Steve Rubel: Microsoft's RSS Warm and Fuzzies.

He links to an update of start.com that was released on the start.com blog. Cool! I'll have a video with the start.com team up tomorrow.

It's a blogger circle jerk. We're back on the Boeing plane. I'm reading Dave Winer who links to PT's photos.

Here's some more photos. More coming. We're all blogging like crazy. Eric Rice is video blogging this.

More on the Stratoblog.

The winery, Reininger, rocks. I bought some Syrah for Maryam. We met the owner and had a great meal. I'm standing over Molly Holzschlag. She's blogging too.

Give geeks some wine and wifi and they go nuts.

Update: the trip back was short, we're landing now. Talk to you later tonight when I get back home.

Why do you need wifi on a plane? To keep up with the news, of course!

ZDNet is reporting: Microsoft sues over Google hire. Watch blog commentary come in on Bloglines (3 links); Technorati (4 links); IceRocket (1 link); I tried the other engines, but none of them are showing any links yet.

By the way, I can't comment on legal issues or HR issues. Someone just asked me "what's Microsoft's blogging policy?" and I answered "be smart." That makes sense, no?

Welcome from the Boeing 737-400 test aircraft. We just buzzed Mt. Rainier. We'll try to get some photos up.

Boeing just announced to the 30 or so bloggers and journalists on board that we are the first in the world to experience a new service: four channels of live TV. Hey, that's cool.

We were just watching Jim Cramer on CNBC. His "mad money" show is awesome. We were joking that he's Steve Ballmer's brother.

Yura Smolsky, of Icerocket, wrote me and told me I was using the wrong URL for doing blog searches (I needed to click on the "blog" tab to get only blog searches). I updated my post last night and indeed I'm getting a lot better results now.

Blogdigger also said, in my comments, that I was searching the wrong part of their engine as well.

Sorry about that. I've corrected both.

I assume my readers now are seeing this is a work in progress. I hope other bloggers join in and do their own comparisons.

Ed Sim, a venture capitalist, chimes in with an answer to the .NET and VC question.

"While the OS is important, Microsoft has lost its complete and utter dominance as we move to a service-oriented world where broadband is everywhere, apps are in the cloud, and the browser becomes king. All that being said, I will not make my decision to fund a startup based on whether or not it uses .Net. For example, if you want to see a great app built on .Net go to a friend's web service, Phanfare, and try using the application.

It probably hasn't been a fun week over at the Firefox team:

News.com: Coding misstep forces new Firefox release.

Mark Pilgrim, over on the MozDev mailing list reports on a Greasemonkey/Firefox security hole. "This particular exploit is much, much worse than I thought. GM_xmlhttpRequest can successfully "GET" any world-readable file on your local computer."

But wait, it gets worse. An attacker doesn't even need to know the exact filename, since "GET"ting a URL like "file:///c:/" will return a parseable directory listing. (And Mac users don't get to gloat either; you're just as vulnerable, starting with a different root URL.)

Be careful out there!

Update: Greasemonkey is an extension to Firefox. It's worth clarifying that here.

2) About the future of Firefox. They are talking about that over on Channel 9 too.

Update: The Greaseblog writes: Mandatory Greasemonkey Update. There's already 36 links to that post, according to Bloglines.

Om Malik (he writes for Business 2.0, among others): Apple will do a video iPod.

If you are thinking of coming to Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference in September, they've extended the early-bird pricing until July 30, the PDC blog says.

Cool photoproject: Bridges to Understanding.

Give a bunch of kids around the world cameras and they do some pretty interesting stuff.

"Our interactive online program connects middle school students in the developed world with their contemporaries in indigenous communities. Central to the program is digital storytelling mentored by professionals and created by students. We provide the tools and training that enable them to tell stories from their own lives and communities."

Inspiring.

Make blog: How to make enhanced podcasts.

This one is quite an interesting article, by Phillip Torrone. Bloglines (37 links); Technorati (12 links).

Gartner: Magic quadrant for Web Services Platforms.

Oh, I like the quadrant we're in!

I'll be Stratoblogging tomorrow. What's that? Boeing is taking a few of us up in its wifi demonstration plane and Steve Broback, founder of the Blog Business Summit (a conference for marketers and businesspeople trying to figure out the blogging/podcasting/vblogging thing) is taking us to dinner in Walla Walla.

Full disclosure, you see. By the way, I already wrote positive things about Boeing's wifi service after taking a recent trip to Denmark.

Oh, the Tablet PC users will love this one: Flipbook!

It doesn't require a Tablet PC, but sure works better with a digitizer and a pen.

Tim Oren: Dear Robert and Dan'l.

"You all know what we are loyal to, right? That's right, long term capital gains. It's a reasonable simplification to say that VCs and venture generally makes those gains by betting 'on the change'. Static or stagnant markets and technologies are not our meat (unless we can disrupt them). To the extent that there's an aggregate pattern in our investments, it is a sort of rough referendum on which technologies are driving or at least surfing the change. It's again likely fair to say that while there aren't a lot of overt bets against .NET per se, there also aren't a lot of markers down that require it to drive a market to get a win. I think I could say that more strongly about Longhorn, and bit less strongly about Microsoft in the whole mobile arena. I offer three thoughts on the basis for this pattern of activity with respect to MSFT.

He goes on to make three points:

1) Longhorn is tactically and strategically compromised.

2) Strategic leverage as negative indicator.

3) Opportunity costs.

"But, you want us excited again, Microsoft? Show us how you will change, and thereby change the market."

David Berlind, over at ZDNet: Microsoft's Scoble questions ZDNet's agenda.

David, spent the next 1,680 words taking me to task again. I'm going to let him have the last word.

"I'm glad you asked because this, in my mind, this isn't about Technorati anymore. It's about the value of truth, something that we here at ZDNet and at CNET Networks are passionate about. The blogosphere is a fantastic new medium that I'm officially a part of. It's all I do. And I'll be the first one to acknowledge that you were one of its pioneers. But now that people are turning to it as a critical source of information, it'd be nice if it had reputation for being a source of pretty credible information."

I made some mistakes in my original post. I corrected the original post. I have spent the past weekend doing a LOT of work on blog search (which shows that my original point wasn't too far off -- Bloglines has a better index than Technorati in my opinion and I've given everyone access to my work so they can make up their own minds).

As to why I thought ZDNet didn't have comments? Cause, until tonight, I never saw any comments on any of David's blog and everytime I tried to click on the Talkback link it looked like it was taking me over to a forum rather than having comments. Glad to help clear that up too. Sorry for the mistakes.

Anyway, go over to David's blog and check it out.

Let's try again. This time the news is AlwaysOn's new GoingOn. A "digital lifestyle aggregator" that Marc Canter helped out with.

This one has a ton of blogs talking about it yesterday, so it should be even better to check all the engines out with.

Clusty: 0 links.

Bloglines: 9 links.

Technorati: 5 links.

Feedster: 1 link.

BlogPulse: 0 links.

IceRocket: 18 links. Updated, I was using the wrong part of their search before. The new number is a little unfair, though, cause now Bloglines has 16 links.

Blogdigger: 1 link.

One other thing I noticed. Most of the blog search engines include blogroll links in their results. Having blogroll links in your resultset is worse than having duplicates. Bloglines has the fewest blogroll type links that I've seen so far.

Back to the article in question, though. Congrats to Tony Perkins and Marc Canter. This will be interesting to play with and watch.

Update: maybe Clusty just can't deal with URLs. Here, I try searching for just "AlwaysOn GoingOn" and get back 24 links.

So, let's try all the engines this way:

Technorati: 5 links.

Feedster: 54 links.

Bloglines: 0 links.

Blogpulse: 1 link.

IceRocket: 17 links. Updated to point to the blog-only part of IceRocket's engine.

Blogdigger: 5 links. Updated: I was pointing at the wrong URL before, this one gets a few more hits.

Hmmm, IceRocket looks hot, but has a lot of noise. I need to do more research on plain old blog search. That's gonna be a harder one. For looking at who is linking to a specific URL I like Bloglines a lot better than any of the other engines, though.

What do you think?

Gary Price over on Search Engine Watch says he does all his blog searches with Clusty. A few people have emailed me about Clusty in the past 24 hours too. So I know it's getting more popular. So, let's try it out.

First, I picked an article I knew someone linked to (Marc Canter, who is an A-list blogger, linked to it, so I knew that we had a good baseline to test out how good the search engines were.

He linked at 6:43 a.m. yesterday morning. It's now 1 a.m. So, the engines have had lots of time to get around to his blog and index it.

What's the article about? Well, Intermix (majority owner of MySpace) was sold to News Corp for $580 million cash.

So, now, let's test out the engines.

Clusty: 0 links.

Bloglines: 3 links.

Technorati: 0 links.

Blogpulse: 0 links.

Feedster: 0 links.

IceRocket: 0 links.

So, Bloglines wins again. How, again, is Clusty better for looking at who is linking at a blog?

Am I doing this wrong? Why is only one engine finding any links to this URL?