Beet.TV is reporting that Revver is up for an Emmy and has an interview with the founders. Revver is the video hosting engine behind my favorite videoblog: Ze Frank.

Several people have asked me in email, IM, and even my comments, whether I knew anything about what Microsoft is announcing in SF this afternoon. No, I don’t. But am interested.

UPDATE: Looks like some sort of deal with Novell is on. Look at their stock chart.

Nice images from Flickr’s best photographers. That reminds me, photowalking #2, the tour around the pumpkin patch, is coming later today.

Yesterday I had a fun lunch with Edward Saenz, principal of Gravity Branding. He’s done naming for Nissan Xtera, Wifi, among others.

It’s not so much that he’s come up with the names, but that he works committees through a process so that they feel comfortable with a name.

At one point he noted “if you ask 10 people to design a meal you’ll end up with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”

A great name, he says, is the antithesis of something that won’t piss anyone off.

Some other things I remember from yesterday? A great name should be easy to tell other people. It should evoke emotion.

He explained how they do market research. They do in depth stuff with 15 hand-picked people then do more qualitative research with a wider group to justify their theories.

This is an example of a guy that you just can’t get to know through ASCII text. His many stories have to be told on video because most of his technique is visual (he showed me some of the ways they test various names and positioning — basically they have to create stuff that looks like advertising to see how people react to it).

Anyway, I came away with a lot more respect for folks who come up with names of products and learned a lot of sales strategy in the process, since that’s really what he’s doing.

I was just preparing my link blog and noticed lots of Windows Vista launch date news.

Normal people like me and you won’t be able to get it until end of January but looks like the final bits are going to be done within days. Engadget says the launch date is January 30th (looks like CES is gonna be a real big one for Microsoft this year, are you going?) I wonder what the Superbowl ad will be for Vista?

I had dinner with an exec on the Windows Vista team last week and he said their bug list was getting pretty short. Bugs being defined as stuff that would hold up launch.

I liked this demo over on Long Zheng’s blog about one of the small things that’ll make a difference for users.

It’s been a long road. Hopefully the beta testers don’t find a showstopper.

Let’s see if this headline can get on Digg. Heheh. Yeah, it points to my interview with the Google Reader team. Yes, I linked to that in an earlier, less sensationalisticly-headlined post. Am I a traffic whore? Yes. Next question.

Or, should I just give into the dark side of the force and put lots of funky icons like these underneath my blog post in a deseparate attempt to get you to add my post to sites like Del.icio.us and Digg and BlueDot?

Hmmm, if I was a really good traffic beggar I’d even make the link to Digg prepopulate. Ahh, my evil plan for domination over Digg is almost complete.

Oh, damn, Digg just released a new algortihm to make it harder to get on the front page of Digg. Sigh.

Hey, Microsoft is doing aspirational advertising for Zune. Damn, good TV advertising from Microsoft? Who woulda thunk?

And, yes, whoever loaded these on YouTube deserves kudos. Putting your ads on Microsoft’s competitors’ site is fun!

I should do that! I would if I had more time. Sigh.

It’s amazing what my readers remember and go back and follow up on.

Stef Wisniewski posted a comment on a post I made back in March. One where I took on a journalist about bad reporting. Well, he followed up and found out that the “journalist” in question, David Richards, allegedly stole content from the Big Picture Big Sound Website.

My earlier problem with him was when he wrote an article about Windows Vista with a headline claiming that 60% of Vista would be rewritten after the publishing of the article. That was complete hogwash. Vista is pretty darn close to shipping and there was no way that it was 60% (or even 1%) rewritten between March and now.

When you learn a publication is willing to report totally made up crap and stand by it then you shouldn’t be surprised when other sleazy stuff happens too.

More details and real journalism being done by citizens over in the Whirlpool Forums.

Thanks Stef. Australia deserves a better journalist than this guy (what’s laughable is he’s CEO of a magazine. Sigh).

Notice how stories get passed along in the word-of-mouth networks. Here Karel leaves a link in my comments. That leads to his blog, which is asking is Google in bed with the CIA, which leads to Michael Hampton’s blog, with even more info on this.

I gotta call Google PR and find out what the official comment is. Actually, let’s see how long it takes for Google PR to leave a comment here. I’m posting this at 5:26 p.m.

Note: I do not know whether any of this is true. It sure would be nice to have some transparency on the kinds of things that are being collected and also know who those are being shared with, and why. But I doubt we’ll ever get that kind of transparency.

CNBC ran a documentary today titled “Big Brother, Big Business” which talked about similar issues with search engine companies sharing information collected about us with governmental agencies (here’s an article about CNBC’s documentary business). Anyone know if you can find that on the Internet? I searched YouTube and couldn’t find it.

I’m listening to Sam Ramji interview SocialText’s Ross Mayfield while I render another video and answer some email. Multitasking is fun! As long as you have lots of computers.

Good interview, thanks Sam!

If you’re looking to get some insights into the mind of a Googler, this video interview with the Google Reader team is a fun one to watch. It’s with Nick Baum and Jason Shellen. Jason was on the original Blogger team, back when it was called Pyra (founded by Meg Hourihan and Evan Williams). It’s 35 minutes long.

You’ll get a look at Google’s Master Plan 2.0 (it’s on the whiteboard behind Nick and Jason) as well as see just how many Google searches are being done around the world (we get a look at one of the screens which shows each Google search as it’s being done — displayed on Google Earth).

This is the Google Reader team, so of course we talk about RSS and feeds and blogs and all that — plus you’ll get insights into Google’s culture when we talk about whether or not Google Reader will accept advertising and how their 20% time works to help bring new products to market like Google Reader. I filmed a second video with Nick Baum where he gives us a video demo of Google Reader.

Oh, and I have so far about 26 more videos that we have in the bag. I’m editing another Photowalking right now. Editing is not easy. I suck at it (you can see that cause I put my logo on this video twice, but didn’t catch that until after waiting 2.5 hours for it to render — sigh). Also, the weird sound you hear is someone’s cell phone. My wireless microphone picked that up. Gotta remind everyone to turn off their cell phones — I always forget and it ruins the video. I can’t wait until I have an editor who can help. I’m making lots of mistakes, but what the heck? You get to make fun of me for all of them.
Next week that editor will be here and you all will be shocked at who it is. No, not Chris Pirillo. Someone even more shocking.

If you’ve been behind, we have lots of stuff to watch at ScobleShow.com with even more coming.

What’s a minimalist blog? One that doesn’t say much, but has a high signal-to-noise factor. Nick Baum demonstrates. (He’s the product manager of the Google Reader team, too — the video interview and demo of him should be up on ScobleShow tonight if all goes well).

Who else has a “must read” minimalist blog?

Wow, I’ve been on a lot of radio shows, but this is one of the most professional I’ve ever been on: RSS Ray. I’m on air now.

I’ve subscribed. Based on my emails lots of you listen to this show, which is for marketers who are looking to keep up on what’s going on in the industry.

I hate link-love begging icons too.
I like Mike.
I hate bombs.
I like when Mark Lucovsky of Google leaves me comments.
I hate waiting for Final Cut Express HD to save my videos into H.264 (more than two hours for a 40-minute video, and that’s on a decked out MacPro!)

Thanks to Thomas Hawk for making that image last week in Seattle.

Tomorrow is our fourth wedding anniversary.

How do you write a love note for someone as cool, as important, as interesting, as literate, as cuddly, as funny, as smart, as cute, as Maryam?

I can’t.

But she means the world to me. I don’t always demonstrate that. In fact, usually I’m a self-absorbed egotistical ahole with Maryam. It’s easy to take a giver for granted. And she gives and gives and I take and take.

Anyway, my life would be 1/10th 1/1000th as interesting without her.

She is, simply, the best. And that’s why I love her.

This is pretty interesting. I was just doing my link blog (reading my feeds) when I saw this item come through the river of news on Google’s Reader.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work on Wordpress.com. Sigh.

Congrats to JotSpot for selling to Google. (JotSpot is an online Office, er Wiki, suite).

One reason I have interviewed almost all the Wiki companies in my first five weeks of ScobleShow is because I sensed that the Wiki market was white hot. Why? Cause on a post a few months back my comments went crazy. Your interest predicted a deal like this. I predict others are coming.

My interview with Joe Kraus, just a couple of months ago, is here. Here is a demo of JotSpot that Joe did.

Google has definitely gotten over its “not invented here” syndrome with the purchase of YouTube and now JotSpot. They are buying audiences and best-of-breed technologies, which JotSpot definitely was.

Microsoft’s Office team should be looking at this acquisition this morning and wondering what Google is up to.

It’s pretty clear to me: Google is going where the money is.

Interesting. Chris last week was saying he had a “big” secret. No one could figure it out. This week he announces he didn’t move (he was supposed to move to Los Angeles).

Sounds like lots of chaos going on. We’re looking forward to his wedding on December 9th to Ponzi. That is, if THAT doesn’t get moved.

He has me intrigued with his “big” secret, though.

We should have a contest to predict which state he’s moving to. He taunted me last week saying I’d never guess what he’s going to be doing.

Oh, let’s start a really crazy rumor. He’s moving Ponzi to North Carolina so that he can have banana pudding and be Jon Edwards’ press secretary. That’s about the craziest thing I can think of Chris doing.

What’s the craziest thing you can think of him doing?

The Vloggies, this Saturday evening, is proving to be a very popular event. Tickets to it are harder to get than tickets to next week’s Web 2.0 conference. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, is speaking. I read it on Digg.

I have been keeping up with my Feed Reading lately and posting the best stuff to my link blog. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t reading as many feeds lately because it just wasn’t fun.

It’s interesting. For the past few years I’ve used NewsGator inside of Outlook. I fought with Dave Winer about news aggregators for all of that time. He said that a “river” style of news aggregator is a lot nicer than a three-pane folder aggregator, like what NewsGator has.

Now, yeah, NewsGator has a river view too, but I never found it satisfying. I’m not sure why Google’s Reader caught my eye, but now that it has it’s just so much easier to read thousands of posts and sift through them looking for good stuff.

I don’t read separate feeds anymore. I just read everything in one long continuous scrolling Window. By the way, it’s a LOT faster on Firefox 2 than in IE 7.

Partly it’s the cross-platform thing. By using Google Reader I don’t need to worry about getting my feeds loaded into the various computers I use. In fact, I can just sit down at your computer and start reading feeds (something I’ve actually done a lot more often than I’d like to admit).

My readers have been suggesting I go back and give Bloglines and Newsgator online (among others) another chance. Over the past week I have and I just don’t like those as much as I like the Google Reader.

What about you? Have you tried Google Reader? Why do you stick with the aggregator you’re on, if you haven’t switched? Why did you switch to Google Reader if you have?

ASIDE: our PPT slides from our Blog Business Summit presentation are now up, if you wanna download them and take a look.