Congrats to Jason Calacanis for getting to the million-dollar-a-year level with his weblog business.

Channel 9 thread: Xbox 360 or MS marketing?

I have a few friends over on the Xbox team. It's real, turns out and was not a "planned PR event" as one of them put it to me. As of last night the kid's dad still had a job.

Hmmm, can I get an Xbox 360 to leave for my son to play? He's holding "Xbox camp" at my house this summer. Bring your kids over.

He'd podcast about his experiences, that's for sure!

How do you punish a kid who breaks an NDA on your behalf? On the other hand, this IS brilliant marketing! Got a bunch of people to talk about the Xbox 360 this week. I wonder, can we give this kid a copy of Longhorn? ;-)

Chris Pirillo has a video of us circling Mount Rainier yesterday. It really was incredible. We got so close that I have video of climbers working their way up a snowfield.

I hear we got one of Boeing's top test pilots. I wish I got his name, but the crew was saying that he's the only one who loves getting close to mountains. Not too risky. I hear even at the closest point we were a mile or two away from the mountain, but when you're next to a 14,500 foot high mountain that seems really close. The only way to get closer would be to climb it.

Also on the plane were a bunch of professional journalists from the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Seattle Times, and others.

Imagine what would have happened if the Wifi service didn't work? It did and was flawless. Several people were holding Skype calls with friends on the ground. I was watching video and downloading feeds.

We also talked a lot about cell phones and their potential use in planes. The plane we rode in is being used to test out VoIP phones and cell phones. They say the real battle over cell phones won't be technical (they've solved those challenges) but rather social.

I agree. I don't want to listen to some guy behind me talking business for five hours straight. Do you?

Steven Sinofsky, the senior vice president in charge of the Office team, told me the other day he was gonna start a blog. It's up now and he's talking about college recruiting.

I wonder if this means we'll see a lot more Office team members blogging soon? Yeah, the Information Worker Product Marketing Group is blogging now too. I can't wait to show you Office 12 on Channel 9.

I'm interviewing the interns who work on the Internet Explorer team in early August. That'll be fun, they are doing some great new features.

Interns actually get to work on real features. For instance, in OneNote, my favorite feature (audio recording) was done by an intern.

Hugh, why did you have to go create a blog for a master jeweller? Now Maryam is gonna send me permalinks as hints for what she wants for Christmas!

Into baseball? Well, Pubsub's new Baseball site lets you track teams and players.

This is cool: Fold n' Drop. New interaction technique for dragging and dropping between overlapping windows. There's a video that demonstrates it on the site.

I knew it. The moon is made of cheese! Zoom in on the new Google Moon site. You know, those guys over at Google have a great sense of humor. But, they really didn't get to the core. If you could zoom even closer you'd see our stash of Channel 9 guys. Speaking of which, want one? Send me a postcard.

Robert Scoble
C/O Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

I'll send one out to you. We'll use the cards on a future Channel 9 video too. We've gotten hundreds of cards from all over the world so far and they are quite fun!

The Nine Guy is having quite a road trip. Dang, I think someone's gonna get in trouble for this.

That Nine Guy is quite a trouble maker. This video is not work safe. Be careful out there.

Speaking of road trips, Peter Williams and John Davies are taking a Land Rover around Britain while on vacation. Well, it's sort of a vacation. While they are there they are testing out Microsoft's AutoRoute 2006 with GPS and are blogging the whole thing with photos. They are also holding a contest so you can win one of the first copies of AutoRoute 2006. "Our guide for the week is a 'beta' version of AutoRoute 2006, running on an Acer TravelMate Tablet PC mounted on the Land Rover's dashboard. Aiding us on our way is a Hewlett Packard nx9110 laptop equipped with a 3G data card from Orange, an Orange SPV C500 smartphone, and an Olympus C-740 digital camera."

If you see the Nine Guy tell him to behave himself!