Dare Obasanjo: "there are also annoying people like me at work who keep preaching this stuff to anybody who is willing to listen. Will RSS change the world? That's a silly question, it already has."

ArsTechnica does a good E3 Roundup with pictures and all. All about the video game battles that are going on now.

I haven't yet had my hands on an Xbox 360 or a Sony PS3, so I can't really comment on them either way. Are there any other good roundups I should link to?

Kennsington hasn't shown up in my comments here. Or anywhere that I can figure. What does that mean?

"We are clueless and not listening to any of you yahoos," is what my mind translates this behavior to.

Another brand destroyed.

See, what Kryptonite did wrong was that it never talked back and never joined in the conversation.

I wonder if they even know what people are saying about them out here on the Internet?

Update: The Gadget Guy says this story actually was covered at an O'Reilly event last fall. Makes it even worse that the company's PR team didn't answer these claims back then.

Dave Winer, I just read your post. Here's my reply: I spent almost the entire afternoon yesterday working with a team on their RSS plans. A major team, one that you probably are familiar with. I wonder if Ballmer has talked with this team about RSS?

When Phil Holden, of MSN, was on stage at the Syndicate Conference on Wednesday, he said that Microsoft is making massive investments in RSS. I know that to be true -- there are RSS teams springing up all over Microsoft. So, I wonder what Ballmer meant? He certainly did seem to throw mud in the water (if the quotes are accurate -- I'm checking on that with PR right now too). Steve, wanna come on Channel 9 and clear this up?

Mark Lucovsky: Don Box and HailStorm.

Real interesting post. I wasn't working at Microsoft when Hailstorm came along, but I too see the same similarities that MarkL sees (Mark used to work at Microsoft and today works at Google).

I wish we'd bring Hailstorm back (sans the stupid name, and with open interfaces, and an architecture and marketing team that everyone trusts).

OK, I'm gonna need to get my book chapter done, so see ya next week sometime. In the meantime, it's nice to have Steve Gillmor back podcasting.

One other thing? Remember how I was bragging about Office Communicator and how that's changing how I work with my coworkers? Well, you can see what I was bragging about up on Channel 9 now.

Eric Mack just got a new Toshiba M4 Tablet PC (I'm ssssooooo jealous!) and he's not only blogging his experiences, but is podcasting them too!). He got his wife and kids involved. You can hear the hard drive spin up. Damn, these headphones are good.

And, Mike Sax does a similar thing with his new Motion Tablet PC.

Eric Marvets: Scoble Made Me Do It.

Heh. Despite that over the top headline, your blog on the world of security is good. I'm subscribed.

Phillip Torrone posted details on the next version of Make. Ten pages of podcasting? Cool.

Radio stations are trying to make sure they don't lose listeners to iPods or satellite radio, and one great example is Boston's FM411 that opened yesterday. It's a Web-based services that lets you tell Boston radio stations what you want to hear, then notifies you when your favorites are about to play.

Oracle now joins the podcasting world, for all you database freaks.

The Black Eyed Peas has a new album coming out June 7. I'm gonna buy that. I wore out my first Black Eyed Peas CD.

You can preview the CD on the site.

They are my favorite band. Sue me.

We always wondered when the marketers would come into the social software space. Well, they are here now with "Yub."

Yub is an online mall where people meet, hang, and get up to 25% back when they shop.

Brad Abrams linked to the NPR story about blogging this morning and asked "Does blogging take more deep thinking than other forms of public writing (articles, books, etc) or less?"

Well, I'm writing a book and writing the book is definitely a different skill than writing a blog post. But, I know some authors who can't write interesting blogs. So, not sure one is easier than another.

In another post, Brad asks for help planning the PDC lunchtime sessions.

Soma talks about the Imagine Cup (they are on campus for the next few days). I'm going to be over there interviewing some of the students in a few hours. I, too, am so impressed by what high school and college students come up with.

I met Jon Udell again this week. It was funny, I was in a small group of people. I forget who was in the group. But that's not important. What was interesting was that after Jon left our small group to move onto something else, the rest of us all agreed that Jon was one of the smartest people we had met and that we were all jealous of his skills to dig into developer-centric topics in ways that very few other people do.

I just wanted to say again that I enjoy Jon's weblog and other writings (he works for InfoWorld). I always am struggling mentally to keep up with him, and that's the kind of person I really enjoy being around. Thanks Jon for making our life richer!

Amit Malhotra ran into Steve Ballmer at a tech conference and asked him a couple of questions about RSS and blogging.

In the interview Ballmer said that RSS is important but isn't going to change the world.

Oh, dear.

A few things.

1) Ballmer is right. RSS is still a technology only used by a very small percentage of the overall market. I don't get bothered by that. If only the news freaks in society use RSS, that's still a quite sizeable audience and one that will change the world with RSS.

2) RSS still has a long way to go to get mainstream adoption. The aggregators are still too rough. They still do too many negative things to users. They aren't reliable enough. They often bring back multiple copies of the same item. Most haven't hit on the right interaction model yet. Many fall apart when you put thousands of feeds into them. It's hard for many people to subscribe to new feeds. Or even find them on pages. We're a long way off from getting mainstream adoption because of these, and other, drawbacks.

3) Web services vs. RSS. I don't see the world that way, but do admit there are things that would be nicer in a Web services world than in today's RSS world. For instance, when you subscribe to my blog for the first time you can only get the last few items that I published here. Why couldn't your client tell the server "give me all items published in 2003." If we had a Web services model, that'd be possible. But, a Web services model would be FAR FAR harder to get anyone to adopt. Why? Cause it'd be more expensive and would take both aggregators and servers to work together.

That said, RSS has totally changed how I work and how I get my information. In that sense, RSS has changed the world already and everything that comes now is gravy.

What do you think?

Oh, and thanks to Steve Rubel for linking to this.

As you know, I've been bragging about my Etymotic EB-6 headphones for quite a while. I love the things. I've had a chance to compare them to dozens of headphones and they always stand up well.

At least they have until now.

Coworker Ken Levy kept bragging about a new kind of headphone that he's been trying. "Can I try yours?" I asked. "No, they are custom made."

"Oh, I guess they are expensive."

Indeed, at about $900, they are. "So, how will I know if they are really worth the $900?"

"I'll get you a pair."

Today the new pair arrived. It took a couple of weeks from the first conversation to today. Why? Well, an audiologist had to visit me and put some goo in my ears to take a custom mold.

The headphones? Ultimate Ears UE-10.

First of all, no one from Ultimate Ears was in contact with me. Ken took care of everything. They never asked me to write about the headphones or even give them a good review. But, I did get them for free, so need to disclose that.

OK, now I know why Ken was so adamant that I try these things. They are simply unbelieveable.

Even with audio podcasts the difference is stark. They block a lot more external noise. I can't wait to try these on the plane tomorrow.

And, they just have a far far richer sound.

Ken Levy, today, wrote extensively about his experiences with his Ultimate Ears too.

Wow, more than 100 people are coming to the London geek dinner on June 7. I'm very honored. That's amazing.

ZDNet's Dan Farber has a podcast interview with Microsoft's CTO Craig Mundie. Talks about all sorts of interesting stuff. New silicon coming online. Mundie is respected internally as one of the smartest people who work here, so it's interesting to hear his thoughts.

Marc Orchant: At last - a great Tablet PC demo from Microsoft! "Whoever put this together deserves a raise. Scoble must love this."

Yes I do, Marc, yes I do! Although it is old school and there's no RSS feed. Thanks to Chris Coulter for pointing this out to me.

I'm back from the Syndicate conference. It went by fast. Thanks to Jeremy Pepper who shared his room with me and then wrote some nice things about me on his blog.

Also thanks to Fergus Burns of Nooked.com for taking a bunch of us to dinner the other night. That was most cool.

I met so many great people and I wish I had more time to talk, but I need to work more on a book chapter that is due on Monday.

Speaking of book chapters, we just put Chapter 7 up on our book blog: Naked Conversations. It's all about PR folks and how they are using blogs.

This weekend is packed too. Tomorrow night Maryam and I are taking Patrick to Star Wars. On Saturday night we'll be at the KFOG Kaboom Concert in San Francisco (I need to work on my book, so we probably won't make it until 7 p.m. -- if you're at the concert, why don't you call my cell at 425-205-1921 and we'll figure out how to meet up).

Speaking of my cell phone, I got my first hate voice mail last night. To the guy who called me, I'd be happy to pay for you to see a shrink. Holding hate in that way isn't a good thing. Hope you can deal with it in a more appropriate way than leaving me voice mails.

Oh, speaking of Syndication conference, here's eWeek's look at MSN's announcements there yesterday.

This is just the start. Microsoft is investing in RSS all over the place. I just got briefed on another team's plans. Can't wait to talk about those.

Hint: be at Gnomedex.