up: "I am Ten Scobles!"

If I'm +lucky+ I'm 1/10th a Joey. I can't play accordion. That's all the proof you need!