SmugMug just released HD video player that really works great here. While other photo sharing sites have added video, they have tiny little videos that only are allowed to be 90 seconds. And people wonder why SmugMug has hundreds of thousands of people paying real money for its services? Here you see why.

Tomorrow afternoon we’ll be interviewing Xerox’ CTO at its Palo Alto Research Center. This will be my first visit to this famous center (they basically invented almost everything we use in our modern computers).

What would you like to know? Over on Twitter there’s a bunch of interesting questions already.

Steve Gillmor’s mind is quite a trip. You can see why on his post over on TechCrunch about Microsoft’s Mesh.

The only good excuse I’ve heard so far why Microsoft Mesh isn’t interesting is “I hate Microsoft.”

That’s a tough thing to overcome, but I thought Steve Gillmor was one of those who hated Microsoft too. After all, he bought a Mac and kept repeating on his blog “Office is dead.”

But, let’s translate Gillmor: Microsoft Mesh is fascinating. Agreed.

What do you think now that you’ve had a few days to check it out?

Heheh, I knew Twitter and FriendFeed was affecting my writing.

It’s weird to read the New York Times to find this article on Ansel Adams on the front page. What did we just do? We spent two days in Yosemite with Michael Adams, Ansel’s son, who spent the better part of two days showing us around.

I shot a TON of Qik/cell phone video with Michael. We also did a bunch of “pro” video with our expensive HD camcorders, those will be up soon as part of a new show for DSLR photographers that’ll be on FastCompany.tv. Titled “PhotoCycle.” We haven’t set a start date for that, yet, more on that later. A special thanks to Marc Silber (he’s the professional photographer who’ll host PhotoCycle) because he’s the one who did the work to arrange this trip.

Ansel Adams Gallery now has a blog, too. One reason I was there was to film Ansel Adams Gallery, which is one of America’s most beloved family businesses and has been operating in Yosemite Park for 102 years.

Thomas Hawk, my favorite photographer that I watch on Flickr, put up a single photo from the two days and it already has gotten 50 votes on Flickr as “favorite.” Getting a “favorite” on Flickr is really hard, and to get 50 for one photo of something as photographed as Half Dome is demonstrates Thomas’ skill and popularity as a photographer, it was a real treat to get to follow him as he made images in Yosemite.

One really big thrill for all of us? They opened the Glacier Point Road just for us. There wasn’t another soul in place for 13 miles of road. Totally amazing once-in-a-lifetime experience of Glacier Point. We also made our own history: we did the first cell phone live video from Glacier Point thanks to Qik. It’s amazing that we had a live audience around the world while filming these videos.

The New York Times had a separate article about Flickr. Here’s Thomas Hawk’s feedback about that (he was one of the photographers quoted in it).

So, why a Kodak moment? Well, Michael Adams told me that Ansel Adams did a lot of work for Kodak. He shot a few of the Colorama ads for Grand Central Station in New York. Did you know Kodak has a blog now? I like the Kodak blog a lot, it gives me some great ideas for photos.

Little known Scoble trivia: I used to help run a camera store, LZ Premiums (now long gone) in the 1980s and was responsible for buying all the Kodak film and darkroom supplies. I saw someone walking out of the Ansel Adams Gallery with a yellow box of Kodak printing paper and it took me back to the hours I spent in a darkroom and all the friends, photos, memories I made back then.

This was — by far — the most special two days I’ve had outside of getting married or watching my two sons being born. I told someone I would have traded my Davos trip (which was freaking awesome) for hanging out with Michael Adams for 24 hours. It was that good and I can’t wait to show you the videos and more of our photos. Thomas Hawk told me he’ll have his photos up soon, along with a writeup of the two days.

Now, go back and read the New York Times article, and listen to it come alive thanks to Qik videos done on my cell phone.

Michael Adams, Ansel Adams’ son, in front of the family business, the Ansel Adams’ Gallery.
The famous Tunnel View, where Ansel shot his famous Storm Clearing photo. In the video we meet a tourist who took a class from Ansel and he tells us about that experience. I talk with Thomas Hawk about this view, and we find some other things to shoot as well.
Video from a meadow shooting Yosemite Falls.
Half Dome from the Bridge. In a second video Michael Adams tells what a photo from this bridge meant to his mother.
You’ve seen the famous photo, Moon and Half Dome, here you see where to shoot it, and we talk about some of our experiences making new images there, but also hear Michael’s stories about the photo and what it meant to him (it was used on his wedding announcement).
Up at Glacier Point we had the whole place to ourselves, so I made a TON of video.
Glacier Point 1.
Glacier Point 2.
Glacier Point 3.
Glacier Point 4.
Glacier Point 5.
Glacier Point 6.

In the videos you’ll learn that Michael is an interesting innovator in his own right. He was a fighter pilot, then went to medical school and now teaches medicine while also keeping memories of his father’s work alive and well.

I don’t know how I’ll top this in my career. Hope you enjoy this as much as we did (and there’s a LOT more to come from this two-day experience).

I also put up a bunch of photos on my Flickr stream and I’m sure that Thomas Hawk will have a lot more of his own.

Zude invited me into the Web 2.0 Expo hall to see some new stuff that isn’t released yet. Damn, Zude is one of those things that you just need to keep playing with to get. They are letting you drag-and-drop all sorts of stuff from all sorts of places on the Web.

Think about building a mashup between Twitter, Facebook, Upcoming, Yelp, and other social networks. Now you’re starting to understand a little bit about how disruptive these guys are trying to be.

Of course, if you don’t think Zude is all that cool, I made a few videos at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. Here they are:

TripSay, a new site for vacationers.
My former boss, Lenn Pryor, who now is a VP at Nokia tells me about Nokia’s latest.
Moo’s CEO shows me the latest from the cool business card and printing people.
I get a neat tour of Blist, a cool Web-hosted database.
Amy Shuen, business school professor, talks to me about her new book on Web 2.0 strategy.
I get a look at Zloop, a new company that’s making a service for us to work together around projects. Part I, Part II/Demo.
Morfik showed me their new Web development tool, which builds rich internet applications.
DotHomes tells me about new real estate search engine.

Every time I walked into the Expo Hall yesterday I got pitched by PR people and couldn’t even get much passed the front door. So, when I got a chance, thanks to Zude, to sneak in after hours I couldn’t resist. What’s fun was Jeremy Mazner, PM on Microsoft’s Live Mesh team was still working there and we stopped to find out more about Microsoft Live Mesh. Of course, this is one time I can get a photo of the Google booth without being told off.

You probably won’t have a chance to visit CERN, where they are slowly turning on a new 27-kilometer-long particle collider called the Large Hadron Collider. Even if you could, they soon won’t give public tours down underneath into the collision chamber. So here MIT Physicist Frank Taylor gives us a tour. We’ll have the second part up next week.

This isn’t the sexiest video. It probably won’t make it onto Digg, but it will make you smarter about the science that’s going on that will probably dramatically change how we understand our world.

Along on this tour is famous science fiction author Bruce Sterling, who you can see in the background at about minute 5 and also Ben Segal, who was Tim Berners-Lee’s mentor when he invented the Web at CERN.

Microsoft’s fans are delivered to the promised land.

For three years now I’ve wondered “what is Ray Ozzie up to?” And with this announcement you see just why he’s Microsoft’s CTO. Yeah, there are about 100 smart people working on Microsoft’s new “Live Mesh” which was turned on tonight, but this is Ray’s coming out party, as much as anything.

It also gives key insights into how Microsoft is going to keep Windows relevant and keep us all from sliding into a Web that doesn’t rely much on the underlying operating system. Will Microsoft succeed in that? Well, they better otherwise we’re all very close to washing Microsoft out of our hair: forever.

It’s very hard to explain it all in a few words. It took 1.5 hours this morning for them to peel off the covers and show me all of Mesh’s feed goodness and start to explain what’s coming. What Mesh is today is mostly some end user functionality that looks like Plaxo Pulse done right, but if you stop right there and either get excited or dismiss it, you’ll miss the point entirely.

Yes, the synchronization features that most of you will notice when you start up the Live Mesh are pretty cool. Unfortunately they aren’t even close to being finished. Mac support? Coming in the future. Nokia support? Unclear. iPhone support? Ask Steve Jobs (translation: will be very limited due to Apple’s complete control of that platform). Firefox support? Yes! Linux support? What’s that?

When you start up the Mesh you get a desktop and you can build a new folder and you can drag stuff into that folder and share it. Simple enough. Then you can add a piece of software to each of your machines (XP or Vista right now only, Mac later this year) and that folder will be automatically synced.

But if you stop right there you’ll say “isn’t that like FolderShare?” Yes, it is.

Keep looking.

There’s a Window that has news generated by the sync system. Hmm, this looks vaguely familiar. Sorta like Facebook’s news feed. With a dash of Twitter thrown in. Funny that they showed me a prototype of how Twitter and Facebook items could be shoved in there. Oh!

Let’s keep looking.

There’s a way to wrap up Web sites into a sandbox’ed app and take them offline. Oh, cool.

So, what’s doing this? MOE!

The “Mesh Operating Environment.”

What does it have? An HTTP server (aka a Web server). That lets the Mesh run stuff that’s offline.

And MOE also has handlers for many wire formats including ATOM, JSON, FeedSync, RSS, WB-XML, and POX.

Now wait a second. This thing understands feeds underneath its covers! And it’s not just one way RSS the way, say, Google Reader treats RSS. It’s a new two-way system that both receives Atom (default) or RSS feeds from other MOE’s as well as sends them out to other MOEs.

And, everything has a URI so you can subscribe to everything in the system with, say, Google Reader. Hmmm. I wonder what Dave Winer will think about this system.

We haven’t even gotten into the developer SDK. They spent about an hour showing me how to build new kinds of syncable apps on top of the Mesh in a variety of tools.

Now you’re just getting a taste of how Microsoft is going to use the Mesh to stay relevant. It is bringing its developers onto the Internet in an interesting new way.

Is this ready for mom and dad to run? I’d wait, this needs some major testing and hashing out. But developers should absolutely take a look at this.

Several Microsofties pointed out that this is only a small portion of the Mesh strategy that’ll be revealed in October at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference.

TechCrunch’s initial post is now up, and that Microsoft will have several videos on its Channel 9 Website. UPDATE: Here’s the first with Ray Ozzie. Keep tuned to Twitter all night, cause we’ll discuss this in depth 140 characters at a time.

UPDATE: I didn’t even mention the identity system, er, social network underneath this.

UPDATE2: Mary Jo Foley has “10 things you need to know about Mesh.”

UPDATE3: It’s already on TechMeme, with tons of other info linked off of there.

UPDATE4: it’s fun to watch the news flow. Here’s a search for Microsoft Mesh on FriendFeed. Here’s one on TweetScan, which shows every Twitter message that mentions Microsoft Mesh. Here’s Google Blog Search, which shows all blogs that mention Microsoft Mesh.

UPDATE5: On10.net, another Microsoft video site, has a video demo that’s similar to the one I got today.

UPDATE6: the Mesh team has its own blog.

Jeff Sandquist already got things underway on Twitter.

I’m sure we’ll do some Qik videos tonight too to show off some of why I say this demonstrates Microsoft has a compelling Internet platform and strategy now.

Wow, my head is swimming — Microsoft’s Mesh is much bigger than I expected. I just got a look at Microsoft’s Mesh, but had to agree not to talk about it until 9 p.m. tonight. You’ll want to check in tonight. I hear Channel 9 will have a bunch of videos up about it. More to say at 9 p.m. Pacific Time tonight.

Later today Microsoft will bring out the Mesh. They are being pretty cagey about the details (I learn more at an 8 a.m. meeting, and from what it sounds like they will embargo everything until around 9 p.m. Pacific Time tonight.

So, what is it? Well, there certainly is lots of speculation on blogs. I’ll stay out of that business until I get a look for myself.

One thing I’ve heard is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming from Ray Ozzie’s team. Which is why Rocky and me are headed up to Seattle on June 10-12 (to get a closer look at Microsoft’s Internet strategies, and meet up with a bunch of startups).