I'm on the way to Gnomedex. Instead of blogging this weekend, I was thinking, why not start some conversations? So, I'll be posting from Gnomedex in the forum area on Channel 9. Just look for the "Gnomdex" threads. You can even subscribe to the forum's RSS feed.

Well, I'm outta here, off to go to Gnomedex. Have a great weekend. Want something to read? Check out the Share Your OPML News Aggregator.

Yikes, while there, I see that there was a deadly car accident at a recent computer conference (SANE). My thoughts are with those involved.

Steve Rubel, the PR blogger, linked to an article about Channel 9 today. But the site isn't pulling up for me. Hmmm, is Rubel driving so much traffic that he has the power to take down Web servers the way Slashdot once did? I think I'll start calling this the "Rubel affect." Hopefully iMedia Connection's site comes up soon. I wanna read the article.

It's interesting, because I watch such a large number of blog feeds, I get to see trends that happen over time. For instance, when I started blogging, tons of people would link to Jeffrey Zeldman. He's a design guru who's written great books on designing with Web standards and such.

But lately no one has even mentioned him in the blogs I'm reading. Why?

Here's my thesis: his RSS sucks. It isn't full text. I unsubscribed.

Another thesis? He hasn't been writing as well lately as he was in 2000.

I do want to congratulate the Zeldmans on the birth of their new daughter, though. Oh, wait, that shows that someone linked to them, which invalidates part of my argument (I found that link by searching Feedster -- I don't subscribe to the Digital-Web site either because of their lack of full-text feeds. But I'm talking in generalities here). Zeldman used to be talked about on a broad range of sites a LOT (go back to 2000 and look). Now he's not getting nearly the mentions he once did.

What do you think the cause is?

Oh, cool, Doug Kaye is gonna be at Gnomedex and he's broadcasting a whole bunch of stuff from there. His ITConversations shows are great.

There's already a Gnomedex page on Feedster too, so you can keep up to date on what's going on when the geeks go wild.

Chris Pirillo, the founder of the Gnomedex conference, says that Google has cooler swag than Microsoft has. Oh, boy, there were the OS wars. The application wars. The browser wars. Now there's gonna be the "swag wars." ;-)

Some conference news. First, lots of info about BloggerCon has been posted to Scripting News. I'll be leading a discussion on information overload. I posted my thoughts to spur some discussion yesterday.

Second, I'm off to South Lake Tahoe for Gnomedex. If you're blogging that, please leave your URL here. It's really shaping up to be an interesting conference, I hear tickets are still available.

Third, I thought long and hard about attending next week's Web 2.0 conference. I just couldn't justify being away from the office and home so much. I wish I were going, though. Lots of interesting people will be there.

I hear a new company named "Jot" will be among those that'll show off new products there.

I probably won't be blogging until late Sunday night. Have a great weekend, wherever you are!

I love stuff like Vienna University of Technology's invisible train.

Aaron Swartz has blogged his first 10 days at Stanford. I hope he keeps it up, it's interesting.

Let's see, what started at Stanford? HP? Apple (the Homebrew Computer Society met there)? Google? Excite? Cisco? Yahoo? Yup, all that and more.

Will Aaron start something like that?

I saw on Rick Klau's blog that FeedBurner has added Amazon integration to its service. I've gotta learn more about FeedBurner, these guys are getting mentioned more and more around the blogosphere lately.

Over at Business Blog Consulting they are looking for people who've been hired because of their blogs.

Blogging was influential in my hiring, but I actually met Vic Gundotra (my boss's boss) in a newsgroup where I was answering questions about the Tablet PC. After he purchased an NEC Tablet from me, then he found out about my blog.

He did say when he offered me a job that he knew more about me than he knew about some of the people who were already on his team.

By the way, he's one of probably a handful of people in the USA who has one of those new NEC Tablets that weigh less than two pounds. They aren't selling them in the US. I'm so jealous!

Anyway, I can't really say that I was hired solely because of my blog, but it sure helped build a relationship that led to my eventual hiring. Anyone else?

Cameron Reilly wonders if Microsoft might get wiped out by a volcanic eruption. I took my son to visit Mount St. Helens over the summer. Don't worry, it's more than a hundred miles from Microsoft, well out of reach. If the wind blew the right way, though, we'd get some ash here.

Over at MarketingProfs.com, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, keepers of the "Church of the Customer" blog, give us seven reasons why businesses should blog now.

I love Hugh Mcleod's cartoons on a business card: gaping void.

He does use "salty" language, though, so if you can't handle adult language, don't visit.

Glenn Reynolds author of the political blogger site Instapundit and Steven Levy of Newsweek have, uh, a "conversation."

Um, am I an ankle-biting-pajama-wearing slacker? Heh. Michael Savage, last week, called bloggers "unpaid typists."

A few of the business bloggers and venture capitalists pointed to Jeff Nolan's "Pick your VC carefully" post.

This is one reason I read 900+ RSS feeds. If I only did searches for various technologies, or relied on a smaller number, I probably would have missed this excellent information.

The Physics Illustrator for the Tablet PC was released yesterday.

Whew, just loaded about 150 things into my link blog. It's 2 a.m. and I'm just getting started on my own blog. Gotta find more time to do these things. But had a great dinner with Steve Broback tonight. He did one of the first, if not the first, Web design conferences back in the mid-90s (along with other conferences on topics like Photoshop, and Pagemaker) and is starting up a bunch of interesting things including this blog for digital photographers and this blog on the RAW format that professional digital photographers use (a new RAW format standard was announced this week and Broback's blog has been covering it).

Anyway, onto other highlights from the linkblog next...