It’s Zune day. Despite my being harsh, two Zunes arrived tonight for me to play with. I didn’t ask for them. Edelman sent them over. Very nice of them. It says I can keep one, if I want, or I can send them both back (they included postage-paid return box). One of them is just so I can test out the music sharing part of the Zune.

Ahh, it’s 12:21 p.m. — zune it’ll be Zune time. Heheh.

First I gotta go through my feeds for my link blog. There’s a TON of great stuff on the feeds today.

Marc Canter said it: Salt Lick. I’m in!

Someday I’ll get Adobe Blogger John Nack on but here I video Peter Ryce. He calls himself the “Connectionist.” Anyway, Peter talks with me about what Adobe Connect does and gives a demo of how you can use it to give a presentation to your customers or coworkers.

Hey, John Dodds, first thing we need to discuss about marketing is that “2.0″ is SO last week.

This week we’re renaming it to “2007.” So, your “Marketing 2.0 Manifesto” becomes “Marketing 2007 Manifesto.”

I really really hate the new Valleywag design. Luckily I’ll never see it again thanks to RSS. Good luck to Nick Douglas. Interesting that yet another blog star of the Nick Denton network walked away (Peter Rojas walked away and went to Engadget, which ended up making millions).

Yesterday I was at Dave Winer’s house and got an early look at Confabb, a Web 2.0 site that just opened this morning.

Since I’ve been involved in planning, attending, or speaking at dozens of conferences and expos and other events this was very interesting to me.

In a few minutes I’ll have a demo and interview with founder Salim  Ismail up on ScobleShow. UPDATE: the interview is up (latest Quicktime required). By the way, that was done on Dave Winer’s “RSS couch.” Demo coming shortly is up now.

Is this a cool demo? Nah, not like last week’s Photosynth. Will it put Microsoft out of business? Nah. But is it something that you will probably use? I think so, at least if you’re going to go to a conference.

I’ll definitely use it to update the CES 2007 site on Confabb and add mention of our BlogHaus, which will be in the Bellagio there (Seagate, Microsoft, and AMD are sponsoring that).

Of course TechCrunch has a mention of it up already.

Heheh, Mary Jo says she’s going with Bill Gates and smacks me back into my corner.

I’m sure it drives many of the geeks crazy in the industry that so much attention is being paid to four little notes. The Associated Press has the story — nice to see Steve Ball get some attention, he’s one of the truly great guys at Microsoft. But, I find it fascinating. I wish I had the videotape I did of Robert Fripp in Microsoft’s studio. But it’s in a big box somewhere inside Microsoft.

Hugh Macleod: the Microsoft question.

Thanks Hugh for the overly kind things you wrote about me.

Truth is, I’m still interested a lot in Microsoft too.

I read both blogs.msdn.com and blogs.technet.com and other Microsoft blogs every day.

Why?

For many of the reasons that Hugh talks about.

The people I met there are, for the most part, top notch.

To me, that alone makes them interesting to watch, no matter what happens.

Yeah, I’m a little more ascerbic toward my former coworkers than I was when I was there (that’s normal, I think) but part of that is just hoping that they break out and do something amazing.

Translation: I’m still holding my meager cache (a few hundred shares) of Microsoft stock.

Tomorrow at noon Pacific Time a new company will be born. I have video with the CEO coming to ScobleShow. But what was remarkable was just how much was built without spending a single dollar.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard an entrepreneur tell me that they built a business with zero, or almost no, money, by the way.

This is another thing that Bill Gates doesn’t understand and will have deep implications for everyone. After all, Bill is still struggling to compete with free software.

Now he’s going to have to compete with free companies (or, more accurately, micro financed ones).

By the way, the service is cool and I’m going to use it a lot. It doesn’t have a killer demo like the photo thing that Microsoft showed off last week but it is useful for many of us, which is good enough.

More tomorrow after I get released from NDA at noon.

Anyone notice this? It seems that I can read faster than Google Reader can mark as read. At least it isn’t very good about marking things as read.

So, what I do is read all the way through my river of news and when I get to yesterday’s stuff I mark all as read.

Hmmm, Bill Gates is reported to have said “we’re back kind of in Internet-bubble era in terms of people thinking: ‘OK, traffic. We want traffic. We want traffic. There are still some areas where it is unclear what’s going to come out of that.”

Yup. The bubble is back Bill says.

A few differences I’ve noticed this time around (so far):

1) I haven’t seen a really stupid business model yet. No selling dog food that would never make enough money to pay for the trucks it was being delivered on. Yeah, there’s too many Web 2 businesses with too much reliance on advertising, but most of these businesses are funded for very little money so the pain to investors for the death of these things is going to be very small (and, I predict most of them will make enough to pay salaries and give back something to their investors, so we won’t see a huge number of bankruptcies like the last time).

2) No retail investors. Joe Kraus pointed this out to me. There haven’t been any IPOs. No “mom and dads” buying stock like the last time around.

3) Irrational exuberance isn’t there. Yeah, we all get together at Arrington’s house or a VC’s office and drink a lot of beer and wine. But, really, those parties are small potatoes affairs compared with some of the shindigs in expensive locations last time around. Most Web 2 companies aren’t spending more than a few thousand in marketing and if they do, it’s to hire someone to build a Google keyword buying and SEO strategy.

4) Wealth is transfering not from retail investors, but from big companies who are battling with each other, to both inventors/entrepreneurs and wholesale investors (VCs).

One thing I’ve noticed is that Bill is taking a very conservative approach to Web companies. He even pointed this out to me and Mike Arrington at the Mix06 conference earlier this year.

It’ll be interesting to see if Bill has the last laugh in this game. I usually don’t bet against him, but I am this time around. Why? Cause I think Microsoft will end up spending more to clone some of this stuff than its competitors paid. Yes, even YouTube. Tell me, how will Microsoft create a video service that gets talked about almost nightly on mainstream media?

It’ll have to spend a lot of money buying cool and exclusive content for its Soapbox service. Funny thing. I couldn’t even remember the URL for it and I’m an insider in this industry. How did I find it? Google. Told me the URL is http://soapbox.msn.com/. So, they haven’t even gotten a cool URL yet. Yeah, that won’t cost $1.6 billion. But I keep hearing about YouTube. YouTube this. YouTube that. Everytime I hear about YouTube doing something they extend their lead on Microsoft.

Hey, Bill. You want to be in the advertising business, right?

Go to your advertisers and tell them “it’s not about traffic” and see what they’ll say.

This will be announced tomorrow morning. Simon Phipps, Sun’s Java guy, just IM’ed me the news.

SANTA CLARA, CALIF., — November 13, 2006 — Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW), the creator and leading advocate of Java(TM) technology, Monday will announce it is releasing its implementations of Java technology as free software under the GNU General Public License version two (GPLv2). Available today, are the first pieces of source code for Sun’s implementation of Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and a buildable implementation of Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME). Details are available at: at http://www.sun.com/opensource/java (on Monday morning). In addition, Sun is adding the GPLv2 license to Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), which has been available for over a year under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) through Project GlassFish(TM) at http://glassfish.dev.java.net.

I wonder how Microsoft will respond.

UPDATE: Tim Bray has a lot more on this on his blog.

Oh, now I understand why Microsoft didn’t offer the ScobleShow a Zune sponsorship! Andrew Baron reveals that he was offered such but turned it down because the terms said he wouldn’t be able to say anything disparaging about Microsoft or the Zune. Since I’ve already done both, that leaves me out of the running explicitly.

Lame.

Seagate, for instance, hasn’t told me ANYTHING about what I need to say about them (they are the founding sponsor for my ScobleShow). I could say Seagate sucks. I could say they rock. Or I could say nothing.

That’s why I really appreciate Seagate.

But, while I got Seagate’s CEO listening to see what I WILL say, why don’t you have a go? Got anything to say about Seagate? Anyone have one of their new 750GB drives? I know Thomas Hawk bought two and swears by them. But, here’s the deal. I want to know if their products suck. Why? Cause I can take that feedback to their execs and say “fix this and you’ll increase your brand’s equity.” If you think someone else makes better storage devices, tell the world right here. Even better, link to your blog where we can read why.

Microsoft, I guess, still hasn’t discovered what’s magical about blogs: they let a big company listen in on the word-of-mouth conversation in a way that no one was able to before.

UPDATE: James Robertson says this isn’t the way to turn down a deal cause it blows up all bridges. I don’t agree. You define yourself and your business by the customers you fire. I’m sure that the next sponsorship deal that Andy gets offered will be a lot more like what Seagate gave me than what Microsoft usually offers.

This takes me back to what was so special about Channel 9: that the customers could write “Microsoft sucks” right on the home page and we wouldn’t pull it down.

It’s too bad that Microsoft just doesn’t put Jeff Sandquist in charge of marketing and sponsorships. There’s no way he’d have left that as part of any deal he offered.

Damn, I take a few days off of blogging and the New York Times (er, John Markoff) goes and invents Web 3.0.

Huh?

I’ve done more than 50 interviews in the past three months and collected hundreds of business cards and I’ve NEVER heard anyone talking about Web 3.0.

Why am I left out of this joke? Ahh, the joke is on me.

Well, I was talking with several Web leaders tonight (seriously, I was) and we decided that Web 3.0 just won’t do.

So, tonight, we’re announcing Web 2007.

It’s just like Web 2006 except it has more widgets. Works on Windows Vista (which will ship in 2007). Apple will make it better (they are shipping a new OS too).

In best renaming tradition, it will embrace and extend Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 concepts. So, of course, Google will put ads on it.

Ray Ozzie will demonstrate a cool application framework for Web 2007 at Mix2007. David Heinemeier Hansson will hit back with Ruby on Rails 2007

Dave Winer will build OPML 2007 for moving your feeds from Web 2.0-oriented RSS readers to Web 2007-oriented RSS readers. Of course, RSS 2007 is the same as RSS 2006, but wait until you see Atom 2007!

Now, the important stuff. We need a “ready for Web 2007″ logo. Someone needs to design new rounded-corner graphics.

But, Valleywag nailed this — there’s no story here. So, move along.

Whatever the geeks are inventing it won’t be first seen in the New York Times and it probably won’t be called Web 3.0.

How did this get on the front page of the New York Times, though?

Other news here on Web 2007:

VC Peter Rip says the recombinant Web is coming. I agree with him, by the way, about Web 2.0 Summit. There weren’t many geeks there. Lots of CEOs and VCs, though. For a guy like me who wants to get those people on camera, it was pretty good.

Ross Mayfield says that Web 3.0 will be known as a marketing disaster.

Greg Linden says “cut the “Web 3.0″ hype. MY NOTE? Oh, wait Greg, until you see Web 2007 hype. It’ll take the Web 2.0 hype and multiply it by the Web 3.0 hype. It’ll be like “hype squared!” Heheh. Damn, I’m almost hyped up enough to create a PowerPoint presentation and start going up and down Sand Hill Road and see if I can get a Web 2007 company funded without having a product, a team, a business model, or, even, a blog. GASP. Can Scoble do it?

Dave Winer asks “does hype ever go out of style?“

The rest of TechMeme goes link happy, which, might just be what the New York Times was going for. So “Web 2.0.”

Web 2007 will be about what DOES NOT get linked to. Steve Gillmor style. I wonder if the New York Times can sense the gesture I’m sending it? Note I didn’t link to the Times.

Of course Dan Farber will write about Web 2007 and Nick Carr will say it’s irrelevant.

Oh, Nick reminded me to get a URL. Damn, Web2007.com is already gone.

I’m going back to do more chores for Maryam. You all have fun with this whole Web thing, OK? In the meantime I’m preparing a bevy of stuff for ScobleShow, which is the first approved Web 2007 site. Well, we will be as soon as we turn on our new API, our new iTunes/iPod feed, our new rounded corner graphics, our new social networking program, and our new hype machine which will be covered in next week’s New York Times.

Sigh.

Yesterday, Gary Flake, head of Microsoft’s Live Labs, gave me a tour of Photosynth. It is simply the demo of the year. Certainly the coolest thing showed off this week at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Gary gives a great demo.

Behind me there were a couple of Web 2.0 summit attendees and they were whispering to each other “f***ing amazing.” Even better than you can load this on your own computer, get it on the Photosynth site.

I’m going to take the rest of the day off. In fact, I might take all of next week off from my text blog to dedicate time to answering email and to getting caught up on ScobleShow editing tasks.

Interesting writeup by Don Macaskill, CEO of SmugMug, who tells why Amazin is saving his photosharing service big bucks.

Stephane Rodriguez: Google’s Mayer bogus claims on Gmail speed. Love how he uses my last name to look into Google’s search quality. It really does give Google a black eye when my top result is a site that hasn’t been updated for a year and a half. Calling Matt Cutts, can ya tune up the engine?

Ever go to a content mall? Well, there sure are a lot of them being built. It’s where the VC’s are seeing some potential cash, at least in part because that’s what Jason Calacanis did when he built Weblogs Inc. and sold that to AOL for somewhere around $25 million. Get 100 or so niche bloggers (I’m focusing on videobloggers and podcasters) together, lash them together with links, hire a sales team to sell advertising, and build value through a good community, both inside and outside the firewall.

First, a disclaimer. I’m a content mall builder. But, when you are doing something you should stop and appreciate the great work your competitors are doing, right?

So, who else is building content malls?

Let’s start with Leo Laporte. He is kicking a** and taking no prisoners. I’m listening to this Inside the Net show right now. Oh, OK, I must admit I’m a Laportean at heart (I helped run his chat room back when he was on KGO AM radio back in the mid 90s before he joined TechTV). Leo already has nine “stores” in his content mall. Including Paul Thurrott on Windows and Denise Howlett on Law. Great stuff and a HIGHLY engaged audience. When I was on TWiT dozens of people called or emailed me, that’s the only time that’s ever happened when I’ve been on someone’s show (even being on the BBC didn’t bring that kind of reaction).

Now, let’s head over to PodShow. Adam Curry’s network. Patrick loves Dawn and Drew. But they have tons of great shows including Geek Brief TV, Gillmor Gang, and are actively hiring more content producers. They have $23 million in venture, so are actively spending it trying to build bigger audiences so their salespeople will have more inventory to sell.

B5 Media. Jeremy Wright’s network. More than 100 bloggers. Doing a great job. Lots of bloggers I respect. Key features of their network? They are paying people to blog and also have built a private community that rocks and rolls (they have a gold medal swimmer, a few scientists, and some of the best bloggers out there). They just picked up some venture capital from Rick Segal and Co.

Federated Media Publishing. This is John Battelle’s company — which is so busy he’s turning down new bloggers — and is a bit different in that he’s not trying to get exclusive employees like some of the other malls, but partners with A list bloggers like Boing Boing, Tech Crunch, and 85 others and sells ads for them on a CPM basis. Some of the bloggers I’ve talked to are very happy. They are getting up to $16 CPM (dollars per thousand page views) out of which FM takes 40%. All content malls take a percentage, it’s just I know FM’s, not sure what the others take.

Gawker Media. This is Nick Denton’s content mall. I don’t know much about Nick, although I know they produce Valleywag and Gizmodo, two popular blogs that I read a lot.

ZDNet Blogs. Dan Farber has signed up a great group of tech bloggers for ZDNet. As I understand it, they get paid for each post they make and also have incentives for traffic and comment posts.

Other up and comers in the content mall business?

Om Malik, with his GigaOm network. Mike Arrington with the growing “TechCrunch.”

Revision3, which produces Diggnation, which has hundreds of thousands of viewers a show.

Do these content malls matter? Not to most users. But they do link to each other more often, which helps, and they can group together enough audience to sell to advertisers and sponsors (you and I can’t walk into the ad buying group at a car company, but many of these content malls can).

So, how does PodTech compete? That’s for the market to decide, but by the end of next year we’ll be judged a few different ways against these competitors:

1) Audiences. (Which comes from serving niches well — Calacanis had gadget blogs, auto blogs, parenting blogs, etc etc).
2) Revenues. (Revenues follow audiences for the most part, but some audiences are more monetizeable than others — the business guy in me would rather have a blog focused on real estate than world peace, for instance, because more advertisers are willing to pay more money for real estate-focused audiences).
3) Brand quality. (If you ask 1,000 participants in these content malls what they think of each, the answer demonstrates brand quality, also what bloggers and other influentials say based on blog searches).
4) Engagement. Ze Frank, for instance, has signed up tens of thousands of people for his ORG (which is a club of other ZeFrank viewers). That demonstrates engagement. Also, how many people follow a link to other sites. Does economic or adoption activity happen for sponsors/advertisers or just by getting mentioned?

So far PodTech has had pretty good success in hiring interesting people and in building the Vloggies, which got TONS of respect and response from the blog and videoblog world (Leo Laporte mentioned it tonight, for instance).

The next six months are going to be very important ones. We’re signing up TONS of new content partners. It’ll be interesting to see if we can finish up the technology-focused part of our content mall and get some key stores in other areas like movies, sports, lifestyle, built up.

Either way, the content mall expansion projects are underway at all these companies. What do you think and who is most likely to get the advertising and sponsorship revenues and respect of the community?

Who else has a content mall under development? (I’m talking about new companies, not older ones like Yahoo or Washington Post, etc).

And, yes, we’re looking for great “stores” to join our “mall.” My email is robertscoble@hotmail.com if you’re interested.

If you’re a blogger/podcaster/videocaster, are you thinking of joining a content mall? If so, how are you going to decide between all of us?

UPDATE: I totally forgot the most excellent GearLive Media (headed by Andru Edwards) and the Podcast Network (headed by Cameron Reilly).

Colleen at a Simple Kind of Life blog writes that Wordpress.com doesn’t want to become home to spam bloggers and/or folks who make money off of advertising (she has an email that says that PayPerPost advertisements aren’t allowed on Wordpress.com).

Wordpress.com’s Terms of Service are very clear on this point, even highlighting it in blue.

This is a good thing for Wordpress to do. Why? It protects its reputation. PayPerPost is a way to game search engines. If you want to do that, take your blog somewhere else and protect those of us who aren’t willing to do that.

Also, if you want to put lots of ads and things on your blog, why are you using a free service? Pay for a host and put that stuff somewhere else.