John McDowell, the evangelist at Macromedia, points to Amit Asaravala of Wired, who is writing about using phonecams to capture barcodes and retrieve info in return.

Slashdot got to this one before I did, but it's powerful writing. Ever wonder what it's like to have your computers seized by the FBI? This weblog tells all.

Bink points to a program manager at Microsoft who is trying to better understand customer concerns with Windows XP Service Pack 2's firewall through the use of a survey.

Clarke Scott says that BlogJet is a cool little Windows blogging app. I love their tag line "it comes with Windows 2020." Heh.

I totally don't get the Bloggies (here's a link at Feedster's blog). Stupid awards. But, Feedster is certainly deserving of some sort of award.

Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, gives a good idea of what to do when you experience "bloggers block."

Heh, I never knew there are two David Chappells.

Jim Martin is looking for MSN's technical support. Anyone know how to help Jim?

@stake, Inc compared .NET Framework 1.1 to IBM WebSphere 5.0.

Here's two DevDays Flairs to add to your weblog, if you're going to DevDays:

Yahoo News: Report finds "staggering" WiFi growth.

Wanna make sure your .NET code is kosher? That's what FxCop is for. Here's a look at the next version, courtesy of Michael Fanning.

Interesting evening in American politics. You know where to go for the story, if you care.

Watching the political blogs is pretty interesting, though. Lots of theories as to why Dean fell, and why Edwards did so well. A hint in the polling: TV.

That takes me back to my college years when I covered Bill Clinton on campus. After the event, I was sitting in San Jose State's bar, talking with Clinton's team. The news came on. The bartender asked "you want me to turn up the sound?" The team says "nah, it only matters how he looks on TV -- what he says isn't that important."

Very cynical, I know, but in a poll result I heard on the radio on the way home tonight they said that 75% liked Kerry's and Edwards' TV ads, but only 45% liked Dean's.

It still comes down to TV.

Speaking of which, John Edwards is on CSPAN right now. He looks good on TV. Much better than Dean.

Along these lines, by tomorrow, I'm sure there'll be more than one person that will gnash their teeth and write "weblogs failed Dean."

Well, the weblog hype did get overboard the past few weeks. Weblogs do matter. Why? The influentials read weblogs. The press. The insiders. The passionate ones.

But, the average Joe doesn't read these. Come on, be real. Instapundit gets, what, 100,000 to 200,000 visitors a day? I get 2,000. That's a small little dinky number in a country of 290 million.

Weblogs and online technologies have helped Dean and others collect a lot of money, but you still gotta have a TV persona that hits home. Just reality in 2004. I'm not bitter about that.

The lessons for big-company evangelism (or small company, for that matter) are the same. If your product isn't something that average people like, it doesn't matter how good the weblogs are.

OK, enough politics for a while.

Now back to geek stuff.