Rick Segal, a venture capitalist who also used to work at Microsoft, just posted his thoughts on VC loyalty of .NET: eWeek and VC Loyalty = Confused.

The lengthy reply starts with this: "With respect to Mary Jo Foley and Darryl Taft (the writers), they are missing a rather fundamental point about VCs in general. We, as a group, aren’t loyal to anything component technology, that’s just silly. To make a headline out of that comment is, well, it’s entertainment let’s just put it that way."

Caterina Fake (founder of Flickr) posts over at Misbehaving.net: Women leaving tech jobs in droves.

And Antonella Pavese: Leaving IT.

"I found that the IT culture, initially exciting and seemingly full of possibilities, in the long run does not fulfill its promises."

This is a real problem. I'm not sure what to do about it, though. I am going to be following the BlogHer conference in two weeks to see if we can figure some things out.

eWeek: Is .NET failing to capture Venture Capital Loyalty?

Why is only one VC firm quoted in this article?

I wonder what Rick Segal, for instance, would say?

Update: Rick just blogged his answer.

Joi Ito? Allen Morgan? Bill Gurley? Jason Caplain? Steve Hall? Steve Jurvetson? Jeff Nolan? Tim Oren? Ed Sim? Martin Tobias? Fred Wilson? Brad Feld?

Now, I'll be honest, most of them will say Microsoft is dead. That open source is where the action is.

Why do I know that? Because they've told me such. And, because most of them are looking at yesterday's money and assuming that tomorrow's money is gonna be made the same way. Google made some of them fantastic sums of money, but now the rest are chasing that dream.

Problem is, will tomorrow match up with yesterday?

You're probably noticing a theme here. I'm posting all of the bad news about Microsoft. Steve Rubel is switching to a Mac. The VC firms are supporting open source. Longhorn is seen by many as a failure waiting to happen.

I love big challenges. These are big challenges.

But, I keep going back to what's important: the small things. The details. The devil is in them, right?

Obviously I'm speaking from a position of strength here. I know what's coming. So, I'm fearless. Go ahead. Punch us in the stomach. Again and again. Go ahead. Tell us we're out of the game. Go ahead. Tell us we can't do anything right.

Let's get it all out, all here, all now.

Give us your best shot!

Tom Servo: Obligatory Longhorn Article.

"People have started calling it Windows ME2 already. That should give Microsoft a clue."

OK, I want everyone to link here and call Longhorn all the bad names you can. Let's get it out of our systems.

Here, let's go.

Longhorn = Macintosh 2000.

Longhorn is a trainwreck.

Longhorn=longwait

Longhorn=XPSP3.

Longhorn=what a Tiger eats for lunch.

OK, that should get you all started. Can you come up with more fun ones? I think I'll make some T-shirts for the PDC from the best ones.

Here, let's watch Bloglines (who is linking here) and Technorati (who is linking here) for links to this post. Sorry, comments are temporarily down right now.

J.D. Lasica, on his blog about new media, talks about a new "Screencasting" blog.

These are the new tools of technology evangelists.

Over the next six months I predict you'll see an explosion of screencasts. The Blogcast Repository is yet the first to build a directory of a bunch of interesting screencasts.

Technorati tag for Screencast.

Wikipedia definition of Screencasts.

Do you have a favorite screencast?

John Naughton, in today's Guardian: Why I have serious doubts about the 'citizen reporters'

"I suppose there will be arguments about how this imagery and footage is justified because it conveys so vividly the horrors of which terrorists are capable. But I don't buy it, and I don't think broadcasting organisations should either."

Hmmm, when I was a journalism student at San Jose State University we had a lot of professional journalists come and talk with us (and some were our professors). I remember meeting several professional journalists who brought their images that were never published. They had horrific images from war. From traffic accidents. From murder scenes.

They shot the images because that was their job: to capture the scene and do reporting. They were never used because editors were sensitive to their readers and because they could find images that told the story without needing to rely on the blood and guts.

So, what's changed? Well, the photographer can publish his/her images now without checking with an editor. Just go to Flickr and drag the images up.

Interestingly enough, I didn't see many of the horrific images get published. And, the ones I saw most bloggers link to were pretty benign images.

But, of course, a headline of "citizen journalists were pretty responsible" isn't nearly as interesting as the one John had on his story today.

What's the real truth? I'd love to hear Dan Gillmor, or JD Lasica, our resident "citizen journalism" experts talk about it.

A reader just asked "why don't you also include Ice Rocket, BlogPulse, Feedster, and Pubsub?"

I answered "because I've been testing those out for each query too and they aren't in the ballgame for these kinds of searches (ones that see who is linking to specific posts). Those engines excel, though, on other kinds of searches (like searches for specific words, like "Microsoft" or "Scoble") and some weekend I'll look more in depth at them.

Just to give you an idea, though, here's a comparison right now of the four engines when queried with one of the most popular blog entries of the past few days: Tim Bray's announcement of the Atom 1.0 spec being finished.

Bloglines: 72 links

Technorati: 51 links

IceRocket: 0 links.

Feedster: 63 links.

BlogPulse: 31 links.

Ice Rocket is actually getting to be my favorite search engine for other kinds of things. But, you can see that there isn't one engine that does it all.

Doc Searls wants an objective analysis of search engines. I wonder, are there other people who would help out? Maybe we should start a Wiki and figure out how to analyze blog search engines?

Anyway, I'm going to bed. I see my blog just got Slashdotted and traffic is already going nuts. Have a great Sunday!

Would love to hear your thoughts on what blog search engines you use!

Update: I got the Feedster URL wrong. Sorry about that. I've updated the URL here.

Feature request for Bloglines or Technorati. Here's where authority makes a big difference: when you search for something with a huge number of blog posts. Say, for http://spaces.msn.com. Technorati, for instance, brings back 3,392 links. But, as you can see on the first page of results they are useless.

Basically they are content dupes.

Here's where authority matters. For instance, Walt Mossberg linked to MSN Spaces from his blog. Now, he's VERY authoritative. Is a tech journalist for the Wall Street Journal. So, his post should come up high. Well, really, any post that has unique content should come up higher.

But, Bloglines is doing no better with this query. I tried three times and it says the database is having problems and to please try again later.

Christopher Coulter asked, in my comments, "Are you going to do “Bloglines (# links); Technorati (# links)” for every post hereafter? I hope not, the jokes already old. =)"

I actually like the links there. They are far better than a trackback, for one, and they make finding other opinions on a post far easier. They make blogging far more conversational too since you can quickly see who else is talking about a specific subject.

I wish there was a bit of JavaScript code that I could insert into my posts here, that would add a link automatically.

That'd be a cool feature for the MSN Spaces folks to add, by the way.

MSNBC: Podcasts on MSNBC.

Lots of audio feeds to subscribe to.

Bloglines (0 links); Technorati (0 links).

Financial Times gives me a promotion. One problem, I'm not an executive. I'm just a Technical Evangelist. I also wasn't hired specifically to blog about the company. In fact, blogging wasn't part of my review goals until the past year.

Oh, wait a second, I thought only bloggers made mistakes? By the way, my title is on my home page, right underneath my cell phone number so that you can call me. Thanks for including me, though!

Bloglines (12 links); Technorati (9 links).

Washington Post: Fighting words.

"Take two bloggers from opposite ends of the overheated political debate, put them on a Washington tour bus together, then ponder the fate of an increasingly uncivil society."

Glad to see Memeorandum getting some mentions.

Good writeup about how bloggers on opposite sides of the fence are covering issues and learning from each other.

Bloglines (4 links); Technorati (6 links).