Maryam, Patrick and I were just having breakfast at the Sunnyvale Four Points Sheraton and when we came out we saw a huge vending machine. OK, that alone might be notable, but Patrick instantly recognized that it sells iPods and other Apple stuff, along with the typical junk food and other items you might expect in a hotel lobby.

Here's a picture of Patrick in front of the vending machine. By the way, it is running on Windows. Update: some readers say it actually isn't running on Windows. I am pulling that part of the post until I can verify with the company what OS it actually is running on.

Alright, now I've seen everything! Patrick and I are off to San Francisco.

Dave, I am on the RSS team. My door at Microsoft has an RSS button on it. I wear the RSS button at work regularly on my laniard. I'm the one who said "if you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired." And, I just changed my feed links, to the right, to include RSS in them. I've been a tireless evangelist for RSS.

Inch by inch, but as "RSS team coach" you gotta help me fight the RSS battles. Attacking me isn't helping our cause. It isn't helping move the RSS football down the field. It's increasing the noise. Where there's noise, engineers and PM's stop listening.

I'm off to San Francisco. Anyone want to have dinner tonight? Call me. I'm wifeless and kidless. Looking to hang out with geeks. Will buy dinner! 425-205-1921. :-)

By the way, I'm very cool with the XML icon. I wish every page had those on it.

Oh, I want one of these new HDTV camcorders (review by New York Times). A little pricy (the camcorder I'm currently using runs about $750, while this one is about $1,800) but looks like it gives awesome picture quality. The problem is there's no way I can really deliver very much HDTV content -- we'd probably take down even Microsoft's bandwidth if we put multi-gigabyte files up.

Anyone try out the new MSN Mobile stuff that was released last week?

Small companies die for this kind of PR. InternetWeek held an essay contest and one of the winners was Brendon Connelly who won an iPod for his essay about why he loves ActiveWords. Key point of his essay? He says if he is at a computer without ActiveWords it feels like he's not wearing pants. Buzz Bruggeman, CEO, is beside himself.

Our "Blog'n My Way to the PDC" contest is pretty much over (the official entry deadline is 8/15 at 11:59 PM PT), so now we have to start judging. One that caught my eye already is Wesner Moise's entry. Funny!

Imeem 1.0 was released last week. It's a desktop app that lets you create blogs and more. I've been watching this for a while and it's pretty cool. Built on .NET, too, if I remember right.

The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business recently ran a bootcamp for 33 MBAs where they did a a fun study: they tried to see if the bootcamp's weblogs would outperform a small business's Web site on major search engines. Suprise, suprise, the bloggers kicked behind. "The bootcamp results demonstrate that with moderate but systematic effort bloggers can achieve search visibility that outperforms established local players for relevant searches."

Hill and Knowlton, a major PR firm, made a major jump into blogging recently.

Lest anyone think I'm a corporate shill for Microsoft, check this out: WonderfulWorld. It's a music video done with Google Earth. Thanks to Daniel Nugent for sending that along. He says he got it from the MAKE Blog. Those Vloggers are awesome.

Michael Swanson attended the SIGGRAPH conference last week and got an idea for the PDC from that: show off your app at the PDC.

You don't even need to be at the PDC. Got an app you want to show off to your peers? Then read Michael's blog post.

Channel 9 thread: Sick of Scoble.

Dozens of posts already and I haven't even been involved yet. Update: here's my response to the first few dozens of posts.

Matthew Hurst is tracking the rumors of Technorati's sale.

Just for the record, Dave Sifry, Technorati's founder/CEO, has not answered my email inquiries and has not said anything about this rumor (which is uncharacteristic of him -- he usually leaves a comment, even on obscure blogs, everytime Technorati is mentioned).

Susan Mernit says that the rumor is untrue but gives as little attribution as the original rumor that started this thing.

This all said, I think blog search is a very interesting area -- already I'm doing about 30% of my daily searches using blog search engines -- that's a huge shift in my search usage in just the past year or two.