Ed Bott: Why would anyone go to a Macintosh site for PC news?

School starts next week and in celebration of that here's a video I shot with Emily Rimas who demonstrates the Tablet PC Education Pack. I +love+ that equation editor!

Our book, Naked Conversations, went on sale on Amazon today. Our publisher is looking at our Amazon sales rank and is extrapolating that it already has sold about 1,000 copies. Wow.

Dare Obasanjo: Scott Isaacs on AJAX design patterns.

For those who don't know who Scott is, he's a Web Guru. One of the inventors of DHTML.

TDavid asks "where's the Tablet PC support?" in the Google Word for Blogger plugin.

Well, it doesn't do images either. Nor does it do tables. Nor does it do other weird things.

Brent Ashley saw my post about being starstruck by Aaron Boodman, the guy who authored Greasemonkey and that reminded him of his own Boodman story.

Chandu Thota: Virtual Earth + Flickr = geotagr.

Note to Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central. Neither Mike Torres or I were interviewed for that article in ComputerWorld you linked to today. They ONLY quoted our blogs. And they didn't get it right. Go read the original blogs we wrote. Neither Mike nor I said that.

Sigh.

To ComputerWorld: Can we get journalism please and not something that takes our blogs out of context? Please?

But back to Todd: this article is wrong. Please don't base your opinions of how we're treating RSS on it.

If you have any questions and want to do some original reporting, please let me know. My cell phone is 425-205-1921. I put it on my blog just for instances like this where you're about to make a perception change about us.

I'm very open about what we're doing. So is the entire IE and RSS teams here. I'll be with Dean Hachamovitch, head of the IE team, on Friday at the Blog Business Summit. We'll answer ANY concerns you have. But, please give us a chance.

Irony: I just got invited to Barcamp. Why the irony? You don't need an invite to go. This weekend.

I'll try to sneak in. ;-)

Hey, do you think we could get these two guys to attend Barcamp? I shot that picture of Sergey at the first foo camp. Or maybe we could get DeanH (the guy who runs the IE team) to come? He's in the middle of this picture. It was experiences like that that made foo camp something that everyone wanted to attend.

News.com punctuates what I've been seeing in meetings lately: From Web page to Web platform.

The Web services world became real. You just witnessed it.

(IN)SECURE is a free digital security magazine in PDF format. Just checked it out. Stephen Toulouse, of the Microsoft Security Response Center is in the current issue.

Steve Makofsky: How to win a sale.

"I'm going to buy a copy of TopDesk today."

Seth Godin: Clueless.

"We're all clueless. That's the best word I can use to describe the state of the art of marketing."

This is why I read Godin and why I'm not 1/50th the writer he is.

I'm linking to Elisa Camahort simply cause I think she's cool. Is that a good enough reason?

Michael Gartenberg: Is Google co-opting Microsoft?

Well, yes Google is. But, here's the deal. A platform vendor must be OK with this. A platform vendor must WANT other companies to get freaking rich and famous using our platforms.

That's why I was at Google today. Does that make Google sexier than Microsoft? Yes! But, then our Office users today have an application that they can use that they couldn't have used Office for yesterday.

I think that's called a "win-win-win." Google wins. Microsoft wins. Customers win.

As Steve Ballmer said with his funny math: 1+1=3. One company (Microsoft) works with another company (Google) and three entities win (Microsoft/Google/Customers). Value is created that didn't exist yesterday.

Hey, Google, let's do it again!

PS, Google isn't the only one who can play this game. I work with developers big and small to see if we can make you rich and famous. Who's next?

Randy Charles Morin reports there's a shortage of C# developers in Toronto.

David Aronchick is raving about GreatNews, a new RSS aggregator.

My comments are down back up and the PDC sold out. Mutter amongst yourselves.

I'm back from a delightful meeting with the Blogger team (and a few other people). I signed an NDA, so not sure what I can share or not. But, the food in the cafeteria is wonderful. They have a cool vibe.

I got a tour and they showed me the Google's Master Plan.

I think I found a good strategy to slow down Google: one weekend we should show up with 400 Xbox 360 machines and install them around Google. We all know engineers can't resist playing with new hardware. That'll slow them down a week and maybe at the end of that they'll start a killer Xbox game company.

It's a thought. ;-)

One thing that thrilled me? No, not the Odwalla. In the lobbies they have projectors that show a subset of the search queries people are doing.

And, at the end of the Master Plan they have a rotatable image of the earth. Streaming off of it are bits of light that represents a single search query. So, you can see which part of the world is doing the most Google searches.

Anyway, meeting with the Google team was fun and the Word Plugin works great!

Yes, my comments are down. Will work on getting those back on.

I'm sitting in Google's lobby of their building 42, but before I go in to see Jason Shellen, I wanted to tell you about Thomas Striegler, CEO of Neurok Optics. He was hanging out in the lobby of the Sunnyvale Sheraton showing off a new monitor. 3D baby! Have I mentioned I love Silicon Valley?

He showed me his new monitor. It has two LCD displays stacked on top of each other. One for each eye. He handed me a pair of polarized glasses.

Wow, was that awesome. Costs less than $1,000.

The Blogger news? They have a free plug-in for Microsoft Word that works with Blogger. The Blogger blog has the details.

Now you know what Craig Jaris was evasive in this video (he was the guy who said "if I told you why I was blogging I'd be fired"). He was working with Jason at Google on this.

I'm here with Greg Isaacs, director of eBay developers program, and he's showing me how developers are using eBay's API's. He wanted to show me what eBay is doing lately.

For instance, check out fatlens.com. That site sells tickets. Search for, say, Dave Matthews, and it queries eBay, among others, and brings back what tickets are available and the current price.

Are you noticing a theme yet? I think we're about to see a revolution in retailing. Someone could build an interesting new store using a combination of Google Maps or MSN Virtual Earth, Amazon, eBay, and other Web services.

You can read more on the eBay developer blog. He showed me a bunch of demos that let sellers and buyers have better experiences.

He just told me that they have some affiliates that are making $1 million per month. If I were a kid I'd be building an online retail store.

Greg showed me solutions.ebay.com which has tons of cool little things built by developers. Here's a Media Center eBay app, for instance, built by a developer in Germany.

Another fun one is MarketGizmos. RSS feeds for eBay. That's cool.

By the way, I see over on Search Engine Journal that Mark Cuban is threatening to pull Blogger blogs out of its index due to "splogs" or "spam blogs." I'll ask Jason about that as well.

Come back later today for the Blogger news -- I'll be interviewing Jason Shellen around noon and I'll see if I can get a Wifi connection to post from Google's campus. Gotta wait for the news to show up on the Blogger blog before I can release it.

On other news, everyone is all gaga over Feedster's top 500 list. But, I was thinking about it today and as a writer what matters to me? Is it inbound links or readers?

For instance, our Channel 9 site is #36 on Feedster's list. That's really cool. But look over on Bloglines. I have 7,900 subscribers there and Channel 9 only has 700 or so. As a writer it's far more interesting to know that people find me interesting enough to hit the "subscribe" button. Why? Well, let's say I say something bombastic right now. That'll get lots of people to link to me, and might get a temporary traffic hit, but will that bring long-term readers? I don't believe so.

I'm far more honored by having people say "you're interesting enough to read day after day."

Anyway, Bloglines' top 100 list is here.

It's the week of geek dinners.

Tomorrow I'm spending with Maryam. Wednesday we'll be at Niall Kennedy's Blog Business Summit geek dinner in San Francisco.

I'm rearranging my flights so I can stay for Dave Winer's OPML roadtrip on Saturday night in Berkeley. More on that later in the week.

Les Posen sent this one along: Classroom presenter for the Tablet PC. I just watched the video and this looks awesome. Developed jointly at University of Washington and Microsoft Research.

Michael Anderberg: The coolest Guinness World Record Ever - set by Microsoft.

Ahh, so that's what you do with a Unisys ES7000 32 CPU/32 GB RAM server and 5,500 people in Sweden!

Now THAT sounds more fun than Foocamp!

Ian Dixon tells me he just started selling his RSS News Aggregator for Windows Media Center. Neat looking!

This might not look important, but it is. More and more homes are getting big screens (they are selling like hotcakes at stores). Once you get a big screen you are more likely to hook an entertainment device to it. That's what Media Center is and once you get that you'll want to display more stuff than just TV on it.

Jason Shellen breaks the news: Blogger is getting Scobleized in the morning. You'll hear why after about 7 a.m. Pacific Time today.

Oh, and Jason, I didn't get an invite to O'Reilly's Foocamp either. Maybe Microsoft and Google should start our own campout? I wonder if Bill would let us camp out on our soccer fields? That would be a trip!

Does it matter anymore? Yes and no. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to be there. On the other hand, I got my shot at Foocamp and now it's time for someone else to have their shot. Not to mention that every night in my life is amazing just the same way Foocamp was fun. Tonight is an example. A bunch of awesome geeks came to the dinner tonight. Including employees from Yahoo, Google, Imeem, Memeorandum, Collutions, ePlatform, NetFluent, and a few others I've forgotten.

And a few women showed up! Including Jasmine Strong of Google. Gabe Rivera has some photos on his Flickr site. Here's my own four photos (if you were involved, can you leave a note and identify yourself in the photos). Her personality matches her name. She says she called me a blowhard on one of her blogs (I couldn't find it in a quick search). One of the most interesting conversations I've ever had. On a street corner on Castro in Mountain View. I'll never forget it.

Laura Lemay was there. I thought her name sounded familiar when she left a comment the other day in my comment area, but when she first joined our group tonight someone else said "I learned HTML from your book." Ahhh, THAT Laura!

At one point Gabe Rivera looked up and said "that's Netscape's first office." You have to had seen the unique juxtaposition there. Gabe is one of Silicon Valley's next stage of entrepreneurs. He runs the site Memeorandum (and is the guy who is working on the service I've been hinting about for weeks -- he showed it off to everyone tonight, but still isn't ready for it to go public).

Do you remember when Google used to run on a single stack of machines? I do. Well, remember tonight. Gabe said his service's spider is still running in his bedroom. Isn't it weird to visit a service and know that the bits came from a machine running in some guy's bedroom? I can imagine the pickup lines. "Wanna come up and check out my server rack?" ;-)

I have no idea if Gabe is gonna be the next guy to make gobs of money in Silicon Valley. But, I feel the same way about his stuff as when I first had my hands on an Apple II. Or the way I felt when I first used ICQ. Or the way I felt when I saw my first Google search result flash on the screen. Or later Technorati. Or when Bill Gates showed me and a few hundred other people the Tablet PC.

Gabe has changed my world. Improved it. In my mind anything else that happens to Gabe is just icing on the cake. He continues the long line of Silicon Valley geeks who just wanted to change the world. You know some of those geeks' names. Many you don't. But I am so blessed to be able to share a meal with folks like Laura and Gabe.

And, heck, let's run through the stack of business cards. Scott Knaster, Technical Writer at Google; Matthew Trunnell, principal at Cognix; Jasmine Strong, engineer at Google; Ramana Kovi, CEO of ePlatform; Richard Bell, Enterprise Network Architect at NetFluent; Jan Jannick, founder/CTO & president of imeem; Jim Duncan, President of Collutions.

I'm so bad with names, though. There were a couple of people there that I didn't get on this list.

Jason Calacanis challenged the industry to come up with a better "Top 500" list of blogs. Feedster responded tonight with the Feedster 500.

Kevin Burton responds. "I still fail to see why this is that interesting. Top 500 lists are nice but this is the short head not the long tail. Blogs are cool specifically because of the long tail."

Jason says it is amazing.

Scott Rafer, Feedster's CEO, talks about it.

I think I know why Jason finds it amazing. Engadget is at the top of the list.

Me? I'm #74. Very honored. But, personally, it's not a big deal. What was a big deal in my life today? The dinner we had. Let me collect my thoughts and talk about that shortly.

Weather in Hell tonight? Coooooooooolllllllddddddd. Asa Dotzler of the Firefox team defends Microsoft.

Oh, oh, food fight ahead.