Dave Winer: "Someday someone is going to rise to challenge Microsoft. But bet on the challenge not coming from Silicon Valley."

Dave, don't be so sure. Linus Torvalds lives in the valley now and many of the folks here at Microsoft believe that Linux (and the free software movement) represents our biggest competitor.

John Porcaro: "effective communications "tools" will always be used to further free enterprise, as long as they work."

And: "My team will be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on market research this year, and finding a company or an individual analyst that I trusted would help me in finding partners to work with (the marketing angle)."

Interesting points!

Oh, Simon, blogging in a frameset is a HUGE no no. I hate frames.

On the other hand, I cringe everytime I hear someone say that I'm part of some sort of "inner circle," though. I only have a small fraction of the traffic that Orlowski has at the Register, or Dave has at Scripting.com, or Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com has.

Weblogging is a lot bigger than just the folks I track here. But, I'm honored that Simon thinks of me as some sort of inner circle. I think that and about $3 will get me a latte at Starbucks.

Simon Phipps asks: "How does one break into the 'inner circle' of weblogs?"

Well, asking the question just got Simon 18 readers. For whatever that's worth.

Ted Leung did a nice writeup of last night's weblogger dinner in Seattle.

Jupiter Analyst/weblogger Robert Leathern says I was flaming his collegue. Just so I can be seen as an equal opportunity flamer, here's a flame for Robert: where the hell are the permalinks on the Jupiter weblogs?