What a five year run we've had. But now I read Slashdot and discover "geek blogging is on decline."

Oh, cool, well, then you won't mind if I turn back on my TV, drink some more merlot, and kiss Maryam some more, right? Heheh.

Oh, oh, but that means that we'll have more blogs like the Britney Spears News Blog. Oh, boy. Just what the world needs.

Oh, wait a second, I've moved a few spots up the Technorati top 100 in the past couple of weeks. Does that mean I've turned more like a Britney blog or does it invalidate the thesis that geek blogs are on the decline?

Dave, my son and I, are gonna go on a car cruise around California next weekend. Hmmm, what should we do? So many choices. It's fun just doing something spontaneous. A few months back Patrick and I rented a Cadillac with a satellite radio and went up to Mt. Lassen National Park. That was a lot of fun. My favorite places in California are Monterrey and the Gold Country and Yosemite. Any ideas?

Kevin Burton and others notice that CNET doesn't link to bloggers. Oh, I've seen this behavior before. It comes from the old-school "make a site sticky" attitude. There are lots of people in this industry that believe that the way you get the biggest audience is to build a roach motel. You know, get your viewers in but don't let them leave your properties.

Problem is that doesn't really hold up. The sites that get the most traffic send their users elsewhere. Now, go, get out of here. Enjoy the weekend. Shoo. Visit some Sun blogs. Some Oracle blogs. An Intuit blog. Some IBM ones. Or some Adobe ones. Or a Google one. No roach motel here. Heheh. Maryam won't allow that!

Speaking of Maryam, you know she moderates lots of MSDN Webcasts, right? Here's the MSDN Webcast blog so you can keep up on the latest. What's fun? I'm doing a webcast on September 26. I hear my wife will be moderating. So you'll get to meet both of us, along with Jeff Julian and John Alexander who are real geeks (they write code). But, really, I've been listening over my wife's shoulder while she does her webcasts. There's a lot of interesting stuff and it's all free to listen to.

More fun events over on the MSDN Events page. This fall is gonna be busy. We're launching a few things that you might have heard of (coming in November is the launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005).

Don't know why that's important? Well, grab a glass of wine and read the Wine.com whitepaper where you can see how they are already using those to better run their business.

Anyway, have a great weekend. Don't get stuck on a "sticky" site, OK?

TechCrunch writes about Flock. I saw Flock at Barcamp last weekend too and it looked interesting. I'm still not sure what will make it a commercial success rather than something that gets geeks excited.

Are you bored? Watch Alek Komarnitsky's "concrete cam." He's in black shorts and white shirt today. He reads my blog. This is a weird world we have here.

Smarttags come back in Yahoo's IM as LiveWords.

Why is linking words so interesting for companies? Because it means more views on advertisements. It's money, what else?

Om Malik (he writes for Business 2.0, among others): Tough Times ahead for Steve Jobs. Links to a New York Times article that says the music industry is increasingly concerned by Apple.

Personally, I am listening to music chosen for me by Comcast right now and a combination subscription/buy model sounds most interesting to me. Most music I listen to isn't worth owning. But the RIAA doesn't seem particularly concerned about music listeners.

When Chris Pirillo can't get his wireless to work this is what he looks like.

Eric Mack is giving Toshiba a hard time for its customer service after his Toshiba M4 Tablet PC crashed and JK gets on Microsoft to fix the problem. I agree. I hate not having recovery disks available. I've sent these to the guy who is in charge of OEM relations with the Tablet PC team.

More on this on Warner Crocker's blog.

Chandu, what you up to putting events on my blog map? Hmmm? That's cool!

Scott Isaacs (one of the guys who invented DHTML) is keeping us all guessing over on his blog. Looks like those start.com folks are up to something developer oriented.