Kevin Burton says it’s going to RULE. Kevin is the author of Tailrank, which rules itself! I should get PodTech there. I’m spending the day with Maryam and Patrick, though, and will be away from the computer for most of the day.

Alec Saunders notes that there’s not much of Robert Fripp inside the audio in Windows Vista (he was the guitarist who recorded the four notes that you’ll soon be sick of. They’ll probably be used in all the marketing and are the startup sound for Vista). I was there while he was recording this, and I TOTALLY agree. You should have heard the raw sounds while they were being recorded. He did THOUSANDS of iterations.

I wish Microsoft would have given me at least a few dozen to choose from for my own startup sound.

Instead we got the sound that won’t piss anyone off.

Sigh.

Where’s the rock guitar sound?

The edgy jazzy sound?

The weirdo techno sound?

If I were Steve Ball I’d come out with a free Vista addon that adds back some of the funky sound that the committee killed.

And, yes, a committee did kill this.

Here’s a test. Take a world famous guitarist. Have him record thousands of iterations of something. Now, give those sounds to 20 really freaking smart people. Watch what happens.

Music is personal.

By trying to make it please everyone they miss exactly what the user generated world is all about.

Piss me off, Microsoft, please! Get rid of your committees. Show some SOUL.

For Vienna BE TRANSPARENT during the choice of the sound and LET US CHOOSE OUR OWN FREAKING SOUND!

I LOVE “YourMinis” from Goowy. Watch today’s LunchMeet show with Irina and Eddie and meet Alex Bard, CEO of Goowy Media to see what is so cool. It’s only eight minutes long.

In the hallways people have been talking also about OmniDrive. Jeff Clavier said I had to try it, for instance. CEO Nik Cubrilovic is standing here and says his servers have been busy ever since they announced it this morning on their blog (you’ll need to visit there to get a download code).

When I arrived at the Palace Hotel at least 10 people walked up to me and asked “did you see the Photosynth demo?”

By the end of the day it was very clear that Photosynth was the killer app of the Web 2.0 Summit and you can download it now. More on the Photosynth blog.

This video was supposed to open the Vloggies. But it didn’t. Blame Microsoft. Or, Apple. Or, Canada? Heheh.

Need to see something cute? Then I have a Website for you!

And, no, this is no Ajaxian. Cute Overload doesn’t have anything useful. Just cute pictures of dogs and cats and stuff like that. Oh, so cute!

But if you want to learn something, especially when it comes to Ajax stuff, Ajaxian is my choice.

Today they show off a continuous scrolling trick like what Google Reader uses.

If you watched my Microsoft Research video last night you’d know that eye track research shows that scrolling is good (the second demo we got there was with a guy who does EyeTrack research on how people use the Web). It’s why I argued to make PodTech’s pages scroll down so that surfers could scroll through the river and fish for interesting stuff. If you watch the MS Research video you’ll actually see how this works on an EyeTrack machine and we talk about why Live.com turned off its continuous scrolling capabilities (the engineers there couldn’t make it work smoothly on all browsers).

The Streaming Media conference now has video of a lot of its sessions up. The panel I was on, the Business of Podcasting & Video Blogging, is here. Windows Media player needed.

Hmmm, Chris Pirillo (founder of Lockergnome and Gnomedex conferences) has been in a bitter, dour, mood lately. A major deal he was working on blew up. We don’t know what happened and he’s not allowed to tell anyone due to lawyers involved (anytime you have to tell your friends lawyers are involved while also being unable to share any of the details you know it’s gotta be bad).

My advice that I gave Chris (I’m best man in his wedding): Follow Munjal Shah. Same thing happened to him — Google decided not to buy his company at the last minute (and, unlike what Valleywag reported it wasn’t my fault, but no use trying to argue about that here and now).

What did Munjal do? Dusted himself off and came out with the best new product of the week (which is saying something because 200 companies competed to be one of 13 on stage yesterday at the Web 2 Summit — Munjal wasn’t one of them, but kicked everyone’s behind).

So, Chris, let’s make next year’s Gnomedex conference the biggest and best ever. What can I do to help?

Really great walking tour with Kevin Schofield of Microsoft Research.

This is a 50-minute monster. Not for the faint of heart.

But, if you do the download, make sure and catch what starts at around 36:00. It is f**king awesome.

What is Andy Wilson (the guy who did Bill Gates’ CES keynote demo last year) showing?

A video camera. Aimed at his hands. The picture above gives you a hint. His hands are controlling the keyboard — without touching anything.

The software he wrote is magical. You gotta see the video.

The rest of the video is interesting too. Oh, and you see Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Activewords, ducking in behind Kevin in a few places in the video too. Anyway, enjoy.

UPDATE: I should have linked to Kevin’s blog.

Oh, and did you catch my plug of Valleyschwag?

UPDATE2: someone took just the Andy Wilson piece of the video and uploaded it to YouTube.

Guy Kawasaki has an interview with TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington where he talks with Mike about how to get covered there.

First of all, why are we focusing only on one person? Personally, if your product is so hot then go to the Z list, get them to write about it. Mike and I both watch hundreds of blogs and Digg. If something interesting is going on we’ll hear and write about it.

But the real way? Show up at conferences and geek events where Mike is at. Show him a demo of your product. But only do that if it totally kicks ass.

I saw a few things this week. Like.com was the best so far.

Translation: make something worthy of TechCrunch. If you do that, you’ll get on.

Wanna be on the ScobleShow? Show up at the lobby of Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow at 10 a.m. — I’ll be there with my video camera.

John Furrier got a bootleg recording of the Web 2.0 Summit’s keynote with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

I read it on Digg. Some kids created a real-world wiki, they call it their wikiTchen.

I don’t even want to know how geeks get to this point. I have a feeling it’s not by eating health food.

This is cool. You upload an image and then MapLib lets you put a Google Map interface on it. Imagine a Google Map on top of a Ski Resort. Or any photo.

Or, say I have a blueprint or photo of our Seagate CES BlogHaus. I could put little pushpins on top of it. Like this test image has done.

More on the Google Maps Mania Blog.

I loved this post by Mike over on TechDirt where he details how Tim Berners-Lee corrected a Guardian article that quoted him. All on his blog.

Don’t know who Tim is and why he’s important to the little words you’re reading right now? You might want to learn how to use Wikipedia.

He invented the Web.

Ethan Kaplan does. He complains about spending $3,500 to attend a conference without being able to get good Wifi.

Damn dude. If you can afford $3,500 for a conference then spend $80 a month on Verizon Wireless like I do. You won’t care anymore about conference Wifi. My Verizon wireless worked just fine the whole conference.

So, what should we care about? Access to power outlets!

Ed Bott says that his favorite feature is the new rewritten audio engine in Windows Vista (although he focuses on the visual interface). That was done by Steve Ball’s team (which Larry Osterman, one of my favorite developers I met while at Microsoft, is on).

Second favorite feature? The rewritten networking stack. You’ll never see a good review of it, but the networking performance is a lot better. All that plumbing work will pay off bigtime when we all start throwing HD video files around our networks at home.

Third favorite feature? The security enhancements. I hope never to hear that something bad happened cause Windows’ security isn’t up to par.

What’s your favorite feature?

I too sensed the malaise at the Web 2.0 Summit. I guess the fact that I’m at home in Half Moon Bay right now trying to catch up on editing and email tasks gives you a good hint about what I thought.

Personally I’m tired of events. I want NO MORE EVENTS. I want to sit on the beach with a handful of good friends and have a good bottle of wine.

Or, leave me alone to catch up on my email.

Heheh.

That said, I’ll be back at the Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow morning with my video camera. We’re filming a LunchMeet there at noon. Drop by and say hi!

Interesting point on Jeremy’s blog. Hey, Jeremy, you must have missed my video interview with Munjal Shah. He just came back from a press tour where he talked with tons of fashion and consumer magazine editors (he told me that he’ll have tons of great PR in that world coming soon).

Jeremy’s right. Riya needs to focus Like.com to fashion and clothes buyers (although I think he underestimates just how much men do play a role here). One thing, though. Most guys I know have women in their lives. Like me.

I might never use Like.com again. But I definitely told Maryam about it. I bet she uses it (although she doesn’t like buying things on the Internet, she told me, and would rather go into a store).

So, by hitting all these geeky male-oriented blogs I bet that Riya sees quite a bit of passalong and hits today from women.

Also, there’s another effect that’s good. We (the audience) just beta tested and stress tested Like.com. Now we’ll move onto the next cool thing to come up TechMeme. That’ll leave those 250 servers waiting for the PR from all those fashion and consumer blogs and magazines. They typically are a bit slower, so now the site is tested out, the engineers can tweak things based on the load we all threw at it this morning playing around, and it’ll be ready for business.

It’s a brilliant marketing strategy if you ask me. Not to mention that now we are doing a second wave of conversation about whether or not the strategy itself is brilliant or just totally lame.

Well played Munjal!

Hmmm, the Sphere/Automattic guys are doing a little experiment on my blog (with my permission). I’m not getting paid for this and I’m not seeing any advertising revenue for this. I just wanted to try it out, and see what my readers think. If you all hate it, we’ll remove it. If you like it, we’ll see if we can improve it. It has a link to FM Media, which is cool. They are a great advertising distribution network. But if they stay, I will change that to a PodTech sponsor link.

Anyway, check out the little Sphere links underneath each post.

What do you think?

UPDATE: so far I’m not very impressed. On the Riya story, for instance, that got tons of links and other things to and from it doesn’t pull up anything relevant. Hopefully that can be fixed over time and these will get more useful. I’ll leave these up for at least a week to see if they get more utility over time. If they don’t, they are gonna be gone anyway. I don’t like visual clutter that doesn’t add real utility.