Disclaimer: Maryam and I went on this trip without paying for it. Hey, like I said, if I sell my soul there are a few rules:

1) My soul is not cheap.
2) I will disclose who takes over ownership of my soul.

Anyway, this is all a way to say that the video is now up of “Grapes on a Plane” trip that Maryam and I got invited to. You can see what happens when we all head on a private Lear Jet and go wine tasting. Of course I take you along and, yes, even interview some fabulous Washington state winery owners. Thanks to Greenpoint Technologies for sponsoring the trip (they are the ones who built the planes we used) and thanks to Blog Business Summit (this trip was a reward for top speakers and affiliates). Steve Broback, the founder of Blog Business Summit, helped put the trip together (his dad is one of the founders of Greenpoint).

I guess this is going to be the closest I’m going to get to seeing inside the Google Jet…

Best thing about this mode of travel? No security lines! Yeah, it’s good being a Billionaire. Tomorrow night we’ll be back to flying coach on Southwest Airlines as we travel up to Seattle to attend Chris and Ponzi’s wedding.

The video starts out with a Q&A session with Jon Buccola, the CEO of Greenpoint, who talks about how much it costs, and all that. Then you’ll see Maryam and me inside one of the Lear Jets, where we talk more with Jon. About 1/3rd of the way through you get a nice view of Mount Rainier. Half way through you see Theresa, of Blog Business Summit’s blog. Then from there it’s winery time. I pretty much didn’t edit any of this, so I’d download the video and scrub through it to the parts that interest you the most.

You’ll also see famous bloggers: Matt Mullenweg. Halley Suitt. Andru Edwards. Maryam Scoble. Maryam gets a wee bit excited about the cool seats. Definitely not like coach!

Tom Foremski talks about the 61 video hosting services that have popped up like mushrooms after a long rain.

The problem is, is it possible to create another YouTube?

That’s a daunting task.

The one that’ll win will do something totally different than just host video. Remember when it looked like the photo service site battle was done? Then Flickr came along.

We need something that totally changes the rules of what I can do with my video camera.

And, no, I don’t have it at PodTech either. I wish I did.

Nice list over on Darren’s blog of signs you need a break from your blog. But I’ll add:

#9: you blog about blogging.
#10: you attack an A-lister by saying he’s an echo-chamber enabler and only writes to get on TechMeme.
#11: you say “TechCrunch this” and “TechCrunch that.”
#12: you go to Twitter and write “I’m blogging.”
#13: you tell your boss you aren’t merely reading blogs, you’re doing customer research.
#14: you have taken your son to so many blogger meetups that he starts his own blog to protest.
#15: you know the CPMs of a dozen other bloggers’ ads.
#16: when you say “Nick” “Om” “Mike” “Shelley” everyone around you knows who you are talking about.

James Kim was found dead. Maryam just came in and told me (I was in interviews). She was sad, crying, actually, me too. It’s interesting how someone we never met can affect us so. Our thoughts with the family and with his coworkers at CNET.

While doing my link blog this morning and reading my feeds, I saw over on Michael Murphy’s blog I saw this video about how a guy finds innovative ways to move heavy blocks. I love videos like this.

Also on my link blog you’ll see some nice coffee designs and read why Frank Barnako is calling blog search engine Technorati “Technocrapi.”

Over OnStartups there’s an interesting post about whether or not cheapskates make for good customers.

I remember one cheapskate who came into my store. He drove from San Francisco to “save” five dollars. I still remember that I thought he was the biggest idiot I’d ever met. Why? It takes an hour to drive from SF to SJ and the average car costs something like $.32 a mile to operate. So, he wasted money, even if his time isn’t worth anything. I knew he would never become a loyal customer cause I knew he’d go to any distance to find a cheaper price.

Good discussion, though, on what makes for a good customer.

Me? A customer who gets involved. Who tells other people about you. Who gives you ideas on how to improve (thanks to those who have emailed me, or gone to my wiki and left me suggestions or tips or interview ideas).

I remember one customer in the camera store I used to work at (who eventually became my favorite — and was extremely loyal). While I was writing up his multi-thousand dollar order he went and bought both of us lunch.

Did I remember that the next time he came in? Certainly did.

I’ve gotten around to a lot of Wiki companies lately. The market for them is white hot. One of my interviewees, Wikia, just got funded by Amazon. Another, JotSpot, got bought by Google.

So, to wrap up the group of Wiki interviews, I went to Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, which is the first company that I saw try to make a business out of wikis. We spend an hour talking about a bunch of things.

Other wiki-oriented interviews I’ve done:

Atlassian
JotSpot
Wikia

Silicon Valley Watcher Tom Foremski notices the same thing I’ve noticed recently. Dan Farber is everywhere and is building a very interesting blogger network. And notice, for very little cash too!

That’s what happens when you show up to everything AND you’re nice like Dan is. People want to work for you.

Mitch Ratcliffe says our book rocks. Thank you very much!

Seriously, though. Nice list of books!

Sam Sethi (of UK TechCrunch) had a breakfast last week in London. What did we all talk about? Twitter. Seems it was the topic of conversation on LunchMeet too!

My problem with Twitter? I keep forgetting to do it. Evan Williams, founder of the company that did Twitter, sent me email telling me that there’s a setting that’ll turn on a reminder. Oh, that’s what I need. More reminders that I’m behind. I just need to look at my inbox to remember that!

But, I do love Twitter for some reason. I can log in there and see what all my friends say they are doing.

UPDATE: Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of the company that made Blogger, is in this video.

Ahh, I see Yahoo has reorged while I flew home. It’s all over TechMeme. My analysis? Yahoo’s struggling to figure out how to monetize its users. I feel for them. Google disrupted Yahoo by going with text-ads and turning down the billions in banner advertising that was out there. Yahoo, like Microsoft, is struggling to deal with that disruption.

Trick is, I’m willing to click on blue-underlined content. Steve Broback noted this way back in 2000 when I still worked at Fawcette. The world hasn’t changed since then. I filter banner ads out. I don’t even see them. I certainly don’t take action based on them. Little blue underlined text? Much better cause it gets you to click. To take action. And they are easier to put next to content that makes sense.

Yahoo has two things going for it. 1) Audience. I watch how people use computers and they still go to Yahoo. A lot. 2) Brand. They have new hot brands like Flickr and Del.icio.us along with big old brands like Yahoo itself.

I wonder, though, if it’s too late to give up banners and go text-ads ala Google style? It probably is for Yahoo. And the hottest advertising market in 2007 are going to be in video and mapping. Both places that Yahoo isn’t really known for.

Translation: they might be reorging the chairs on the deck, but fundamentally Yahoo isn’t making the kinds of Google-stopping moves it needs to make.

A new Adobe Reader to try.

Here’s a video that I did a few months ago that shows off the new Acrobat 8 features.

Dan Gillmor says professional photojournalism is on decline.

I think he’s missing the forest for the tree that’s getting cut down.

I know a photographer who is making $2,000 per month from advertising on his blog. That “job” didn’t exist a year ago.

I look at Flickr and see that tons of photojournalism is being done — and being done better than most of the “pros” I used to know did it. Some of those “Flickr-fabulous” photographers are building sizeable brands and are going to soon be sponsorable properties all by themselves. My Photowalking series is the most talked about videos on the ScobleShow.

I heard last week that Canon and Nikon are reporting that digital SLR sales are higher than they were expecting.

Speaking of all this. We’re going to have an open Photowalking. December 27th. 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. At Sacramento’s Train Museum.

I’m getting Seagate to give us some prizes and goodies (more on that later) and we’ll have a lot of fun. Thomas Hawk will be there. We’re inviting a few other “Flickr-fabulous” photographers too.

Why do this? Cause neither Thomas nor Heather Champ (one of the co-founders of JPG magazine) had ever been to the train museum, which is the largest in the world (and offers TONS of great photo opportunities).

First tip? Bring a tripod. It’s dark in many places in the museum.

Speaking of JPG magazine. Have you seen it yet? It’s freaking awesome. That’s another thing that didn’t exist for photographers two years ago.

So, yes, Dan Gillmor is right. A tree in the forest is going away. Getting cut down. But, watch for new trees sprouting up thanks to good digital SLRs and a new kind of “pro” photographer who is using photography to build new kinds of photojournalism businesses.

Everyone we’ve met here has explained to us the Sinterklaas tradition. Today kids are waking up all over the Nederlands to find that a carrott they left in their shoes has been replaced with candy and other goodies. Over the weekend there was a big Sinterklaas event (which is their version of Santa Claus, only he doesn’t live in the North Pole, prefering to reside in Spain instead — sounds smarter to me).

Anyway, we gotta run and get to the airport, be traveling all day today. See ya Wednesday. Oh, I left you some goodies over on my link blog and a new video shows up everyday over on ScobleShow, whether I’m traveling or not.

Ahh, so someone at Microsoft made a mistake and didn’t correctly use an image from Niall Kennedy’s feed from Flickr (or didn’t pay attention to the Creative Commons license agreement). So, what did Niall do? Did he call up one of his former co-workers at Microsoft and explain that he was pissed and get the problem taken care of nicely and behind closed doors? No.

He replaced the image with a porn image, Todd Bishop at the Seattle PI reports.

I’m sure that gets everyone 16 and under to laugh, but is that really the best way that Niall could have gotten the image taken down?

I don’t think so. Unprofessional, especially for someone who used to work at Microsoft.

Remember Niall, maybe someday this Web 2.0 bubble will end and you might need to go back to a company and look for a job. I know that doesn’t seem probable right now, but I’ve been there.

Burn bridges if you want, but I’ve learned over and over that people remember this kind of treatment and it certainly never disappears from Google. All three of my last job interviews had people looking over Google for unprofessional stuff like this to bring up in the interviews. And, all big companies have people who used to work at Microsoft so that bridge you’re blowing up? Might turn out to be the one you need to cross in the future.

UPDATE: Someone on the RSS team just IM’ed me and said that the RSS team was never contacted about this issue.

The news is getting better in the Kim family disappearance. Engadget is reporting that Kati Kim and her two children are safe (the CNET family that was missing for a week) but that CNET editor James Kim is still missing. More on Google News, there’s a press conference this afternoon. CNET has a much more thorough story.

While Ask is copying Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo with its AskCities, Quintura has something that’s far more worthy of a Digg or TechMeme-style overhyping. It’s visual search and I saw it at the Firefox party in London last Friday, just like Ewan McIntosh did, and it’s pretty damn cool.

What does it do? You search on something, say “Amsterdam” and it presents a tag-cloud, built with Flash, that shows you other possibilities around that query.

Yakov Sadchikov, founder, told me that Quintura has gotten popular among SEO types because it shows you keywords that other methods don’t show you. I’ve played with it a bit and it sure is an interesting new way to search.

Adobe’s John Dowdell has the best question (and best set of links) about Microsoft’s new “Blend:” why do it and not support Flash?

Because of what Blend lets Microsoft do: get Macromedia stuff out of the Windows development process.

Huh?

Remember all those “Longhorn rules” posts I made about four years ago? Do you know where they came from?

I do. And I’ll never forget the software development lesson that was harshly handed to me.

Microsofties (before I was an employee) showed me some prototypes of Vista. I didn’t know they were prototypes, though. Later, after becoming a Microsoft employee, I found out that all we really saw were Macromedia Director-based movies.

They looked so cool. Tom Koch, today, and I talked about that MVP meeting where we saw those prototypes and how good they made us feel (almost everything that we saw back then was totally changed in the final release).

This actually was NOT a good thing for Microsoft. Why? Because when you build up expectations and you aren’t able to meet them you look pretty silly.

But behind the scenes things were even worse.

Why? Because executives bought into the Flash and Mirrors song and dance too. They thought what they were seeing was possible.

The problem was, developers weren’t involved. Only people who studied interaction, design, and Macromedia Director.

Problem is, anything you create in Director has to be thrown out and rewritten in C++ (if you work on the Windows team).

That meant a whole bunch of time is wasted, plus it’s very possible that what you are dreaming of is simply not possible. It’s also possible that development teams, that don’t understand interaction design, will change your “experiences” and totally munge things up.

So, could Flash ever be “force fit” to be the UI of Windows? Not according to the engineers who’ve studied the problem.

They needed a system that could be used to design real pieces of Windows, if not the entire UI, and handed off to a developer, or team of developers, without having to have the developers touch the UI at all.

You can see this in my early Channel 9 videos with the Sparkle team (which became “Blend” today).

Blend is based on .NET 3.0, and goes beyond anything possible today in Flash or Adobe products — at least as it comes to the combined design and development team.

I saw how a designer built the original Longhorn clock and a developer coded the interactions behind it using Sparkle in a fraction of the time it would take using other approaches.

Does Microsoft care about cross-platform and all that other stuff? Yeah. But it’s only secondary to Microsoft’s need to make the Windows development process much smoother. The executives never want to go through another schedule slip like they did with Longhorn.

Blend will let the Windows team designers get rid of Macromedia stuff. At least that’s the hype.

How will we know the hype is real? Show me those Vienna prototypes and let me play with them! (Vienna is the code name for the next version of Windows).

UPDATE: TechMeme is all over Expression Blend.

If you’ve been watching http://blogs.msdn.com/ which is where most of the Microsoft employees blog, you’ve seen at least a dozen mentions today of Microsoft’s new Sparkle, Expression, um, sorry, now named “Blend.” I only let one of these through to my Link Blog, but I was just realizing how brilliant this is.

Google counts links from blogs in its search engine. So, if Microsoft wants to get something higher on Google, all it would have to do is call upon its bloggers. It’s probably the best SEO network the world has ever seen (Microsoft has more than 3,000 bloggers, with at least 500 active ones).

Internally, how does this work? The bloggers at Microsoft have a mailing list. Someone goes on the mailing list and says something innocuous, like “hey, the Expression team just announced Blend” with a URL underneath and there’ll usually be a few dozen posts in an hour.

Don’t think this matters? Well, if you search Google for Martin Luther King, you’ll notice the result set has changed quite a bit from two weeks ago (when a bunch of bloggers decided to “Google Bomb” an anti-King site to make it lower on the list because we felt it wasn’t really the most relevant result that should come up when you search for Martin Luther King).

Anyway, this kind of “blog farm” can dramatically change results on Google and other search engines in a way that SEO’s just simply can’t match.

Oh, and even better, they set the agenda that everyone has to link back to. Yes, even the bloggers will go higher. A search for “Expression Blend” on Google’s blog search shows dozens of bloggers talking about the new name and release.

As to Blend and its chances in the marketplace? More later.

I wish I was back in Silicon Valley at the technology evangelists’ meeting. But not too much. Coming to Amsterdam was good for the soul. Meeting Tom Koch and Peter van Teeseling tonight was like my own personal evangelists’ meeting anyway. No, it’s not the “coffee shops” or the “red light district” that were the real turnons about Amsterdam. It was the canals and the great people who gave us experiences we’ll never forget.

Oh, and what happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam so use your wildest imagination and send Valleywag a good rumor.