I’ve been instead dozens of corporate headquarters. Interviewed hundreds of executives. But Rackspace is now at the top of my list of favorite companies. Here’s a tour of their new headquarters. They are turning a mall into a data center. Really great stories.

Later today Shel Israel has an interview with General Motors’ CEO that’s quite interesting too.

My plane is loading, so next time I write you I’ll be in Israel.

I’m off to Israel to interview a bunch of companies and geeks there. Sorry for the slow blogging, I’ve been having too much fun on Twitter and on FriendFeed. A lot of you have been writing saying that you miss the longer, more thoughtful Scoble so I’ll work on that this next week from Israel. My blog’s redesign will turn on the week I get back, too, on the 21st or so. Over on FastCompany.tv we’ll have the first part of an interesting look into Rackspace up today. Watch my Qik channel for video dispatches from Israel when I can get on wifi. First stop in Israel? The Kinnernet event which is hosted by Yossi Vardi.

Some things I’m thinking about?

1. The Friend Divide. Much of the new Web 2.0 software really is lame until you get at least 50 friends onto it. What does that mean and how do we make the first experience people have much better (it really sucks, you should sign up for all these new services with a clean account and compare to when you have a bunch of friends). Have we created a new, nasty, world where if you don’t have friends you simply won’t have access to interesting experiences or, even, news?
2. “The 250.” Valleywag derides the early adopter world, saying that only 250 people care about all this new stuff that gets reported on TechMeme. Even if Valleywag’s numbers are off (millions read TechCrunch, for instance) they do have a point. I just spoke to my dad’s Kiwanis Club and many of the people there hadn’t heard of Twitter, Qik, Flickr, or even, gasp, blogs. Most of the world is even further behind — there are five billion people who’ve never owned a computer, for instance. I’m thinking about what that all means and what it means I should do with my blog going forward.
3. Flickr video. Too short. Or long enough? Discuss in 90 seconds or less. :-)

Anyway, have fun. I’ll see you in economy squished into a seat trying to do my email.

Google announced its new App Engine tonight. I was there shooting video and Mike Arrington has all the details in a wrapup post.

I shot four videos. Here they are:

Meeting some geeks before the event.
Part I.
Part II.
Part III.
Part IV. Watch Pownce’s developers give some feedback at the end.

UPDATE: Google just uploaded the official video, which is better quality. You’ll see me sit up at the front.

Dang, keeping email inbox clean is impossible. At least it’s impossible if you want to have any time to blog. More than 200 emails answered today. Plus I took a little trip to Adobe, did two conference calls, and now am headed over to pick up Mike Arrington so we can head to Google.

What’s the David Allen program? To keep your inbox totally clean. I started the morning out with a totally clean inbox and am failing to keep it clean. Answer one, two come in. It’s time to get ActiveWords back so I can script some of my answers and get faster again.

Anyway, there’s some big news coming tonight from Google. At least it’s big if you’re a developer. TechCrunch will blog it and I’ll video it at about 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time on my Qik channel. Check in there often and you will be able to join us live.

Over on my FriendFeed you’ll see that I’ve actually been quite active on the Internet. I read more than 2,200 feed items in Google Reader today and shared a few of the best ones. Plus I’ve been active on Twitter and other places.

Earlier today I was over at Adobe and got a preview of the new Video Player that they’ll be bringing out “soon.” We cover all sorts of topics about video. If you are a video producer you’ll want to check this interview out.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at the Media Relations Summit, then onto Israel where I’ll be reporting from next week.

Translation: slower-than-usual-blogging will continue. Add my FriendFeed account to your aggregator and you’ll be kept up to date.

Cool, now you can get my videos that I shoot on my cell phone directly into your iTunes or other RSS readers. Here’s the RSS feeds. Also, the feeds over on http://www.fastcompany.tv have been upgraded to support the same.

Hah, the New York Times says that I’m going to die if I blog. Oh, but I’ll die if I drink water. Or breathe. See, one rule of this game is everyone dies.

The article didn’t present any balance. Truth is, blogging has brought so many really great people and experiences into my life that it’s worth the sacrifices I’ve made.

That said, I’m glad I didn’t force myself to blog from Amsterdam. What did I do instead? Cleaned out my email. Almost got back onto the David Allen plan.

Visit my FriendFeed and you’ll see why I’m blogging less (it shows you what I’ve been generating on other services). When I started this blog in 2000 there wasn’t Twitter. Wasn’t Upcoming.org. Wasn’t Google Reader. Wasn’t Flickr. Wasn’t YouTube. Wasn’t Seesmic. Etc. Etc.

I’m off to attend and speak at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. My talk’s theme? The new “Friend Divide.” We’ll take a look at several services and apps and discuss the implications of the new divide between those who have lots of friends and those who don’t have many at all (or who aren’t using software like FriendFeed/Upcoming/Flickr, etc).

Also, notice another trend: you are moving your comments over to FriendFeed as well. The comments I’m getting over on FriendFeed are increasingly more interesting and from more diverse group of people than happen here on my own blog. That’s an interesting trend. Some bloggers are getting pissed off because of that (because they think they need the conversation to happen on their own blog). Me? I don’t mind where the conversation happens, I’ll participate there.

Here’s the first part of our CERN tour. This part is with Ben Segal, who was one of Tim Berners-Lee’s mentors. He talks about the first days of the World Wide Web (it was invented at CERN) and shows us the first Web server.

Oh, can you spot famous science fiction author Bruce Sterling in the video?

I shoot a lot with my cell phone, but not everything is good. Here’s just the good videos, hand picked for you. Thank you to Qik.com and my Nokia N95.

The tech innovators at FriendFeed
Here we meet the engineers behind this month’s hottest Web Service, FriendFeed. But these are some really special engineers: they were the guys behind several of Google’s top services like Google Maps, and Google Mail. Here we spend 46 minutes with them to learn more about what they are doing. Sorry for the abrupt ending, the cell phone died and we have a Part II where we finished off the Interview.
Part I
Part II

Demo of new Google/Outlook mail synch
Cemaphore last week announced its MailShadow for Google Apps technology that lets you synch up the calendars in Microsoft Outlook and Google’s Calendar, along with contacts and email. There are other synch systems, but this one works live and here we have a demo done by CEO Tyrone Pike.
Demo
Interview with CEO

Wine, fun, and business
What happens when Gary Vaynerchuk invites Digg founder Kevin Rose, New York Times best selling author Tim Ferriss, and me to a winery in Santa Rosa, CA? Some great business advice. Gary runs one of the biggest wine stores in America and does $50 million in sales per year. Also part of the conversation is DeLoach founder Jean Charles Boisset.

Meet the Crank behind PhotoCrank
If you read Fake Steve Jobs, you’ll see Photocrank in action. It lets commenters add funny things onto photos. When I met the CEO, Jeffrey Tannenbaum, he thought I was going to punch him (since Fake Steve Jobs uses it to take shots at me). I had a better idea, I’d turn on my cell phone and get back at him.

A micro wine innovator
Get into the wine cellar with master wine maker Shane Finley, who talks about his philosophy of making wine. You can find his website at http://www.shanewines.com and we got this tour thanks to Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV at http://www.winelibrary.tv

See AT&T’s new browser
AT&T has just released a beta of a new browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox. We have a first look with the team that built it.

New bookmarking service
ZigTag has a new way to do bookmarking. Sort of like Yahoo’s very popular del.icio.us, but easier to use. Here Scott Montgomerie, president, demonstrates the new service for me.

Social network portability. Single signon. Digital identity. Keeping personal info private. These are all important things that both users and developers are concerned about. Me too and so I called Kaliya Hamlin, aka “Identity Woman.”

She knows EVERYONE who is working on dataportability or identity and is one of the people who really helped OpenID happen.

So, listening to her on these issues is important and she certainly made me smarter and invited me to a raft of interesting events coming soon.

This was split up into four parts, because BlogTalkRadio’s Cinch service only lets me record for about eight minutes at a clip.

Sorry that I’m so loud compared to her, gotta figure out a better way to do phone interviews (I was using an iPhone in my car).

Part I (the first few seconds are silent, so wait for the recording to start at about 40 seconds into it, these are all audio-only MP3s).
Part II.
Part III.
Part IV.

What did she teach me? What XRI is. That lets developers build features that will federate between social networks your email address, photos, and other personal identifying info. Right now it’s a real pain, because if you need to change something, like your email address, you’ve got to do it on all your services (and I’m on more than 20 so far).

Also discussed:

XRI/XDI and LLLI (Breast Feeding Moms)

Higgins: Open Source Community for Common Identity Framework

Two Identity + Semantic tools being developed - these kinds of things are critical to creating data sharing across context

Higgins OWL & XDI-RDF (drummond explaining it to Chris Mesina).

We talked about the state of dataportability and what she’s seeing developers trying to work on and the events that she recommends, in particular these two:

1. Identity Information Workshop. May 12-14 in Mountain View, CA
2. The Data Sharing Summit, May 15, in Mountain View, CA.
2.

If you are working on this stuff and you aren’t following Identity Woman you really should.