Earlier this evening I had dinner with Chris Pirillo. He's very excited about his conference, named Gnomedex and told me that tickets are almost sold out so if you wanna come, don't wait too much longer to get a ticket. Let's see, Adam Curry is coming and hinted the other day that he might show off some new Apple podcasting technology at Gnomedex (if Steve Jobs gives him permission). Dave Winer is gonna be keynoting too, and Dave's been programming something related to OPML/Outlines lately. I wonder if he'll show it off? Remember, when I was director of marketing at UserLand I demonstrated Dave's Radio UserLand product for the first time in public at Gnomedex.

Google is sponsoring a party.

Marc Canter, co-founder of Macromedia, and J.D. Lasica co-founder of Ourmedia, are coming. So are Dan Gillmor (citizen journalism expert), Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress), Kathy Gill, teacher at University of Washington, Eric Rice, Engadget's podcaster, Asa Dotzler, Firefox dev, Phillip Torrone, the world's top geek, Julie Leung (don't miss her presentation!), Denise Howell (she alone takes better notes than 100 bloggers and is my favorite law blogger), Steve Rubel (the PR guy so good he got a full-page photo in BusinessWeek), Chris Sloop, founder of company that makes WeatherBug, Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines, John Battelle, search expert, And Chris says he has lots of other cool and geeky speakers.

Gnomedex might be small in size, but I'll bet it gets more blogging than most "big" conferences. Why? Cause there's a lot of press showing up and because Chris is so influential.

Oh, heck, stop the spin Scoble. Steve Gillmor is gonna be there. So you know you'll hear something about this show. Especially because his talk is titled "Attention, Full-text Feeds, and Why Chris Pirillo Doesn't Get It."

Ahh, a man after my own heart.

I wonder what Microsoft is gonna announce on stage, though? Hey, Bill Gates, are we gonna show off anything cool at Gnomedex? Or are we gonna let Steve Jobs (er, Adam Curry) and Eric Schmidt have all the fun in our backyard?

Yes, John Lewis, I see your blog where you point out that Hilton Locke, a software test engineer on the Tablet PC team, is blogging. Subscribed!

Just shows that if you want to get my attention, just blog me a note and link to my blog.

Alex Barnett wonders what Jacob Nielsen thinks of RSS? He also details what he's found in Jacob's writings refering to RSS.

Jacob is famous for his thinking on Web design.

I think Jacob totally misses the point with RSS via email. RSS actually has all those advantages and more.

Rick Schaut, who works on the Macintosh Office team, blogs that the Mac Office team will use the new XML file formats too.

It's official. Microsoft announces new open XML Office File Formats. The video and links to all the news are here.

This is BIG news.

My reaction?

When I got called over to meet with Brian last Friday I had no idea what was coming, other than he wanted to talk to me about "new file formats."

I thought back immediately to the pain we had when Office had changed formats in the past. I used to have to remember to save as an older format when emailing files around the office until everyone else got up to date.

So, I started the interview with "are you nuts?"

But, Brian won me over. By the end of the interview I was floored. "The Office team is doing this?" In my mind Office was always associated with format lock-in and a closed, proprietary approach.

But now I can see EVERYTHING inside the new files. Wow.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Congrats to Jean Paoli and Brian Jones and the entire Office team (Steven Sinofsky was behind this too). This changes everything.

As an extra icing on the cake, Brian Jones now is blogging too.

Oh, and one end-user benefit? The new files saved with the new XML format are about 1/4 the size of the existing binary format. Listen to the video to hear why that is.

OK, not many CEOs blog, but there are a few of them that read blogs.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, sent me a personally signed letter the other day (sorry, can't share the contents yet, will be able to in a couple of weeks).

And today one of my blogger friends got an email from Steve Jobs (legit one too!) In both cases it was pretty clear that those two are reading blogs (or at least are getting them forwarded to them by their staffs).

So, watch what you write, a CEO might be reading.

MSDN is publishing new "eHow-tos." This is a way for the mobile and embedded developers to learn more about how to use Microsoft technologies. A favorite of Jenny Kays (she's on the team that did this) is the "Creating a Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC Application Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005."

Embedded eHow-tos.

Mobility eHow-tos.

Very cool, but where's the RSS feed? Sorry, but it's lame to release a new site that's going to have continually updated content without also releasing an RSS feed to go along with it. Lame. Lame. Lame. And I'm going to keep saying this until every single site Microsoft publishes is available in RSS too.

Interesting, everyone who was told the Office news today was asked to wait until 12:01 a.m. eastern time to write about it.

There are at least two professional reports that have been put up on the Web. Who said that bloggers would be the first ones to break their committments to not publish until a certain time?

I've been asked not to post until then. So, see ya in an hour and a half. Developers are gonna love this one.

Jean Paoli stopped by my office this afternoon. He's the co-creator of XML. He was positively beaming.

Can one guy change the world? Talk to Jean sometime and you'll be inspired.

Neville Hobson reports that Boeing has opened a second blog, this time to blog about the 777.

Byron, over on the Blog Business Summit was the first to report the story.

Jeremy Wagstaff complains about Microsoft PR's inability to get him a Tablet PC. He works as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal Online. I saw his blog this afternoon and got the Tablet PC team to take care of him.

I'm sorry about this Jeremy.

Just saw this on Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft Watch blog: Microsoft is reengineering marketing.

That's from CMO Magazine, a resource for marketing executives.

It'd be interesting to talk with Mich Matthews, head of marketing, about this on Channel 9. Is anyone from marketing blogging these changes? Why not?

Buzz Bruggeman sent this one along: PatentMojo. Site that lets you do patent searches -- builds RSS feeds so you can watch specific companies and their patent filings.

Jeremy Zawodny, blogger at Yahoo, tells me Yahoo just posted their blogger guidelines. I'll have to add that to our Chapter 12 which is about how not to get fired with your blog, in our corporate blogging book.

For those of you who are following Bitmans' Place (the site we are developing to help get kids 8-14 interested in computers) we just posted a new game. Sorry, during the beta, registration is still required. Here's a free invite so you can get into the site.

Ivan Mladenov, the lead developer on the team, appreciates all the comments he's gotten and is watching Technorati for more blog posts.

Microsoft today released the new Visual FoxPro roadmap, which discusses what will happen to FoxPro in the future. I'm off to interview that team a little later today to learn more face-to-face.

Visual Basic developers: Jackie Goldstein is on .NET Rocks talking about VB. .NET Rocks is an audio show done by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell (available as podcast and streaming formats).

ComputerWorld: IT Blogging is One-Sided.

Wait a second, someone named Scoble is quoted in this article and it's not me!

Oh, it's my brother. Even better, he's now blogging for ComputerWorld, which just turned on their blogs.

My brother, Alex, is an IT guy at a Silicon Valley law firm and has a blog here.

How did I learn this? I looked at my referer log and saw a bunch of traffic coming from the ComputerWorld site.

Remember the Mary Jo Foley article that had a headline that claimed that .NET apps break in the new version? Well, here's the video interview that explains all about .NET application compatibility.

Nokia, in Wired, seems to be saying the same thing I was: that the cell phone is gonna be an obvious place to play MP3's (among other things).

Getting podcasting technology on my phone is something I want a lot more than getting that added to my desktop PC (cause I already have it on my desktop PC thanks to Doppler).

40 million cell phones with MP3 capabilities. Whew.

While we are having a massive blogger dinner over in London next Tuesday evening, Anita Rowland is hosting a weblog meetup over near Microsoft's headquarters.

New comments server ... again. OK, I just switched over to the new comments server again. Hopefully not too many comments are lost in the switchover and hopefully my old comments are still there after this post as well (comments made before today are on the old server, comments after today will be on a new server that Dave says is gonna be more reliable).

Microsoft today announced support for RAW Images. This is a big deal for digital photography.

News.com reports that AMD is edging Intel in early dual-core benchmarks.

These are the latest processors, dual-core means that the chip manufacturers are putting two processors into one. I expect that soon most computers will include these new processors.

John Foley, on the Information Week blog, reads the tea leaves and says that Google is going to sell appliances to corporations. My take? Already a few percent of Google's sales are from search appliances. I know Google is working on other stuff like calendaring too. Makes sense. When I worked at NEC I would have spent a grand or so to get my workgroup intranet capabilities and/or more email space.

The question John raises is interesting, though. Will corporate types put up with ad-supported services inside their corporate walls?

Speaking of news, tomorrow the Microsoft Office team will announce something pretty important tomorrow. It'll be up on Slashdot for sure. Come over to Channel 9 after 9 p.m. pacific time tonight. We have an interview with the team about the news being announced. Whoever submits the news to Slashdot, can you add a link to http://channel9.msdn.com too?

Memeorandum is my favorite way to get big-city news. Today Memeorandum has hundreds of links to various news sources and people talking about deep throat's unveiling (the secret source of the Watergate story).