Bad Sinatra starts out with a walk into Marc Benioff’s office (CEO of Salesforce.com) and goes downhill from there. How far downhill? Let’s watch…

After Benioff’s office, the video rolls into a conversation with Dan Farber, ZDNet’s head blogger.
Then to Doc Searls talking with Salim Ismael.

Now he’s arguing with Dan Farber. Hmmm, now you get to see what San Francisco parties are like. Ahh, “Office is Dead” already comes up.

Mike Arrington shows up. Calls Gillmor “a dick.”

Ahh, I’m in the Bad Sinatra I video too. Gillmor is too lazy to pan on me. Dang, that tape is old, I wondered when Steve would use it.

Slightly not office safe. Or is that “slightly not Microsoft Office ™ safe?” Heheh. It’s not really that explicit, just a four-letter word or two.

Finally, Marc Benioff’s face at the end when Steve asks him about the iPhone is priceless. I bet Fake Steve Jobs will hate this cause of what he says about the iPhone.

As the description says, “it’s not the Gillmor Gang, but who cares.”

Can’t wait to see #2.

Adobe invited me to come along on part of its On AIR Bus Tour. I’ll be making the trip today up to Seattle. We leave at 6 a.m. from Adobe’s buildings in San Francisco. There’s going to be a live video feed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. AIR stands for “Adobe Integrated Runtime” and is Adobe’s competitor to Microsoft’s .NET and Sun Microsystems Java. Basically it lets you move Web apps onto the desktop and out of the browser. Offline and all that fun stuff.

On my Facebook Profile I’ve been asking people what they’d like me to ask the Adobe executives. I’ll get those questions, and any that are left here in my comments, answered. There’s also going to be a Twitter feed, but looks like that, and a Flickr feed, are reposted on the On AIR tour page.

I’ll post some stuff from the road. Of course I’ll have my Nokia cell phone with me, so you’re welcome to call us on the bus tour at 425-205-1921.

Unfortunately I’ll be in Seattle only on Monday night for a few short hours, so can’t shoot any video there. I’ll spend more time in Seattle around Gnomedex, so if you have something cool to show me, let’s get together then.

Oh, and the Adobe bus will be the first vehicle I’ll have been in that has its own API. You’ll be able to track our movements every step of the way.

I’ve been looking at a lot of blogs. Usually just in Google Reader. But when new blogs come along I have to visit them in a Web browser. Blognation, over in the UK, caught my eye. Nice simple design. I hate the small font, though, but I don’t really care about the fonts anymore. If a new blog catches my eye I instantly subscribe to it and never visit the Web page again.

That brings me to a point. It’s time to redesign my blog. Mark Lucovsky at Google was making fun of my “ugly” design recently. I said it was scientifically designed to get people to subscribe and put it into Google Reader. I was just trying to be funny, but I do admit that my blog is looking a bit “old school” now when compared to things like GigaOm and Blognation.

Mark was threatening to get Google’s designers to redesign my blog. That might be interesting, especially since Google’s custom search engine is getting better now that it lets me search not only the words on my blog, but every blog I’ve linked to.

Of course I’ve gotta bug Mark for not updating his own blog since May of last year. Heck, that’s so long ago that I was still working at Microsoft then.

What do you think? Should I redesign? What’s your favorite blog design and/or designer out there?

This startup makes me sad. Not because it isn’t doing beautiful stuff. They are. Maryam will smile when she gets her flowers delivered this morning. UPDATE: she laughed and said “you remembered I love flowers.” I guess that’s a hint, huh?

But Long Zheng only gets part of the story of three designers who left Microsoft to start a new company. More on “They’re Beautiful” over on TechMeme.

See, I know two of the three people involved. But there are other designers I’ve seen come to Microsoft and leave, too.

These designers tried to make Microsoft build products that are more fun to use, more emotional, more visually pleasing, more user-centric.

IE, more like the iPhone.

But they keep getting shot down, over and over and over.

So they leave.

When I worked at Microsoft I helped get one very talented designer hired into Microsoft (I won’t name him, sorry). The fact that Jenny Lam was working at Microsoft was a key part of his decision to come. He only lasted a few months. He never told me the reason cause he’s a professional but I could see it in his eyes. He knew that the company would never listen to him.

Microsoft is run by geeks. You know the type. They don’t understand why you need to design in animations, great sounds, and a flow from one experience to the next. They, at heart, think that a simple text list is just as good as something that has nice animations, fonts, graphics, etc. Heck, most of the developers who work at Microsoft live in text editors all day long. Even if they do get it, the committees kill these features when the project runs behind schedule because they take a ton of coding time, a ton of testing time, and don’t provide any “hard” value to the product.

Ask yourself again whether the iPhone would sell as well if you had to click a “next” button to see your next photo instead of having them animate across the screen while you drag your finger. My Nokia has the “next” button style interface. My iPhone is magical to use because it does the drag-the-finger animations. Apple listens to its designers. Microsoft and Nokia obviously do not.

It isn’t lost on me that the Xbox team is not located on Microsoft’s campus. They forced Bill Gates to give them a series of buildings about five miles away from headquarters so that this geek culture couldn’t poison the teams who needed to build something a bit more artisitic. Er, emotional. It also isn’t lost on me that Bungie, the folks who make the video game Halo, has its own building 10 miles away from headquarters (in the opposite direction from the Xbox team) and doesn’t even have a Microsoft sign on the front of the building. When you walk into Bungie it’s clear that the artists run the place, not the developers.

Most engineers I’ve met don’t get this stuff. Don’t understand why video games have an emotional effect on people.

Last night I interviewed Nicole Lazarro of XEO Designs. She talks exactly like Jenny Lam. She’s an “emotional architect” and helps game companies improve their games and has a document about “Why We Play Games” that’s a good read for someone trying to understand the emotional response. She does TONS of user testing and she’s already working on a study about the iPhone and why it makes people smile when they use it (they do, and several of the reviewers say it literally makes them laugh when they use it).

Dave Winer, last night, when talking with Nicole, said that it felt like the iPhone was designed by a set of movie artists, rather than software designers. He said that was both good and bad. That it “felt good” (he says the iPhone feels like driving a BMW) but that they forgot lots of little lessons that software developers had learned over the past 30 years. I’ll let him tell you what he meant by that, but those of us with iPhones have all hit lots of walls, and when you hit a wall you’ve probably hit one of those places where a lesson was forgotten

Joe Hewitt, one of the developers on the first Firefox team, was working with Nicole to build a game on the iPhone, among other things. He’s writing about that experience on his blog, by the way. He keeps hitting the walls too and he’s having to do hack after hack just to get it to do something basic, and simple, like a list of song titles.

Anyway, I have an interview with Jenny Lam, back when she worked at Microsoft.

Jenny, and Hillel Cooperman, and Walter Smith are creating a company up in Seattle that’s already one to watch.

Oh, and the flowers? They are nice and all, but are really just a front end to Silicon Valley’s next big business model: Virtual Goods. If I were a Silicon Valley startup trying to get venture funding, I’d go visit Hillel and see what kinds of virtual goods partnerships they could make.

Thanks for the beautiful flowers, can’t wait to see what they do next.

I would rather have had a beautiful set of experiences on Windows, though, or an “iPhone killer” from the Windows Mobile group. I hope that the great designers still left inside Microsoft (and there are a few) start getting listened to by the culture inside Microsoft. But the stream of designers that leave Microsoft isn’t sending a gesture of love and inspiration.

Oh well, at least we have some nice virtual flowers.

Dori Smith, long time Apple advocate and JavaScript expert, responds to my post last night about Apple’s absence at the iPhoneDevCamp that I’m attending. Funny enough I’m not allowed to tell you whether or not I’ve met any Apple employees here because if there were Apple employees here they aren’t allowed to talk to the press. Since everyone is the press now I guess they aren’t allowed to talk to anyone. Sigh.

Joey DeVilla takes the alternate point of view and says “Scoble’s got a sweet job: he’s the only person outside the Bush Administration who can be wrong a lot of the time and still and reap the rewards from it.” Heheh.

Anyway, there’s a growing theme here on the floor of the iPhoneDevCamp: developer pain.

Here’s an example of the developer pain. You know that the iPhone senses when you turn it, right? If you’re in a browser the browser changes from portrait mode (skinny and tall) to landscape model (fat and short).

Now, the iPhone internally has an API for getting data from the sensor. The browser even knows when you turn it upside down.

The problem? They don’t have an API that you and I can get to. So, we can’t make our Web pages really accurately reconfigure themselves based on whether they are in portrait or landscape mode. In fact, there’s no way for you to tell whether the phone has been turned at all.

Or is there?

A smart dev realized that there’s a hack. I’m not sure who found this first, so sorry for not handing out credit, but Christopher Allen told me about it.

The hack? Well, each time you turn the iPhone it causes the browser to resize. So, all you have to do is watch for a resize event. Then you can sense whether the phone is in landscape or portrait mode.

But, because this is a hack it means you really don’t know which way the phone was turned. Is it upside down? Rightside up? You don’t know.

Now there are some game developers here who would LOVE to know that. If they did, they could make games that work by turning your phone one direction or another.

But they are feeling the pain. They are hitting walls.

Another wall?

The iPhone can’t play sounds while surfing the Web. So, you can’t play sound for people based on Web events. Again, makes making a game very difficult.

Christopher has a whole list of iPhoneDevPain that he’ll get up on the iPhoneWebDev site.

On the other hand, the list of apps is getting longer and people are having a great deal of fun trying various things. One group built an app that if your iPhone gets knocked off of its dock it’ll “moo.” Useless, but fun.

UPDATE: A guy named Phil Collins says he’s going to unsubscribe from my blog if I don’t stop talking about iPhone.

Jamie does another one of his C9Park cartoon strips where he explains all of Microsoft’s strategies in one short read. Hillarious.

I’m looking at the Microsoft Live Earth concert site (they have concerts playing right now, and will be for the next 24 hours) but I must be missing something. Is there a damn schedule? I can’t find it. Oh, and I’m not the only one who is having problems finding the schedule, either. David in Chicago called me and asked me the same thing.

OK, let me set the scene here. Three weeks ago this event didn’t exist. 300 developers are here in San Francisco. All voluntarily. All organized themselves.

I’ve already met a Microsoft employee. A Yahoo employee. A Verisign employee.

But where’s the Apple employees?

Here are 300 developers who WANT to help Apple make its iPhone even better. Yet Apple’s secrecy and lack of care for developers demonstrates itself by not showing up.

Apple should remember 1989. It had a massive lead with the Macintosh. It ended up with, what, five percent market share.

Why? At least in part because it told developers to go pound sand.

History is repeating itself.

This is a VERY geeky room. Developers only (I’m one of only a handful of people who aren’t a developer here).

Watch Flickr for photos from the event.

Watch Twitters from the event. I’ll put up some TwitterGrams (short, recorded audio pieces sent to Twitter) shortly.

If you’re a developer you’ll want to be at this event. It’s a remarkable event already. The conversations here are flowing big time. I haven’t seen this kind of developer energy for a long time.

Where’s Apple? Microsoft is here.

If this were a Microsoft event the evangelism team would be here in force with T-shirts, stickers, free dev tools, tons of geeks who could help people figure out technical issues, and more. Look at how Microsoft dealt with Maker Faire, they sent the guy who builds Bill Gates’ keynote demos to help out. THAT is how Microsoft got 90% market share.

Where’s Apple?

UPDATE: John Dowdell notes that there may be a few Apple employees there, but they aren’t telling anyone they are from Apple. That changes his opinion of Apple, for the worse.

It’s real interesting that many of the blogs are playing up Skinkers and Microsoft’s new P2P video distribution system as a “Joost killer” or, more humorously, a “Slingbox killer.” My Slingbox has a tuner. I don’t remember seeing a tuner in my Media Center box upstairs so how could a piece of software kill my Slingbox? I don’t get that.

These things have another problem: the Web is a better video distribution network cause we don’t have to leave our browsers where we all feel comfortable.

Why else? Cause the Web can be fixed. The Web can be added to. The Web can be participated in. AOL-style clients lock us in, can’t be updated on our timetable. And how do we get our own content into Joost? Anyone know? I don’t.

I look at how my son uses media. He dives in and through various Web sites snacking on media along the way. A YouTube video here. A New York Times video there. A PodTech video next. A Kyte.TV video later. Now he’s already using his camera to upload photos from the street. He’s joined the media creation revolution. Can’t wait until Apple turns on the video camera on the iPhone. Wait until he sees that Facebook has a video feature. THAT is the thing everyone in the video industry should be worried about and focused on. Anyone notice that you can upload video to my Kyte.tv

Why would he start up another environment just to watch video? Especially when many of these let him participate by throwing comments up, or chatting, or doing other things?

I just am not a big believer in yet another AOL-style client. I think the Web is far more interesting. Don’t miss what Facebook is doing with video, though. It’s totally not sexy. Not wrapped in a pretty client. No big deals with Viacom, etc. But I bet that in two years it’ll be something that changes the industry. Joost? Skinner? I don’t think so.

What do you think?

Oh, and don’t forget about the iPhone. Heheh.

I started Google Reader to see what the bloggers are yakking about and Ed Bott was the first poster I saw. He’s complaining that A-list bloggers don’t get it right and don’t correct their posts. What caused him to write this? A story that’s at the top of Techmeme that announces that Skinkers and Microsoft announce a live, streaming content venture. But the problem with Ed’s whine is that I see three headlines on TechMeme, one from “One Microsoft Way;” another from “TechCrunch”; and another from Don Dodge who works at Microsoft. That’s it. And all three stories don’t have the problems that Ed is going on and on about. So, not sure who the “A listers” who got it wrong are. Ahh, I see, Long Zheng wrote a post that details it.

Interesting that I saw both of these guys’ posts before I saw any of the offending ones. Maybe that’s why I like reading feeds more than I like reading TechMeme lately.

But it’s also why I’m at least partially off of the “break the news first” bus. That business is getting a LOT more competitive and I find I’d rather sit back and read everyone’s feeds and pick the best post out of the bunch for my link blog.

One other thing, I told an audience recently that I don’t believe anything on the blogs for the first 24-hours. So I guess I actually agree with Ed’s thesis. If it doesn’t get refuted by someone who is actually involved then it probably is true. Except over on sites like Valleywag and Fake Steve. There they don’t even try to get the facts right and are TOTALLY for entertainment value. I read those things just for a laugh and don’t try to refute every little post they make about me (which seems like every few hours lately which is funny cause Nick Douglas of Valleywag, about a month ago, wrote a post saying I was irrelevant. If I’m irrelevant and they are writing about me what does that make them? Heheh).

Anyway, onward. I’d rather work with mainstream press than take potshots at them. Same with bloggers. We all can do a better job.

UPDATE: Of course it’s not just bloggers who don’t get things right. Here’s a Dow Jones refutation of a professional news outlet’s claim that Dow Jones has been acquired.

Translation: be skeptical! And distrust things that don’t have open comments.