Maryam Scoble: I never asked for an iPhone…

Ahh, she chooses the iPhone over jewelry! Now I know why I married her.

It’s amazing how fast news passes through the blogosphere. I’ve gotten this emailed to me four times from four different parts of the world. It’s a rumor of whats coming in a future update for the Apple iPhone.

I tell ya, nothing gets people to talk like Apple does. Nothing.

Sounds interesting but most Apple rumors don’t turn out to be true. Just something to keep in mind. I’ve been burned before by rumors, even ones I heard from Apple employees.

I’m going to play the arrogant bbbaaaahhhhssstttaaarrrddd and brag about how many feeds I’m reading and how many items I’m putting on my link blog.

Google Reader says: “From your 739 subscriptions over the last 30 days you read 28,433 items, and shared 979 items.”

Seriously I really appreciate the kind notes you all have been sending me about my link blog. I really love doing it and reading so much helps me keep up with the industry and know what companies are getting hot. Plus you tell me it saves you lots of time. It’s a lot easier to read 1,000 items a month than it is to read 28,000.

If you have a blog or news source you’d like to see me add to my link blog, let me know. UPDATE: I just uploaded my OPML file (a list of all the feeds I read) to share.opml.org. That site lets you see all my feeds and compare how many people are subscribed to each one. It’s even cooler if you upload your own list of feeds (er, OPML file) to that site.

Danny asks “Why did we all stop using ICQ?”

I’ll tell you why (I was a very early user of ICQ, which was the first instant messaging client that I remembered seeing. It was sold to AOL eventually where it never got best of class status, always remaining spiritually behind AOL’s other IM client, AIM).

For me IM started sucking more and more until it got to the point that today I can’t use it.

Why? Everytime I start it up I get a flurry of messages. Unlike Twitter IM has an expectation that you’ll answer it sometime soon.

But that’s my problem and I’m an outlier. So why did everyone else stop using ICQ?

It got too cluttered and stopped being developed. In 1996 it seemed like there was a new feature every few days. At some point after 2001 it stopped seeing radical improvements.

I think they were scared of taking stuff out which people liked, too, which made it hard to improve.

Today Facebook and Twitter (and Pownce and Jaiku) have totally replaced IM for me.

How about for you?

PS my ICQ number was 165361. That means I was the 65,361’st person to use it. I haven’t turned it on for years, though.

I saw Joe working on this on Saturday. His new iUI library makes developing iPhone web apps easy. Well, easier than before. If Apple really had its act together for developers then it’d have a ton of samples already out and a ton of real APIs, too. But we’ve been through why Apple is fumbling with developers.

Instead Joe Hewitt, who was one of the developers on Firefox, wrote a neat little library that developers will appreciate.

I was just reading about 30 Boxes new Facebook ad swap service. That got me thinking. My Facebook profile is literally a “who’s who” of the Tech industry. And anything I put on my Facebook profile instantly goes out to everyone who is my friend. I have more than 2,200 friends and I’ve only been on Facebook for three weeks.

Since ABC.com charges $75 per 1,000 users to show people advertisements on Lost and other shows, why shouldn’t I do the same?

Why shouldn’t I charge $300 to $500 to companies who want me to ad their applications to Facebook?

But, nah, I’m not evil.

I will put a thank you to Seagate for sponsoring my digital life, though, on my wall.

But seriously, that might add up to some serious change someday…

Bad Sinatra starts out with a walk into Marc Benioff’s office (CEO of Salesforce.com) and goes downhill from there. How far downhill? Let’s watch…

After Benioff’s office, the video rolls into a conversation with Dan Farber, ZDNet’s head blogger.
Then to Doc Searls talking with Salim Ismael.

Now he’s arguing with Dan Farber. Hmmm, now you get to see what San Francisco parties are like. Ahh, “Office is Dead” already comes up.

Mike Arrington shows up. Calls Gillmor “a dick.”

Ahh, I’m in the Bad Sinatra I video too. Gillmor is too lazy to pan on me. Dang, that tape is old, I wondered when Steve would use it.

Slightly not office safe. Or is that “slightly not Microsoft Office ™ safe?” Heheh. It’s not really that explicit, just a four-letter word or two.

Finally, Marc Benioff’s face at the end when Steve asks him about the iPhone is priceless. I bet Fake Steve Jobs will hate this cause of what he says about the iPhone.

As the description says, “it’s not the Gillmor Gang, but who cares.”

Can’t wait to see #2.

If you haven’t heard the hype about a slew of new search engines that are either here now, or coming soon, you probably will. There’s Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo. There’s Barney Pell’s PowerSet. And there’s Jay Bhatti’s Spock.

I’ll try to get all three onto my ScobleShow, but today I have Spock which is actually a useful way to find information on people.

Too bad that Facebook is quickly becoming THE place I search for people’s email addresses. Seriously, you should check out my Facebook friends. The 2,200 people there are the “who’s who” of the tech industry. Everyone except for Fake Steve is there, it seems.

Anyway, Spock is an interesting personal search tool and one I’ll be using a lot to stalk Kevin Rose with. Why Kevin? Cause mentioning him in a blog post along with Jason is worth at least 13 more hits today. At LEAST!

To get serious for a moment, here’s a pretty interesting demo and a separate interview for those of you who really want the details.

Sorry about the headline but I had to get Jason’s attention.

Wild, I was just reading feeds and posting the best to my link blog when this came through Google Reader: Old Media Jumping to New Media. Wow, Jim Louderback (pictured above at a recent photowalking) is now CEO over at Revision 3. Damn, that just made Revision 3 a lot more interesting (not that they needed interesting with Kevin Rose and millions of dollars in new funding behind them).

I’ve known Jim a long time. He interviewed me for a job back when ZDTV was starting up (you know it as TechTV, which is where Kevin Rose, along with a raft of others, gained his popularity).

That report is also saying Veronica Belmont has left CNET to join Jason Calacanis’ new firm, Mahalo. UPDATE: Veronica has posted her own announcement on her blog.

Bonus link: I love Mark Cuban’s HDNet and he gives a report on that here.

Ahhh, the video space is heating up! Gotta get back to work…

PS, thanks to Alan Leclair for the photo of Jim.

John Furrier theorizes that getting on the Scoble Show is worth some bank.

Shel Israel is scared by Ning’s valuations.

They are mighty lofty, that’s for sure! I think someone on Sand Hill Road has been drinking the Facebook juice!

I wish I were still in Seattle (just got back to Half Moon Bay from Seattle) but tomorrow if you’re there you should drop by Zillow for lunch tomorrow. They have the best view of any startup I’ve been to (and I’ve been to a lot). You’ll meet these guys, if you go.

Tonight, if you’re in Seattle, you should drop by the Seattle Ignite event where you’ll meet the Adobe AIR team, among others. My friend Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords will be there too.

Those funny blender guys in Utah have done it again: Will it Blend with an iPhone.

Ahh, it blends!

How come they never blend their own products? I’ve always wanted to blend a blender. Haven’t you?

Marc Andreessen wrote an interesting post about his first five weeks blogging. He was the founder of Netscape, for those of you who are new to the Internet.

Anyway, he says he doesn’t have open comments anymore cause he couldn’t keep up and keep them clean enough.

I say “outsource what you hate.” I’m definitely working to outsource my email, for instance.

There’s lots of bloggers who are trying to figure out how to make money from blogging out there and cry that they never get linked to. Imagine what would happen if you could say “I run Marc Andreessen’s comments!” I bet that PR people would start calling you. Steve Jobs might even answer your phone calls. Heck, the maître d’ at Junnoon (Silicon Valley’s best place to spot a venture capitalist — it’s right next to Facebook too so you could probably make up some good stories for Valleywag there) would probably give you the best table and would impress your significant other with “special deserts from the chef.”

Heck, I used to help run the chat room for Leo Laporte (really, I did, back when he was on KGO radio and before he helped invent Kevin Rose). That alone was good enough to get a tour around Fry’s Electronics from the co-founder of that (true story, it was the opening day of the Sunnyvale store and he gave a bunch of us “Laporteans” a tour).

So, I’ll appoint myself to be temporary keeper of Marc’s comments until he figures out there are lots of people who would LOVE to keep his comment area free of people like Nick Denton. If you want to say something to Marc without having your own blog, just say it here. For now.

So, I’m sitting with Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Adobe, is proudly showing off his iPhone. That led me to ask “will we see Flash on the iPhone?” He said that I’d have to call Apple to find out about that.

UPDATE: a little later I was trying to play one of Kongregate’s games and it is taking a long time to load cause our wireless network in the bus is not consistently good (that’s how a corporate employee would say “it sucks”). So I turn to Kevin and say “if the iPhone DID have Flash, how would you make games load fast on it even when you’re using AT&T’s Edge network?” He quickly answered “I’d use AIR [Adobe’s Integrated Runtime] to cache the game locally.” Then we had a good laugh as he realized his words were going out over the Internet over the streaming video here and that his words might be construed as something official on behalf of Adobe (it’s not, but it was a fun moment nonetheless).

Why do I keep talking about the iPhone? Well, there are six iPhones on this bus. That shows how quickly Apple has excited the top geeks inside Adobe.

We’re streaming live on Ustream. Come join us.

We’re rolling into Portland, Oregon. The ride has been mostly boring so far — I’ve seen very little of the scenery, been head down in email and feed reading. Some geek talk. But not much going on other than trying to answer some email. There’s a few people building apps, but it took some time just getting the infrastructure of the bus (wireless, GPS, etc) working well. Now everything has settled in and we’re about to pick up Kevin Lynch, Adobe executive. That’s when I’ll turn on my camera and get an interview.

Anyway, you can track our progress, we have about three more hours to go to Seattle so we should get in at about 10 p.m. tonight. We’re on Twitter, on live streaming video, and our progress is being tracked by an app that gets data from the GPS on the front of the bus.

Call us up and say hi. 425-205-1921.

UPDATE: here’s a TwitterGram (30 second MP3 audio clip) where I ask four geeks in the bus what they think about Twitter vs. Pownce.

Rocky just got up the videos I did with Jim Greer, co-founder of Kongregate. They have more than 1,000 games up. Really great stuff. Their traffic in May was 300,000 unique visitors and in June it was 750,000.

Anyway, Jim was the technical director Pogo.com, now owned by Electronic Arts. That site has my brother-in-law totally addicted. Jim and I talk about that, and other video game trends. Women. Casual gaming. What Steve Jobs might do with the iPhone. (At one point I hint that Steve Jobs should buy Kongregate, which gets us both to have a good laugh, but in hindsight that would be an awesome idea).

There’s three videos:

1. Interview with Jim and his sister, who also is a co-founder.
2. Demo of what Kongregate is along with some of his favorite games so you can see what all the hoohaw is about. (Embedded here).
3. An Editor’s Choice video where Rocky gives you just the highlights of the above.

Jakob Nielsen’s Web 1.0 post today sends lots of gestures:

1. Don’t do quick posts like Scoble.
2. Don’t risk being an idiot like Scoble.
3. Don’t put comments on your idiocy like Scoble.
4. Don’t link to other idiots like Scoble.
5. If you want to seem like you know something, unlike Scoble, write long ass white papers with lots of charts.
6. Don’t have fun like that idiot Scoble.
7. Don’t you dare put pictures of cats or babies or other personal details up like Scoble does.
8. Don’t add Web 2.0 mechanisms to your Web site like Scoble does. Definitely no “del.icio.us” or “Digg” voting graphics.
9. Don’t get caught dead inside an Apple store like Scoble does.
10. Don’t give Fake Steve or Valleywag a reason to deride you like Scoble does.
11. Definitely don’t get close to Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce/Facebook like Scoble does. If you can say it in 140 characters you shouldn’t say it at all.

OK, he didn’t quite say all of those things on his Web site today.

Well, I wish I could tell you the truth about Jacob (he worked for me back in the 1990s at one of our conferences — we never hired him again) but Steve Wozniak taught me to never say anything if I can’t say something nice about someone.

Yes, I am a sucker for good link bait. Sorry. Guilty as charged. I’m not the only one.

I will say this, it’s amazing that we’re listening to a guy who has an uglier Web site than I do.

Oh, wait, he just wrote a post worthy of Valleywag or Fake Steve except he doesn’t have comments, doesn’t have trackbacks, and used about 2,000 words to say something a better writer would say in about 300 words.

Heh!

Adobe invited me to come along on part of its On AIR Bus Tour. I’ll be making the trip today up to Seattle. We leave at 6 a.m. from Adobe’s buildings in San Francisco. There’s going to be a live video feed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. AIR stands for “Adobe Integrated Runtime” and is Adobe’s competitor to Microsoft’s .NET and Sun Microsystems Java. Basically it lets you move Web apps onto the desktop and out of the browser. Offline and all that fun stuff.

On my Facebook Profile I’ve been asking people what they’d like me to ask the Adobe executives. I’ll get those questions, and any that are left here in my comments, answered. There’s also going to be a Twitter feed, but looks like that, and a Flickr feed, are reposted on the On AIR tour page.

I’ll post some stuff from the road. Of course I’ll have my Nokia cell phone with me, so you’re welcome to call us on the bus tour at 425-205-1921.

Unfortunately I’ll be in Seattle only on Monday night for a few short hours, so can’t shoot any video there. I’ll spend more time in Seattle around Gnomedex, so if you have something cool to show me, let’s get together then.

Oh, and the Adobe bus will be the first vehicle I’ll have been in that has its own API. You’ll be able to track our movements every step of the way.

I’ve been looking at a lot of blogs. Usually just in Google Reader. But when new blogs come along I have to visit them in a Web browser. Blognation, over in the UK, caught my eye. Nice simple design. I hate the small font, though, but I don’t really care about the fonts anymore. If a new blog catches my eye I instantly subscribe to it and never visit the Web page again.

That brings me to a point. It’s time to redesign my blog. Mark Lucovsky at Google was making fun of my “ugly” design recently. I said it was scientifically designed to get people to subscribe and put it into Google Reader. I was just trying to be funny, but I do admit that my blog is looking a bit “old school” now when compared to things like GigaOm and Blognation.

Mark was threatening to get Google’s designers to redesign my blog. That might be interesting, especially since Google’s custom search engine is getting better now that it lets me search not only the words on my blog, but every blog I’ve linked to.

Of course I’ve gotta bug Mark for not updating his own blog since May of last year. Heck, that’s so long ago that I was still working at Microsoft then.

What do you think? Should I redesign? What’s your favorite blog design and/or designer out there?

On Saturday at the iPhoneDevCamp someone was showing me his computer. It was running Ubuntu. Linux. I noted to myself that it finally got over some of the ugliness that turned me off of earlier Linux-on-the-desktop attempts. He showed me, and a few other people some of the cool things (much nicer 3D switching than even OSX has, for instance). Damn, I thought to myself, it’s time to give Linux another look.

Then, tonight, I see another article over on ITPro about the future of Ubuntu and Linux as a desktop platform.

I should credit several readers lately for bugging me about Ubuntu. I forget them all, though, and don’t want to cause any hard feelings. Thanks for staying on my case. It sure is looking nice!

Anyway, it’s time to get an interview with Mark Shuttleworth. Anyone know him and want to introduce us?

Looks like Dell is seeing the same thing, too, Digg is linking to a report that Dell is expanding its line of Ubuntu-powered computers.

What do you think? Is this finally Linux’ time on the desktop? Is it getting good enough to get more than a tiny number of geeks to switch?