You probably don’t know Charles Fitzgerald. He’s one of those guys who you might read about in the press once in a while but most people wouldn’t see. But I’m on his team and I’ve gotten to see some of the things he’s done at Microsoft and I’m most impressed. I met him in the hall the other day and we chatted about the tech industry and he’s one of those guys who is scary smart and that you can’t BS. He’s one of those guys who gets mentioned at meetings with 1,200 people. Why? Cause he makes stuff happen and cause he doesn’t hold back his opinions and he’s scary smart.

I’m so blessed to be surrounded by people like that. Why? Cause it sharpens your mind. You’ve gotta do your best work to impress people like that (and sometimes even that isn’t enough).

He doesn’t write on his blog very often, but it is enjoyable when he does and I always learn something.

I’m going to make a real effort not to link to anything that’s already on Memeorandum. Why? Because that way new things will show up on Memeorandum. Sorry, Shelley Powers, that means I won’t link to you today either. ;-) (Which is a bummer, cause she made some good points about Memeorandum’s bias).

But, yesterday at the Blog Business Summit I saw two things that really are interesting. Here’s why. When I go to companies to speak, they keep asking me “how do I do something similar to Channel 9.” That isn’t easy. We had two developers working on that for quite a while. They started with Community Server from Telligent (Microsoft’s employee blogs are run on top of Community Server — we have more than 2,000 now and a TON of traffic, so it holds up very well. The new Xbox.com forums are built on top of Community Server as well). Our tech team on Channel 9 (Charles, Brin, Adam, and Jeff) mashed in video components and a Wiki and other stuff and then hacked the heck out of it to make it Channel 9. I’ve been hoping that a company would come out with a set of tools/service that would make it possible to do a Channel 9 style site.

BlogTronix is the answer. It’s awesome. Has all that and more (and has security built in so you can blog both internally and externally very easily). I’m going to get a test blog there and will write more after I actually can try it out.

The other thing that Steve Broback showed on stage was FeedFire. It lets you build RSS feeds out of sites that don’t have feeds. Steve writes about that tool here.

Update: I totally messed this post up, so here’s the fixed post.

Dare Obasanjo, who works on the backend team at MSN, says I just rediscovered Hailstorm (which was Microsoft’s doomed effort to host your data on its servers). Hmmm, I didn’t remember Hailstorm being aimed at end users. I also didn’t remember that Microsoft tried to take people slowly into that world. They wanted them to jump in feet first. They also didn’t have the trust of customers the way Google has the trust of people on the street.

The other thing that’s hurting Microsoft? We don’t have a monetization gadget. Do we pay bloggers yet to include components? Not yet. Google does. That gets bloggers and Silicon Valley businesspeople to feel good about including their components on Web pages (and bootstraps them into this new world in a way that keeps people from screaming). Oh, and they didn’t name it “Hailstorm.”

Hey, .NET’ers VistaDB is giving bloggers a copy of VistaDB for free ($229 value). That’s smart.

I like how Steve calls me the “attention bunny” in response to my post last night. Here’s just a small tease of his lengthy reply: “Could it be that Microsoft is paying attention? On Tuesday, Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie will likely shake up the industry with details of their rapid move toward the attention economy.”

I still don’t think I totally understand Steve’s vision, but that’s OK. It took me two years to understand Dave Winer’s vision of RSS. I have a 486 brain in a 64-bit world. Here’s a little more — I totally get his point that link-based relevancy is now commoditized at best and is going down in value because of splogs:

“As splogs destroy the perception of page rank legitimacy, which is based not on the actual metrics of linking but the accrued reputational value of a site’s authority, the number of false positives will undermine confidence and dilute the economics of the system. It’s not so much that links are dead, Doc, as that trust in link rank is undermined. As in the bond market, weakened trust lowers ratings and shifts the market in other directions. This is Microsoft’s opportunity.”

Do you grok this? I do. It’s a key part of what I’ve been talking and thinking about, particularly when it comes to search (although Steve has gotten me to see bigger than that). Attention data is gonna be what brings us a new kind of Web — one that doesn’t look like what we know of the Web today.

Hmmm, WordPress.com only lets me display a certain number of items on the home page. Well, tonight I’ve been a bit prolific. So, a bit of stuff (including a lengthy essay on attention that I hope Microsofties are reading) is on the second page. I know from usability studies that most people won’t go to a second page. Anyway, I’m heading to bed. See ya at the Blog Business Summit.

Update: I LOVE MY READERS. Within a few minutes Donncha answered this post and showed me where to find the right option. Damn, why is it under “reading?” I guess that makes sense, but not on first look. I was looking for “posting.” Heh.

Congrats to these teams. This is several years in the making. Thousands of people are working on these products/tools/platforms. Ayman Shoukry has the links.

Publish Magazine has an interesting interview with Naked Conversations co-author, Shel Israel.

If you’re working with OPML, check out the OPML validator. It’s in beta.

Maryam, my wife, posts about things she’s learned from the CEOs in her life. I wish I had had a chance to meet her dad (he was a CEO of a phone company in Iran and gave up his post to protect his employees — that’s leadership and courage that I hope I’ll have if the time ever comes).