And with that, I'm outta here. If you wanna meet up at the Apple store opening in Oakridge Mall (south San Jose) I'll be there at 10 a.m. tomorrow with my son Patrick. My cell phone is 408-314-8233 if you wanna get together. I'll be off the blog until Sunday night.

As always, if something big happens on the blogosphere, it'll probably be on the top-100 RSS Aggregator eventually.

Carl Franklin co-authored the first Web site about Visual Basic. And, now, he's started a Web site and company about podcasting. They'll be providing services and other things for podcasters. He knows a bit about it. He also was the founder of .NET Rocks, an audio show about .NET.

Oh, boy, did my question the other day get a lot of commentary going around the Web. Every Microsoft employee should read the comment thread and watch my link blog for more.

But, one in particular, Matthew Mullenweg, depressed me. Looks like a recent Windows update rebooted his machine and he lost some work that he hadn't saved. I hate it when updates do that. I understand why, though. When our customers are in severe danger of getting hit by criminals, you really need to make sure you get your machine patched. It's part of the 14-layers of security that I recommend.

Funny enough, though, I learned in college, back when I worked on Macintoshes, never to leave any work unsaved. Too many things go wrong on computers. Power dies. Reboots happen. Machines crash. People come on and close apps without thinking about your work. I've had all of these, and others, happen. It's part of the reason that I do more and more of my work in apps that automatically save. For instance, Outlook. Or OneNote.

I'm sorry, Matt, though, for messing up your work.

By the way, even Word automatically saves now. Were you using Word 2003? I bet there's a file somewhere that saved your work. If not, what were you using?

I got the reboot dialog last night myself. It gave me a choice of whether or not I would like to have my machine rebooted (it gave me five minutes to make up my mind).

By the way, if you ever have a problem with a Microsoft update, there's a toll-free support line -- the number is listed on this Web site.

Kim Polese, CEO of Spikesource, just spent some time with me on the phone. We had a nice chat about what she discussed at the Web 2.0 conference. She wanted to let me know more about what she actually said on stage -- she says that I got the wrong idea about her talk. She didn't say that Microsoft wasn't getting the new world, she quoted other people who said that. She also quoted Bill Gates about what he's said about open source.

So what did she talk about at Web 2.0?

The renaissance of IT. Specifically that she sees two trends are happening. Software business and way software is getting built is going through enormous change. The architecture of software is undergoing enormous change. When that happens a renaissance is underway.

To come down a notch from that, what is happening in the software business as she sees it is that the open source world has flooded the world with components. That she's seeing rapid innovation in software process automation to assembly.

That the traditional way of doing business -- top down control and vertically integrated set of products -- is being disrupted by open source and community-involved software projects.

She says that wikis, podcasting, are powerful examples of what happens when developers get together with users and that the speed with which innovation is happening and the speed of which users are trying these tools and adopting them is changing the industry under our feet.

"Microsoft is a smart company and has identified major trends in the industry before and has adopted," she says. "I wouldn't count any company out." She praised Microsoft's blogging efforts, which she sees as signs that Microsoft is already reacting to these undergoing drivers in the software business to get closer to customers and more agile, (more than 1000 employees are now blogging) and, she says, it'll be interesting to watch Microsoft further respond to the changes she sees undergoing in the industry.

But, make no mistakes about it, she's making bets on open source. Recently she joined Spikesource, which is doing preconfigured open source stacks. Along with services. These services and stacks handle updates. Upgrades and ongoing maintainance. Their intellectual property is in the ongoing assembly, integration, and validation of those stacks. They are running 10s of thousands of tests nightly."

An example is their LAMJ stack. Doing testing of over 50 components. Scaling that automated process is where we can provide something of value.

It was not possible until there was friction free collaboration (blogs, RSS, Wikis, IRC chat), and a large number of open source components.

Interesting chat. Kim's been an industry leader for a while and generally is ahead of the curve (I remember reading her ideas in Wired magazine about "push" long before RSS came onto the scene and she was the original product manager for Sun's Java). I'm honored to talk with her.

It will indeed be interesting to watch these trends play out. Thanks Kim for spending a few minutes chatting with me! I hope I properly captured her ideas, it's hard to type furiously while trying to listen and understand what she's saying -- my little 486 brain had a bit of a hard time keeping up with her 64-bit watercooled processor.

Wired News: RSS feeds hunger for more ads. "No online medium is safe from advertising anymore."

Hey, Dave Winer, do I get to do a "bing?" BlogMatrix just introduced Jäger 1.6 for Windows. Key features? Podcast reception. Bloglines synchronization. Universal searching.

I'm going to my first Nerd Dinner, next Tuesday (the 19th) in Portland. I'm also meeting up with Ed Brill, the blogger from IBM, who is going to give me a demo of Lotus Notes.

Everyone is invited and I hear you don't even need to be a nerd.

Danny Sullivan shows why he's the authority in the search engine space. He links to everyone else who writes about Google's Desktop Search Engine.

Oh, I'm seeing some speculation on blogs that Google released it sooner than they wanted to. I wonder if that's true? If so, what event could have forced them to release now? MSN Search Champs, maybe (we met last week)? After all, what did we show them under NDA? You can take a guess (I'm still under NDA too, so can't spell it out here). Heh.

One question is why they didn't release this last week at the Web 2.0 conference? That would have made a lot of sense.

Either way, this is going to be a hot space. Don't forget about the desktop search engines that aren't owned by big companies yet too (Copernic and X1). Hey, Zawodny, is Yahoo working on desktop search too? I hear that AOL is. Man, this space is gonna be crowded really fast. Lots of choices, gonna be fun for users!

Dave Winer just linked to new RSS feeds on MSNBC. Cool. I bet they aren't full text, but I'm getting used to the fact that commercial sites won't be full text. I visit MSNBC anyway as part of my news rounds. I really wish I could get rid of the browser in my life. It makes me less productive.

Speaking of which, Dean Hachamovitch the other day showed me prototypes of the next Internet Explorer. I got to see them before he even showed them to other executives. He told me I could say about that much (I wanted to post screen captures on my blog, but he turned down that request, bummer). I'll add in that if they ship about half of what they showed me that I'll uninstall Firefox. Of course, I'm guessing that it'll probably be a year before any of us will get any bits to look at and I'm sure that Asa, Ben and the other devs over on the Firefox team won't twiddle their fingers. It sure will be an interesting competition.

Browser wars aren't what they used to be, though, cause the less I have to use the browser, the better (although Dean and team have some cool ideas to make my browser life more productive). Already only 15% of my Internet life is in the browser (I have 950 RSS feeds, most of which are full-text feeds). That's a HUGE shift in my usage patterns in just the past year or two (I only really got into RSS about two years ago).

If Dean were here, though, he'd remind me that when I look at feeds in NewsGator I'm still using IE's rendering engine. So, his team has two challenges: how do they improve the browser to make it more productive, and how do they make the rendering engine, er, platform, better to make new kinds of news aggregators possible. That's a tough job and I'll be watching the IE Blog closely to see what changes they make.

Oh, while we're talking about new Microsoft sites, if you're interested in the new MSN TV 2 (most geeks won't be, but it's a nice device to buy the non-geeks in your life) Tommy Suriwong has started MyTVLife.com, a blog about MSN TV 2.