Judge the Made in Express software contest

I’ve been pretty harsh on Microsoft lately. Hey, that’s normal, I guess, after you leave a job. Sort of a “jump on the man” impulse. Anyway, there are some killer things happening at Microsoft. Catching my eye is the hobbyist renaissance that’s happening there.

Another is the Made in Express Contest. I agreed to be a judge for free cause I believe in this kind of contest which encourages normal people to try their hand at software development. Anyway, like American Idol there’s an audience part to the judging and that’s open now.

Dana Epp blogging the birth of a new product

Dana, a security expert I’ve been following for quite some time, is blogging his development of a new product, all in one month. It’s an interesting look into the development process that we rarely get to see.

Now, imagine Apple or Microsoft or Google or eBay doing the same.

Imagine that they let you participate, even a little bit, in the development of a new product.

But, no, they won’t try that. It’s too bad. When I did my book I accidentally found that building something in public view ends up with that end thing being a lot better because of the participation of the people who drop by. Not to mention that our search page rank is a lot higher than it would otherwise be (even bloggers who hated our book, and said “that chapter sucked,” added to our search engine ranking).

Third day with Windows Live Writer

I am liking Windows Live Writer so far, but I’m not pushing the edges like some others are (I saw a bunch of complaints about bugs in some of the weirder features. I just type and post, so it works great for me so far).

Anyway, just saw that Ed Holloway has an Ink Blog Beta out for Tablet PC users.

One problem with the Windows Live Writer is the tagging support. It has categories, but that capability sucks. So I gotta open each post back up in the browser and apply categories there.

Blogs can get hoaxed, or mislead (sorry to Iran’s president)

Turns out that CNN, among others, is reporting that Iran’s president’s blog doesn’t have malware or viruses after all. So, how could I report such yesterday? I wasn’t reporting, just passing along information I had from a reputable technical source (O’Reilly).

Blogs can get hoaxed. But, if they do the truth does come out eventually. I try to update my posts as I learn more information. If you see something incorrect that I’m reporting, just point it out in the comments. Thanks!

GoogleTalk updates

I just downloaded the updated GoogleTalk which just got a bunch of new features (I’m “Scobleizer” if you wanna drop in and say hi). A lot of Microsofties used to “poopoo” GoogleTalk saying “it has no features.” They were right. But, it also had something much more important: elegance and shipping.

It was a small thing. Microsofties don’t get small things. I think it’s a disease of Microsoft’s. Not getting small things. Until it’s too late. I usually don’t keep MSN or Skype up and running during the day. Why? I don’t know. Part of it is I get too many chats from people just asking “who are you?” or who say “hello” and then want to get into some stupid conversation. But another part of it is just the weight of those apps — MSN just popped up a bunch of dialogs that I had to close (more than 50 since I hadn’t been on for several weeks).

Funny enough Joe Beda, who now is on the Google Talk team admits that he had the disease when he worked at Microsoft on the Avalon, aka Windows Presentation Foundation, team.

GoogleTalk is the lightest weight, has an elegant UI, and, well, simply works.

What do you think?

Oh, I’m also on Skype as “RobertScoble” and on Windows Live Messenger as robertscoble@hotmail.com.

Cool chat and wiki tools

I’m going through my mound of email right now looking for things I haven’t linked to. The list is way too long (more than a hundred at last count and I’m not even half way through my “blog this” folder). Lots of cool little things, too. Like ChatCreator. A neat little chat creation engine. Here, let’s try. I’m here now.

Another thing that’s fun? How about WetPaint? It’s a wiki tool. But, unlike PBWiki I used for my OffTheGrid it’s easier to use for normal people. I used PBWiki cause it had — by far — the best setup I have seen so far, but WetPaint isn’t far behind and is nicer once you get inside. More on that soon.

Oh, enough of this, I just wanted an excuse to point out that on WikiMapia there’s a nude beach that someone pointed out just south of Half Moon Bay. Are there “no Flickr” signs there?

Got any other wiki or chat tools we should be playing with? Post them here, I’m gonna put them on my new video show next month.

News alert: Ze Frank blinks

Ahh, the blogs are boring this morning. Too much talk about how cool it’d be if everyone could be an A lister. Me? I just want to be a Z lister. Why? I get too much email. I can’t even get started on my show. It’s a conspiracy to keep me down. I think Om and Mike are telling all their fans “email Scoble, it’ll keep him uninteresting.”

Well, one advantage of Maryam having a famous blog is she gets invited to Evelyn Rodriguez’ dinners. I didn’t know a single person other than Evelyn when we went last night. What do you do when you’re in such a situation? I went up to someone (turned out it was Charles Adkins, who doesn’t have a blog) and asked “do you watch Ze Frank?”

I was expecting a totally dead stare. But, damn, that got a reaction. “I love Ze!!!”

Ahhh, a fellow member of the ORG. We were instant friends. Anyone who likes Ze is cool in my book.

Speaking of the ORG (Ze’s little social experiment tool that you can use to find people near you that also listen to Ze), Michael Markman just wrote me and said “he blinked.”

Yes, Ze isn’t feeling well today. Now we know that blinking is a disease and must be stopped. Do it enough and you’ll die. It’s a scientific fact. I read it on a blog. It must be true.

OK, enough pandering to someone with real talent hoping that I’ll get a link, or a blink as it were, to justify my existence keep my ego sufficiently stroked.

Oh, yes, someday I’ll have the writing skill of Evelyn Rodriguez and I’ll figure out where she got those peaches she was serving last night. They melted in my mouth the way stuff off the trees in Silicon Valley used to (it was an orchard, I miss the apricots).

Evelyn told me last night she’s trying to shine light on things of value that few people get to see. She held her little shindig in an art gallery. Her food was hand picked from farmers markets. She was wearing a great hand-made shirt with hand made jewelry. And she invited some very interesting people. That explains her tone on her blog lately. For those who don’t know, she rode out the tsunami in Thailand a year and a half ago and she hasn’t stopped riding life ever since.

David Chamberlain impressed Maryam and I. He does philanthropic travel, is founder of Exquisite Safaris. Takes rich people to weird and exotic places and, in return, gets them to donate to local causes where they help out for a day or two. Go to Victoria Falls? Build a school.

He got me to think. Every day I have a choice. Do I tear down someone else? Or build up someone’s efforts?

I just created a WetPaint Wiki for those who love Ze Frank. Leave your URL and see how it works. More on why I did that next post.

Anyway, other reasons I want to be on the Z list? Cause then all my friends wouldn’t know when I piss off Maryam by doing something stupid.

Hacking A listers

Ahh, why do I fall for this stuff? Nick Carr started a whole debate about why he doesn’t get enough traffic.

I think the whole thing is bunk. No one promised me traffic when I started blogging. I just wanted to impress Dori Smith, JavaScript guru.

But, yesterday I was talking with Levy Cohen, CEO of Collarity (hot new search engine to add to Web sites that’s coming out) and told him that I missed the whole bookmarking thing. Why? Because I learned early on that blogging is an awesome way to get stuff into Google. I can instantly pull stuff out just by adding my last name onto a query for something I wrote earlier.

For instance, here’s a Google query for an entry I wrote about Victors Coffee in Redmond, WA. For me it’s better than Del.icio.us.

Yesterday I learned just how much better. Mario Luna, a guy I hadn’t seen since about 1990 (we went to West Valley together) called me up and said “is this the Robert Scoble who went to West Valley?” He found me on an obscure Google search, not even my name.

So, thanks Google for bringing my college friends back to me. That’s why I blog.

Being an A lister is not a good reason to blog. Nick will find that out soon enough. Starbucks lattes are still $3. I still need to take out the trash and wash the dishes. Sigh.

I love the “hack” though. Someone does it every six months. Call A listers names. That gets them emotionally involved and usually gets a link. Brilliant. Well played Nick!

Geeks in Montana

Geek Entertainment TV goes to Montana and Montana will never be the same. What was sad is that the horse that Irina was interviewing actually bit her after the camera was off. Damn, if we had a clip of that we’d be on the top of YouTube!

In other news: the IE team is doing a good job of engaging with bloggers and Slashdotters to explain how IE 7 does or doesn’t support Web standards.

Time lists its 50 coolest Web sites

Ahh, Mena Trott must really have a headache today cause Time Magazine just released its list of 50 coolest Websites.

Aaron Brethorst gave me a nice compliment when he wondered why I wasn’t on the list (I don’t belong, Aaron, but I appreciate your thought!).

Iran president’s blog used to spread malware

I just read over on O’Reilly’s Linux blog that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad has a blog but is spreading malware with it, albeit only to IP addresses that come from Israel. Amazing, but guarantees that Silicon Valley will continue gaining a steady stream of good developers and technical folks from Iran. The Iranian community here is quite large and very influential.

Update: turns out this story was false. Sorry for passing along a hoax.

Surprise of the month: Macs crash?

OK, I just purchased a Mac. A 17-inch MacBook Pro. I was forced into this by HD and wide-screen video formats. Windows Movie Maker doesn’t do it (it does on Windows Vista, but I can’t use beta software to run my business). Apple’s software does do HD today. I don’t even need to wait (there’s a reason why Microsoft’s Channel 9 and On10.net aren’t wide-screen or HD and it’s spelled Movie Maker). And, anyway, most of the video community here uses Macs (I learned a lot from watching Eddie and Ryanne edit their videos about FinalCut Pro). So, I’m going along for the ride. So, why am I posting this? Cause I just read about Dave Winer’s crashy experiences with his Mac.

Last week on the way home from Montana Ryanne was editing her video on her Mac. The app just suddenly disappeared from screen. In my book that’s called a crash. I found that to be very strange cause the hype on Macs is that they never crash. But, those commercials are so strong. The hype is so strong. That I believe that the Mac is perfect.

Ahhh, are the Mac faithful is Patrick Scoble ready for me getting a Mac? We’ll find out. Irina started calling him “lemming” because all he would do is talk about how cool Apple is all week. It does get tiresome, doesn’t it Irina? Maybe I’ll join Guy Kawasaki’s evangelistic hoardes.

Don’t worry, this post was typed on a Tablet PC. All is not lost for the Windows faithful.

The Geotagging evangelist

I’m on the phone with Rod Edwards and he’s the sole person involved in BlockRocker. This is a cool mashup — all based on geotagging, which is the use of location data. For instance, I could stick my photo on a map by using geotags. I like how he built some cool tools for people who want to add geotags to their posts, it’s really easy. You just find your location on a Google Map that he’s embedded in his page and it spits out the HTML code that lets you geotag your posts. Here, his tool created this HTML code:

See this post’s geographical context.

I just copied and pasted that right into Wordpress and have an instant geotagged post.

Anyway, Rod is the kind of guy I like to get calls from. Passionate about doing something cool on the Web and builds tools to help other people get into his world. That’s great evangelism.

Google lawyers NOT evil

OK, OK, I’ll take the bullet for the Google lawyers. They aren’t evil.

TDavid doesn’t understand their behavior this week, though.

Oh, T, They just live in an alternate universe to the one most of us humans live in.

See, in a courtroom things happen differently than they would on a street corner. On a street corner if someone tried to steal my name I’d just hit them over the head with my Bogen monopod (trust me, that’d hurt).

But in a courtroom a judge will ask “did you defend your trademark?”

If you didn’t defend your trademark it could legally be used. To a judge “defend” means “did you send threatening letters out to anyone who used your trademark improperly and can you prove that they were sent?”

Imagine a world where Bill Gates would be allowed to call his search engine “Microsoft Google.” Now you can start to understand why lawyers for brands like Google, Xerox, or Kleenex have to defend their trademarks.

Every journalism school student, though, learns that the lawyers are generally just going to email badass sounding letters out, but aren’t willing to make the PR mess of taking you to court (not to mention that it’s expensive and most of the time they just need the copies of the letters to convince the judge they are defending, not a full-blown trial). I got a bunch of those cease-and-desist letters for using things like the word “Kleenex” in my stories in without capitalizing it or putting the usual “TM” after the word (we never did that, mostly cause we were too lazy to look up the symbol inside QuarkXPress).

Translation: cut the lawyers some slack. If they weren’t sending out stupid letters like this they’d be doing something far more evil with their time.

Blogs and Digg, not geeky enough?

I notice a general trend looking through blogs, TechMeme, and Digg. There aren’t many coders anymore.

Five years ago the discussions were far more technical and geeky. Even insiderish. When compared to the hype and news of today.

It makes me pine for ye old RSS vs. Atom geek flamefests.

Anyone else notice this trend?

Anyway, thanks to Mike Gunderloy for helping keep technical blogs around.

What brought this on? Last week at OffTheGrid we had a “language war” that spontaneously broke out. I filmed part of it. Not sure I learned much that I didn’t already know, but it was fun to hear some of that old developer passion break out in a fun way.

Anyway, tonight over on Digg I see that Pirillo and Laporte are bringing back TechTV. Hey, wait a second! You wanna bring back TechTV but you want ME to do all the work? I didn’t sign up for THAT! Heheh.

Elsehere on the blogs, yes, I did tell On10.net at BlogHer that Maryam was my #1 Maryam. But it helps that she’s #1 on Google too.

But, back to geeks. Jason Perlow, contributing editor of Linux Magazine is one and gives PodTech a preview of LinuxWorld, going on this week in SF.

Oh, and Richard Stallman who is almost as geeky as Shelley Powers is on the decidedly not geeky geekentertainment.tv talking about borscht. I love how Irina gives him some heck. You know, sometimes people gave us Microsofties crud cause Steve Ballmer would say or do some outlandish things (developers, developers, developers!) but if I still worked at Microsoft I’d just send Richard’s video to everyone and say “this guy makes Ballmer sound normal.”

Ze, this picture is for you

On our trip we watched a ton of Ze Frank. We even sang a few of his songs. Some of which included the word “duckie.” Which is why I took a picture of this sign in Livingston, Montana. I stopped the van and said “I’m taking this one for Ze.”

Speaking of Ze, I’m not afraid, but I am terrorized. Terrorized that they’ll take away my electronic equipment on flights. Gosh, what will I need to do? Read a book? Next someone will figure out how to turn paper into some sort of weapon.

And people wonder why we drove to Montana.

Oh, Jeff Sandquist reminded me of how bad travel can get (and how being a Microsoft employee sure makes it nicer) with his posts from India.

Anyway, Ze, I wish I had your talent. While I try to acquire such (not blinking is HARD damn it!) you’ll just have to put up with my lame photo of a rubber ducky river rental sign.

Sorry.

Wordpress.com getting new features

It seems like Matt Mullenweg and team are adding features every few hours lately. For those of you who are on Wordpress.com, check out the “Dashboard.”

Since I went off the grid I noticed a new “Tag Surfer” and “My Comments” features. Tag surfer is cool — it shows me posts other people have made using the same tags I use. Very likely that we’ll have content that’s similar to each other. I can add new tags too and subscribe to content from other Wordpress.com users.

Next to that is “My Comments.” It lists comment threads I’ve participated in. This is very interesting, but I wish I had the ability to pull out spam I see here. Some spam has gotten through Wordpress’ excellent filters (the best in the industry — by far) but it’s old, so pulling it out takes too many steps. For those who have no clue what I mean, if you are inside Wordpress there’s a “Manage” page, where I can look at my current comments. On that page I can kill spam with one click. It’s awesome. Makes it like playing a video game.

Some things. Both of these show that Wordpress.com is becoming a community. Spam, for instance, doesn’t look like that, but if I kill spam on my blog it’ll kill it on yours too (if I prove to be a good spam killer).

I don’t want to talk too much about how Matt is using the community to kill spam cause I’m scared that the spammers will get smarter as a result (they will anyway, but might as well not help them along the path they’ll find) but it is interesting what he’s doing.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks to the Wordpress folks. I’m definitely not regretting my decision tonight to join up.

It’ll be interesting to compare it to Windows Live Spaces and to Six Apart’s new Vox service (I’m getting tons of email from people joining that service so know it’s gaining in popularity very quickly).

But, the short of it is that Wordpress.com is going to pick up steam once new users see these features.

I came home to find 3,569 spams removed for me by Wordpress.com’s spam filter. It is so superior to other blog comment engines that I’ve tried it isn’t funny. At least in my own experiences. It’ll be interesting to watch how good Vox is.

How to get a top Technorati blogger to link to you?

Nice list of ways to get a top Technorati blogger to link to you. Be warned, though, it’ll piss off Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, who, at BlogHer, told us to please stop making lists. But, no need to beg for a link from a jerk like me who has gotten too self important to read all his email. No, just leave your URL in the comments here along with a good sentence explaining why your blog is worth checking out.

Or, you could always invite Maryam and me to speak at your conference like ConvergeSouth just did (October 13-14 in Greensboro, North Carolina).

Boiling (and freezing) in Yellowstone’s rivers

Click to Visit the Video’s page.

Ahh, the joys of owning a low-cost videocamera. Anyway, I bring you along to the Boiling River inside Yellowstone National Park. It’s an experience that I can’t quite explain to you other than to say my butt was freezing and my legs were burning when I shot this on my Sanyo Xacti HD1. Nice camera, by the way — stores videos on a SD card instead of tape, which makes it a lot easier to put up on Blip.TV, albeit the quality isn’t even close to the Sony. It’s also a lot smaller and a lot less expensive (about $700 at B&H).

On the video you’ll see Christian Long, CEO of DesignShare. He was a high-school teacher who now helps design schools around the world.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by scobleizer with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Xbox team opens up its platform (HDTV next?)

There are a few things I learned at Microsoft that required me to really bite my lip cause of my NDA. This is one of them. And, yes, Fred, I totally agree that this is a game changer.

But the thing I’m keeping my eye on is the fact that my Xbox brings me new videos every few hours.

Now THAT has the potential to change everything from ABC news on down to YouTube.

Why?

Did I mention that Comcast in Half Moon Bay (only a handful of miles from Silicon Valley) does NOT have HDTV yet on its cable lineup? Isn’t that lame?

But Comcast DOES bring Internet access to my Xbox 360. I smell a route-around here. Media Center and BitTorrent, here I come!

Oh, speaking of HDTV. We bought a couple of Sony HVRZ1U’s. They cost about $4,000 over on B&H. But I wasn’t prepared for how stunning an image they produce when hooked up to my 60-inch Sony TV. Wow. Almost as good as the Discovery Channel (most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless two images were put side-by-side).

I SSSSOOOOO want to show you the videos we did in Yellowstone. But all the video services like Google Video, Youtube, and Blip.TV compress the video all to heck to make it economical to distribute.

I wish the big video distribution networks would make HD capable by using something like RedSwoosh.

In the meantime, I gotta put my videos on Blip.TV.