Astute reader Diego Barros noticed this note in Apple's Shareholders meeting notes:

"In a response to a question about Microsoft's Media Center, Jobs replied, "we hear you loud and clear." "

If I were at Apple, what would I do? Come out with a "DisneyPod." Huh? How about a Media Center style Mac that has a ton of Disney content on it? Every five-year-old in the world would beg their parents for one.

What do you think?

At Earthlink they had a take your child to work day yesterday and a fun writeup about how they taught the kids to blog. Staff Engineer Josh Kleinpeter was worried about being cool when he saw kids getting a tour of a firetruck. He didn't need to worry. He had blogs.

Ed Cone, you're right, this is a great example of how to hurt your brand name. I spoke to a group of MBA students in Silicon Valley and most had heard of how Dell had treated Jeff Jarvis and they thought less of Dell for how they responded.

Picking on bloggers isn't smart PR.

Why not? Well, now I'm thinking of not going to Pop!Tech, which is held every fall in Camden, Maine. I wonder if other bloggers are doing the same? Every attendee brings thousands of dollars to the local economy there and high-reach reporting about Maine's tourist attractions (most of the people in the audience are executives, VCs, press types, or bloggers).

Memeorandum has more reactions to the Maine lawsuit. Lance Dunston, the blogger involved, gives his side of the story.

Update: Scott Johnson does some homework (calls the agency in question). James Robertson replies to Scott. I agree with James.

Update2: Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is even more disgusted with this lawsuit than I am (and he's a lawyer).

Squeet just shipped a new version today which lets RSS feed producers (aka bloggers) watch how much buzz their RSS feeds are generating.

To me, though, Squeet is a cool way to convert RSS feeds into emails. Good way to get your favorite blog emailed to you. Never miss when your mom posts again.

Joe Schmidt asks "how much do you Google?" and then shares his stats.

I wish MSN had a feature like that so I could watch how much I use it vs. Google and share that with you. It would make a killer blog sidebar gadget, too. "Watch Scoble as he searches."

Hmmm.

Rod Boothby, a manager with Ernst & Young, has an awesome post about what he wants from a Web Office, among other things. He wants us to make a decent internal enterprise blogging platform. Why? When it's already done. It's called Blogtronix. I got another demo the other night and it's much better than anything I've seen to date. Oh, he already pointed that out in his post.

Wants me to send his paper on the next wave in productivity tools to Ray Ozzie. Oh, that way of convincing teams is SO yesterday!

I'll just lay it out here. I bet Ray gets it within a few hours of my post. Seriously. Ray gets this new world better than almost anyone.

Regarding moving quickly (a point he brings up) I've been talking with teams about this a lot. And I'm noticing a lot of teams that are using the new "Scrum" methodology.

Here's what is going on. Old-style apps, like Excel, are developed using the "Waterfall" style methodology. You know, spec it out, develop it after that, then test it and fix stuff, then beta test it, then ship it. 18 month ship cycles (or four to six years for OS's).

Scrum says "do all that all together in eight week cycles."

The question is, can you move a massive team like the ones that develop Office and Windows to a scrum model where you ship every few months and get feedback on the new stuff that's added, and then turn around and ship again.

Can customers deal with such a model? I don't think so. Why? Deployment. Scrum is great for a model where deploying is just pushing new bits out to a small set of machines. Ala a Web site. But it's not good for when you need people to download bits, and install them.

But, it's fun to watch how the new agile models are getting played with and adopted inside the teams that build Visual Studio, for instance.

It's interesting times to be a software developer, that's for sure.

By the way, I'm in. I want better productivity tools. I can't deal with the flow of RSS feeds and email and phone calls and decisions and info and tasks and all that.

I'm finding I'm having to adopt to the new flow in my life and find ways to deal. I know others are dealing with the same thing (that's why David Allen's book is a best seller five years after he wrote it).

What do you think of Rod's ideas?