Disclaimer, Seagate is the founding sponsor of my show.

Anil Dash has the details (and his own thoughts) on the apology that Seagate’s CEO made yesterday — he links to the details from the author of the article.

Me? I knew it would cause rumblings inside a big company. I, like Anil, hope that Bill doesn’t lose his sense of humor. I told one guy over at Seagate that there’s a silver lining to all this: everyone will want to come to the BlogHaus to meet Bill and see if he’s going to say anything else quotable.

The other thing is: business leadership is about taking risks. Sometimes those risks pay off, other times they don’t. But I’d rather have a leader in charge who is willing to take risks instead of always “playing it safe.”

Ahh, I already get called out of my Christmas blog vacation by Andrew Baron (he started Rocketboom), who is building a content mall named Abbey Corps. He’s positioning it against PodShow and the company I work for, PodTech, saying he can demonstrate it’s a better business than either of them. Dave Winer’s blog is where I saw this and Dave has a few of the names he thinks are involved, many of which are my favorite videobloggers.

An entrepreneur once told me: hope you have great competitors cause they’ll inspire you and demonstrate your dreams have value.

So, thank you Andrew for the Christmas present! Now, off to see Mary Hodder at Dabble who has a killer video/social media search engine/platform.

UPDATE: PaidContent is reporting that Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are starting a new site too, based on their highly successful “D” conference. Oh, I can’t wait to see Kara and Walt at CES again. Everything they do is quality.

Well, it’s time to put the blog down for a few days. It’s Christmas for those who are Christian. A fun holiday for the rest of us. Anyway, hope things go well with your families, it’s been quite a year. I can’t believe Christmas is here again.

To John Welch, thanks for the nice goodies for Maryam and me from Amazon. That is so kind.

Oh, regarding Photowalking #5. We will meet on Wednesday, December 27th at the California State Railroad Museum at 1 p.m. — everyone is invited, you don’t have to be into photography. As it stands right now we’ll have some really great photographers there, including the co-founders of JPG Magazine. I have a stack of 8GB Seagate Flash Drives to give away as prizes. Should be a fun day. I’m not sure where we’ll have lunch, but Ajay is driving me and we’ll probably have lunch in Old Sacramento at noon. More will come next week after Christmas. Bring your tripod and your digital camera. It should be lots of fun.

UPDATE ON PHOTOWALKING: there’s a small chance the date and/or time will change. Check in on the evening of December 26th here to see what’s up.

Either way, happy holidays and Merry Christmas. Hope Amazon brought you some goodies too!

Well, you know how everyone talks about “unconferences,” right? Well, Nick Douglas is writing over at Valleywag again. Hey, I thought he got fired. I’m so confused. Next you’ll tell me that Sam Sethi and Loic Lemeur are working on CrunchTechEurope together. Or, that Andrew and Amanda are ReBooming.

Anyway, come on Nick, we all know what video is really good for, right? Wink, wink!
That’s right. Really long interviews with geeks!

Anyway, Nick is doing something over on Valleywag called “DiggBait.” Hmmm, the latest thing is if you can figure out how to get Digg to ban you then you’ll end up with more traffic than if you got on Digg’s home page. Why? Cause then all the other bloggers who can’t figure out how to get on Digg will link to you to make fun of the whole Digg meme.

I’m too lame to figure out how to get Digg to ban me, though, so Nick, you’ll need to work on this on your own time.

Seriously. If you want to get on Digg, just get a Digg tattoo or something like that. Particularly in a painful place on your body. That should do the trick.

Ed Bott is asking what he’s missing on his CES schedule.

Oh, let’s see.

How about an appearance on the ScobleShow? I still have some slots left open. By the way, we’re gonna be doing the “Retrevo Gang” at 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. every day in the Seagate booth.

I’ll have something fun for you up at the PodTech/Seagate BlogHaus — news will be announced there on Sunday afternoon. Make sure you get your name on my invite list (leave your email on the comments or send me an email). It’ll be going 24 hours a day during CES and I’ll be there a lot.

Ajay Juneja is bringing his ultra cool car. Oh, if you need a ride around Vegas, let me know that too. I have some, um, connections.

Wanna see Stevie Wonder? I know someone at Monster who has tickets.

Or, we could go over and beat up DirecTV and ask them why they don’t have more HD channels?

So, anyway, here’s who I have on my “CES Dream Team” list:

Leo Laporte. Hell, he lives two blocks from my son (seriously — Leo’s son has Patrick’s math book from last year). To me Leo IS CES.
Jason Calacanis. I wonder, what would happen if Jason and Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins got on the same microphone? Hmmm. But Jason started Engadget, knows CES better than anyone (he was EVERYWHERE with Peter Rojas last year) and is a gadget freak to boot.
Mark Cuban. He’s Mr. HD to me. I’d love to get his thoughts on what he saw on the show floor.
Dave Winer. He needs a new Surround Sound system and would be fun to see the show through his eyes.
Doc Searls. We had a blast hanging out last year. Doc always seemed to get into the keynotes. That takes skills and connections and often both.
Gina Trapani. I bet she’d have some good “how to survive CES” productivity tips. Mine? Wear comfortable shoes and carry your own bottled water. It’ll be a lifesaver for those times when you’ve stacked up five meetings back to back.
Chris Pirillo. Cause he buys every gadget I do, except a few weeks earlier.
Ryan Block. He writes for Engadget. What else do I need to say?
Peter Rojas. Ryan’s boss. What else do I need to say?
Kevin Rose. Just to see if I could get something on Digg. Just kidding Kevin! But not really.
Tom Warren, aka “Creamhackered” over on Neowin. That guy knows more about Windows than anyone other than maybe Raymond Chen.
Om Malik. I like Om and his take on gadgets.
Staci Kramer. Paid content. We can talk about PodTech and how it’ll get paid for content. Bad pun.
Vic Gundotra. The guy is the biggest gadget whore I’ve ever met. I can’t wait to see his blog start back up again.
Michael Gartenberg. He too was all over CES last year. In fact, I’ll bet that he has more gadgets that’ll be announced at CES than anyone else. He just doesn’t talk about them.
Walt Mossberg. He’s the king. Still is.
The Heiny family. They were all there last year and they knew where to go for the hot stuff.

OK, I’m starting to get dreamy.

Who would you want to walk around CES with?

Back to the news…

UPDATE: It’s Brandon LeBlanc’s first time to CES. We’ll do a “CES survival guide” for Brandon. I have a love/hate relationship with CES. It’s big. All the important vendors in the gadget space are there. But, that also makes it suck. I remember getting off the airplane at 12:15 a.m. to get into a two-hour-long taxi line. Not fun. I’ve got some ways around the taxi lines this year, though.

UPDATE 2: Staci Kramer is going (she’s awesome) and is looking for a room at the Venetian. If you have one, Staci is a worthy person to give it to.

Alright, I live in Half Moon Bay. A mere eight miles from Silicon Valley. A 30-minute drive from Sand Hill Road. An hour from Google. But I can’t get HD.

Oh, I’ve tried to give money to the content industry.

Over the air antenna? Nope. Not a single signal received. Mountains are between me and the main transmitters.
Comcast cable? Oh, we have cable. I’m typing to you on it. But no HD.

So, I go off to DirecTV and spend around $300 on the DirecTV HD PVR and get a satellite dish and all that. It works great. Except when I want to look at NBC, CBS, ABC, or PBS in HD. No, those channels are locked out. So, I call up DirecTV and ask what’s up. Turns out I can’t even buy them. They are kept from offering them by the local station owners.

Hmmm, let me get this right. I can’t buy access to Lost or any of those other shows that you guys offer on NBC, CBS, ABC, or NBC, but I can watch ESPN. Got it.

I also can’t see any local news in HD. Wonderful.

Yeah, I get all those channels in standard def. Wonderful. Here’s the thing. Dave Winer showed me how to get good stuff hooked up to my TV over the Internet.

I haven’t had any TV since moving from Microsoft, by the way. I survived by renting movies and playing more Xbox and by watching more YouTube (hell, if I can’t get HD I am gonna at least watch some original content — first thing that came up on my TV? Dr. Phil. Hey, Dr. Phil, can you tell me why this industry is doomed and why we won’t even shed a tear? Just like we didn’t really shed a tear when Tower Records went out of business?

Amazing.

I can get video off of DivX’s Stage 6 which looks just as good as any standard def TV channel does.

TV is dead. Mark Cuban, you need to step on the gas on HDNet. These guys have left a seam for you to drive a truck through.

Ahh, the guys who brought us Skype are gonna maybe provide the answer with something they call the Venice Project. Gizmodo says it’ll kill YouTube. Oh, hell, don’t kill that! Kill my local freaking TV stations who are too clueless to figure out how to get me HD. That’s who we need to club with a ClueStick.

How do you turn a Google Map into a holiday greeting? Here’s how.

Marc Canter answered me back and said his new PeopleAggregator is “MySpace in a box.”

In my head I answered “why do I need that?”

Then it hit me. I’m not in high school anymore and I already have a blog and a video blog and a Twitter account which is the best social network I’ve ever seen.

That all said, though. I gotta go see Marc. Or, maybe I’ll just bribe Patrick to check it out and do a review since he’s soon gonna be 13 and gets all this cool new MySpace stuff better than I do.

One nice thing about having kids is they keep you up to date on the cool stuff.

Tomorrow we’ll be in the East Bay cause we’re interviewing Mary Hodder and getting a good look at Dabble. Cool media search and organization engine.

Joe Lewis rates several Web 2.0 personalities. He says the new Rocketboom is better than the old, for instance (I like both for different reasons, but he reminded me to check out some more shows). Pays me a huge compliment. Appreciate that very much. I don’t see myself as a Web 2.0 personality, though, and I don’t call what I do “writing.”

To me it’s more like having a conversation. I listen, then I say something, then I listen some more (or avoid the bricks coming through the front window. Heheh). Nice list, though, for someone who’s just starting reading blogs today. I really just wanted to say thanks for the compliment. I’m still not feeling all that hot and it made my day.

I put both of these blog search engines on notice. One improved. The other didn’t.

I thought Google had a bunch of PhD’s who cared about search quality?

Here’s my test. Any blog search engine that includes http://news.naikmichel.com in its result set is outright crap.

That’s a splog (it’s an automated copy of Scobleizer). Get rid of it Google, please.

Technorati wins!

Here’s the two tests:

Technorati. No Naik Michel.
Google Blogsearch. Has Naik Michel.

But, Ask’s blogsearch really is the winner here. I didn’t need to ask it to get rid of good old Naik.

Sphere is bad too. No Naik, but it has a different splogger. BlueBoxSystem.com.

UPDATE: Whoa, just checked out IceRocket and didn’t find any splogs, but lots of interesting little features like hot links up at top. I gotta watch IceRocket more and see how it does against Technorati in other searches.

We have a good competition for once in the blog search space. I can’t wait for the day when automated copiers don’t get included in any search engines and trackback systems on blogs refuse their trackbacks.

What’s your favorite blog search? Why? Is your opinion changing?

Are you a YouTube viewer who likes short, weird, videos of things going into a blender? Or, do you like Ze Frank? I love his holiday series on getting on MySpace. Will it Blend has a lot more viewers and is getting talked about on a lot more blogs, though (three times today alone in the 350 blogs I watch).

I like the little duckie, though. Hey, how about if they’d try to blend a little duckie? Ahh, now THAT is LINKBAIT! Ze Frank’s icon vs. the blender. Yowza.

Well, they did get close to putting a little duckie in the blender for Christmas. Heheh.

…is the DLP one from Texas Instruments that’s running on Engadget HD.

Why? Cause it’s actually three separate ad units that surround the content and the same ad is on all three. Also, the pattern and movement caught my eye. It also matches other advertising they are doing elsewhere (I’ve seen their TV ad as well). Well executed ad campaign.

Hey, I’m noticing that some things get into TechMeme for only a minute or so and then disappear. Hmmm.

I bet Gabe is watching for evidence of gaming and then removing anything that doesn’t belong.

The item in question, Photowalking, appeared for a few minutes (you can see it on the TechMeme River, but not on the main site) but then quickly disappeared.

Personally I would have removed it too. Thomas Hawk and I are friends. It got onto TechMeme cause both Thomas and me linked to it. We weren’t trying to get it on TechMeme, just both organically linked to it (we’re both involved).

Anyway, I’ve seen other evidence that a human is changing the results behind the scenes too. We’ve started talking about this at parties and, invariably, we think it’s good that Gabe’s doing that. Why? He’s good at picking what’s really interesting and what’s not.

Gabe, for his part, says that it’s his algorithms that decide whether something is worth staying on the page.

I wonder what the truth is: I’d love to sit with my camera and watch Gabe all day long and see what the system looks like to him. I bet he’s learning a lot about the linking patterns, and other patterns that are going on in the blogosphere.

By the way, it’s fun to compare the TechMeme river to my link blog. I notice that Gabe usually beats me with his algorithms, but that I can still beat him one out of every few stories. Why? Cause I am just looking at whether the post is interesting to me, not whether or not it has some inbound links. Funny enough usually within an hour the best of my “finds” are also on TechMeme cause they earn enough links from other people to get onto that page.

UPDATE: Now it’s back, that’s weird.

UPDATE 2: In related actions Digg is removing entire domains from its service.

UPDATE 3: It’s gone again.

UPDATE 4: Gabe says he doesn’t mess with the site in my comments and is on vacation right now with his family (but, says, that we should expect more of this kind of behavior).

I was one of those who noted that Donald Trump spent a ton of time on a recent show I was listening to flaming Mark Cuban. Today Mark bites back. Ahh, celebrity bickering. It’s almost as interesting as reading Valleywag or TechCrunch.

Mark’s taunt to the Donald? “Your blog sucks.” Among other things. Heheh.

Heather Champ is community manager over at Flickr and today we got up the latest Photowalking with her and Thomas Hawk.

Unfortunately one of my microphones was failing during this walk, so if you hear a pop or two that’s what’s going on. Sorry about that. We tried to edit out the worst of it.

This was an awesome Photowalk, though, in San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate park.

She’s also cofounder of the awesome JPG magazine.

Thomas Hawk has some photos of the day up on Flickr. More to come.

Heather shows off how she uses a Polaroid camera to make some gorgeous images.

Oh, did we sneak a little tiny short Seagate ad into the end of the video? Hmmm.

Hey, I’m getting bashed in comments for being too anti-Microsoft. Which is funny seeing that if you search Google for Demo of the Year a post I made about a Microsoft product comes up. I still haven’t seen a better demo this year.

Anyway, I’m not just into bashing Microsoft when it deserves it, but other companies too. Adobe got on Fred’s radar screen with the new Photoshop icons.

Using ASCII characters in an icon? Come on Adobe. You’re the king of using graphics and photos. Put a freaking photo onto the icon. It’s “Photoshop” remember?

But, icons are branding opportunities and tell me one thing. Will this “brand” do well in, say, China? How about Japan?

No.

Adobe should invest in imagery and iconography that’ll transcend cultural, language, and other barriers.

The problem is you should have a single icon that works everywhere for training purposes.

I remember when I was in China at a computer show and I needed to demonstrate NetMeeting. I could do it cause I knew what the icons looked like.

But, even better, look at how Firefox uses its icon to market itself. It’s on Tshirts. Stickers. Posters (one was hanging in a company I interviewed at yesterday).

I look at the XML icon and that’s a bit different. First of all, RSS and XML were aimed at geeks for the first few years of their life. So, they needed to communicate a bit about what was underneath (note that the newer Feed Icon is becoming much more popular — partly cause it doesn’t look so darn American-centric on, say, Chinese Web sites).

I think Yue (new girl videoblogger on 1938 Media) said “Scoble’s hot” in Chinese.

Or is it my cough medicine I’m taking kicking in?

I’m staying home sick today. Not the only one. I couldn’t get to Twitter to report that (Twitter is the new way to call in sick, cause my coworkers and employees are on there). But, this is a good chance to try to catch up on email.

Hotmail’s connector to Outlook isn’t working, though. So, that’s forcing me to compare the Web interfaces of Hotmail to Gmail. Maybe there’s an interesting post to come out of that.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of good new blogs this morning on all sorts of geeky stuff. Again, I keep the noise down and the signal high (I only posted two posts on the Google API stuff, for instance, even though over on TechMeme there’s a lot more).

Stuff posted last night on ScobleShow? Sarah Blow gets interviewed by Maryam. She’s a real geek (is an embedded systems programmer and started Girl Geek Dinners, which are much cooler than my own dinners, I’ve gotta admit). I hate my laugh. I’ve gotta stop laughing so much, it really is annoying. So, here’s the deal. After January 1st everytime I laugh I’ll put $5 in a bucket for charity.

If you’re an entrepreneur and wondering what the basics of dealing with Venture Capitalists are, Philip Baddeley helps entrepreneurs in Cambridge, England, deal with getting funding. We have an interesting talk about VC 101.

Ken Thompson does the BioTeams blog and is an interesting guy (lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland). He studies animal behavior and sees what lessons he can apply to making teams more efficient.

Hope you are enjoying these videos from Europe. A few more are still to come.

I can’t wait to go to LIFT in February. Maryam and I are both going and probably will drop in on Frankfurt, Germany, to see my mom’s sister too so I can see another beer drinking tour with the geeks. Something about beer and geeks that always works.

Anyway, if you want me, use robert@podtech.net instead of my Hotmail address. Gmail is still working with Outlook. Anyone see the irony in that?

Mark Lucovsky, of Google, posted that Google has replaced its SOAP API with its AJAX Search API.

That’s interesting because it’ll hurt Visual Studio developers (VS likes SOAP and WSDL, not AJAX).

Yet another defining moment. This is Google’s way of saying that “we don’t care about Windows applications anymore.”

Last week I posted a video with Lucovsky where he shows off some of the things that are possible with the AJAX Search API.

Lucovsky writes: “While the AJAX Search API does not provide server-side access to search results, it has a number of more powerful features, including access to Video, Maps, Blog Search, and News search results.”

What do you think? How will this hurt or help Microsoft and/or Google?

UPDATE: Dave Winer wants to string up the developer and/or team that came up with the just shipped Del.icio.us API.

UPDATE 2: Yesterday Dave Winer chimed in on the Google API deprecation. He thinks it leaves opportunities open for Google’s competitors.

UPDATE 3: David Cooley likes Google’s new API, says “they listen.”

Whew, look at TechMeme today and you’ll see we’re on an upswing in the news cycle. I remember the days when only one or two people got on TechMeme, now I can’t read everyone that’s on there.

I am trying, though. I’m adding RSS feeds to my reader at a pretty fast pace lately. I’m getting close to my breaking point, though. I think I can’t read more than about 400 feeds. Not enough time.

Anyway, I still notice that smaller stories get on my link blog than get on TechMeme. I pick some of the same stories that are on TechMeme, but there’s a lot of “flavor” that TechMeme filters out. Algorithms are sure efficient, but they often miss the cute little stories. TechMeme will never point to Cute Overload, for instance. I don’t often point there either, but it’s fun to mix in a cute cat photo into a mix of 100 tech stories.

One thing I caught going through my aggregator is Om Malik’s NewTeeVee blog interviewing my boss, John Furrier, about PodTech. Oh, remember that guy who said he hated my videos? Yeah, we signed him up for our network too. Welcome 1938 Media! And don’t you dare stop attacking me.

Speaking of which, I gotta have a talk with Christopher Coulter. He’s been too quiet lately. He’s the best hire I ever did, though. He’s amazing.