Those Wordpress developers been building a community and the new Wordpress.com home page is really great.

I told Om Malik yesterday (I had lunch with him over on Pier 38 at TrueVentures’ offices — thanks to TrueVentures for the sushi, by the way!) that my reign at #1 is almost over. His “Web Worker Daily” was at the #2 spot yesterday, and I expect him to overtake my blog soon.

Speaking of Om, it’s his fifth blogging birthday today. Congrats Om, and can’t wait to see what else you’ll do. I notice the number of tabs along the top of Om’s page are increasing in number.

I also talked with Automattic’s CEO, Toni Schneider, yesterday (that’s the company that makes Wordpress) and he told me they are looking at ways to turn on advertising without encouraging spammers to join their service (they want to keep Wordpress.com as spam and splog-free as possible, which is one reason why they are keeping people from advertising).

It’s interesting that most people haven’t caught onto the community aspects of Wordpress.com. The new home page surfaces popular tags where you can taste some of the community aspects there. More stuff coming soon, Toni says.

Oh, and Microsoft has a new home page too today. How come no one sent me the “it’s new home page day” memo? Heheh.

Jeff Raikes covers a lot of territory in this interview with the Guardian’s Jack Schofield.

Don’t know who Jeff Raikes is? Think Microsoft Office.

Hey, where’s that “Office is dead” guy?

Over at Geek News Central Todd Cochrane asks an interesting question about yesterday’s Bill Gates Blogger Meetup. “It pisses me off that none of them could ask a hard question” he says, while asking what hard questions would you ask?

Truth is that getting access to tech industry leaders is so rare that most people, if they do get access, turn into softies. Why?

Well, let’s assume I paid your round-trip airfare, hotel, bought you nice meals, and gave you some nice swag. Wouldn’t you be feeling just a little more generous toward me? But, now, let’s say I set it up so that every year I’d do the same thing but I’d put little hints out there that you wouldn’t get to come to next year’s shindig if you made any trouble.

Or, even better, let’s say I just don’t invite any trouble makers at all.

I remember many times when troublemakers got washed out of many of these kinds of events. Not necessarily because they’d piss off Microsofties either. Often times they’d piss off other attendees. I know of one event that I am no longer invited to simply because I turned on my video camera, which made another attendee uncomfortable. The host, instead of just telling me to knock it off, stayed quiet, but didn’t invite me to his next shindig.

It’s also really hard to just keep your bearings when you meet someone “important.” Remember when I ran into Steve Jobs on a street corner in San Francisco? I became a blubbering idiot. Couldn’t think of a good question, or a good comeback to his insults. I’ve been thinking of them ever since.

Another part of it is simple respect. Bill Gates is at the top of the industry, is probably going to be known as the greatest philanthropist we’ve ever known, and is simply bigger than life to most of us who’ve never gotten to know him personally. It takes a lot of confidence to ask a tough question, particularly when you know that 14 other people are going to be making judgments on you in the public square.

And don’t think it’s a blogger thing, either. I’ve been in attendance at press conferences with Bill and most of the pros don’t ask all that hard a question.

Bill is a professional question answerer. He’s done it probably 10s of thousands of times. If you ask a really hard or biting question that he doesn’t want to answer he’s going to pretty adeptly spin it around on you anyway and answer a question he would rather answer.

The real interesting thing isn’t that hard questions weren’t asked. It was that Google is shipping a ton of little tiny things (you’ll see some in the interviews I did this week that I’ll have up within a few days) that are going unanswered by Microsoft.

See, some bloggers are excited that they get to go see Bill Gates. Done that, have that T-shirt. It’s a fun trip to make (hope you get invited back in April when they do Mix07).

But Google is delivering the Web goods and is taking over more and more of my life. More on that soon.

It’s important to present a balanced view of things. I guess that’s the journalist training. If you are hearing strong emotions going one way, try to find out the other side of the story. I don’t always do that and when I don’t, and I really am honest with myself, and go back and look at it later, my audience is always underserved. So, I’ve been looking for a positive view of Le Web. Hugh Macleod gave one. Thanks Hugh. That brings back memories of last year’s Le Blog conference.

Personally I agree with Hugh. The time for blogging conferences to end is here. I’m getting tired of them. Why? I rarely learn something new.

But there is something in the air. Spending a few hours at Google got me excited again. I’m playing with a Blogger blog just to play around away from public view.

I am playing with JavaScript and all the latest gadgets and gidgets and widgets and code (Mark Lucovsky hates calling them anything but code, by the way, cause he says looking at it any other way starts to limit your thinking. He pointed out that most gadgets on blogs are rectangular. He asked me “why do they need to do that?” Then he showed me lots of examples where code sprayed results into the page in a totally non-rectangular way. And the stuff he demoed on maps is cool. I’ll get that video up for Christmas so we can all spend Christmas break copying JavaScripts from each other and playing around.

I want to go to a conference that Mark Lucovsky plans. One where he just shows me tip after tip of things I could do on my blog with code.

Why is JavaScript interesting to me? Because I can go to a site like Google’s Code site, check out the samples, have it generate code for me, and copy and paste that code into my blog’s template.

If I start to get more advanced, I can even built a little gadget for Windows Vista’s sidebar. Or, build a gadget for inclusion in Goowy, Pageflakes, Live.com, MyYahoo, or a raft of other gadget hosts.

I’m seeing a TON of innovation hitting in this space. Even Microsoft, who is seen as behind in the Internet space, has something like 470 gadgets, most of which were created by folks in the community.

The recent Gadget conference planned by Niall Kennedy sold out, without much PR or marketing.

So, maybe it’s time for “Blogging 2007 Style.” Hint: it ain’t your standard old blog anymore.

Tris Hussey is now blogging for PodTech. More hires coming soon. We need that in the worst way. I’m uploading my PST file with all the blogging emails I’ve collected since I’ve left Microsoft. It’s already 118MB in size. Whew. Tris is a blogger I’ve been reading for years and I’ve appreciated his look at life and business. Welcome to Podtech Tris! Looking forward to working with you — there’s so much that deserves getting covered out there that isn’t. Can’t wait to see what Tris does.

On other PodTech news, over on the ScobleShow I have a video interview with SendMail’s founder, Eric Allman. SendMail is 25 years old and most of the world’s email is sent via SendMail servers. Fun talk about both the impact of email and the discoveries he’s made along the way, as well as what his company is working on now.

I agree with Chuq Von Rospach. Sites shouldn’t be forced to take advertising, even to give that money to a charity.

I don’t take advertising here, well, except if you count my Amazon link and my occassional mentioning of Seagate, which sponsors my video show.

Anyway, there’s a cost to advertising in clutter, in extra bits that the infrastructure needs to push out, and in reduced quality of experiences for users.

And, it’s a smart piece of business on the part of Craig’s List to try to be different. You get audiences that way. There’s other ways to make money from audiences than just putting a few ads on your site.

I’m very loyal to Craig’s List, cause he got me my job at NEC, which led to getting a job at Microsoft.

Ahh, lots of bloggers got invited to an all-expenses-paid shindig of some kind up at Microsoft. How do I know that? Cause Evan Williams posted such on his Twitter account.

Rael Dornfest, Mike Arrington, Molly Holtzschlag, are there, among others. Can we get a complete list?

By the way, our BlogHaus at CES will be open to ANY blogger, not just those “blessed” by Microsoft or some other company. You just need to have me put your name on the list so you can get up to our suite. My email is robertscoble@hotmail.com.

For those of you who can’t get an invite to stuff like this (me neither, so don’t worry) maybe you should watch JibJab’s Nuckin’ Futs video. Funny!

Ahh, the future of tech evangelism is Laura Foy doing her shtick for Microsoft’s On10 YouTube style (she works in the evangelism group, same group I worked in). Yeah, I missed the popularity of this video. But Jeff Sandquist was bragging about it at the wedding on Saturday night so I just had to check it out. I wish I had creative skillz. Then I could be popular on YouTube too!

It’s the small things that will cause your PR teams headaches.

I’m sure someone at Google thought it was OK to copy a page Yahoo did. Details on TechMeme, thanks to getting kicked off by Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny. Maybe even thought the page came from Microsoft. Hint, it didn’t.

It’s at the top of TechMeme. Is on second page of Digg. On first page of TailRank.

But it gets worse. The person doing the copying didn’t even copy the HTML very well. Not good. Especially for a company that prides itself on hiring PhD’s and keeping out idiots. Hey, one got through the hiring process.

But, so far, they are way too slow to react. Matt Cutts, who over the weekend, debunked a bunch of other things, has been silent. The Google Blog is silent too.

Here’s how I would have handled it.

1) Found out who did the page and get them to publicly apologize.
2) Buy the Yahoo team they copied pizza lunch and beer tomorrow. Even better, have a limo show up and take them to a nice steak dinner.
3) If #1 isn’t possible (it might be an outside vendor, I found at Microsoft that often was where stuff like this happened) then have someone like Matt or, even, a VP like Marissa, apologize on behalf of Google.
4) Explain that this isn’t acceptable Google behavior (evil, even) and that steps are being taken to keep it from happening again. Just by saying “that’s evil” will be good enough to tell all Google employees that this kind of thing won’t be tolerated in the future.

It’s the little things that define companies and Google is being defined right in front of us.

For my part? The folks I’ve dealt with at Google are ethical, straight shooters, who wouldn’t dream of copying someone else’s work. This has got to be ripping them up. Tough day ahead for Google PR. It’ll be interesting to see what they do, if anything.

Rex Dixon thinks it’s smart to copy. I can see his point — developers are “inspired” by others all the time. But sheer copying? No. It’s unethical, for one. For two, if you’re going to copy you better add some value. Hint: that means making sure your HTML and images are better than what you’re copying. Not worse.

UPDATED: Google has updated the site in question.

UPDATED 2: Matt Cutts of Google answers back. Note to self: don’t point out someone else is copying if you’re guilty of such transgressions yourself!

I’ve been looking over what I’ve been putting on my link blog trying to see trends that are happening. One thing I realize? No one has a lock anymore on being “the source” for Web 2.0 information. If you want a complete picture you need to subscribe to more than one feed. Yeah, reading TechCrunch will get you about 65% of the way there, but look at the numbers of interesting news, new products and services, opinions coming from other places.

I don’t know how we can keep up anymore. Just this weekend there were several new services added. I put dozens of new items on my link blog. It’s amazing the quality of blogging that’s being done in the tech industry — and there’s no way any one person (or company) could do it all.

While I was talking with Sanaz Ahari of Live.com, she was bragging that there’s hundreds of new gadgets available. 471, in fact. That’s just crazy and I haven’t even listed the ones available from Microsoft’s competitors like Goowy, Google, Netvibes, and others.

How will we keep up? How will any new company get adoption?

Either way, I’m sure enjoying reading feeds again. So you don’t have to.