Steve Rubel answers the secrecy question with: "Respond or Die."

Steve: I agree with you. It's why I do this. But it isn't clear that responding actually brings you much in the marketplace. Google's stock is up this morning. Microsoft's is down.

In fact, looking at how Apple's fans respond to Apple, I'm starting to surmise that it's better to be secretive and "suprise" the marketplace with news, either good or bad.

It's that suprise that makes people believe the company has its act together (even when it doesn't). Does the marketplace just want to eat hot dogs but doesn't want to see how they are made?

Now, there's one area that isn't true: when dealing with geeks. I think it was Jonathan Schwartz over at Sun who said that developers don't buy things they join movements. Well, if you wanna create a movement you've gotta show people how the hot dogs are made.

David Berlind: Ground zero for credibility in blogging and journalism.

Interesting discussion!

Another one that we're having internally is "is it better to be secretive or open?" So far the market is rewarding the secretive companies and it's getting harder to defend being more open.

My thesis is that being more open leads to a better long-term relationship. That will lead to better product ideas. Better PR. And a better stock price. But over the long-term.

Of course, that theory has yet to be proven. What do you think?

A couple more quickies before I go to bed. Lots to catch up with tonight.

Mark Jen catches wind of a new MSN group of blogs (they call it MSN Filter) and he asks "Interesting, but who's doing the filtering?" Mark links to Jason Calacanis, and others.

I'm meeting with that team tomorrow. Will report what I know then.

Om Malik hosts a guest blog by Robert Young which dives into some of the reasons why Rupert Murdoch acquired MySpace. His thesis? They are going into competition with MTV.

I don't know how I missed the TechCrunch blog, but their week in review is great! Lots of good blogging going on there.

Lee Holmes responds to my earlier post (the one about Monad and the virus) with: astroturfing?

Here's something I learned while working in the tech industry: if something is being discussed and answered in public, it almost never is evil. But, if something is being kept secret, then you should focus more scrutiny on that. When the stink is going up, people's normal reactions are to stop communicating.

Speaking of which, Dare Obasanjo riffs on perceptions of how big companies work (he points at Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny who does the same).

Anyway, back to Lee's post. I brought the astroturfing charge out into public because someone was doing that internally. I knew that by shining light on it any misperceptions would go away.

It's unfortable to work in public with the gaze of thousands of eyes on your work. I know that. But, I told someone else tonight that I am SO SO SO glad I work at Microsoft where there are thousands of employees blogging (including some who do so anonymously). If I make a mistake my coworkers are usually among the first to point it out.

It gets back to the marketplace of ideas again. If an idea (or a post) is good, it'll survive a thorough look. Translation: good job Lee!

Fast Company magazine has invited 75 people to guest blog for the next couple of days as part of its second annual blogjam. I wonder what I'll write. Watch the Fast Company blog tomorrow to see.

Peter Jennings died from lung cancer, ABC News reports.

Shelley Powers: Technology is neither good nor evil. Ahh, more bagging on Technorati's top 100 list (I see several bloggers ganging up on that list, Jason Calacanis being the one with the best criticisms).

Jason's ideas are great and I support them. Hope to see a better list soon.

I missed this, but Rick Schaut works on the Mac team and talked a couple of months ago about Apple's move to Intel processors and what it means to the Word/Mac team.

Jeff Sandquist has another PDC contest -- this one is for one of 10 special seats in the house.

My friend, Larry Larsen, who works at Poynter Institute (the news industry's R&D arm) has a post today about Google-Mapping the News. This is EXACTLY what I hope to see with citizen journalism. Imagine an earthquake that's covered by hundreds or thousands of bloggers in an area. You'd be able to watch a map like this and see reports constantly popping up.

Speaking of maps, the MSN Virtual Earth team posted a blog about what they learned from the first week of their service's existence and Nikhil Kothari has a prototype photo browser (Photo Map) implemented with Virtual Earth. That's very cool! I tell ya, mapping is hot and the industry is just getting started!

Eweek, in an article on Lenovo's product supply: "The ThinkPad Tablet has sold so fast since its introduction that Lenovo quickly ran out of stock and is now working to catch up, he said." Oh, that should effectively end the "Tablet PCs aren't selling" argument.

Shhhh, don't tell Maryam, but MSN opened a new Shopping site. It was bad enough that we went to the mall today. Now she'll be sending me pictures of pants she wants to buy me. What's cool here? The RSS feeds. Do a query and you'll see an XML icon at the bottom of each page. SearchViews has an interview with Chris Jolley of MSN Shopping.

Newsmap shows you Google's News page in a different, and cool, way.

The Tao of Mac blog is asking if OS X is becoming crufty.

Jonathan Hodgson has some crazy ideas for Solitaire to evangelize Windows Vista. Demonstrates how the bar for what's considered "good enough" is going up.

Apple released a new mouse when I was on blog vacation and caused the usual discussion in the blogosphere. Is it cool or isn't it? That is the question. You can see the discussion on Bloglines/Citations.

Dogpile has an interesting campaign to get you to consider using its search service instead of MSN or Google or Yahoo: It's letting you compare the search engines using its comparison tool. I like this a lot. Try it out for the word "blog" for instance.

ZDNet is introducing "PhotoCasts." Sorta like podcasting, but with photos.

When Jeff and I had the idea of giving away a PDC ticket to a blogger, we never expected that people would create videos to try to win. Amazing!

Skylook is a Skype plugin for Outlook. Logs your Skype calls. This is cool! I'm out of time tonight, but I wonder if I could use this to record podcasts right from Skype?