Mark Pilgrim has some fun with the Echo chamber meme that's going around.

Note to Dave Winer: if you move BloggerCon to April 17 I'll go.

Cool idea, DevDays is holding a blogging contest. Just to help, I'm not eligible. :-)

Oh, by the way, just to prove to designers that I think design +is+ important I increased my leading (er, space between lines) and my paragraph spacing. One of those designers I love told me that would make my blog more readable. I listened to him. Why? Cause he understood what I wanted. I want to make this blog a great reading experience. Thanks for the help!

See, some designers just decided to say "he's an idiot." But others decided "hey, we can help this idiot." :-)

I wonder how the first group gets any clients.

Ahh, I LOVE designers! Look at Adrian Rinehart-Balfe, who in my comments says, "I think that your blog ranks so highly in the listings because throughout the centuries, people have always found it hard to resist staring at the village idiot!"

Oh, and if that weren't enough, read the comments over on Whitespace.

Here's the highlights. Er, lowlights.

Joel: "[Scoble's] the typical web jackass sounding off."

Brian: "His particular audience may not care about design but I think he is underestimating the entire web population." My response: I never said no one cares about design, just that most of these designs get in the way of the words, which detracts from their usefulness. Obviously design is important. Did I need to say that? I assume my readers noticed that we're not looking at the web in Notepad.

Chris Vincent: "I think maybe the Technorati rating has gone to the guy's head."

JC: "I do have to laugh about "we'll just read it in an RSS aggregator" ...how many 'average' people do you know who would have the faintest clue what that means?" My response: all presidential candidates have RSS feeds. Imagine that!

Scrivis: "I do have to thank Scoble for giving me something to write about since I always seem to run out of things to say here ;)" My response: you're welcome! :-)

rseal: "I wonder why he hasn’t distributed his blog on a zip file. That would be pretty fast opening and would be usable." Hey, don't give me any ideas!

I just got back from church.

"Whoa, Scoble, I didn't know you believed!"

"I do believe. In the power of the customer."

Yeah, just got back from seeing Jackie Huba teach an audience about the power of customers and the team I'm on had a nice lunch with Ben McConnell (the two of them write the "Church of the Customer" weblog -- Jackie will speak to a thousands or so Microsoft employees tomorrow as part of an event that's happening here). If you read here regularly, you know what she said. That word-of-mouth is far more powerful than advertising.

One guy in the audience said he just bought $30,000 worth of camera equipment because Walt Mossberg told him to.

Some stories we heard? That customers of Southwest Airlines were so freaked out after 9/11 that they sent cash into the airlines to help save jobs of the people that worked there. That the opening of a new Krispy Kreme outlet usually has hundreds of people camped out overnight. That new Apple store openings have thousands of people in line.

How do you get that kind of loyalty? She says build "remarkable" products and services. In other words, products and services that people will tell their friends about.

Absolutely. It's why I point at any weblogger who takes the time to tell Microsoft how to improve a product or service.

By the way, Jackie put my weblog up on screen at one point as an example of corporate employees who are weblogging and doing interesting work. That was an honor. But is a bit freaky. Anyway, I'm glad I can attend Ben and Jackie's church today.

UPDATE: The Church of the Customer Weblog says I should be named "Microsoft's Chief Blogging Officer, or CBO." Oh, geez, now I'll get a whole new round of ribbing when I go to the kitchen to get another Diet Pepsi.

More geek event alerts:

Tuesday night (tomorrow) in Silicon Valley, the Software Forum will be hosting a session on RSS. Kevin Burton, developer of NewsMonster.org, Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome, and Thomas Gieselmann, a VC type from BV Capital, will be there. 6:30 p.m. on Microsoft's campus in Mountain View, CA.

A Silicon Valley Geek Dinner will be held on Thursday, at 6 p.m. in Mountain View's Castro District. Andy Ruff, program manager on Entourage (Microsoft's version of Outlook for the Macintosh) and Steven Garrity, head of Mozilla Visual Identity Team will be hosting a variety of other fun and geeky guests. You need to RSVP with Andy to get the location. andyleeruff@hotmail.com.

Makes me want to move back to Silicon Valley!

Scott Hanselman is on .NET Rocks talking about everything from ASP.NET to Perf testing. Scott's a Microsoft regional director (translation: someone who knows his stuff) and a darn nice guy to boot.

Oh, NewsGator found me a feed for Mezzoblue, I just didn't see a "syndicate this" icon on Dave's weblog.

Another pissed off designer. Dave Shea, who wrote today on the cool Mezzoblue: "Throwing arguments in favour of design at one with an engineer mindset is as effective as stapling Jello to the wall; it just won’t stick."

At least Mezzoblue's really tiny font (does any designer look at their fonts on IE/Win on 1600x1200 screens?) is overrideable. That's better than most of the "art sites."

"Debate can be healthy, but sometimes it’s just a waste of time. If you get paid for your decisions, you’re better off standing confidently behind them instead of reversing them at a hint of opposition."

Hmmm, isn't that the "Steve Jobs school of design" sneaking out there? (He was the guy who refused to put a floppy drive in his NeXT computer).

But, the banter is interesting. I'm learning about design. Hopefully a few designers are learning about readability.

Speaking of which: a weblog is something you want me to visit every day (or even more -- I used to visit Dave Winer's site every few hours before I got into reading via RSS). In such a case the "art value" of a site goes way down and the "information value" of a site goes way up.

By the way, Dave, where's your RSS feed? I want to read you on a regular basis and I don't want to use a Web browser to do it.

ZDNet: What's up with blogging, and why should you care?