There's lots of companies that don't allow blogging, the New York Times reports today.

That's cool. I hope none of my competitors allow their employees to blog. Why? You'd be amazed at the number of job seekers we get simply because we blog openly and, even report that there's dirt under the rug over in the corner.

Yeah, it drives our PR teams nuts, but that's why they earn the big bucks!

I'd never work at a place that didn't let me have open and frank conversations with my customers. That just seems nutty to me. How about you?

Rick Segal says I appreciate CMP and Tim O'Reilly taking over my "King Evil" spot — by trademarking, and defending such, the words "Web 2.0" in a cease-and-desist letter to Tom Raftery.

Um, no. I want that spot all to myself! I hate it when people try to steal my evil. :-)

Seriously, this news was discussed by Shel Israel, my coauthor, and a bunch of other people over on Memeorandum.

This brings about memories of when a competitor to Fawcette Technical Publication's conference series would copy everything we did (down to the format of the brochure). So, I understand some sensitivity on behalf of conference producers to brands and trademarks.

That said, all this does is give IT@Cork a bunch of free publicity. All Tom has to do is change it to "Future of the Web Workshop" and the lawyers don't have a case and they get all this free publicity.

It looks like O'Reilly is claiming a service mark on "web 2.0 conference" if you visit their conference Web site. IT@Cork's site says "Web 2.0 Half Day Conference." That could, possibly, be confusing to people, so CMP and O'Reilly probably does have a legal case. But, probably not if they change the name to "Web 2.0 Half Day Symposium" or something like that.

Either way, I don't think it's confusing enough to warrant the lawyers and the impending bad PR for CMP and O'Reilly.

Update: O'Reilly responds here.

We're seeing total overload on our activation servers today so some people haven't been able to get keys to install the new Office or Windows betas. We apologize for that and are working on getting more capacity online. In the meantime you might want to watch the keynotes from WinHEC. Lots of good stuff there.

And keep trying. Hey, I remember when I was a beta tester on Windows 95. I had to download the entire OS on a 28.8 modem! I did that every weekend. How things have changed!

The mapping war continues…

The folks over on Virtual Earth team, er, the Windows Live Local team, continue to roll out new stuff. And they are slowly making their UI more usable too (something a bunch of us have been, um, giving feedback to the team about).

Hi ho, hi ho, I'm back in the office and snowed under with 265 emails (and that's after cleaning them out). Whew.

But some interesting stuff coming through my aggregators and email.

Lots of good feedback about Windows Vista. Chris Pirillo sent me and Jim Allchin the kind of feedback that product teams die for (when I was a beta tester I won a $1400 laser printer for reporting about this number of bugs and issues about Adobe Acrobat). Yes, Jason Clarke, I'm making sure this list gets seen by everyone.

A reader asked me whether I think it's smart business, given my visibility, to point out everything that's wrong with Microsoft. After all, that might give people the idea that Windows Vista is buggier than it actually is, was the thesis.

That's a risk I'm willing to take. Why? First, my belief is that my readers are smarter than I am and can figure out the truth. Second, I am sick of companies always taking the "only report good PR" route — that's no way to build trust and improve products together. Third, I know a few people in power read my blog and I want the best possible Windows Vista out there (translation: public discussion increases the chances that these issues will be fixed and not swept under the rug). Fourth, this is the time to fix problems, not worry about PR. Fifth, I assume you all know how to use Technorati to search for the dirt on Microsoft anyway.

I'll report when things work well too. For instance, Chris Pirillo used to really bag on Outlook (his bashes of Outlook are legendary). But look at his post "Outlook 2007 Might Not Suck!"

Anyway, thanks for this kind of feedback. Anyone else? Link to your bug reports here and I'll make sure they get entered into the bug tracker.

Geoff Coupe is having trouble getting Office 2007 loaded on top of Windows Vista. I'll try to get someone over here to help fix this stuff. It is beta, so expect some turbulence! But, yeah, I hate it when Microsoft groups don't use our latest stuff.

Anyone else having troubles?