Speaking of Channel 9, did you know that my new Tablet PC has three microphones? I didn't either, but asked Bert Keely, the visionary behind the Tablet, why there are three microphones and what they could be used for.

Does anyone have any software that makes use of the array microphones?

Oh, geez, I just about wet my pants in laughter when I saw Scott Johnson's new "Nine Guy" site. I never knew that the Nine Guy subscribed to Linux Magazine.

Can someone warn me when sites like this get posted? I almost spit Diet Coke all over my new Tablet PC.

Oh, oh, Chris Pirillo is getting his lawyers up in arms due to this new site.

Congrats to Google on doubling the number of pages in its index. I read that on the Google Blog.

So, of course I did an ego check on Google (that's where you search for your name to see if you're mentioned in Google). 428,000 mentions of Scoble on Google.

I'm still the #1 Microsoft Geek. The #3 Robert. The fifth-most authoritative link for offshoring. At least according to Google.

OK, enough of this egotistical stuff. Glad to see my ego has doubled thanks to Google's pat-on-the-back power. Now back to reading feeds.

For the past three days I've been sitting in the cafeteria of building #1 at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus. Hey, they'll let me in anywhere. This morning I bought Halo 2. No lines here. In Redmond, yesterday, they had a long line to pick up a copy of Halo 2.

I've been meeting with some interesting people from various teams here. Hotmail. Virtual PC. Entourage. Entourage? Isn't that for the Mac?

Oh, yes. People here have been saying I've been too anti-Apple lately. So, I went and hung out with the guys who make great Macintosh software. Yeah, I used a Mac today. I love the Mac. The Mac makes me feel good. OK, is that enough praise for the Mac? We'll get back to evangelizing the Tablet PC tomorrow. ;-)

Steve Friesen is a program manager on the Virtual PC for the Macintosh team. As he proudly showed off Virtual PC he said something like "yes, we want you to run Windows, we just want you to run it on a Macintosh!"

He reminded me that I could even run Longhorn on Virtual PC.

But, the really cool stuff was meeting the Hotmail team. They wouldn't tell me the exact amount of storage they had, but they said it's more than a petabyte. That's a lot of hard drives.

"So, Scoble, why can't they increase the amount of email space each user has?" They are working on doing just that. They told me about Hotmail's data center. They told me what they are doing to expand that data center. Let's just say that it isn't as easy as buying an Xbox and plugging it into your TV.

Hotmail users are being converted over to a higher capacity system at a very rapid pace -- I don't want to give specifics because I want to make sure that what I say in public is accurate first. How many users? Well, Hotmail is used by hundreds of millions of people. Think about that one for a second. That's a LOT of email. Something like a billion messages every day (and that's after separating out all the spam).

It's an interesting time to be in the email business. It'll be interesting to watch the Hotmail team over the next year.

The MSMobiles guy takes a bunch of swings at me and the "bloggosphere.". Heh. I wanted to correct one thing. I paid my own way to go to BloggerCon. Microsoft hasn't paid a dime.

Some people, both inside and outside of Microsoft, wrote me and said "you do realize that Mirra uses Linux, right?"

No one said I couldn't write about companies that use Linux, but it was implied in how they asked the question. I say hogwash. Go back to my corporate weblogger manifesto. If a competitor is doing something interesting, you might as well talk about it. My readers are smart. Smarter than I am, certainly. They all know how to use Google and Yahoo and MSN. Some even know how to use all three together.

Here's a clue: not everyone in the world uses Windows for everything. I'm going to write about them here. Business is about relationships and relationships start by talking to each other and figuring out where you can find some common ground.

Speaking of which, I must admit there ARE some areas where I don't dare talk due to fear. Fear of getting inundated with protests by a small group of passionate people who'll stand up for their causes without listening to my side of the story.

This is similar to politics where radio talk shows rarely talk about, say, abortion, because no one listens to each other on that topic so no reason to discuss it in public. And, even when they do discuss it, no one really learns anything because the positions on both ends of the scale are so calcified.

Does that fear help people figure out the truth? No. I'll try to get over my fears in these areas but right now I'm not willing to deal with the calcified views on some topics. So much so that I'm not even willing to admit in public which views these are.

In a recent podcast that Dave Winer and I did, we discussed these kinds of fears. He admitted that he was very likely to attack Microsoft, but not Apple, because of these kinds of fears. Does that really help people figure anything out about the marketplace? No.

Any way we can figure out how to talk about technology in a more rational way with each other?

Why bring this up? I'm getting a lot of pressure to do a podcast, er audio talk show, about technology. I want to find a way to discuss things across company and religious (technology wise) boundaries in a calm measured way so that people can learn more and think of partnering with the other side when appropriate.

It starts with what I'm discussing here. Must we always look at the industry as "us vs them?"

Dave is pointing to a John Markoff article that tells that MSN's new desktop search is coming out soon.

I can't comment either. Talk more soon!

By the way, I own Microsoft stock. I'm not selling either. But that has more to do with Halo 2 than anything else in the market. $100 million in video games sold in one day. Whew. And the naysayers say that Xbox is a failed business model.

If that's what failure looks like, I want more failures at Microsoft!