One more post before I take off the evening and spend it with my son. Chris Lanier has a nice list of Windows Media Player podcasting plugins.

Speaking of podcasting and my son, he's real excited cause he was mentioned on both Rocketboom and Dawn and Drew today.

Note to Steve Gillmor: thanks for the support. He writes: "This may seem like so much inside baseball to most of you, but this has been building for a long time. What's new is the insistent voice of the blogosphere beginning to dominate the conversation between vendors and customers. It's more of a zero sum game than many are willing to accept."

Yes, it definitely feels like we're playing a different game now. I'm still trying to figure it out.

I notice that there's a lot more people saying that I'm idiotic, lame, dorky, arrogant, wrong, or somehow otherwise defective in my thinking.

And that's just my 11-year-old talking on his podcast. You should see what some of the others are saying.

:-)

Anyway, onward and upward! I'm going home to play with my son some more.

I'm speaking at the Blog Business Summit on August 17-19, in San Francisco. I'll be in Atlanta next week for a Microsoft internal event. Anyone wanna meetup in Atlanta? Next Thursday evening?

Redmond, WA bloggers: Jeff Sandquist is trying to get a blogger meetup going up in Sammamish.

Leave him a note over on his blog and let him know a few dates that work for you.

Shawn Van Ness has the details on ink support in Avalon. More hints of what's coming in future computers.

Rory, I've gotta remember not to be drinking my Diet Mug Root Beer when I read your blog. Your "Innovidiot" Comic would have made the root beer pour out of my nose! Luckily someone warned me before I read it.

Mike Drip's rant about Sharepoint is getting quite a bit of reactions. Here Paul Schaeflein is linking to quite a few reactions. Andrew Connell notes that Mike's getting slammed in the Sharepoint community.

I actually enjoy a good product "food fight" once in a while. It shakes everyone up and I learn a lot about how people perceive themselves and the product they use. I've learned more about Sharepoint this weekend than I have in a long time.

Update: sorry, it was Mike getting slammed, not Paul.

My step mom is in town, so yesterday we drove for 10 hours through Northern Washington (went across the Cascades). Stunning scenery. Highly recommended. Anyway, we ended up in Winthrop Washington, a neat little old town. Well worth the drive to get there. But, that's not why I'm writing here (well, that explains why I'm even further behind on email).

No, just wanted to give you a report on my Sirius satellite radio. This thing rocks. Worked all the way. I think we had 30 seconds of dropouts in more than six hours of listening (it dropped a few times in tunnels and driving through some heavy tree overhangs).

I love it because if you get bored you can change your musical genre (or, even, switch over to talk radio or comedy). Keeps everyone in the car happy.

One question, though, for General Motors or Ford: why don't any of you put a headphone jack input and output on your dashboards? I wonder if Bob Lutz over at GM's FastLane Blog has answered that? I want to hook my cell phone up to my car stereo (the bleeding edge cell phones that MSFTies are starting to get have 3GB hard drives in them so can store quite a bit of music and podcasts).

Question for Sirius: what would it take to get an entire channel of podcasts? Adam Curry is on from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weeknights, but that's not enough. An entire channel devoted to podcasts around the clock would be awesome.

Ed Bott: Dear Microsoft: Why should we trust you to detect spyware?"

Ed is so right on with this post it isn't funny. EVERY MICROSOFT EMPLOYEE SHOULD READ IT NOW AND FOLLOW HIS ADVICE!

I get asked a lot "how do we win customer trust?" You know our execs care about it. They sponsor programs like "trustworthy computing."

But, it starts here with Ed's post. He nails it. I thought about saying more, but he just so completely nails it that I can't improve on it.

On a tangental issue. I keep thinking back to Ballmer's respect of Google (in his interview last week with me he mentioned that Google is one of those companies that does interesting stuff).

What Google did was to nail the trust issue. They didn't piss off end users to serve some other business end. Now, maybe they were lucky enough not to have other business needs to serve. I guess we'll find out as Google expands into other markets. But, Google's primary competency has been to earn customer trust.

If Microsoft wants to grow its business it needs to really get this stuff right. Listen to Ed. Enough said.

Patrick and I just recorded another podcast. He cracks me up. We talk about music players, Dawn and Drew again, tells off Freddy (who said he was an obnoxious s##t), talks about Yahoo music since Jeffrey McManus, a developer evangelist there, wanted to hire him to be an evangelist.

We also talk about the Cowan music player (that's the one I'm buying).

Anyway, if you're not into our podcast (it's pretty boring) there's a lot of other stuff to talk about:

For one, Dave Taylor doesn't like podcasts: why podcasts won't help promote your business. Question for Dave: is Channel 9 a podcast? If so, it GREATLY helps promote our business. It's an awesome tool and one that's seeing sizeable effects on all sorts of stuff (that I can't talk about because it's a competitive advantage -- let's just say that I can't believe every big company doesn't do its own video blog).

But, let's take it a different way. Hey, reading a newspaper is a lot easier way to consume the news than watching CNN or listening to KGO radio, right? Right? Well, then, explain why more people watch TV news than read the average newspaper?

Translation: Dave, you're missing the point of podcasts. Audio is different than blogs. Don't miss the power of both of them.

Randy Holloway has been moving up my "favorite blogger" list. He's been linking to a bunch of great stuff lately and has a nice compact writing style that, honestly, is a lot better than mine.

Dare Obasanjo asks whether Microsoft is always ahead of its time or a bad marketer?

Michael Gartenberg tells me to get the story right, don't worry about being first.

Joe Wilcox jumped on and really flogged me on this one too.

I agree, but caution him that if you don't participate in the conversation you'll get locked out. Why? Cause of how search engines and news services work.

The online conversation happens and that locks in all sorts of traffic and linking behavior on search engines. Let's say something new gets invented right now. Let's say I invent it and it gets hot in the blog world. Well, the first 10 sites to link to it are a lot more likely to be on the first page of search results than the next 90. I've seen this over and over again.

So, the Internet rewards people for being early, not for being right.

It's why I said I bias toward being early. I'm not saying that being right isn't important. That's TOTALLY missing the point. Where Boing Boing went wrong is that it took far too long to get it right on all of its pages (they still had an incorrect version up this morning) and that they didn't come forward with a post specifically saying they had gotten something wrong.

Of course, the journalism industry isn't good at this. When newspapers make mistakes on the front page, where do the corrections go? Almost always not on the front page.

It's time I linked to my corporate weblog manifesto again. Note rules #1 and #2 and the order they are in.

Also, when I say "bias" that doesn't mean to do one thing to the exclusion to the other. I do try to get it right.

One other thing, Joe Wilcox, I gotta call you out. You take my words and try to make what I say here indicative of some larger conspiracy inside Microsoft. That's just as wrong as what I said -- this is my personal blog and I haven't talked with any other Microsoft employee about what I wrote here yesterday. I don't run product teams and I had that bias to getting it first long before I came to Microsoft. Ask those who hung out in Fawcette's off.ramp. I was the first one there to report that O.J. Simpson was not guilty. Doing what you just did is wrong too. Stop it, please!

Shelley Powers, I'd be happy to hold Kevin's hand at the BlogHer conference. But, unfortunately, I won't be able to make it since Patrick, my son, is up here. I haven't spent enough time with him lately and I gotta invest more in that relationship. While over at Shelley's site I see that Dori Smith is insisting that she's invisible again. I don't get that. Dori, have you ever thought that we don't link to you because you're talking about Diet drinks and things to do in California's wine country instead of geeky stuff?

Has anyone tried Flickr for Windows Media Center yet? I still haven't gotten my Media Center (I'm holding off more entertainment center purchases until the new Xbox gets here).