ActiveWin has opened a Longhorn InfoCenter.

Alex Barn wacks me upside the head and says "podcasts and screencasts are not the same."

CNET slaps us all upside the head and says "get back to work you freaking slackers!" Oh, OK, that was a Patrick translation of what their headline actually says.

Have a good evening!

David Geller, CEO of What Counts, links to an article in Internet Retailer that reports that REI is using What Counts' blogging tech on its store's Web sites.

Yeah, what they are doing used to be called content management. But back then you needed to buy systems that cost a ton of money.

Josh Einstein, who has an interesting Tablet PC-centric blog, asks "why does anyone list on Handango.com?"

Michael Lehman is off to attend the Shareware Industry Conference. Sounds like fun! If you're there, look Michael up.

BetaNews: MS Unveils New Media Center Hardware. Heh, that was the thing they were hiding from my camcorder when I visited the hardware labs a few weeks ago. It's a cool keyboard.

Joe Wilcox says that the press missed the real keyboard announcement today.

Channel 9: Watch Scoble Boogie at Gnomedex.

If you look closely you can see Asa Dotzler stick a Firefox hat on me.

Mike Swanson is a real technical evangelist. I just play one on TV. He wrote a cool little plugin to convert Adobe Illustrator files to XAML and I interviewed him for Channel 9 the other day.

Windows Media Plugins site is sure getting a lot of interesting stuff lately. RSS Radio, by Dorada Software, sure sounds interesting. I'll have to try that out.

There's an article there, by Jake Ludington, about Listening to Podcasts on your Windows machine.

Ed Bott links to ClickZ News that says Microsoft won't buy Claria. I can neither confirm nor deny THAT rumor either! But, glad to see the anti-rumor rumor or something like that. Now we can get back to our normal games of guessing just what Longhorn will look like when it ships and other important questions like that.

On his blog, Ed says that if anyone actually was considering a Claria deal that they should be locked in a room until they realize what a stupid, stupid, stupid idea this was (he used three stupids).

No comment. I might be stupid but I'm not THAT stupid! :-)

Fellow evangelist Marcelo Negrini sent me this one: PressDisplay. It's a site that brings you newspapers in a unique interface. Tech used? AJAX for the interface. ASP.NET on the server.

New York Times Video: iPod Flea Spoof.

Played at Scott Kelby's Mac Design conference (he's the one who did it).

Bill Simser: Get your butt to PDC.

He reminds us that the early-bird registration discount ends Friday.

Another AJAX site has popped up: Ajaxmatters.com.

I know it's not AJAX per se, but the A9 search site has a feature that's really killer: Yello Pages searches. You see, you search for a business -- here I search for Pikes Place Market -- and they give you pictures of that business.

Now, how did they do that? They put a camera on top of an SUV. Hooked a laptop running Windows XP to it along with a GPS. And drove around town taking pictures. I learned that while sitting through an A9 presentation at the Supernova Conference last month.

Frans Bouma: If you're an ISV, want to become one, or just want something really valuable to read, just go over to Eric Sink's latest entry.

Covers competitive strategy for ISVs. I enjoy Eric's writings too. Great stuff.

Michael Howard (Microsoft's security guy) reveals he's working on a new book: The 19 deadly sins of software security.

Dana Epp, a security expert that doesn't work at Microsoft, tells us Michael his one of his favorite writers.

Seattle Area Residents: check out the Seattle Bus Monster. It uses Google Maps to place where public transport is now at. Did I explain that well? In Seattle they have a web service where you can see where your bus is currently located. Now someone put that on a Google Map.

This is what happens when you open up your services via APIs that anyone can figure out. I'm very jealous. I know the MSN team is working on Virtual Earth too. I tell ya, the mapping competition has just started. Over the next year you're gonna see sizeable innovations in this market. Hang onto your seats!

James Governor, on good blogging form: "Scoble offers daily examples of being more competitive by being less competitive. For every coolaid drinking exercise, there is another pointer from him that could get someone severely reprimanded at another company."

I love his final point: "Reward thlinky people."

And if you just think this is all a bunch of hooey, well, then, you'll enjoy this page which advocates for striking a bunch of words, including "blog," from our vocabulary.

I've gotta say, Bloglines Citations is -- by far -- the best way to see what bloggers are saying about a specific post or web site.

I see a lot of people are ragging on Technorati over the past 48 hours.

The new PR again.

If you aren't the best on the market, people will know about it within hours. That's my cautionary tale to product developers everywhere. There's no way you can whitewash the PR (or control it) anymore.

The only thing you can do is participate. No more sticking your little toe in the pool. It's jump in time!

Don't believe me? Well, the "Microsoft doesn't like the word podcast" meme has already spread to 10 blogs.

The slow die in this world. Yes, you better work to get it right, but if you take too long to get it right you just are gonna be left on the sidelines. It's not a world for the meek, that's for sure!

Tim Bray: The New Public Relations.

You wanna know what the new public relations is? Here, go to Bloglines and see who is talking about Tim Bray's post.

That's it!

The word-of-mouth network. Now more efficient than ever. If you don't participate WHILE THE CONVERSATION IS GOING ON you DO NOT EXIST!

Note: look at that Bloglines page. I'm not there. I don't exist.

Come back in an hour. I'll be there. I'll exist. When I say I bias toward posting fast, this is what I mean.

Other people who are slower just will get locked out of the world-wide conversation.

Are you participating?

You wanna know how to pitch an idea out there? Well, let's just put it this way: I don't send Russell Beattie email. I post.

And I read.

I post. How about you?

Here's something that wasn't reported very well: The Unofficial Apple Weblog: Blogcasting anyone?

What you missed about it is that internally we call it podcasting. Now, what they also missed is that I argued about this out in public with Mike Hall. I didn't like that internally we were calling EVERYTHING delivered over an RSS feed "podcasting." Even stuff that can't be played on an iPod, like video.

I'm still fighting that battle. I believe that podcasting is audio files delivered over RSS but that it's better to specifically name other things as to the type of file that gets delivered. For instance, I believe that what we do over on Channel 9 is a vlog or video blog.

But, if you followed the argument with Mike Hall and me you'll see that I lost the argument and so now I'm calling any kind of audio or video file delivered over RSS a "podcast."

Why? Cause podcasting in my mind is "Personal On Demand Casting"

So, now you see how the blogosphere gets the full story out. One source didn't do much reporting. Put a rumor out there without any real sources. And now I get to have my say.

You, the reader, gets to triangulate in on the truth. You can ask more questions. Get more information. And, I might need to come back with a clarification post later on.

Why? Well, we're still arguing it out, but inside and outside. Some groups call what they do "screencasts" (cause they are doing Flash videos of what they are doing on screen). Other groups call them blogcasts, but that term hasn't been accepted outside of a few small groups yet.

By the way, we have a podcasting alias internally. We don't have a blogcast or screencast alias.

Also, at TechED there was a video crew that did a bunch of video blogs. They called themselves the "podcasting crew." They even gave me a shirt that said Microsoft TechED Podcasting Crew.

Ian Betteridge: Why 30,000 bloggers might not be right.

"Does Scoble call up people before posting something about them? No, of course not – he doesn’t have the time."

I TOTALLY disagree here. I have hundreds of key people in the industry on IM and Skype. I have thousands more that I can email.

Also, you missed my day job: Channel 9. There I go around Microsoft and do an awful lot of "reporting." What you don't see on tape is the dozens of hours I spend every month getting around to meet key people. For instance, I just had lunch with a key developer on the MSN Search team. He showed me a bunch of stuff about how they are working to make search better.

But, let's take Ian's side for a second. Let's assume I put something on my blog that's erroneous. It happens.

What Ian totally misses is that when you write on paper for, say, eWeek, if you make a mistake it's out there and there's not much I can do to get it fixed.

But, if I make a mistake I get dozens of emails. Hundreds of comments. And a whole lot of people all around the blogosphere calling me names.

This is something that Ian totally misses in his rant.

Here, let's try correcting something that's false. Come back in the next post.