For those of you not following Longhorn closely, you might have heard a lot about WinFS (the new file storage system in Longhorn). Here's some info on what it is:

Brent Rector's book chapter on WinFS

MSDN TV, J. Patrick Thompson, WinFS schema managers, discusses WinFS's schemas and extensibility.

More info on Longhorn is up on the MSDN Longhorn DevCenter.

Update: I fixed a mistake, the name in this post is now the correct one. Sorry about that.

Feedster is keeping a separate list of "top 100 feeds." Weird, I'm #4 on that one too. I'm very honored that so many people subscribe to me.

Since there's a lot of Web designers visiting me right now thanks to the Web Standard org linking to me, you all should check out this new event: i3forum. It's done by Steve Broback and friends. You might know Steve, he was the guy who started Thunderlizard (they were famous for Pagemaker, Photoshop, and Web design events). He knows EVERYONE in the Web design and imaging space. The folks who went to the first one last year raved about it. Is this the West Coast's version of SXSW? What do you think? I'm gonna try to get there this year. Oh, Zeldman is gonna speak there. That alone shows the quality of the event.

Seattle geek dinner alert: I'll be at next Wednesday's meetup. More details over on Anita's weblog.

Jim Blizzard is looking for something to do that evening. Hey, Jim, I'll drive you over to Seattle. The Meetup crowd is fun. Lots of geeks and a few non-geeks to keep us all honest.

I forgot, here's Dave's announcement of being on campus.

Dave Winer will be on Microsoft's campus on February 9. I'll post more info soon. But, we're both setup to speak to the .NET Developer's Association on the evening of February 9. This user group is open to the public, and offers free pizza. We'll be there from 6:15 p.m. to approximately 9, and I know that many of the members there go out for beer afterward.

Hope to see you there!

Andy King reviews shipping sites (FedEx, et al) for how fast they are.

Thanks to Lawrence at UserLand for helping me with my blog. The calendar should be working again now. So, what's next? You might have noticed that my blogroll now points at the new feeds site. I keep that up to date cause it's a list of all the feeds I actually read every day.

I want to start a list of "top 10" places I like. Things like "top 10 Microsoft employee blogs." Or "my favorite 10 blogs overall." Would that be useful? Of course for these lists I'll use the new XHTML Friends Network.

You might notice my blog is loading even faster now. I optimized my CSS file and templates a little more. I still have to dig into the calendar code and turn that from a table-based layout into a CSS-based one. If you're a Radio UserLand user and want a highly-optimized template and CSS file to start with, download it here.

Paul Thurrott has a review of Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Larry Larsen has been "painting" with his Tablet PC. I wish I were talented like that. I'll try to get him to talk about the software and technique he uses.

My traffic has doubled here lately. Yesterday had 5400 people show up. Welcome to all my new readers. You can see my referer page over to the right, so you can see who's pointing the most traffic to me.

Robert McLaws also is raving about Tasklines, an add-on for Outlook 2003. I'll have to check this out. My task lists are getting longer lately.

Robert McLaws asks for help on how to fund a popular community site (Longhorn blogs). This is a common problem. It'll probably become a problem at some point for my blog. A year ago I only had a few hundred visitors a day. Yesterday I had 5400. In another year?

And Longhorn blogs had a lot more visits than I've been getting. Whew.

I'd rather the community figure this out, by the way, rather than Microsoft fund it. Why? Because that'll give the community a stronger voice and more independence (let's be honest, when you get money from any company, there are usually strings attached, and even if they aren't evil strings, there will be the perception that there are strings there). As of today Microsoft hasn't given a dollar to Longhorn blogs.

This isn't just a Microsoft issue, either. All companies have this issue if they have communities of users on the Web. So, this makes for an interesting discussion topic for all of us.

Mary Jo Foley: it's not all about Linux.

"Windows is cool again, thanks to all the excitement around Longhorn."

She also points to the new Services for Unix that was released this week.

Folks with the PDC build of Longhorn might wanna check out Robert Wlodarczyk playing around with images in Avalon. He gives away the source and binaries so you can learn from his efforts.

eWeek reports people are still using Windows 98. What's really scary is this quote: ""There have been tons of updates for IE [Internet Explorer], Outlook and Windows Media Player, which are common components on Win 98, but very few that affect the operating system," the administrator said. "In fact, the most common recent vulnerabilities have not affected Win 98, and the recent evidence would indicate that Win 98 systems are vastly more secure than XP machines. I use 98SE. I still build machines for customers based on 98SE."

That is absolutely false and anyone who thinks this is really dangerous. Yikes.