Fortune Magazine: Google and Apple: Are They Media Bullies?

"...when it comes to understanding the changing role of media in covering business, [Microsoft is] way ahead of its two biggest rivals—Apple and Google."

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing us to that.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, is gonna be at the Bar Camp tonight in Palo Alto. I'm gonna try to drop in there too with Maryam.

Everyone is invited to come. Damn, we should have invited Steve Jobs!

Ever want to be a program manager at Microsoft on a cool team like MSN Virtual Earth? Watch what you wish for. Steve Lombardi was put into an embarrassing video explaining what is Virtual Earth. The day they ask me to wear the butterfly costume better come with a very large check. :-)

Hey, Steve Jobs, you think you're famous? Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, is here in the hall and is talking to me, along with Anil Dash, vice president of professional network at Six Apart, are here surrounded and talking about TypePad and the new version of Moveable Type.

They just turned on 10 new features in TypePad, including the ability to include an RSS feed in the sidebar of your blog. Mena told me that Ben Trott coded that as part of a "Scratchathon" that was held inside Six Apart where the engineers could code their favorite feature. Ben writes about that experience in "the joy of hacking."

Tantek just left for Foocamp and told me that he just posted about how Barcamp (which is where I'll be) came about. He's also working on building a video link between the two camps.

Wild. Dave Winer, Dean Hachamovitch, and I were having lunch at Kyo-ya, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco. We're here for the Blog Business Summit.

Anyway, a couple guys walk by our table and Dean says "hey, was that Steve Jobs?"

I check and say "yes." The trademark black turtleneck and jeans gave him away.

Then I follow him outside and introduce myself. "Hi I'm Robert Scoble and I work at Microsoft and it's an honor meeting you." By then Dave and Dean walk up. "I'd like to introduce you to Dean Hachamovitch, he runs the Internet Explorer team and this is Dave Winer."

He then said something like "cool, nice to meet you. It's nice to see that you're copying our stuff." Ouch. But then Dean invites him to see the rest of Internet Explorer and Windows Vista and says we have a few innovations to show him. Steve graciously hands over his email address and invites us over.

Of course that's now the talk of the hallway here at the Blog Business Summit. Tantek Celik, who now works at Technorati (and who was one of the main authors on Internet Explorer for the Macintosh) said we should have asked him why Apple copied IE 4 for the Mac.

Ahh, lots of fun. Dave Winer said "I should have taken a picture."

I wish I would have asked Steve when he's gonna do a Tablet PC or a Video iPod or asked him whether Windows would run on the first Intel-based Macintosh. I was a little star struck myself and my brain froze.

Update: here's Dave Winer's account.

Molly Holzschalg visited Technorati the other day and has a ton of interesting stuff she learned.

Silicon Valley's VC's about RSS:

Bill Burnham: RSS: Geeks Only Please.

Jeff Clavier: RSS adoption -- let's get rid of the technobabble first.