It’s remarkable on my timing of quiting and joining a podcasting/videoblog company. One thing I hoped for was a breakthrough on distribution of large files. Why? Because of cost. Remember at Channel 9? Most of my video was about 200MB each. Some of my video had been downloaded 100,000 times or more. How much does it cost to distribute a gigabyte? About a $1. Let’s say you’re Google or MSN or Yahoo. Well, you probably get a killer rate, maybe about 1/10th that, but it still costs SOMETHING to get bits from my machines to yours.

Today Red Swoosh came to the rescue.

It will let me distribute large files to you for a far reduced cost. They claim free, but I’ll say “nearly free.”

I got an early looksie at RedSwoosh and it looks like Bittorrent for the rest of us. Easy to implement. Easy to use. Which isn’t always true of Bittorrent. And, first time visitors have a good experience (RedSwoosh has servers so that you’ll always be able to get files, even if you don’t have RedSwoosh loaded).

So, what’s the catch? Well, it’s an advertising supported network. Someone has to pay for the production of RedSwoosh and the initial servers that kickstart the system.

This is a big deal. TechCrunch has the details.

Thanks for asking great questions today. We had a great day here in the Scoble house. Had a nice goodbye party with tons of great people (we had just as many Google employees at the house today as attended Gnomedex yesterday). Lots of good New Orleans cookin! Anyone wanna come over and help eat it? The beer is still cold. Anyway, let’s get started.

BRAD ASKED: “What’s the one thing your most proud of about your time at MSoft, the one thing you might do differently, and the one thing you didn’t get to do but wanted to?”

MY ANSWER: Getting Steve Ballmer to change Microsoft’s support of a Washington State Gay Rights bill which led to its passing. That was probably the riskiest thing I did but I told my mom I’d look for ways to stand up for minorities in society and glad to help play a part in that. What might I do differently? I’m still sad I didn’t learn to program. I think it hurt my credibility with developers both inside and outside the company and I wish I had more skills. Even now I’m finding that I’m interested in learning more about how to build things rather than just mouth off about them. What was the one thing I wanted to do? I really wanted to go to China and India and see what Microsoft was doing there. I was planning a trip to India when I decided to change jobs. Hopefully I’ll still get to do something like that but it’ll be looking at Microsoft and other software companies from the outside rather than the inside.

BROOK ASKED: “What is Microsoft’s internal perception of what you did for them, and have the noticed a change in public perception?”

MY ANSWER: There are more than 60,000 employees at Microsoft and the perception would vary widely from employee to employee. Many employees (nay, most) still don’t know who I am or care what’s going on in the blogging world. But, today I had more than 100 people at my house, a large percentage of whom were Microsoft employees (including executives from Research and Audio) so I think that demonstrates the extraordinary love I’ve felt from most Microsoft employees that I’ve run into over the years. As to change in public perception. It’s hard to sense that, but in internal measurements I have seen show sizeable movements in our survey results. I really only cared about what customers thought anyway and I keep hearing that Microsoft is an easier company to deal with now than it was four years ago. Here’s another way to look at it: today you can go to Google, search “OneNote blog” and find Chris Pratley who runs the OneNote team. You can leave him a comment and tell him you think his product sucks. And you can see how he, and his team, reacts to that. To me that’s a huge change from how I used to help people in newsgroups before blogs.

STEVEN ASKS: “What can you tell us about RSS/OPML/XMLRPC and the internal opinions of Microsoft? (ie. Don’t care so much about RSS readers, dime a dozen)”

This is an area where we’ve seen Microsoft make huge adoptions. When I started at Microsoft three years ago they didn’t have RSS in any product. Now they have it in lots including Sharepoint, which is the intranet tool used by many many Fortune 100 companies. I can’t understate that enough. And, if I helped by saying that Microsoft product planners and marketers who didn’t support RSS should be fired then I’m very happy to have played my part. OPML is also supported by Outlook for inbound and outbound RSS feeds. I think you should watch what Ray Ozzie does in this area very closely. The stuff I saw before I left was astounding.

HE ALSO ASKS: “You switched to Wordpress because Matt added OPML support, do you still use Manilla, Frontier or the OPML Editor and are Microsoft doing anything at all within this realm?”

Sharepoint looks very close to Manila. I am still using the OPML Editor and will use it more in the future at PodTech.

RANDY ASKS: “Now for a tough question Robert. Do you think Windows is a drag on product teams, not a factor, or a benefit to other product teams? Explain.”

It’s both a drag and a benefit. First, the drags. Windows only ships once every two to five years (at least the consumer Windows like Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, and now Windows Vista). So, if a developer comes up with some killer new feature he or she needs to wait until the next version will ship. Features under development today won’t ship until 2008 or later. I know a lot of people who like working more on Windows Live technologies (like Virtual Earth) for just that reason — they can ship new features every few weeks and don’t need to wait for Windows to ship.

Benefit? Well, anything you put into Windows will be used by millions of people. Even a feature hidden deep inside a control panel will get massive usage. There aren’t many software projects in the world where you can say “my little tiny feature will get used by millions, or maybe hundreds of millions of people around the world.”

That said, I’d like to see Windows be a bit more agile in shipping out new features. I want a Media Player, for instance, that has podcasting support built in. How long are we going to have to wait?

BRIAN ASKS: “Is there a super-duper secret backhannel method for communicating directly to Bill Gates?”

Nope. He answers email sent from Microsoft employees to billg@microsoft.com (he answered a couple of mine directly which always thrilled me and other employees who got this treatment). Employees can also submit “ThinkWeek” papers directly to him. I spent some time looking through the ThinkWeek site (it’s open to every employee) and you can see BillG interacting with tons of different employees right there. So can any employee interact with him.

Oh, and customers can email him at the same address, but then it’s a little more likely that one of his assistants will answer it.

Getting into his office physically is a bit harder, but not impossible. The best way is to write a killer ThinkWeek paper about something that he wants to learn more about. Some of my writing was included in a paper written by Lili Cheng and a few other researchers and that turned into a 1.5-hour conversation about RSS and blogs. That turned into public statements by BillG and let to RSS being included in many projects throughout the company.

JEFFREY ASKS: “Who’s Mini?”

I don’t know. He says he met me once, though. The only guy I know who knows him is Jay Greene who is a journalist at BusinessWeek. I asked him to sell Mini out, but, of course, Jay refused. I’m sure Jay will be happy to confirm to anyone that Mini isn’t me, though. (I’ve been asked that more than once lately).

GEORG ASKS: “I’m from Austria and will be in October in San Francisco. Stupid question: Will there be something like a geek-dinner?”

I’ve been telling everyone that all you need to do is bring a bottle of wine and you are welcome at our new house in Half Moon Bay (we have a guest room and we love meeting bloggers, geeks, developers, interesting people). And, of course, we’ll have lots of fun events.

GABE ASKS: “Three things you would change at Microsoft?”

1) I would incubate more products outside of Microsoft for a longer period of time. What do I mean by that? Well, I’ve seen lots of things change this industry that were done by small teams of people. Xbox? Two people. .NET? A handful. Live.com? A handful. Or, look outside the company. How many people built my favorite TechMeme? One! The problem is that if any team develops something that’s cool it’s brought into the main mother ship very quickly now. That slows them down as they now need to deal with being dependent on other people and other teams. In fact watch what Google does. They keep teams separate which makes them look chaotic and not strategic but it lets them innovate longer before they get sucked into the “integration” phase. I’d also like to see teams forced to get some momentum on their own before being integrated into Office or Windows or Live.com. The MSN Spaces team, for instance, got so many users so fast that they needed to focus most of their energy the first year on infrastructure rather than features. If they hadn’t been integrated into MSN Messenger for another year maybe that would have forced the team to compete on the basis of sheer features instead of integration. But, keep in mind that I’m full of shit too and doing what I say might have really screwed up things. That’s what’s fun about business. No one really knows the right idea until after it’s been discovered, implemented, and customers chime in.

2) I would actually start a new company that’s designed to destroy the old one. Xerox got very close to doing that with Xerox PARC, but the executives weren’t able to pull the trigger. Imagine what our industry would have been like if the executives there HAD pulled the trigger?

3) I would put a single person in charge of naming and fire anyone who didn’t listen to the dictator. I’d do the same thing about corporate image. Same with conference planning. Same with advertising. Committees just suck the soul out of the best ideas. On the other hand, I would hate to be that person cause if you screwed up you’d have no one else to blame.

HE ALSO ASKS: “Three companies you would purchase and or merge with?”

I always wished we got along better with Sony. Some parts of Sony just make beautiful products. I used a Sony camcorder. I’m watching a Sony TV. It’s stunning. Jeff Sandquist loves his new tiny Vaio notebook. But, integrating Microsoft’s corporate cultures would be very difficult, and the DOJ would never allow the game divisions to exist in the same company.

SCOTT ASKS: “What didn’t Microsoft want you to blog about?”

The one thing I was asked to stay away from was legal issues. Mostly for my own protection. Executives told me stories about spending months away from home to spend time in courtrooms. They all say it was the worst experience of their lives and they didn’t wish that on their worst enemies.

JIM ASKS: “Does Ray Ozzie have what it takes to change the Microsoft macro development culture from cathedral to bazaar?”

Yes. I came very close to staying at Microsoft just because of Ray. I hope everyone gives him a chance.

CHRIS ASKS: “Why do people hate Microsoft?”

Because Microsoft has treated many companies and people poorly. I have lots of stories about that. Remember before I worked at Microsoft? Someone at Microsoft tried to get me fired from a job. I’ve talked with lots of journalists who feel that Microsoft just tries to control what they write and don’t talk with them like human beings.

But, there’s something deeper. It’s the same reason I hate the Yankees. We hate entities that are on top. Our culture loves to make people bigger than life and then rip them down. That culture is exactly why so many people read gossip magazines (or, in our industry, why ValleyWag is already so popular).

UMA ASKS: “So what are your thoughts about fixing the blogging mess at Microsoft (since now you can really speak your mind ?)”

If you think it’s a mess at Microsoft you should hear stories from other companies. Most other companies’ employees in the world aren’t allowed to blog at all. Personally I LOVE the mess. It creates opportunities for you! If you think it’s a mess, clean up something. Invite people out for coffee and see if you can work together with other people to make it better.

I keep bugging execs to blog, for instance. They’ll get a clue about the power of doing this sooner or later. If they don’t, they’ll be fired and then the “clued in” leaders will get a shot. Just stick around. That type of change in the corporate world is coming and coming fast. The audiences are just getting too connected. Look at how fast my story broke. All you need to do is tell 15 bloggers something and if it rings true it’ll get repeated around the world. That’s what gets executives fired.

That’s what I was trying to warn Steve Ballmer about. The fact that he isn’t talking with the grassroots IS getting noticed.

GERT ASKS: “f you had a good/huge say in the development of Windows Vista: what would be the first thing to be changed, added, …”

First of all, the best stuff I’ve seen is the small things. 1,000 small things put together make a great experience. Things that bug me? The small things. The UI that isn’t consistent across all apps and all Windows. Why is that? Because Microsoft internally is like a hundred companies all under the same roof. Those companies often have their own ideas about how things should be done. It comes out in the small things. And, conversely, when things enthrall you that’s probably where tons of small things were done well.

But, specifically? My computer doesn’t understand that I have different roles. Why does it look the same when I’m using Second Life as it does when I’m watching a movie or as it does when I’m editing my blog or when I’m working on a spreadsheet. My computer is stupid (keep in mind I’m using Maryam’s new MacBook Pro and it’s just as stupid). I’d like it to understand a lot more about the roles I’m in and bring me experiences (and files and apps) that match those roles. For instance, when I’m watching a movie, why doesn’t my Sidebar pull up a YouTube gadget that lets me watch more videos after my movie is done? It should recognize that I’m in a movie-watching, or entertainment role. When I’m working on a spreadsheet, that stuff should go away and I’d love to see things like Money, a calculator, financial tools, stock reports, and other stuff that’d be in a “money management” role. But, our computers are stupid.

Don’t even start thinking about Steve Gillmor’s “attention” ideas.

ALFRED ASKS: “Who is the person you most wanted to interview for Channel 9 but didn’t get to interview?”

David Cutler. He is more responsible for the kernel than anyone else but doesn’t give interviews anymore. I heard that he wants his work to speak for him, which I respect. But I’d still love to interview him cause those of us using Windows really are playing inside his ideas and that would be fascinating.

A ASKS: “What would you say is the biggest flaw at Microsoft?”

Its inability to see small things when those things are still small. Did Microsoft see RSS eight years ago? No. Did it see blogging five years ago? No. Did it see search eight years ago? No.

It’s the small things that’ll do a big company in.

JOHNNY ASKS: “Do you think Microsoft should have tried to be more international and less USA-national?”

That’s always a problem in the tech industry, but Microsoft actually is a leader here. Most products are released in 26 languages. One video I did that still is in the hopper on Channel 9 is one I did with the localization teams. Really great stuff they do. But, there’s more to do. Microsoft has offices all over the world, though, and that’s a huge strength that it has that it should use more.

CAROLUS ASKS: “Now that you are leaving, are you going to buy a Mac, and only run windows when you absolutely have to?”

Yes. I am buying a Mac. But I’m also buying another Tablet PC.

I will probably run Windows Vista on my Mac. I’m using Maryam’s new MacBook Pro right now and I still don’t like OSX as much as Vista. But, I know lots of people don’t agree with me there. Yes, I’ll use Windows Vista as my main OS. The latest builds are really looking great, although I’m still having problems with drivers here and there.

SHE ALSO ASKS: “When will Mac and Windows become one?”

Well, with Parallels and BootCamp, it’s getting closer. But, I doubt they’ll ever be totally one. There are too many APIs on each one that only work well natively. Rebuilding those so that they both would run together would be akin to tearing down New York and rebuilding it from scratch. Not gonna happen due to sheer economics. Not to mention that the people who built the buildings aren’t working in the industry anymore.

SEARCHENGINES ASKS: “1- http/xml ultimately became known as AJAX last year - and took off - why did microsoft not attempt to promote the technology and publicize it.”

Whenever you ask a question like this you need to realize that Microsoft is a business. Now, phrase the question again: “what would the business value be of publicizing a marketing term like AJAX?” I don’t see any. What do you see? I think Microsoft is completely happy simply to employ Scott Isaacs and other geeks who developed the core technology underneath AJAX.

SEARCHENGINES ALSO ASKS: “MSN search engine only became a unique engine last year - why did Microsoft go YEARS without attempting to create an individual search engine.”

Because it didn’t look like search was going to be a big business. Google, in fact, almost went out of business. The other day I met a guy who worked at Exodus and told me that Google almost was closed down because it couldn’t pay its bills. It wasn’t until AdSense came along that Microsoft woke up to the fact that there was a business there.

Google was a small thing that Microsoft missed.

JACK ASKS: “Do you have a non-disclosure agreement with MS?, if there isn’t, will you join Google instead of PodTech?”

Yes, I do. But, I think what you are really asking is about a non-compete agreement. I think I have one of those too.

I’m not going to Google and doubt I would. Although if they want to offer me millions of dollars I sure would listen! Heheh.

JACK ASKS: “How should Microsoft view its competition-should it focus on the bigger competitors or the smaller ones?”

If you are building music stars, can you build them by copying Elvis or the Beattles? No.

Microsoft should focus on doing interesting things with software that help humans. If it does that, it’ll thrive for a long long time. If it just copies its competitors it’ll find that it’ll be increasingly difficult to hire the smartest people. Which will cause them to go into a death spiral. Smart people want to build innovative new things. They don’t want to copy what someone else does.

Hey, look at maps. No need to copy. None of the big companies has let me put reviews on addresses on maps. Wake me up when the innovation is done!

Translation: focus on doing things to help people live their lives and the rest of it will take care of themselves. That said, do watch what your competitors are doing to see if they learned something you didn’t see.

BRETT ASKS: “The actual number isn’t important but I wanted to know if there *was* a number that would have kept you at Microsoft? Did Microsoft ever ask you, “What would it take to keep you?” or were you leaving regardless of what they could have done?”

I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m sure that there’s a number that would have gotten me to stay for a while longer. But, I don’t believe that really would have mattered long term.

I’m a guy who likes taking risks and trying new things. As my mom was dying I realized I just wanted to shake my life up a lot and try something dramatically new/different. Having failure on the table again as a possiblity was a bit part of my decision. Oh, and getting rid of our twice-a-month commute down to California to see Patrick.

RONPIH ASKS: “Why did you decide to take a job at Microsoft?”

Because it is a company I admired and wanted to learn more about. And, because an executive bought a Tablet PC and was so passionate about gadgets that we’d have interesting conversations. Then he started reading my blog and asked if I’d be interested in joining the evangelism group.

Having someone show some interest in me and my career was intoxicating and exciting.

RONPIH ALSO ASKS: “What, if anything, changed your perceptions of the reasons you decided to take a job at Microsoft in the time you worked there?”

My reasons were only strengthened. It is — by far — the most interesting company in the world right now. Google seems sexier, but does Google have a research division? Does it have an Xbox team? Does it do everything from mice to Hotmail? No. Microsoft stands alone in my mind. It also is the most interesting organization of humans that I can think of. Despite its flaws it still builds the software that most of us use everyday.

RONPIH ALSO ASKS: “What obstacles did you encounter that made your job more difficult than it had to be?”

That’s a hard one to answer. I didn’t hit a lot of the stuff you might expect. Yeah, PR at the beginning gave the Channel 9 team a bit of trouble but we won them over.

I think that if there’s a thing that made my job more difficult it was the constant and increasing email load. I wish I had the temerity to ask for help with that.

RONPIH AGAIN: “What made you consider an offer from another company?”

I helped write the offer. So, of course I was interested in it!

I covered this already in blog posts before. 1) I saw a dramatic new user model developing (content for portable devices and computers) and I wanted to try some new ideas I had. 2) I wanted to be back down in the Bay Area to be closer to our families. 3) I liked John Furrier and believed in him. 4) The team he was building was top-notch and interesting. 5) There was a considerable potential reward for the risk I was taking (I was trading in the best job in the industry for something unknown and that had the potential of failure).

RONPIH: “Would you consider working at Microsoft again in the future?”

Absolutely.

RONPIH: “What advice would you give to your successor?”

Be yourself. Don’t try to be my successor. I don’t wish that on anyone. Could Elvis copy the Beattles? No.

Build relationships with as many people as you can. Listen to feedback, particularly the harsh stuff (lots of geeks don’t like it when they are told off, instead, assume that they are right and you are wrong).

RICHARD ASKS: “What really happened to Longhorn? It was such an ambitious and groundbreaking product around PDC 2003. Vista is NOT Longhorn!”

Huh? Name one thing that Longhorn would have let you do that Vista doesn’t let you do.

DMAD ASKS: “Why did you keep whining about your less than $100,000/yr salary? Do you were fairly compensated
for carrying around a camera and interviewing people that actually worked on products that were intended to make money for the company?”

Because I was getting offers for more that I kept turning down. My value to the company had gone way behind just “carrying around a camera.” Demonstrates that you have no clue about what I actually did. One example? I spoke at Google to Google’s best customers and they gave me a better rating than 98% of the other speakers. Is that valueable? You betcha and companies were willing to pay for that. Why do you think that Steve Jobs is worth billions? Most of what he does is communicate with other people.

JAWAHAR ASKS: “Will you revive “talkingmoose” ?”

Hmmm, that might be fun, but I really don’t think a character blog or an anonymous blog is the best use of my time.

ENZO ASKS: “For the upcoming generations, like those whom have just graduated from college or high school, would you recommend working at Microsoft? Or would you suggest anywhere else?”

I can’t answer that. For some people I’d definitely recommend working at Microsoft. For others a startup might be more appropriate. It depends on what you’re trying to do. For instance, Emre, who works in Research, just came to Microsoft from Stanford. He said he considered startups and other big companies and no other company he researched was doing as much interesting work as Microsoft was doing.

Thank you Werner Vogels!

By kicking our behinds when we visited Amazon for a book reading an executive review on corporate blogging, he taught us a valuable lesson: "always be prepared."

So, this week when we spoke to BA Venture Partners (one of Silicon Valley's most powerful venture capital firms, the "BA" stands for "Bank of America" which is one of the world's largest banks) we were prepared with all the ROI answers that came up. Not only were BA Venture Partners there, but a bunch of CEOs and other Entrepreneurs were there too. They recorded it and we won over some very tough customers. Hopefully they'll have the recording out as a podcast soon.

Meeting Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life, at that talk, was a major "cool meeting" for me. Next week I'm gonna spend a lot of time in Second Life helping my son, Patrick, build out his house, so it was good to have a conversation about where Second Life is going. Can you imagine a world where your blog or RSS feed will be painted on any 3D object? Philip can. And is. I told Philip about Eric Rice's new record label in Second Life.

But, mostly, this past week was about change.

Some things I've changed? 1) No more coffee. 2) No more soda. 3) Xercising. 4) No more unhappy people in my life. 5) Get balance back in my own life.

Thanks to all the interesting people I've had conversations with this week. More than 100 people by last count. Some, who, Gent Hito, showed me some killer technology (it's called RSSBus, and takes RSS into places I never really thought about. In other words, things that aren't blogs or news feeds. If you're a developer you should get a demo from Gent).

One of my most memeorable conversations, though, was with Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords and a good friend. He told me to hang around people who are happy. And I realized I had been listening to too many people who were deeply unhappy and not bringing any value into my life. He told me to listen to this recording on NPR about "finding happiness in a Harvard Classroom." He also told me about the four agreements, which are Don Miguel Ruiz's code for life. Good stuff.

It was that moment that I decided to moderate my comments here. Yes, I am now approving every comment here. And I will delete any that don't add value to either my life or the lives of my readers.

This is a huge change for me. I wanted a free speech area, but after having a week off I realize that I need to make a change. That, I'm sure, will lead to attacks of "censorship" and all that hooey. Too bad. I'm instituting a "family room" rule here. If I don't like it, it gets deleted and deleted without warning — just the same as if you said something abusive in my family room I'd kick you out of my house. If you don't like that new rule, there are plenty of other places on the Internet to write your thoughts. Start a blog and link here. Etc. Etc.

Anyway, another conversation that I had on Monday, with Bubba Murarka, lead program manager on the Windows Live search team, led me to say to him "why don't you guest blog my blog next week?" He said "yes" so starting tomorrow he'll be guest blogging here.

Now, that might sound strange, but Bubba is one of those guys who is a connector. Everyone I know loves him. He works at our campus in Silicon Valley and was one of the first Microsoft employees to buy a MacBook and put Windows on it. Translation? He likes trying new things and is someone I trust and feel good around.

His attitude is life changing.

Plus, he knows a lot about the tech industry. He can tell you how many shares of stock you'll likely get offered at Google, for instance, if you're gonna take a new job there. And he has not only a new MacBook, but a new Lenovo T60 that he says is a "rocking machine" on his desk too. And, he's one of those guys who ships software. He was on the desktop search team. When I visited him he was showing me some software that blew my mind, too. I doubt he'll tell you about that, but, that gets to the other part of my philosophy.

Help developers ship great software. Bubba has, so he's earned his way onto my blog.

See ya April 23!

Oh, and if that wasn't a good enough post for you? Here's some quickies:

Steve Rubel, senior vice president at Edelman, had dinner with me on Monday night and gave me a bunch of fun stuff (these are his favorite sites):

Ask a Ninja is Hillarious!
Hop Stop is a cool guide for city travelers, not many cities, yet, but shows off public transit. Here's the Hop Stop for San Francisco, for instance.
With Meebo, a Web 2.0 Instant Messaging service, you can sign into four accounts at once.
Want to see if there's a domain available on the Web? Instant Domain Search rocks for that.
Want to see popular sites in the Del.icio.us service (which lets people share their favorite Web sites) then use Populicio.us.
Or, maybe you want to see what a combination of Digg, Slashdot, or Del.icio.us looks like? Well, that would be Diggdot.
PopURLS is his favorite aggregation site. Shows off popular news from popular sites. This rocks.
Steve was praising NewsVine, which is a news site that combines news from both pros and amateurs.
The memetrackers that Steve uses include Memeorandum/Tech, TailRank, but also include Cloudee, a site I hadn't tried before. I've been using that and it's a good way to find what people are talking about too.

From elsewhere in my email and/or aggregator:

Orrin, of itsjerrytime.com, wrote to thank me for being the first site to link to their funny animations. He was proud that they were nominated for the first Internet Emmy's. That so rocks! Orrin and Jerry, you're welcome in my living room anytime! I watch your stuff anytime I need a smile!

Sarah in Tampa says to check out this unbelieveable geeked-out office. Oh, that's Larry Larsen's office and it made me drool. You might need to open this URL: http://www.greenjem.com/office/Cribs.wmv in Windows Media Player to see the video.

Allen Bush, of Sharpcast, gave me a demo of their new photo organization tool. It rocks. Instantly synchs your photos among multiple devices, multiple platforms, and multiple browsers. Not sure it's good enough for normal people, but there's a direction here that I really like. They blog too.

This week I'll be on stage with Matt Cutts of Google and Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo (we're doing a keynote at the Webmaster World conference) and to help me prepare Andy Edmonds of the Windows Live Search team (we gotta get you a shorter and cooler name Andy if you're gonna compete with "Google" and "Yahoo") put together a demo of their new macro language.

Do you lend stuff to your friends? BillMonk lets you keep track of who's borrowing and not giving back.

Technology Rock Stars are hiring on here at Microsoft at a rapid pace, Ken Levy notices.

Wow, every attendee at the TED Conference (about 1,000) got a free copy of our book, Naked Conversations. That's a huge honor.

Do you know who this is? It's the 12-year-old daughter of Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr. She's doing a cooking video blog called "BiancaVision." That rocks! Do you know of other kids of geeks who are doing podcasts or video blogs?

Speaking of Jeff Barr, he's built a master list of ways to put RSS feeds on Web pages.

And speaking of video blogs, there's a Vloggercon coming up June 10 and 11 in San Francisco.

I heard some other company announced a calendaring service this week. Oh, OK, it was Google with its calendar. But did you check out Kiko too? They have a bunch of things that Google doesn't do like it can send alerts via any IM and lets you get RSS feeds off of your appointments. But, does it really have a hope of competing against the big guys? As I watch people use calendars, I sense that they are swimming upstream. As Steve Gillmor said in his podcast with Mike Arrington the other day, he wants Google and everything else can go to heck. What I thought was fun was here at Microsoft employees were sending around instructions on how to get Office 2007 to work with Google Calendar.

Greg Hughes is not just my brother's boss, but he's a security expert too, and he wrote a good blog on phishing scams and asks can it really be stopped? IE 7 is gonna try Greg, but it will be interesting to see the new anti-phishing technology will change the game.

The next London Girl Geek dinner is coming up on April 24. Some of my coworkers will be there.

Microsoft this week shipped Academic Search, so of course I read Gary Price for his reactions. Gary's a librarian. A search expert. And very influential.

Think the Easter Bunny hates you? He just might! (video).

Are you a TWiT'er? There's a LOT of geeks who are. I was getting emails and IM's all week after being on the show on Sunday.

And with that I'm off for another week of Xbox playing. Oh, regarding Xbox, my readers warned me not to let Maryam play Zuma. They were right. She's addicted. Even is waking up early now to play Zuma. And what do I mean by "Xercising?" Well, you get on your exercise equipment and start playing Xbox. Chris Pirillo lost 15 lbs by doing that. I find I can play half an hour of Geometry Wars while Xercising. Heheh, and I see the "Get Naked" meme continues with Xbox Live team member Larry Hryb being challenged to a fun video game of "how well do you know your Xbox?" Heheh! Larry's such a good sport.

Oh, and thanks to Hugh Macleod for the continued wonderful cartoons on your blog. Thanks for letting me borrow one for this post. They make me smile. And that's really all that matters, isn't it?

Guy Kawasaki gives some great advice to those of us who work in companies “how to prevent a bozo explosion.”

#9 got a little close to home. *

Anyway, one thing that I will always appreciate about Bill Gates is that he lets me walk around Microsoft with a camcorder so I get to study one of the world’s best businesses from inside (how many business school graduates get to do that?).

And, even better, I get to meet a LOT of people from a lot of different businesses, so have collected a few of my own rules about bozo explosions.

There are a few other things I’d add to Guy’s list after studying the problem in detail:

#15: If you are a software developer and if you spend more time in meetings than writing code you might be in a bozo explosion.
#16: If the first question out of your manager’s mouth is “can this be monetized?” you might be in a bozo explosion.
#17: If the name for your product is something like “Contosa Bozo Exploder 2006” you might be in a bozo explosion.
#17B: If your product’s box has 45% more text on it than an iPod box, you might be in a bozo explosion.
#18: If, when an employee comes up with a new idea the answer back is an email with the words “business value” repeated 13 times you might be in a bozo explosion.
#19: If, when you ask a business leader “what’s your philosophy?” and they answer “huh?” well, then, you might be in a bozo explosion.
#20: If more than three people have to be consulted to spend less than $100 million to acquire a company, or build something new, then you might be in a bozo explosion. (Committeeism guarantees slowness, lack of philosophy, and lack of creativity).
#21: If your marketing team can change the spec after the development team has started development, you might be in a bozo explosion. (Or, if your development team doesn’t communicate well, or listen to, the marketing team you might be in a bozo explosion).
#22: If your company forces you to work computers built in 1999, you might be in a bozo explosion (you do realize that having two monitors has been shown by several studies to make people up to 15% more productive, right? Are you working on two or more monitors yet? I keep visiting lots of companies and am suprised to see how many companies force their workers to use small, low-resolution, single monitor setups. They are literally throwing 5% productivity down the drain. For what? A $1,000 per worker savings? It gets worse when we’re talking about software developers who have to wait minutes for their companies’ code to compile (I’ve seen so many horror stories here it isn’t funny).
#23: If your best employees leave you might be in a bozo explosion.
#24: If you’re not allowed to write on your blog that you are in the middle of a bozo explosion you might be in the middle of a bozo explosion (hint: we don’t have such a rule at Microsoft).
But, back to #9. You knew I couldn’t resist, couldn’t you? Well, I personally think that a major company (IE, one with more than 1,000 employees) that only has ONE paid blogger IS potentially a bozo factory. I personally believe every employee should blog. But, then, I’m an edge case.

The asterisk is because my employee review goals show that I’m not paid to “only blog.” I’m facing 197 emails tonight (many of which don’t have anything to do with blogging). Tomorrow I’m going to Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York to speak. And, really, my “day job” is to do videos for Channel 9 anyway. I don’t look at that as blogging. Most of my blogging is done at nights and on weekends, so Microsoft gets blogging mostly for free. Who’s the bozo here?

How can you get out of being in a bozo factory? I’m seeing some best practices:

1) Stop having meetings. Put a 23-year-old in charge and let her ship and get out of her way. At Microsoft that’s Sanaz Ahari (and Scott Isaacs and a few others who are just kicking butt). Or, have a “meeting dictator.” At Amazon Jeff Bezos is famous for coming into meetings and challenging the team who organized the meeting “give me the three reasons why we’re having a meeting.” If they can’t answer, he leaves. Hint: it isn’t good when Jeff Bezos leaves your meeting like that.
2) Have your development team over for Xbox and pizza instead of keeping them locked in their offices during ship nights. I watched Jeff Sandquist do this and his team has done magical stuff in just a few weeks. (You’ll see their work real soon now, it blew me away when I saw it last week. It’s amazing what three developers can do in less than a month).
3) Tell your development team to do something better than the competition. Anything. And then fund it. Expect it. I’ve been watching the Virtual Earth team under Steve Lombardi and have been impressed.
4) Listen to your blog’s commenters, even if it hurts. The IE team hasn’t had the public corner turn yet, but those guys respond to every customer’s request I’ve been getting. Often within minutes (you should see the email I get and pass along). At some point that’s gonna mean they get a killer new feature that you weren’t expecting. I remember one post they had had about 1,000 comments. Or visit the IE wiki. That was started by customers. Not done by a Microsoft employee and it’s watched often by the team.
5) If your team blogs, even when it has no customers, or worse, is derided by the community, you’re on your way off of the bozo explosion. Something interesting happens when you have a conversation with people about what they want. It focuses meetings and gets things going.
6) Get great competitors. Seriously. Stuck in a bozo explosion? Watch what happens when your competitors get rid of their bozos. Everyone notices and that pushes management into action. If they don’t, then you really know you’re on a bozo explosion and that’s a good opportunity to leave.
7) Keep people from changing the spec. A few teams at Microsoft are developing by using scrum (an agile development process where you lock down the requirements for a month and keep people from changing them while you “sprint” to complete that work) and are seeing great results. One manager told me this transformed how they worked and got stuff done.
Reward good work. Publicly. With cash. Nothing will get more good people to want to join your team. Nothing.

How do you know you’re in a Bozo explosion? Have you been in a company that successfully has gotten out of it?