There’s a new conference coming March 23: Under the Radar | Why Office 2.0 Matters.

I’m seeing all sorts of new products and startups in this space. Everyone wants to bite off a little bit of Microsoft’s lunch here and it’s making for an interesting space to watch and participate in.

These folks just announced that 26 companies are coming to this one. If there’s anything that’s going to disrupt Microsoft’s Office business it probably will be at this show.

Funny enough, Microsoft is a sponsor of the organization that’s putting this on. I wonder if they are going to make moves into the online Office space before they get totally disrupted.

Ray Ozzie, where are you?

Nick Hodge reports that Mike Arrington, of TechCrunch, will interview Ray Ozzie on stage at Mix07. I’ve verified with a contact at Microsoft that that’s true. Oh, and Dave Winer is going. Me too. Although I’m not going to be on stage. I’ll be out in the lobby looking to scoop Mike, like I did when I got a video “lobby” demo of UrbanSeeder.

Why out in the lobby? All the coolest stuff happens in the lobby. I bet even Ray’s stuff will look cooler out in the lobby than on stage.

I’ll be in Seattle on Wednesday and Thursday. Maybe I’ll camp out in Ray’s lobby until he gives me an interview. Heheh. Hey, it worked for that kid at Google. Why not for me at Microsoft?

Today Jon Udell is showing you how to blog from Word 2007.

Yes, my Google Reader is working again (it was a munged up Firefox cache or something).

But, anyway, this is something I’ve noticed since leaving Microsoft. When you’re up at Microsoft all you think about is how to work with Microsoft stuff. Conversations like the one Jon is participating in seem normal and commonplace.

Then you get out of Redmond and the conversations are very different. I’ve never had someone ask me how to blog from Word outside of Redmond.

Their heart is in the right place, though. There are hundreds of millions of Word users (I saw some in a Starbucks in Geneva, Switzerland, and I see them everytime I travel on planes). So, how do you get those people to see that they can post stuff right from Word into blog tools like Wordpress?

Jon Udell will be there if they show up.

The problem is that Jon uses a language that most normal people don’t. He is writing for us, the geeks, the developers, the passionate computer users who know more than how to turn the thing on.

And if he’s talking to us, the geeks, I don’t think his message will fall on listening ears.

What do you think?

OK, OK, I’m partly at fault here. But, hear me out.

Last year at Gnomedex I had my son demonstrate Second Life up on stage while I was hosting a panel discussion. Someone from Linden Labs (the folks who make Second Life), Beth Goza (she now works at Microsoft), saw that, and told me and my son to knock it off. People under 18 aren’t allowed in Second Life.

So, what did I do? I just told Patrick never to go into Second Life and I didn’t go back into Second Life either.

Problem was, my credit card was being charged $9.95 per month by Linden Labs. I didn’t bother stopping it cause I thought I’d go back at some point.

Well, I just tried to get back into Second Life to cancel my credit card. Problem is, I can’t get in. Someone changed my password.

The other problem? I can’t get my password. I think I signed on with my Microsoft address.

I hate how hard it is to cancel accounts like these. Companies are perfectly willing to charge you forever, even if you don’t use the service one bit.

I think I’ll just call my credit card company and change my card number by saying I lost my card.

Sigh.

UPDATE: I guess banging on Second Life is in vogue this weekend. Valleywag did it too and has tons of comments.

Alfred Thompson taught high school computer science for eight years and done other academic-related work (he now is in such a role at Microsoft).

I knew he’d have something to say about Steve Jobs’ advice for the school system and he didn’t disappoint. I don’t even mind the little “leave this to an expert” barb in his post aimed at me. He’s right, which is why you should read his post.

One of the best database minds in the world is still missing and his family has called off the search. We’re missing a great San Franciscan and my thoughts are with his family and friends and coworkers at Microsoft.

I met with Aaron Stanton yesterday, who is visiting the San Francisco Bay Area with the goal of getting Google to build his idea (his home is in Idaho, and this is the first time he’s been to SF/Silicon Valley since he was younger and visited with his parents). I see Mathew Ingram is asking “now what?”

Trouble is Aaron signed an agreement not to talk further about the process on his Web site, or with anyone in the media (including me). So, now we won’t hear much more. I guess if he says he’s a Google employee we’ll know how the story turned out, but I doubt he’ll know such a thing this week.

I found Aaron to be interesting and smart, but I wasn’t able to learn what his idea was because of the agreement. He told me he wanted to stick to his goal: getting Google to use the idea (which, he admitted, was actually a combination of three ideas that he’d written a prototype for, and prepared a presentation about). Not to make his Web site popular (he was quite surprised at how popular it had gotten, in such a short period of time. That didn’t surprise me, though. The word-of-mouth network is quite efficient now and ideas spread fast). Funny enough he said most of his early traffic came from within Google and after that it got on Digg and TechMeme and other popular blogs, which brought waves of traffic.

That’s typical too. If one guy in a big company finds something interesting they email it around and you can get thousands of visits in an hour. I remember one time when I emailed something around one of the bigger lists at Microsoft and the blog owner asked me what the heck was going on, cause he had gotten 2,000 visits in a few minutes. Turns out big company employees are email happy and click on links in email at a ferocious rate.

Anyway, Aaron said his trip had already succeeded and that he was going to stick around a few more days and see Silicon Valley’s sights (I told him to visit the Computer History Museum before he goes home, especially since that’s only a couple of miles from Google’s campus). Oh, and he also told me he’s been working on the idea for several years, and that Google is best positioned to make his idea happen (he’s considered going the venture capital route, but that Google with its massive new data centers is able to take advantage of the idea right now, vs. a few years from now).

Actually, that’s the best reason to go to work for a big company. IF you can get them to implement your idea (not easy at all, as I covered yesterday) your idea will get resources that a smaller company can only dream about (and most VC’s won’t be willing to fund).

More links on this over on TechMeme.

One thing I try to teach Patrick, my 13-year-old son, is that he can make his dreams happen. That’s why today I’m taking him to the San Francisco Apple store. No, dummy, not to check out the latest Macs or iPods, but to meet Aaron Stanton.

Who’s he? Well, he thinks he has a good idea for Google. So, he flew to Mountain View and hung out in Google’s lobby until someone would talk with him.

I thought it was a brilliant idea. No, not his tech/business idea. I have no idea what it is. But the idea of using both this Website and his strategy for getting heard.

By the way, lawyers tell employees at big companies not to listen to unsolicited ideas. Why? Well, if the company ends up doing the idea it’ll end up with legal exposure. I’ve heard of lots of stories of employees already working on a similar idea anyway.

One question I have is: if the idea is so good, why not just visit Sand Hill Road instead and get a company funded based on it? Big companies (even ones like Google) will rarely execute on totally novel new ideas.

Why? Committees and not invented here syndrome. If you talk with 10 random smart people about an idea, at least one of them will say it’s impossible. I want you to watch the interview with Ben Segal at CERN again and again until you get this. He told me that if he had thought of doing Internet search back in 1992, he would have dismissed the idea of “impossible.”

I want you to think about that. Here’s one of the smartest guys in the world. And he thought something was impossible that clearly wasn’t. He would have dismissed that idea.

Now, Google is full of smart guys like Ben. Your idea doesn’t have a chance there.

Instead, go get some money, hire a couple of smart programmers who are looking to build something “impossible” and make a company happen. Then, get bought by Google after it realizes that it’ll miss out on a new market if it doesn’t get in (or that Microsoft could pick up some marketshare on its back).

In the past month I’ve gotten a lot of people doing the metaphorical equivilent of yelling and screaming at me, so it’s nice when I get some compliments too. Here’s a couple:

Adnans Sysadmin Blog:

“Perhaps its Scoble’s enthusiasm or passion, or his really loud and excited laugh. But ever since Scoble left channel 9, I haven’t been able to watch more than five minutes of a channel 9 video. Perhaps it was how the camera was always moving, looking at the screen, following the conversation. I keep clicking on the channel9 videos, as they show up on techmeme, but it just isn’t fun any more.

On the other hand, every scobleshow video is watched completely. Take this scobleshow video for instance.”

Loren Feldman:

“I was looking around Podtech and I came across this from Scoble. I watched the whole thing! No kidding. I’m a huge Hugh fan, and the whole thing was awesome. I know I’m alone in this but I like Scoble’s laugh he’s having such a good time it seems. “

One interesting thing is that the video tour of CERN hasn’t gotten any comments at all. It’s really sad that historical videos don’t get as much traffic (I’ve noticed this trend before — my previous tour of the Computer History Museum got a lot less traffic and comments than other videos I’d done, even though it was done by one of the greats in our field, Gordon Bell).

What’s important of the tour of CERN? It was done by the guy who freaking pushed for TCP/IP. Without him the Web wouldn’t have happened at CERN and we wouldn’t have known Tim Berners-Lee. Not to mention the work that CERN is about to embark on will have a bigger impact on what we know about the world universe everything than anything Google, or Microsoft, or any Web 2.0 company will do over the next four years.

Raymond Chen is one of the smartest developers at Microsoft and he writes a blog which is one of the most popular at Microsoft (if not THE most popular). He writes about why Windows does weird things. Anyway, the 15-year-old Indian wunderkind Yuvi puts his analysis tool to the test again, this time on Raymond’s blog. Finds that most of Raymond’s posts are made at 7 a.m. He theorizes that Raymond is actually a bot and that there’s no human there. Well, I know Raymond (his new book is quite excellent, by the way) and I know that Raymond just programmed his blog tool to post a post on his behalf every day (he writes and batches them up). Not quite interactive, but fine for someone who is trying to share his knowledge with the world.