PR Week is reporting that Edelman is taking over the Microsoft Windows Vista account. That underscores that Edelman and Microsoft need even more transparency at this time into what they are going to do with bloggers.

This is a big deal and a big loss for Waggener Edstrom.

UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley wrote me and said that Edelman didn’t take the Windows Vista PR account from Waggener Edstrom, just the one-day launch in January. Sorry for the error.

Yeah, Paul, I was just reading through my feeds (I just shared a ton of items on my link blog) and noticed that Apple has been taking a lot of crap for blaming its shipping a virus on Microsoft. That WAS classless. Paul Mooney called it right.

By the way, I’m hearing about all sorts of problems with Apple’s MacBooks (and Maryam’s MacBookPro runs very hot). Maybe Apple should take the log out of its own eye?

Speaking of saying what I think, Doc Searls did that today on a post about PayPerPost.

It’s code-named Soapbox and On10 has a video of it (and 10,000 invites). Oh, On10 is a Microsoft site. But they disclosed that up front, so I feel better about linking to it than I did about linking to the Walmart thing earlier.

Microsoft says its viewing experience will be better. Jeff Sandquist says that Soapbox supports tagging, RSS everywhere, much higher quality video than YouTube and more. We’ll test that out. Will it be possible to do wide screen?

This is a view I’ve heard before, back when I worked at Microsoft, so I thought it was useful to share so you can see how Microsofties think. Aleem Bawany writes “We don’t need to buy any community, we already have a really large one we can tap into.”

They are right, if you look at it that way. But you can’t have it both ways: you can’t live off your existing community and be “cool” and I know that Microsoft desperately wants to be cool. (They were paying for coolness initiatives to try to get people to see them as cool).

Why? Cause if you’re a consumer company and you want to see growth, you’ve gotta be interesting at minimum.

Why does growth matter? It’s what the stock market rewards.

Now, maybe passing on YouTube was the right thing to do, but lately I’m noticing a lot of cloning going on. That never will be cool. It may, however, be very profitable.

So, maybe Aleem will have the last laugh.

I still think we’re in an audience business, though, and audiences don’t appreciate copies as much as they appreciate originals.

That big audience that Microsoft has? It’s theirs to lose.

Oh, and I think Om Malik’s analysis is pretty funny that Google already paid for the YouTube acquisition thanks to a higher stock price. Of course Microsoft’s stock price has been going up lately too. So, not sure anything can be made out of that here, although it is interesting to note.

If you don’t disclose you’re being paid to blog, you’re gonna create a mess, like Edelman and Walmart did. That’s why I don’t like PayPerPost (which sponsored part of the conference yesterday). I don’t mind PayPerPost on the face of it. As long as you disclose you’re being paid, your integrity is intact. The problem is that PayPerPost doesn’t ask its bloggers to disclose the fact that they are getting paid to blog (I talked yesterday with one blogger who is using PayPerPost and says he doesn’t always disclose that fact).

That said, bloggers are selling out too cheap. What PayPerPost is really about is getting better search engine ranking. SEO firms used to charge thousands of dollars to do what bloggers are now doing for $5 to $20 per post. I think PayPerPost is brilliant, actually, as long as Google/Yahoo/Microsoft don’t change their rankings to punish PayPerPost advertisers.

If I were running a search engine I’d actually come out and say “we’re gonna remove any advertiser on PayPerPost from our listings.” Why? Cause any engine that doesn’t allow organized buying into the organic search results that way is going to get good feelings from me. Companies should be forced to buy advertising if they don’t want to do the hard work of actually earning a link and/or coverage.

The nice thing is that when the corrosive effect of money comes into the blogosphere and isn’t disclosed it’ll earn a direct blowback just like is on TechMeme today.

Brad Chase. Remember the name? He was the Microsoft executive who led the Internet Explorer team against Netscape.

Recently he dropped by my office for a 16-minute long chat and a look at Vizrea, a cool mobile photo and video blogging service that he is on the board of directors for. He did a separate 12 minute demo, in case you’re less interested in what Brad has to say and what Vizrea does.

More videos coming tomorrow (and every day for at least the next three weeks).

I was just adding stuff to my linkblog, cause we missed our plane to Greensboro (got another one that leaves at 1 p.m., we’ll be spending the night in Chicago) and I saw a couple of things that got me to write about the coming Microsoft/Adobe developer/designer death match.

Both Microsoft and Adobe are readying their armies for a massive fight with each other next year over both developers and creative professionals.

Microsoft fired its big gun with the Visual Studio 2005 vs. Dreamweaver page. But, don’t count Adobe out of this fight yet, this is only the first battle in a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar battle. I was over at Adobe yesterday and they have some major things coming next year that’ll play off of Adobe’s strengths and take the battle back to Redmond.

Looking at Microsoft’s list it’s interesting to note what’s not there. Some things that come to mind?

1) Video. Adobe’s Flash is what YouTube used. Microsoft doesn’t have a good video story anymore because it pulled out of the Macintosh, which is where a lot of video folks spend their time.
2) Web standards. Yeah Visual Studio supports most of them, but weird that they didn’t call that out. For designers this is the #1 most important thing whenever I hear them talking at conferences or on blogs.
3) Integration into print workflows. Adobe’s strength is its Acrobat franchise. That came from print fidelity. Things look the same on screen as they do in a magazine. Microsoft is just getting onto that bandwagon with Windows Vista printing. Also, because Dreamweaver rarely sits alone, but as part of InDesign and Acrobat, it has a strong print-centric workflow (ask Printing for Less’ CEO what designers use to create printed items and he’ll tell you largely Adobe software).

So, you can see how Adobe and Microsoft are going to attack each other over the next year. Adobe comes at it from design/video/print/layout. Microsoft will come at it from the programmer’s point of view. Tools. Protocols. Source code control. Debugging.

You’ll see both shoring up their offerings where they are weak. Winners? Both designers and developers who’ll have a raft of new tools and approaches to choose from.

Oh, and me, cause I’ll be videotaping this battle from both sides.

Some of the battlefields where this will be decided on?

1) Security. Who can make it easier to build secure corporate systems. For instance, what happens when your laptop is ripped off? Does Adobe or Microsoft protect your corporate data there?
2) Openess. Which systems really will be most extendable and usable on all platforms. Important now that Apple has been gaining market share again.
3) Collaboration. Which systems let disperse development and design teams work together best?
4) Faithfulness to original creator. If you shoot a photo and on one system it keeps its color integrity, no matter where it’s displayed or printed, and on another it doesn’t, the one that’s faithful will win.
5) Blog-centricity. More and more corporate systems are going with blog-centric content management systems like Moveable Type or Wordpress. Even big ones that you might not expect. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe has gotten on these bandwagons yet, but this will be a more important point over time.
6) Multi-tenant system development. More and more of our Web data, especially inside corporations, will be stored on multi-tenant systems. Salesforce.com shot its big guns off with “Apex” which is a toolset to make it easier to develop systems that’ll reside on dozens or hundreds of servers. Watch for Adobe and Microsoft to help developers build these systems too.

Anyway, what do you think? Will designers move to Microsoft? Will developers move to Adobe?

Oh, and Ajaxian points out that we can’t write off Google or third party companies in this battle either.

Damn, I saw some people talking about how much better Microsoft’s Live Search was and I just tried a few searches and, indeed, it’s a lot better than it used to be. They’ve significantly closed the gap with Google.

How does it do on your favorite searches? I even picked out a random Windows API call and did a search on that. MSN used to always suck on those. But Live.com gets it right.

It’s also fast and the UI is nice. I think it matches Google all the way around on search.

Google is still slightly better on some searches (I think the result set on Google for Scrapbooking Blog is better than that on Live.com for Scrapbooking Blog, for instance). But, it’s much harder to tell the difference than it used to be. Live.com even does well with all my stock quotes (it used to be far less consistent than Google) and on my ego search for “scoble” Live.com is much better than Google (Live.com lists my current blog first, Google lists my blog that I haven’t posted to for a year first).

How does it do on your searches?

Now, the problem is, if Microsoft matches Google, who will switch away from Google? I won’t. The trust I’ve built since the late 1990s of searching Google many times a day without a problem is going to be a very hard thing to beat. To get me to switch Microsoft will have to be better than Google.

How about you? Does Microsoft (or Yahoo or Ask) have any hope of getting you to switch your default search engine?

I was reading Steve Ballmer scratching his head in BusinessWeek where he was wondering about the valuations that are getting paid out for companies like Skype and YouTube.

Good to hear that Ballmer’s leadership on the social software industry has remained consistent since he turned down Flickr when that sold to Yahoo for $30 million. I, and others, told Microsoft’s execs to start buying everything that moved in the social software space cause we knew that valuations were gonna be much more expensive later on. The executive leadership at Microsoft didn’t believe us. Still doesn’t.

Don’t miss Ballmer’s question here: “[You’ve got to ask] could Google do whatever it is they’re hoping to buy without paying $1.6 billion?” That’s Microsoft’s engineering culture coming through. Clearly Ballmer believes he can build YouTube for less.

The thing is, YouTube is two SEPARATE things: 1) the technology. 2) the community/brand.

Doing the technology is fairly straightforward. I’m sure that could be built for $100 million or less. Probably far less if they really are smart about how they go about it.

But duplicate the community and brand (er, those eyeballs, as Ballmer calls them) is far far far more difficult. The fact that he insists on calling me a set of eyeballs tells me Ballmer doesn’t understand the trend here. Why we love YouTube isn’t cause we can watch other people’s videos. It’s cause we can upload our own lame videos!!!

Now, will Microsoft be able to spend less than $1.6 billion and build their own YouTube? Maybe. Why? Cause Microsoft will have to spend hundreds of millions (probably more than a billion) in advertising just to attempt to appear “cool” and get people to try its video service.

Even then, as AT&T has demonstrated, spending a billion on marketing is no assurance you’ll come out the other end with a good audience and with people thinking you’re cool.

Google realized it couldn’t make its own video service look as cool as YouTube. Too bad Ballmer still hasn’t figured out he can’t buy his way into cool without buying some things that are cool.

Back to Facebook. Is it worth as much as YouTube? I don’t think so because only college students associate with that brand. With YouTube everyone from 80-year-old friends to my son were using it and talking about it. Facebook is struggling to make its brand interesting to non college students. So far it has failed, which is why I don’t think it’s worth as much as YouTube.

Lots of good stuff on my new link blog (done thanks to Google Reader). I read hundreds of feeds so you don’t have to. There’s a feed here too. Everything on there is less than a day old right now, so feel free to surf through all the pages.

While I was reading my feed I saw Matt McSpirit talking about Blinkx, which is a video search engine. So, why didn’t Blinkx close the $1.65 billion deal that YouTube did?

Well, for one, the name. I can say YouTube even after drinking four beers. Now, how do you tell your friends to use Blinkx? I can’t even spell it. I had to look at the logo three times just to make sure I was spelling it right. If I can’t tell my friends about something new your growth won’t be as fast. Make sure I can say your name on radio. Or on stage when I’m talking. YouTube works. Blinkx doesn’t.

Also, the home page is WAY overbearing. Too many moving things. And one design principle I learned in college: pick ONE thing and make that twice as big as anything else on the page. YouTube wins here. Why? Because your eye needs something to enter the page with. If everything is the same size, as it is on Blinkx, your eye feels uncomfortable. Doesn’t know where to look. And instead of picking something will just leave. Dave Winer reminded me of that last night when he said he hadn’t watched any of my show because there was too much for him to pick from. He wanted a page design like Ze Frank or Rocketboom have: just one video. On my ScobleShow, I pick one video and make it bigger than the others.

Back to the home pages, Blinkx has lots of big-name videocontent. Movies. TV shows. Etc. YouTube has lots of “small-name” videocontent. Kittens. Goofy videos. We’re all looking for different kinds of content. Stuff to impress our friends with that they probably won’t have seen. Here’s a hint: your friends and family have probably already seen the latest Lost. But they haven’t seen the latest cute kitten video. Microsoft makes this mistake too (remember IE 4 with ActiveDesktop? What was there? Big name media companies. No small guys. I wonder if Microsoft will learn that it’s the small guys that make an experience different and interesting?)

It’s not hard to see why YouTube built a brand name and audience worth paying billions for. And why Blinkx didn’t.