Dana, a security expert I’ve been following for quite some time, is blogging his development of a new product, all in one month. It’s an interesting look into the development process that we rarely get to see.

Now, imagine Apple or Microsoft or Google or eBay doing the same.

Imagine that they let you participate, even a little bit, in the development of a new product.

But, no, they won’t try that. It’s too bad. When I did my book I accidentally found that building something in public view ends up with that end thing being a lot better because of the participation of the people who drop by. Not to mention that our search page rank is a lot higher than it would otherwise be (even bloggers who hated our book, and said “that chapter sucked,” added to our search engine ranking).

I just downloaded the updated GoogleTalk which just got a bunch of new features (I’m “Scobleizer” if you wanna drop in and say hi). A lot of Microsofties used to “poopoo” GoogleTalk saying “it has no features.” They were right. But, it also had something much more important: elegance and shipping.

It was a small thing. Microsofties don’t get small things. I think it’s a disease of Microsoft’s. Not getting small things. Until it’s too late. I usually don’t keep MSN or Skype up and running during the day. Why? I don’t know. Part of it is I get too many chats from people just asking “who are you?” or who say “hello” and then want to get into some stupid conversation. But another part of it is just the weight of those apps — MSN just popped up a bunch of dialogs that I had to close (more than 50 since I hadn’t been on for several weeks).

Funny enough Joe Beda, who now is on the Google Talk team admits that he had the disease when he worked at Microsoft on the Avalon, aka Windows Presentation Foundation, team.

GoogleTalk is the lightest weight, has an elegant UI, and, well, simply works.

What do you think?

Oh, I’m also on Skype as “RobertScoble” and on Windows Live Messenger as robertscoble@hotmail.com.

OK, I just purchased a Mac. A 17-inch MacBook Pro. I was forced into this by HD and wide-screen video formats. Windows Movie Maker doesn’t do it (it does on Windows Vista, but I can’t use beta software to run my business). Apple’s software does do HD today. I don’t even need to wait (there’s a reason why Microsoft’s Channel 9 and On10.net aren’t wide-screen or HD and it’s spelled Movie Maker). And, anyway, most of the video community here uses Macs (I learned a lot from watching Eddie and Ryanne edit their videos about FinalCut Pro). So, I’m going along for the ride. So, why am I posting this? Cause I just read about Dave Winer’s crashy experiences with his Mac.

Last week on the way home from Montana Ryanne was editing her video on her Mac. The app just suddenly disappeared from screen. In my book that’s called a crash. I found that to be very strange cause the hype on Macs is that they never crash. But, those commercials are so strong. The hype is so strong. That I believe that the Mac is perfect.

Ahhh, are the Mac faithful is Patrick Scoble ready for me getting a Mac? We’ll find out. Irina started calling him “lemming” because all he would do is talk about how cool Apple is all week. It does get tiresome, doesn’t it Irina? Maybe I’ll join Guy Kawasaki’s evangelistic hoardes.

Don’t worry, this post was typed on a Tablet PC. All is not lost for the Windows faithful.

OK, OK, I’ll take the bullet for the Google lawyers. They aren’t evil.

TDavid doesn’t understand their behavior this week, though.

Oh, T, They just live in an alternate universe to the one most of us humans live in.

See, in a courtroom things happen differently than they would on a street corner. On a street corner if someone tried to steal my name I’d just hit them over the head with my Bogen monopod (trust me, that’d hurt).

But in a courtroom a judge will ask “did you defend your trademark?”

If you didn’t defend your trademark it could legally be used. To a judge “defend” means “did you send threatening letters out to anyone who used your trademark improperly and can you prove that they were sent?”

Imagine a world where Bill Gates would be allowed to call his search engine “Microsoft Google.” Now you can start to understand why lawyers for brands like Google, Xerox, or Kleenex have to defend their trademarks.

Every journalism school student, though, learns that the lawyers are generally just going to email badass sounding letters out, but aren’t willing to make the PR mess of taking you to court (not to mention that it’s expensive and most of the time they just need the copies of the letters to convince the judge they are defending, not a full-blown trial). I got a bunch of those cease-and-desist letters for using things like the word “Kleenex” in my stories in without capitalizing it or putting the usual “TM” after the word (we never did that, mostly cause we were too lazy to look up the symbol inside QuarkXPress).

Translation: cut the lawyers some slack. If they weren’t sending out stupid letters like this they’d be doing something far more evil with their time.

I notice a general trend looking through blogs, TechMeme, and Digg. There aren’t many coders anymore.

Five years ago the discussions were far more technical and geeky. Even insiderish. When compared to the hype and news of today.

It makes me pine for ye old RSS vs. Atom geek flamefests.

Anyone else notice this trend?

Anyway, thanks to Mike Gunderloy for helping keep technical blogs around.

What brought this on? Last week at OffTheGrid we had a “language war” that spontaneously broke out. I filmed part of it. Not sure I learned much that I didn’t already know, but it was fun to hear some of that old developer passion break out in a fun way.

Anyway, tonight over on Digg I see that Pirillo and Laporte are bringing back TechTV. Hey, wait a second! You wanna bring back TechTV but you want ME to do all the work? I didn’t sign up for THAT! Heheh.

Elsehere on the blogs, yes, I did tell On10.net at BlogHer that Maryam was my #1 Maryam. But it helps that she’s #1 on Google too.

But, back to geeks. Jason Perlow, contributing editor of Linux Magazine is one and gives PodTech a preview of LinuxWorld, going on this week in SF.

Oh, and Richard Stallman who is almost as geeky as Shelley Powers is on the decidedly not geeky geekentertainment.tv talking about borscht. I love how Irina gives him some heck. You know, sometimes people gave us Microsofties crud cause Steve Ballmer would say or do some outlandish things (developers, developers, developers!) but if I still worked at Microsoft I’d just send Richard’s video to everyone and say “this guy makes Ballmer sound normal.”

On our trip we watched a ton of Ze Frank. We even sang a few of his songs. Some of which included the word “duckie.” Which is why I took a picture of this sign in Livingston, Montana. I stopped the van and said “I’m taking this one for Ze.”

Speaking of Ze, I’m not afraid, but I am terrorized. Terrorized that they’ll take away my electronic equipment on flights. Gosh, what will I need to do? Read a book? Next someone will figure out how to turn paper into some sort of weapon.

And people wonder why we drove to Montana.

Oh, Jeff Sandquist reminded me of how bad travel can get (and how being a Microsoft employee sure makes it nicer) with his posts from India.

Anyway, Ze, I wish I had your talent. While I try to acquire such (not blinking is HARD damn it!) you’ll just have to put up with my lame photo of a rubber ducky river rental sign.

Sorry.

There are a few things I learned at Microsoft that required me to really bite my lip cause of my NDA. This is one of them. And, yes, Fred, I totally agree that this is a game changer.

But the thing I’m keeping my eye on is the fact that my Xbox brings me new videos every few hours.

Now THAT has the potential to change everything from ABC news on down to YouTube.

Why?

Did I mention that Comcast in Half Moon Bay (only a handful of miles from Silicon Valley) does NOT have HDTV yet on its cable lineup? Isn’t that lame?

But Comcast DOES bring Internet access to my Xbox 360. I smell a route-around here. Media Center and BitTorrent, here I come!

Oh, speaking of HDTV. We bought a couple of Sony HVRZ1U’s. They cost about $4,000 over on B&H. But I wasn’t prepared for how stunning an image they produce when hooked up to my 60-inch Sony TV. Wow. Almost as good as the Discovery Channel (most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless two images were put side-by-side).

I SSSSOOOOO want to show you the videos we did in Yellowstone. But all the video services like Google Video, Youtube, and Blip.TV compress the video all to heck to make it economical to distribute.

I wish the big video distribution networks would make HD capable by using something like RedSwoosh.

In the meantime, I gotta put my videos on Blip.TV.

Geoff Jones wonders why I haven’t written about the two big Microsoft announcements. Well, cause, I thought they were already covered to death.

But, I’m using Live Writer. I would have had a chance to use it all weekend long, I just learned from my email, but I was off the grid all weekend long (no wifi at my new house yet and my Verizon card isn’t working either — I think we didn’t pay the bill, gotta call about that tomorrow).

Anyway, if you’re one of the three people who didn’t see the announcement, Windows Live Writer is an editor for blogging. I like it very much and am using it now full time. I’ll have a review on the editors on my show next month sometime. Works just fine with Wordpress.com. More pro and cons from tons of different bloggers over on TechMeme.

OK, you have to picture this. A resort in the middle of nowhere that’s been here for 100 years (Theodore Roosevelt stopped here when he was planning the first national park). How weird is this resort? Well, its front driveway is a landing strip.

Now, look at the front porch. There’s nine geeks all on laptops checking their email, blogging, uploading videos, or watching the keynote from yesterday.

Yeah, Herschel Horton, that’s exactly where we are (he found an image on Google Earth of my mom’s house)

Eddie has first photos.

Laura Moncur has video from the Salt Lake brunch we had on the way here.

Anyway, the mix of people here is just perfect. There are a couple of families. A professor. A couple of CEOs. A couple of hard core geeks (one wrote the software for Microsoft’s wheel mouse). A few video bloggers. A few locals. A few eccentrics.

It’s Blogher meets Gnomedex. With no agenda other than to get to Chico, go swimming, and get on Wifi. Anyway, having fun in the sun.

30 people is a perfect size for a campout. That’s enough so that you get enough diversity and you get enough time with each person to really have a good conversation. We stayed up last night until about 3 a.m. just talking.

Richard White, founder of KikoCalendar and SlimTimer, which got a nice writeup in TechCrunch, was here and he was suprised to find some users of his product here.

John Masterson, founder of GrupThink brought his homebrew beer, which we’ll start consuming soon. Grupthink is lots of fun to browse through. It’s a site where you can get your questions answered.

Thanks to Jan McLaughlin for the photo. We just couldn’t stay off the grid. But, now it’s “jump in the pool” time. More later.

Niall Kennedy leaves Microsoft, he announced today on his blog. That’s a bummer. Microsoft needs more Web natives, not fewer. Reading his blog today I’m left saddened, especially since Niall was hired to make an RSS synchronization platform. Good news for NewsGator, though, since NewsGator already has a decent synchronization platform.