Jeffrey Veen: the Usability of subscribing to feeds.

It's a big problem that lots of people are working on. Got any good ideas?

In this corner are A-list bloggers and over in this corner is John C. Dvorak.

It's a Google mudfight!

Hmmm, I unsubscribed from Chris Pirillo's feed yesterday and now several people are sending me messages via RSS. See how this works? If you read enough feeds you're gonna hear the important stuff anyway, no matter what happens.

Oh, I got the secret message: Chris has turned on full-text feeds. Subscribed!

OK, all you people who were nerds back in the 1980s, this site is for you -- BBS: The Documentary.

Yeah, I was one. I remember my friends who ran bulletin board systems out of their garages. I remember dreaming of the day when I would finally be able to afford a Hayes 9600baud modem like those that my friend had running in his garage. That's so slow in comparison to the Wifi network I'm typing to you on right now it isn't even funny.

Here's an interview by Roland Piquepaille (he has a famous tech blog) of Microsoft France employee Vincent Lauriat. He talks about a bunch of Microsoft France blogs. Unfortunately the interview is in French. Cool, I wonder if I can talk someone out of a travel budget to go hang out with the French bloggers?

Maybe that's why Eric Rudder went to France? By the way, nice article about Eric in the New York Times yesterday (it, for one, gives the real reason why Eric went to France).

Dan Green blogged the 411 Song Beta mobile phone service. Hold your phone up to the radio and it'll identify the song you're listening to. For a fee, of course.

Erik Mack: how to get your kids interested in computers?

Great ideas.

Ahh, there's a group who is holding a little contest (Contagious Media Showdown) to see who can get the most hits to a new Website or weblog.

How do I know this? One of the sites has put my name on some sort of celebrity blogging list. I'm honored, but you do realize what "A" stands for, right?

'boards: Orange - Gold Spot - Darth Vader. Darth Vader's heart of evil is no match for Hollywood executives.

Funny video spoof!

I just saw Julie Leung's post about Lawrence Lessig's admission that he was sexually abused as a child.

Why am I linking to this? Well, I've been reading Lawrence and Julie for quite a while. That's the real thing about blogging. I get to know people on a level I'd never have known unless they were my closest friends. Lawrence is a law professor at Stanford University and is quite famous in his own right. Julie is just an all around great person. If you ever get to see her speak, I highly recommend it. Her speech at Northern Voice got many people in her audience to tear up.

This is powerful, brave, stuff. If it gets even one other abuse victim to face his ghosts, then Lawrence's admission will have done a world of good.

In the past 24-hours I've been seeing some really raw human stuff coming through my aggregator. I'm trying to deal with it all.

Jason Calacanis talks with Bill Gates and blogs the conversation. I think I'll ask Bill about Jason next time I see him. ;-)

I've only talked to BillG once since joining Microsoft two years ago. I am totally jealous of those of you who got to go to the D conference.

Mick Stanick from Australia was just IM'ing me and showing me the Podcast Network. Very cool! Got a bunch of new feeds to subscribe to.

While we're talking about Podcasting, just saw this excellent reply to the podcasting hype by James Governor: Note to Steve Gillmor: Podcasting is still not mainstream. James then gets into comparing the RSS adoption of Microsoft and Google.

Interestingly enough, the OneNote team was over here today for an interview and Chris Pratley joked with me that they had podcasting in the OneNote product plan three years ago but had to cut that feature in order to ship on time.

I agree with James Governor. Asking for someone in Office to be fired, like what Steve Gillmor asked, is pretty ludicrous. You fire people after they mess up a business. That clearly hasn't happened yet on the Office team. Yes, we can have disagreements about their feature choices, but Office, so far, has shipped on schedule, has come out with innovative new products, like OneNote, and has interesting stuff coming soon.

Whoa, hundreds of RSS feeds for Microsoft's knowledge base.

In the past I said that people should get fired if they don't do RSS. In this case, the team that did this should all get 4.5s (Microsoft lingo for "get a raise.")

This is really huge. Now someone who is really passionate about one of our products and wants to keep up to date on all the problems and fixes for that product, can subscribe and instantly be warned when a new knowledge base article comes out.

MVPs are gonna LOVE this one! (When I was an MVP I LIVED inside the knowledge base).