Christian Burns and his wife, Jenni, are continuing to talk with me. They have an incredible story. Last July their house burned. Their kids were inside, Jenni heard the fire “popping sounds” and got the kids out OK. But, then Christian blogged it and people sent stuff and funds (they were uninsured) in.

You can read the story here on their blog. It’s a great example of a blogger’s readers rallying around to help out. They posted pictures of the fire here on Flickr.

Christian Burns is here talking to me and he showed me his Google Reader widget. Look at the right side of his blog. He’s using Google Reader and sharing items with his readers, just like I do, but he uses the Wordpress.com’s widget to share the most recent shared items.

I’ve heard about the Ignite Seattle videos a few times here at Northern Voice. Two that rose above the rest are Hillel Cooperman’s “How to make every meal a memorable experience” (he’s a software entrepeneur, used to work at Microsoft on the “Max” project — now killed, sorry — and is a food blogger); Ryan Stewart’s “Rich Internet Application Lowdown“. I like the trend of videotaping smaller events and putting them up on sites like Blip.TV.

Someone in Eddie Codel’s video session here at Northern Voice just said Mojiti is very cool cause it lets him annotate videos. Anyone try it?

Ahh, more talk about conferences that are all male. Anil Dash writes that the old boys club is for losers. I’ll link to TechMeme, cause there’s a bigger conversation going on here.

Funny thing. Out of all the videos I’ve put on ScobleShow, the one that’s gotten on Digg is one of a woman. Shelley Powers deserves the credit for making me focus on this issue over and over. Keep it up Shelley.

Looking at ScobleShow the past two weeks, I have 12 interviews and five of those are with women. Maryam, my wife, and I are always looking for interesting geeky women to get on our show.

Who would you like to see interviewed? Rogers Cadenhead has a good list. We’ve had two of his list 10 Web geeks on the show, but that leaves eight we haven’t.

James Robertson’s comment, on Rogers’ post, resonates with me too: that the goal shouldn’t be just gender/race/creed diversity, but intellectual diversity.

It’s why I really liked the LIFT conference. It wasn’t just the same old boys club.

We’re playing Dave Winer’s talk to NPR types yesterday on the car stereo as we drive up to Vancouver. We’re only a few minutes into the talk and already it’s a great talk. Dave Winer at his visionary best. How do you judge interesting talks? I judge them by “did it cause conversations at parties away from the event?” This one did, which is why we’re listening now. He’s talking about things the podcasting industry should do.

Oh, boy, Don Dodge says that Microsoft will not fall into innovator’s dillema.

Hmmm, someday I’ll post an email to me from a top Microsoft executive that had the words “business value” repeated 13 times (I asked them to buy a variety of things, including Flickr (this email was written three weeks before Yahoo bought Flickr). The executive was running a business with billions in revenue and didn’t see the business value in what I was proposing Microsoft do. Truth is, Microsoft is run by people who aren’t taking risks and don’t see the value in Web stuff. Why can I say that? Name a single Microsoft Internet product/service that made you say “wow” in the past three years. I can’t name one and I’ve been looking.

But, in this trip to Seattle I had a few meetings with MSFTies that I didn’t talk about cause they don’t want to be quoted on my blog. In them I was reminded once again that Microsoft has a far deeper problem: it isn’t shipping cool stuff THAT IT ALREADY HAS BUILT. I can’t tell more. I heard the story of yet another team that had a killer service that was killed. Funny enough several members of that team have left because they were demoralized about building something cool, getting close enough to ship that they had already sent the technology outside of Microsoft to partners, and then getting reorged and getting the product killed.

It isn’t the first time I’ve heard this story, either. I remember when Mark Lucovsky said “Microsoft has forgotten how to ship software.”
I stuck up at that time for Microsoft. Kevin Schofield, who works in MS Research, defended Microsoft too. But, yet again, another developer left Microsoft (this time Chandu Thota, on the Virtual Earth team, who is starting up his own company). Just remember, happy workers don’t leave. And the continual flow of smart developers leaving Microsoft tells me that Microsoft has deep managerial problems that are going to prove challenging to overcome.

But, I’ve learned never to bet against companies with billions of dollars in its pocket and tons of smart people still working there.

If Microsoft gets the marketing teams, the executives who are constantly reorging teams, the bean counters who don’t want to spend money to acquire interesting companies, out of the way, watch out.

Then what Don Dodge says will really have some truth behind it. Until then, Microsoft is sure getting boring to watch lately.

Can’t wait to hear what Ray Ozzie is working on. The silence gets worse for Microsoft with every passing day. I wonder how many companies are looking into Amazon’s S3 service yesterday. Last night I met Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web Services evangelist, he told me that I wouldn’t believe how many customers are adopting that service and how big Amazon’s data centers are getting because of it.

I got a fun book a month ago, She’s Such a Geek, and thought it’d be fun to meet the authors.

Kevin Tofel asks “Why would I want different reader apps for different publications?”

He’s talking about New York Times’ Reader.

I’ve tried the reader, and I remember seeing prototypes back when I worked at Microsoft. This was an app designed to show off Windows Presentation Foundation, er, .NET 3.0. Some things that that technology does that the Web doesn’t do are much better text control, better typography, and better resizing of the app on different resolution screens.

But, it doesn’t matter. Google Reader is eating the lunch of this approach. Why? Cause we’ll put up with a little less readability in order to share items with other people, in order to see the information on multiple computers and platforms, and the ability to mash up the content with content from other services ala BlogLines, NewsGator, or Google Reader or other RSS aggregators.

The other trend I am seeing is the stunning growth of Adobe love among developers. Everywhere I go I hear “Flash, Flash, Flash.”

Next week Adobe is showing a bunch of us a bunch of stuff that’s going for developer’s love in an even bigger way. Microsoft is under full scale attack in the developer world. I’ve had developer after developer ask me the past few days “what is Microsoft doing?” Even companies that are seemingly in Microsoft’s camp (like TeamDirection, which is a .NET shop using Sharepoint) are talking about going with Flash, er, Flex and Apollo, which lets developers build standalone applications with Flash technology.

Why is this happening? Because Microsoft is leaving influentials to the Macintosh. Developers who choose Macs (and I see more and more every day) are forcing a move away from Java and .NET toward Adobe Flash stuff.

Microsoft will fight back with WPF/E, which is a .NET 3.0 runtime that runs everywhere, but will it be enough to keep developers from moving away?

OK, if I were an investor I’d be thinking of buying some Amazon stock.

So far today I’ve interviewed three startups and two of them say they are using Amazon’s S3 Web services (JamGlue, a music mashup service, and TeamDirection, a project management software both use it — these two services could not be more different). It’s not just today I’ve noticed this trend, either. Amazon is getting GREAT love in startup land for making it easy to build services on top of the S3 storage service. Every entrepreneur who has decided on Amazon RAVES about the service.

It’s amazing to me that Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are letting Amazon get such a huge lead here. These companies will never switch off of this infrastructure if Amazon keeps delivering this level of service. It lets these companies startup for very little money, and provide services that are very advanced. It’s like owning your own data center without the headache of buying new servers as your startup expands.

Oh, and I’m really bummed I missed yesterday’s Photowalking in San Francisco (Eddie took my place). The photos that Thomas Hawk got are stunning. Some of thsoe photos are hosted on SmugMug (the CEO and team showed up) which are, you guessed it, hosted on Amazon’s S3 service.

Gotta run, another interview coming up.

Oh, and what did Amazon show me this morning? I can’t tell, but it was surprising. Can’t wait to talk about it. Damn NDAs.

Scott Mace, a journalist I trust, is writing for NurseWeek and told me to check out his video of Scott Eckert, CEO of Motion Computing, showing off the Intel C5 Mobile Clinical Assistant that got some press yesterday. He thinks he has the only video of the event.

Why did he send it to me? Cause he knew I have a soft spot in my heart for Tablet PCs. This is pretty interesting. Great example of why Microsoft’s ecosystem keeps Microsoft humming along.

DWeatherly writes: “OK, that’s it Scoble, I’m unsubscribed.”

When I talk with new bloggers they generally complain about not having readers, or not having commenters. I tell them “enjoy those days where you can write an inane post without being abused.”

But, here’s the thing DWeatherly just exposed about himself.

1) He doesn’t use a good RSS reader. I read more than 1,000 posts every day and if I hit an inane post I just hit “J.” Yeah, maybe 10 seconds of my day are gone (sometimes inane posts have grabbing headlines, or a good first couple of paragraphs and “fool” me into reading more) but I generally don’t mind too much cause even an inane post sometimes teaches me something.

2) He has expectations of a private blog that are way out of wack. A private blog WILL BE INANE once in a while if it’s written by a single human being. If you expect any single human being to NOT be inane once in a while, you’ll just get pre-processed, pre-edited stuff and won’t see anything real. Translation: you won’t see any posts done at 2 a.m. when we’re just having some geeky fun and trying to point out the general inanity of life.

3) He missed the whole point of the post, which was to point out that Twitter +is+ inane. But that’s what makes it fun. I posted at 2 a.m. and both of my employees wrote back to say the Twitter equivilent of “hi.” And it’s a world-wide-inanity experiment. Rachel Clarke is somewhere else in the world (she usually lives in UK, but I think she’s in New York).

Anyway, my point of this inane post is to tell my readers that if you don’t like inane posts, please don’t read me. Unsubscribe right now and head over to TechMeme, where every post has been linked to by some other smarter, better looking, blogger (or, probably five or 10 of them).

Me? This is my personal blog and, sorry, I’m inane. Stupid. Lame. Boring. Headache inducing. A lot of the time. If you do stick around, just hit “J” in Bloglines or Google Reader and we’ll all get through those parts together.

Oh, and DWeatherly also demonstrated he didn’t watch my video interview that I posted yesterday. That was 45 minutes of an Austrian developer who, definitely, is NOT inane.

Or, he missed where I posted about Jott.com. That service helps you use your cell phone to not be inane (or, at least, not to forget stuff before you can get off the freeway and write it down). But, no, we don’t have DWeatherly here anymore cause he couldn’t put up with an inane four posts about Twitter.

One last thought. Have you ever noticed that the most abusive commenters don’t have blogs of their own? I sure wish these readers who think they know how to do this so well would do a blog of their own so we could all learn from their greatness.

And that’s my inane thoughts today from Hiway 5 in Seattle. David Geller, a guy who is NOT inane, is driving. We’re going to have breakfast with Buzz Bruggeman and Alvey Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar. How do you know he’s NOT inane? Cause he’s won two Oscars and built technology that revolutionized the movie business. UPDATE: Alvey couldn’t make it, but breakfast wasn’t inane anyway. Onto Amazon.

I want to go to sleep. But I made the mistake of posting on Twitter a few minutes ago. Here’s the exchange:

• Scobleizer Irina: get back to work! Heheh.
• chrispirillo @Scoble: Dude, that is a magic couch. If you turned on the fireplace, you’d have been asleep hours ago.
• Scobleizer chrispirillo: it’s so weird when you say I’m one floor down from you right now. Your couch rocks, by the way. I’m off to sleep.
• irinaslutsky scoble: yay!
• chrispirillo @Scoble: Dude, I think we’re having the world’s first unofficial twittercamp.
• Scobleizer rachelclarke: you’re up early to talk to me cause I’m up late.
• chrispirillo @Scoble: i don’t have half as many followers as you. Then again, how geeky is it that you’re one floor down from me right now?
• Scobleizer ssethi: when are you bringing those CEOs to the valley? I’d love to be there. Everyone: help chrispirillo with Gnomedex speaker/sponsors.
• ssethi C2C announced in the guardian. Oli Barratt and I are taking 30+ Euro startup CEO’s to the valley in June with party at the end
• rachelclarke why am I awake this early?

Ahh, Google is sure to own half of TechMeme by the time I wake up. I won’t even bother writing more. Good night, talk to you after I get some sleep.

I just checked out Hiten Parmar’s blog. Why? Cause he writes that I give him a headache. Anyone who gets a headache here probably has an interesting point of view. Actually, Hiten, if you don’t like my editorials, unsubscribe from here, and check out my link (er, item) blog. I don’t editorialize there, I just pick the best items every day for you. Here’s my current stats, as reported from Google Reader:

From your 554 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 24,998 items, starred 0 items, and shared 1,349 items.

So, if you read my link blog, you’ll get a more complete look at the top tech blogs (I put tons of stuff on it that are deserving of your attention, but never get on Digg or TechMeme) and you won’t have to read 25,000 items to do it.

UPDATE: Loren Feldman is keeping a list of people who hate him. Chris Pirillo hates Loren, Chris just told me. Yes, Chris and I are both up at 2:14 a.m. watching fun stuff on the Internet. I wonder what Ze Frank is doing at 2:14 a.m. (er, 5:14 a.m.) Probably sleeping. Slacker!

Remember a few days ago when I was raving about MyPunchBowl.com? Well, Maryam and I talked Chris and Ponzi into trying it out (they were going to use evite). Turns out that in real-world usage (Chris wrote up his experiences with it on his blog) it isn’t as shiny as when you get a few-minute demo. I think Chris nailed a marketing challenge with lots of new startup companies: how do you convince us that your service is worth the learning and trial time?

Here’s a presentation I’m looking forward to. Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and me are sharing a stage at the Video on the Net conference. I’m not being paid a dime for this conference (not even expenses). Jeff Pulver’s not a cheap baaahhhssstttaaarrrddd, though, cause instead of giving us a big speaker fee he’s holding a video contest where he’s giving away $40,000.

Here’s the details on our talk, which Mike and I just worked out yesterday:

TITLE: Collision: What happens when old and new media mix

DESCRIPTION: Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, and Robert Scoble, Vice President at PodTech.Network, and videographer/interviewer on ScobleShow.com, get together to discuss with you their view of what’s happening in the online video world and how it’s colliding with bigger Web 2.0 trends like the widget explosion we’re seeing on blogs and social media sites like MySpace. PodTech, for instance, saw traffic go way up when it changed to a Flash-based player similar to YouTube’s. We’ll also talk about the collision of old and new media on the net and the disruptive aspects that we’re seeing in the online media space.

Yesterday Tuesday was another wild day in my life. I met Marc Andreessen, who was doing a press tour, with Ning, showing off something you’ll see on ScobleShow soon. He visited Om Malik too, who noticed that Marc had switched to a Mac. Ning, he told me, is the best way to build custom social Websites. More on that soon (he, and co-founder Gina Bianchini, showed me stuff that he asked me not to talk about until next week).

But, in the last two days I’ve met some other incredible people. Meeting Marc was over the top, though (he started Netscape). I told him that my son was born the same year that Netscape was started and we compared notes about just how much has changed in the world (and what he learned from the Netscape experience that he’s applying to Ning).

Here’s the schedule.

It started Tuesday when I had lunch with Mark Ivey. He used to write for BusinessWeek, among other pubs, and wrote speeches for Scott McNealy, among other titans of tech industry. Interesting guy, he’s fascinated by the changes happening to media and PR and is thinking of writing a book since he’s been on both sides of that fence (he worked in PR at Intel and other companies).

OK, that was noon. At 2 p.m. Eric Goldstein, CEO of ClipMarks came over to show me a killer way to “clip” interesting stuff around the Web.

At 4 p.m. Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini, co-founder of Ning, came by. More soon.

At 5 p.m. Martin Nyman of BestBuy came by to talk about technology retailing (he works with VCs and entrepreneurs to make sure BestBuy has the coolest stuff in its stores).

At 6:30 p.m. I was headed over to Stanford for the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, where I introduced Martin Eberhard, CEO of Tesla Motors, who gave a great speech about why electric cars are the future. I then moderated a panel discussion with Martin, Robert Acker, SVP at Dash Navigation, Dave Blakely, Director of Technology Strategy at IDEO, and Dave Mathews, Director of Product Innovation at Sling Media. Ryan Junee has a good writeup of the evening, hope that someone recorded it, cause it was quite an evening and I was very honored to just be on stage with such a great group of people.

Then yesterday we flew to Seattle, where another full day started.

Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Activewords, picked us up at the airport and took us to Chris and Ponzi Pirillo’s house where we heard all about Gnomedex 2007 plans. I told Chris that Gnomedex is still the only conference in the world where you’ll see hundreds of people — almost all of whom are on their computers during the conference. They are looking for sponsors and speakers, but already have some really cool things planned.

Then onto visit with David Geller, founder of EyeJot. This is a video email service. Finally got a good demo that we’ll get up on ScobleShow someday (I have quite a backlog of tapes to play first).

At 3 p.m. I met with John Pollard and Shreedhar Madhavapeddi, founders of Jott. This is the thing I’ll use the most. It’s a service for your cell phone. Let’s say you’re at a party and you think of something you want to remember. Well, you probably can’t find paper and pen, so what you do is call Jott’s phone number (it knows you by your caller ID) leave a 30 second message about what you want to remember, then it converts that into text and emails that to you, along with a link to your original audio recording. This rocks. Buzz didn’t know we were going to meet with them (he’s driving me around) and said he’s been using the service for weeks and already finds it invaluable.

At 4 p.m. we visited with Michael Young, CTO, and Glenn Kelman, CEO of RedFin. They are working to be the place you buy and sell homes on the Web. They showed me how they are now using bloggers to add comments about homes that they’ve visited. We had a long conversation about how RedFin is disrupting the real estate industry.

At 5:30 p.m. we got invited to the top of one of Seattle’s skyscrapers for wine tasting at the home of one of Seattle’s venture capitalists, Petra Franklin, principal of Vault Capital. I’m going to note that Petra is a woman, cause it’s so rare to meet a woman at this level. Remarkable woman and a remarkable home. Real treat to get to spend some time with her.

OK, today (Thursday) we’ve got a full schedule. I’m being picked up at 8 a.m. Breakfast with Buzz, then onto Amazon at 10 a.m. to see something that they weren’t willing to talk about on the phone (always fun when that happens).

At 11:30 a.m. meeting with JamGlue (cool DJ/remixing service), at 1 p.m. meeting with MixPo, (mix video/audio and more into a Web-based widget) at 3 p.m. meeting with TeamDirection, (project and task management for Sharepoint and Groove) at 4 p.m. meeting with SmileBox, (fun digital storytelling for people) and at 7 p.m. Chris and Ponzi are throwing Maryam and me a little shindig at their beautiful new home.

Whew. Sorry if I couldn’t fit you in on this trip.

Oh, and I even got through most of my feed reading tonight for my link blog. Email is suffering, though.

Ahh, the prepare-for-Ray Ozzie’s-speech-at-Mix-7 events have already started. Adam Sohn (he was the PR guy in our group when I started at Microsoft) is quoted on Redmond Developer saying that Microsoft is preparing a Live Development Platform. Ahh, an API that’ll do it all? Hmmm. I’m worried about the boil-the-ocean approach. Web developers like small, discrete APIs (I was just over at Redfin today and saw how they are using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth maps) that don’t take dependencies on other things (which is why Windows Vista itself was so late). Oh, and they like to see lots of iterations, er, small improvements in the service over time that demonstrates a team’s commitment (Virtual Earth got dozens of little, and some major, improvements over the past three years).

Translation: Microsoft is still not speaking the Web’s language. It’ll be interesting, though, to see what Ray does say when he comes out of seclusion.

While everyone is over in London at the Future of Web Apps Conference (great writeup of day 2 is here), I thought it would be fun to put up my interview of Sebastian Moser. Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of him either before he wrote me in response to a request to talk with more developers.

He didn’t disappoint. He’s 20 years old. Has been programming since he was 14 (says he started “late” when compared with people like Firefox’s Blake Ross). Is very articulate and gave some great insights into Europe’s software markets.

It’s long, but then I’m trying to give you a real meal, as Mark Cuban says as he compares YouTube-style “video snacks” to longer form videos like the ones I do.

There’s a wealth of information in this video for Internet entrepreneurs — especially for Google and Wikipedia employees. Read Sebastian’s blog here.