Adam Curry: you should start a site for listing podcast-recording-friendly hardware. For instance, I just found out that these players also come with built-in microphones for recording: Rio Carbon, Samsung 820 (coming in Dec) and Samsung 920 here today at Best buy and Creative Zen Micro -- these are 5GB players for the most part with the exception of the Samsung 920.

NPR: Net connects cross-Atlantic Hip-Hop duo.

Take two hip-hop artists on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean, add a dash of online communication, and you get the musical duo Foreign Exchange. NPR's Renee Montagne talks to Emcee Phonte Coleman of North Carolina and producer Nicolay Rook of the Netherlands about their collaboration and Connected, the album it sparked.

This is cool.

Finding Mini-SD memory for the new Audiovox cell phones is impossible near Microsoft's campus. Do you see the trend yet? At tonight's party I met two other people that just bought Audiovox cell phones. When trends happen, they happen fast.

So, today, I bought a 512MB MiniSD card from the Flash Memory Store for $109.

I remember when Steve Wozniak bought those Macs for our journalism department back in 1989 that one meg of RAM was $450. Now I'm gonna have 512 of them on a card the size of a thumbnail for 1/4 the price.

I wonder what it'll be like in 15 years? Will I have 500 times the RAM for 1/4 the price? That means that in 2019 you'll have 256,000 megs of RAM for about $25. If the trend continues. Freaky!

A few Microsoft researchers were having a discussion about email vs. blogs and they thought they'd move the whole email thread out to their public blog. Cool!

Danny Naidoo went bungee jumping with Eric Rudder, senior Vice President for Server and Tools and wrote about that experience on his blog.

Now THAT is a new way to "hang out with an executive."

Did you know that they are blogging at the end of the earth? Well, that's what the Perthbloggers' tagline says. They have a blognite coming up next Wednesday evening. I wish I were there. I love a good geek dinner.

Another serious blogger I met the other night while at the geek dinner in Portland was Ed Brill of IBM. Actually, I'm not serious about him being serious. We had a great time together, and at one point someone snapped a picture of us with Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems. Nice guy and I won't take any more cheap shots at Lotus. I promise. :-)

Great dinner and I agree that Portland is a fun city to visit.

My carmate, by the way, was Nathan Grigg of Monolith Productions. He creates the music for its games. Fascinating guy, and I really enjoyed learning about his creative process and how he creates the music (he uses Windows machines, by the way). He showed me how he can take four bars of music and turn that into an entire song. The digital tools let him manipulate sound in whole new ways. And record it too. Many of the sounds he uses are things he sampled off of real world instruments or other everyday sounds.

While we're talking about Portland stuff, most of the people were there to see Chris Sells and his XML Developer's conference. I've been watching the blog reports coming through from the conference and it's getting great reviews. Congrats to Chris. Between now and Sunday I'll catch up on my linkblogging and get the best stuff over there.

Rich Tong, on his blog, says that he actually said last night "blogging is the only way to market."

Rich, as big as I am into blog hype, that seems a little crazy to go that far. Blogs still have a small audience when compared to the bigger world.

But, we'll dig into what they are thinking on Saturday. Rich talks about some of the other people who were at their party. Thanks guys!