Lunch with Dave Davison, retired VC’er. Meeting with editorial crew. Meeting with Paul (Maryam’s boss). Interview at Automattic with Toni Schneider, CEO (they make the blog tool you’re reading my words on). Interview at Become.com. Interview of Ryan Block, writer on Engadget (he has some cool toys to show me). Drop off tapes at Ryanne’s. Whew.

Anyway, catching my eye this morning. Wired has an article on Microsoft’s rebuilding. Go Ozzie Go!

Chris has a nice list of feeds of interesting bloggers, mostly centered around .NET programming.

Jason Lee Miller shared a beanbag last week with me. Bummer that Nick Douglas wasn’t there. That would certainly have gotten on Valleywag if he were. Coverage from the Podcasting Expo is now up on NoodleScar and Rocketboom.

CIO Insight magazine’s Ed Cone did a Q&A with me, which is now up.

Hey, maybe I should get a referal fee from TechMeme for those new advertisers. Check out the graph of where TechMeme’s traffic comes from. Heheh. Just kidding Gabe. I love TechMeme.

Gotta run. Full day today. I’m working on getting some stuff up on ScobleShow too. Later.

Damn, I don’t even have time to sneeze the next four weeks.

This week I travel to Seattle to interview a bunch of folks at Microsoft and other companies, and interview Woz on stage at the University of Washington.

Then next week we head to Converge South in North Carolina, where we have a meeting slated with Elizabeth Edwards, among others, and Maryam and I are giving at least one presentation.

The third week of October we’re going to film and post a new show — from San Francisco — which we’re calling “the Lunch Show” for now (it probably will get a better name later). If you wanna be on, please drop us a line — Irina and Eddie will host this daily show from the lunch room of Technorati! Geeks with something cool to demonstrate are what we’re looking for. We’ll film that from noon to 1 p.m. every day and hopefully have it up by 6 p.m. — we’ll see how that goes, doing a daily video show isn’t going to be easy. But we’re excited that Dave Sifry and club have supported the project wholeheartedly and we have lots of fun guests lined up (with more — like you — needed).

The fourth week we head back to Seattle for the Blog Business Summit where we just learned we’re going to be guests on a private Lear Jet trip to Walla Walla (the guy, Steve Broback, who hosts Blog Business Summit is taking several bloggers to dinner, courtesy of Greenpoint Technologies who is a VIP jet completion firm and is sponsoring the trip — details here on the Blog Business Summit’s blog).

I’ll bring my video gear along. It’s quite something to get a ride on a jet that I never would be able to afford otherwise.

I guess I just did a “PayPerPost” here, didn’t I? Well, if you’re gonna sell your soul, why settle for only $2.50? My soul costs more than that. A ride in a Lear Jet is getting closer.

No I don’t love Engadget cause Jason Calacanis bought me dinner and gave me a tour of AOL’s new studios! (How’s THAT for PayPerPost. Heheh. Total collected, about $20 for a nice chicken sandwich at Mantilis, Pramit Nairi caught us in the act, and ice tea and a ride in his yellow Corvette).

Rather I love Engadget because it keeps me up to date on the good and bad about gadgets. I too had a look at the Zune last week and was disappointed, just like Engadget was, to find that I won’t be able to use its WiFi capabilities to download netcasts or music. Instead I’ll have to hook it up to my computer (which is upstairs, while my WiFi works downstairs) to load a bunch of netcasts on it.

Lame, lame, lame. They could have really gotten the Apple’s ve-vant-to-own-your-’pod’ behind. Instead Microsoft fumbled.

But, Microsoft is brave enough to invite me and my camera over for an interview and demo this week. That is something that Apple hasn’t yet done. I guess Steve Jobs is scared that I’ll give him crap for not putting a widescreen into the latest iPods.

Of course Steve doesn’t need the PR right now. Why not? Well, we bought Patrick a new 80GB iPod. I’ll let him review it vs. the Zune. What’s fun about 12-year-olds? They tell the truth. Brutally. Must be a skill they learn on the playground.

I was reading the 10 geek business myths that venture capitalist Ron Garret laid out. Good read. Recommended.

One thing, though, that I’m gonna jump on is his thoughts about Microsoft. He wrote “Microsoft has achieved success largely by seeking out and destroying other people’s brilliant ideas.”

What’s interesting is in other places he writes that it’s what the customers think that really matters, not what anyone else thinks. And, in this single sentence he’s demonstrated that very well.

Microsoft has two really huge businesses that funded the rest. What are those two businesses? Operating System and Office. Well known.

Why did I — as a customer — get into Microsoft’s ecosystem? Because Windows NT crashed less than my Macintosh did in the mid-90s. And because Office cost about the same as, say, WordPerfect (a competitive Word processor) but came with a spreadsheet, a database program, and more.

Did Microsoft then do stupid things like crush Netscape? Yeah. But they were put in that place by building products that customers wanted to buy. And buy in massive quantities. Translation: if you really want to crush the competition, build a better product for a lower price and make your customers very happy. (I was a very happy customer of Microsoft’s back in the 1990s).

Ron’s entire rest of his lengthy post was right on.

I agree with Engadget. The new UMPCs (basically small Tablet PCs) are MUCH better than the first ones. The new Sony is tiny and interesting. The only thing wrong is still the price.

In fact, at Microsoft they did a lot of price testing. If these ever get to $500 they’ll sell like hotcakes. The OEMs don’t believe Microsoft’s own price testing, though. That’s too bad.

At the Intel Developer Forum I got a demo of one that interacted with a new prototype VW and it was awesome. Those new markets won’t really appear for several more years, but I talked with representatives from VW and they can see a whole bunch of things to do with them.

Frank Shaw, who is Vice President of Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft’s main PR firm), asks an interesting question: “If “Diggnation” were on a national cable or broadcast feed, would 250k viewers be seen as success or the road to to cancellation? You decide….“

Here’s a question I have. If you have a new technology product or service to launch, would you rather launch it on Diggnation or on the front of the business page of, say, USA Today?

By the way, Frank is one of those gatekeepers who can get you in front of Microsoft executives. It’ll be really interesting to see if Diggnation is ever broadcast from BillG’s office. Imagine Kevin Rose drinking beer with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. If that ever happens I’ll know the world has really gotten loopy.

I just saw this list of Zune vs. iPod comparisons over on the Zune Insider Blog. I still don’t have enough data. But my son just bought an 80GB iPod. It’ll be interesting to try a Zune out.

Speaking of which, I’ll be up in Seattle on October 5 and 6th (I’m interviewing Steve Wozniak at the University of Washington) and I’d love to come up and interview the Zune team. Anyone interested up in Microsoft land showing off a Zune on video?

I love TechMeme. Today the blogs are going crazy over a new advertising scheme that puts paid posts over on TechMeme.

It’s interesting that the love for this idea is widespread and deep (at least looking at the blogs I could find). Very few complainers. That’s rare, especially on blogs.

What does that mean?

I think it’s because we love TechMeme so we’ll hold our criticisms because we  know Gabe has to pay for servers and his housing and all that. He hasn’t been paid for a while since starting TechMeme.

I love this, but I find what Doc Searls is saying on this topic to be very deep. He thinks there’s “something else” out there as an advertising method.

Since I was at Wells Fargo today I’ve been thinking there’s gotta be a better way for a company to get into the conversation than buying an ad and hoping that people will talk about them just because they have an ad.

As Doc says, that seems inefficient.

I keep going back to Channel 9. Wasn’t that an advertisement? Wasn’t it one that people linked to? Yes. We had to earn every link cause no one would link to us from the Microsoft.com home page. 

I think that “pull advertising” like Channel 9 is where something interesting will still happen. Most companies still haven’t learned the power of this approach: having video conversations with interesting low-cost, no committee done content, a wiki where anyone can participate, putting its customers on its home page, letting them say “you suck,” and including RSS feeds for everything.

Until that day when all companies understand Channel 9 and what happened there and how to replicate it, we’ll see the need for advertising that intrudes in our lives somehow (which is really what TechMeme’s new advertising is — it’s companies with money pushing their way into a conversation that was happening).

I’m taking that money too (my show has a sponsor already, more on that later) but I far prefer the advertising that isn’t intrusive, but sits in the corner of the room waiting for people to come over and check it out on their own terms.

Anyway, for now, I’m very happy that Gabe is getting paid because I want TechMeme to go on and get bigger and better (and more personalized) and that costs money. So, I will check out all of Gabe’s sponsors and support them as much as possible because they are supporting something I love.

Speaking of Channel 9, they have a new video guy (Rory Blyth, announced today in an interview). I love that they point out that Rory is not a Robert Scoble replacement. Heheh, I was always trying to copy Rory anyway. Why? He’s funny.

I remember the time when he refused to shake a top Microsoft VP’s hand and offered that he doesn’t touch other people because they might have fecal matter on their hands (seriously, he said this, out in a public space with other people as witnesses).

Anyone that brave is a winner in my book. I can’t compare. Wow, now I’ll need to watch Channel 9. Guaranteed not to have any fecal matter on their hands.

Ahh, the nerds in charge are trying to turn off Skype at San Jose State University. Of course the podcasting class is pissed. So, what did they do? They blogged it. Caused a stink. And the stink is getting bigger.

I hope they kick IT’s ass. At Microsoft I couldn’t use Skype either. It always pissed me off. How did I get back at them? I got Verizon Wireless. Why? Cause the f***ers couldn’t block me then. That’s how to fight the man. Oh, and I expensed it so the man paid, too! ;-)  

I’m starting to subscribe more and more to audiocasts and videocasts (formerly known as podcasts). But the usual clients suck. Yes, even iTunes. Especially for viewing video.

For the past few days I’ve been playing with Democracy Player and it sure is nice. Plays videos large. Cool and friendly UI.

What do you think? I also like FireAnt.tv, but its UI looks dated compared with Democracy Player. So does the new iTunes.

Oh, and Microsoft is surveying people about RSS. Should be interesting to see those results. I think the methodology is weird, though. Open Internet surveys are not accurate. To get that you need to do what Nielsen does with TV surveys: randomly call people. But, I filled it out anyway, only took a minute or so.