Now if you type in http://scobleizer.wordpress.com it’ll redirect to http://robertscobleizer.com. A little easier to remember. Hope it doesn’t mess anything up.

Oh, how I hate change!

For those who don’t use Wordpress.com, the Dashboard is where you go everytime you visit your administration page. I visit it dozens of times daily to see if I have new comments. New referers.

I just logged in and EVERYTHING has changed.

Yikes.

I’ve gotta be honest, there were two things on that page I used A LOT.

1) The link that showed who linked to me. Now it’s a lot harder to see that (it used to be at the top of the page).
2) Who commented on my blog. (There was a link there to the page where I could just read all my comments in one long page — that rocked, this one doesn’t because I have to click on each comment separately to read them).

Yeah, I know where to look to find both of these things, but this new dashboard took away functionality that I was used to.

OK, now that I’ve looked at it for a few minutes. There are some really great things. What are they?

1) It’s a ton faster.
2) The layout is better overall, and shows you more stuff.
3) It shows me what has happened along a timeline (and it separates out pinbacks, posts, and comments, which rocks).

So, overall, this new dashboard reveals me as a Luddite. I want to go back to the old one overall. I found it served me better as a blogger. Show me who is commenting, let me click over to a list of ALL comments where I can delete spam, etc. and show me who linked to me on their own blogs. I really miss the link to Google Blogsearch on the Dashboard.

Those are the #1 and #2 tasks for a blogger. Put them at the top. Put all the fun other stuff below that.

Oh, and Matt, you have two typos in your first post about the new Dashboard.

UPDATE: Matt already posted that he’s bringing back the incoming links feature. Damn, that was fast.

I’m sitting here on Pier 38 with Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic, the folks who make Wordpress (I was here to meet someone else and dropped in to say hi). He says that Le Monde (France’s big newspaper) just moved 5,000 blogs over to Wordpress. More details on Toni’s blog.

“But I thought Sharepoint was already getting a wiki,” you might say after hearing the latest news that Socialtext (one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Wiki vendor) is bringing Socialtext to Microsoft’s Sharepoint platform. That might be true, but Socialtext is a lot more than what Microsoft is putting in, not to mention that Microsoft’s Wiki functionality hasn’t shipped yet. Anyway, congrats to Ross Mayfield, one of the truly nice guys in this business. He wrote more about this on his blog.

I liked Zaw Thet, CEO at 4Info. He gave me an interesting demo and interview of what his company is enabling on cell phones. USA Today is including their service on the front pages of its sports sections so you can get scores. Pretty cool stuff and makes sense in a world where more and more people are getting cell phones and Blackberries with keyboards.

With their latest platform you can even get blogs on your phone. Video demo here.

Damn, the PayPerPost PR machine continues to pull me in. Yes, all the negative PR about it makes it more interesting as a business.

It’s like some kind of virus has gotten into the blogosphere. It’s all over TechMeme right now.

Anyway, I don’t think PayPerPost’s disclosure policy goes far enough. Having a global disclosure policy is a start, but in the world of search engines and aggregation sites and feed readers we need a DisclosePerPost policy.

What’s so hard about putting a disclosure on each post? Something like:

DISCLOSURE: My sponsor, Seagate, sponsored this post. Read all about their new encrypted hard drive over at Google News.

I like Andrew Bourland’s idea, though, for how I could make a lot of money. Instead of selling a post he recommends selling my whole blog. He thinks he could get me $25,000. Hmmm.

In response to Shelley Powers, AOL hasn’t offered to do anything for me. But, I agree with Shelley. I should just sponsor Shelley’s blog. I like her photography and her books on JavaScript rock.

I wasn’t paid to say that (and, don’t take my word on it, get a second opinion, but you’ll find that most people agree with me about her photo and JavaScript skills).

Does not getting paid make my endorsement more or less likely to be believed or acted on?

Anyway, my disclosure policy? If I take money to say something I will disclose IN MY POST where I write about them. That way if you find my post over on Technorati or Sphere you’ll know about my biases even if you never visit my blog.

I still think PayPerPost is brilliant. Instead of paying some SEO expert thousands of dollars you can just hire PayPerPost to do a better job for far less money (a link from a blogger, particularly if you get that blogger to use the right keywords when they link is worth FAR more than any link farm or other “black hat SEO” techniques and is far less likely to get your company removed from Yahoo or Google or Live.com). Just remember folks, that $20 you took to write about a company is helping them move up the result set in Google/Yahoo/Live. So, when search gets “noisier” you know who to blame.

Anti-disclosure. Seagate didn’t really pay me to post about that here. They got this post for free cause I really appreciate their sponsorship of ScobleShow.

Eric Rice (the guy who gave me my first tour of Second Life) is reporting that Linden Labs is raising prices inside Second Life and that customers are unhappy with what’s been going on. People have asked me what I’ve done lately with Second Life. I really haven’t gone back in since I found out I couldn’t break the rules and let my son play with me inside Second Life.

Several people have added me recently to their private Vox blogs (Vox just started up last week, is done by SixApart, who brought us Moveable Type and TypePad, but many of the early adopter types were on the beta). I am sorry to admit that I “poopooed” Vox as something for “other people.” I didn’t get it.

But after seeing that there’s some value to blogging to just your family or your friends or a small group of people I have to admit I was wrong about Vox. 

Vox is pretty darn cool. I told Matt Mullenweg (founder of Wordpress.com, the folks who publish my blog here) yesterday that he should get into Vox and see what’s going on cause tons of people that I trust are doing the Vox thing. It’ll be interesting to see how Wordpress responds. I’d certainly like to have a Wordpress.com blog where I could post something just to my friends and/or family.

I love this photo, taken by Rommel, of Zaadz.

It was during Maryam and my talk at the Blog Business Summit, titled “10 ways to a killer blog.”

There are some good reports from our session. We joked around about ways to get bloggers to pay attention. One of the ideas was to include sex in your headlines, which got everyone to laugh. Anyway, here’s the best of the reports I found:

Paul Cheney.
Janet Lee Johnson.
Andru Edwards.
Denise Wakeman.
Barry Hurd.
Dustin Luther.

And, of course, thank you to Hugh Macleod for letting us use his great cartoons.

Oh, and after reading this post of Hugh’s I realize why my blog sucks. I’ve been trying to make everyone happy. Well, screw that.

Can you tell we were stuck in a snowstorm today and am punchy? Heheh. Sitting here in a restaurant in Seattle’s airport thinking about how I’m going to go back to writing a blog for one person.

How about Dori Smith? I think I’ll try to find one thing tomorrow that’ll make her happy. The rest of you can go read Digg.

One of my favorite employees at Microsoft was David Caulton. His analysis of various things was always interesting. Here he responds to my post about Microsoft’s Zune. He was the guy who showed off Apple’s iPod in a meeting I was in.

What I mean by conversationality is “will someone who is sitting next to me in the Seattle Airport ask me what that cool new thing I’m wearing is all about?”

The white headphones caused those kinds of conversations. I saw them happen multiple times (I agree that they won’t happen anymore cause white headphones are so commonplace).

If a product causes conversations to happen, then it’ll see more adoption quicker.

I see what Jason Calacanis was asking of Jimmy Wales (to sell ads on Wikipedia and donate the money to charity). Well, my traffic here is a lot smaller, but the folks involved in advertising tell me they could get quite a few thousand dollars per month by selling ads on my blog.

What do you think? Should I sell ads here? If it was your blog, would you hesitate? Why?

Disclaimer: This is a junket report.

I’m in a car driving back from “Grapes on a Plane.” Steve Broback is driving. I’m blogging. And hungover.

Anyway, Kevin O’Keefe give the report (he does a great set of law blogs).

We got a ride on a Learjet, which was a real treat, thanks to Greenpoint Technologies (which sponsored the trip and also sponsors the Big Business Jet Blog) and ate at Hedges Winery, which had awesome wine and a really fun owner.

Other people who were there? Andru Edwards of Gear Live Media, Theresa Valdez Klein, Maryam, Tim Stay, of Know More Media, Tris Hussey and Jim Turner, Halley Suitt, Kim Larsen of Blog Business Summit, Eric Anderson and his wife Jeanene, the CEO of Greenpoint, Jon Buccola who told us about all the weird planes that they’ve done for various billionaires. I’m sure I’m forgetting a couple of people, sorry.

Steve says this was a reward for the Blog Business Summit speakers and a reward for affiliates who got the most traffic to their site.

Anyway, hope you’re having a good time this weekend. Now back to reality.

There’s a lot more on the Blog Business Summit over on Google Blog Search. It was a great conference, I especially liked John Batelle’s speech on Friday.

Chuqui, who is was an Apple employee, has a point. Apple employees ARE allowed to blog. They just aren’t allowed to be spokespeople, as Chuqui admits. So, they don’t feel empowered to talk about anything that they are working on, as Chuqui admits. That’s completely different from what Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, IBM, and other tech companies tell their employees.

Lots of Apple employees have told me that they want to blog about work. He says the goal should be communication, not getting credit.

Absolutely!

But what he doesn’t admit is that Google has changed everything. Now I totally expect to be able to find an employee at a company running a product group. Here’s a test.

Go to Google. Type “OneNote blog.” You’ll find Chris Pratley. He runs the team. I can tell him his product sucks in his comments.

Now, go back to Google. Type “Apple MacBook blog.” Do you find an Apple employee? No. You find a corporate page. Send an email there. Does it go to the right person? I have no idea. Certainly bloggers who’ve tried that recently due to Apple’s rebooting problems are getting unstatisfactory answers.

Anyway, you can see the difference in how Apple treats online communication in Chuqui’s post. At Adobe I see tons of blogs. At Microsoft I see tons of blogs. At IBM I see tons of blogs. At Sun I see tons of blogs.

The difference is telling.

And the fact that Chuqui thinks it’s about credit is telling too.

Oh, well, it ain’t my company.

UPDATE: Chuqui doesn’t work at Apple anymore. He did for years. I am sorry for missing that he doesn’t work there any longer.

I’m here with Ben Constable and Sacha (she’s a math student and one of the top 10 Zuma players in the world and he is a developer on the Microsoft Max team) and he’s showing me all sorts of fun memes. Stuff like:

O RLY

I’d hit it!

Weird stuff people post on the Internets. They use “O RLY” to answer email and forum threads where someone makes an outrageous claim. You can post a picture from “O RLY” to answer that. “I’d hit it” is for anything you think is good.

And, we’re having lots of fun drinking wine and talking about “the Google.” Search Google for “The Google” and you’ll find the George Bush reference.

Hope you’re having a good Friday evening!

Ze Frank and Rocketboom came up in conversations here at the Blog Business Summit several times today. I asked the audience here how many people had never watched Ze Frank and Rocketboom. Most people (I’d guess about 90%) had never watched Ze, but only about 40% had never watched Rocketboom. And these were astute bloggers I was asking.

That said, Ze has a more engaged audience, based on my readings here. Several people said they loved Ze. No one came up to me, or talked to me, about Rocketboom after our talk.

As an advertiser I think I’d rather have Ze talk about my stuff right now than Rocketboom because I sense his audience is growing a lot faster than Rocketboom, and his audience is more engaged. But, that’s very hard to sell to an advertiser. I bet if I worked at a company looking to spend a million on one of these shows it’d be a lot easier to convince my boss on Rocketboom cause of the larger numbers.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch takes this on in an interesting and lengthy post today. So does Heather Green of BusinessWeek’s blogspotting, among others.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch has been telling his readers and friends that he likes BlueDot for sharing his favorite sites with them, so I went up to Seattle and visited with the BlueDot team and learned more.

I love this service.

So, you’ve seen the Zune video. Here’s my thoughts about whether Microsoft is going to be successful.

I’ll come at it from a number of different angles:

THE FUNDAMENTALS

Box design: good. As good as iPod.
Look and feel and overall hardware quality: good. As good as iPod. I actually even liked the brown one a lot.
Screen: better than iPod.
Hard drive size: worse than iPod.
Features: mixed bag, we’ll get into that below.
Price: in the right neighborhood.
Marketing: unknown, but Apple has set such a high bar that I doubt Microsoft can even get close.
Software experience: unknown.
Updateability: better than iPod (if I were Apple I’d worry about this).
Conversationality: (Does it cause a conversation). Here Apple wins with the white headphones hands down.
Integration: beats the iPod cause it works with Xbox.

EDGE CASE

As an edge case, IE, someone who tries all the latest stuff and gets excited about a lot of it, the Zune abjectly fails. It does not have a killer feature. Sorry, Microsoft, sharing songs is not it.

Instead, the bleeding edge of the market cares about sharing cool videos, some of which they might have shot themselves, sharing cool podcasts (my son listens to many podcasts in addition to the music), and using their device to record their own content.

Zune doesn’t have a podcast client.
Zune doesn’t have a microphone.
Zune doesn’t have a way to subscribe to Rocketboom or ZeFrank or any other videoblog.

Last weekend Dave Winer took my son and me to an Apple store. What was on the biggest sign in the store? Podcasting. Apple gets this trend, Microsoft doesn’t.

But let’s look deeper. The Zune has a wifi antenna. Can I use it to download music without hooking up to a computer? No.

Does it work with a Macintosh? No.

Does it free me from DRM? No.

Can I use my iPod music on it that I’ve purchased on iTunes? No.

Can I record off of the FM tuner? No.

The one thing that gets close to a killer feature is the subscription feature so that I can listen to unlimited music. If I buy a Zune this will probably be the reason.

THE KIDS’ VIEW

My son is a good gauge of whether Zune has a chance. Peer pressure is hyper strong to have an iPod. If you show up to school with something that isn’t an iPod you aren’t cool. Now, that’ll change if kids think there’s something cool or better. So far nothing I showed Patrick about Zune got him interested. Especially since he and his friends listen to lots of podcasts and because he’d rather have a huge amount of storage than be able to subscribe to a music service. Let’s be honest too, many of these kids have huge music collections: my son has hundreds of songs purchased off of iTunes and many many others. How do they trade songs? They trade iPods.

THE USER’S POINT OF VIEW

There’s not enough data here. The Zune team didn’t show us the OOBE (Out Of Box Experience). This is why the iPod got my attention years ago. Steve Jobs showed how much faster it was in transfering songs cause they used Firewire instead of a slower cable.

I remember being in a meeting at Microsoft where someone showed off how much better the iPod experience was than what other OEMs had produced. Little things like iTunes knows to put the matching icon up on the UI for the kind of iPod you use. Even the right color. It’s a little touch. But it’s the kind of thing that subliminally makes users feel good about the system.

Until Microsoft ships we won’t know how good these small details have been matched.

Also, several people have told me they didn’t like the round control surface on the Zune because they were used to the iPod wheel and the Zune didn’t work the same way. Once you get used to it, the Zune is just fine (and offers a couple of advantages, especially when watching movies or looking at photos, but that demonstrates just how deeply the iPod’s UI has been implanted into our brains).

THE PLATFORM/ECOSYSTEM

iPod has hundreds of accessories and has car manufacturers who make their cars “iPod compatible.” Zune won’t be able to match that out of the gate. Zune, on the other hand, integrates into Xbox and Media Center better than iPod.

And, the Zune has a better software updater. I’m already hearing that within a few days of release in mid-November that there will already be some new features released.

That’s something Apple should worry about. If Microsoft can upgrade all of its Zune players easily with new features and games and such, then they can build experiences that the iPod can’t easily get (and if third-party developers can play there, watch out. Remember 1989? I thought the Macintosh was superior to Windows. Which one ended up with more market share? The ones that the developers could extend the easiest.

CONCLUSION

It’s that last point that could turn into a killer feature. If software developers are enabled to build new experiences for the Zune, then we could see something killer come along that’ll get more people interested in the Zune.

But, for now, I’d stick with an iPod. Microsoft hasn’t given us a killer feature yet that is easily demonstratable for why we should buy a Zune instead of an iPod.

Do you agree or disagree?

It’s funny, I totally missed the Windows Vista blog’s new design cause I read all about it in Google Reader and on TechMeme. I posted several items about it to my Link Blog.

But, I clicked off of the RSS feed to check out the new design. It looks great but what a bad reading experience! You have to click each item to read the full item and wait for it to load.

Sigh. And people wonder why I have an ugly design. Here’s a hint: I don’t care about pretty pictures. I care about my readers and whether or not they can read my content without waiting and without clicking.

Oh well, back to my RSS feeds.

Yeah, Jason, it was a great keynote.

It’s great to be able to donate $100,000 to help a few underprivileged kids get a great education.

Jason just posted the press release.

I’m not going to break this news, cause the company I work for, PodTech, is involved. But, at about 9:58 a.m. Pacific Time Jason Calacanis, senior Vice President at AOL and founder of Weblogsinc.com, announced something pretty interesting to the Blog Business Summit, where there are tons of people blogging.

This gives us a great opportunity to see how good the blog search engines work.

So, over the next few hours I’ll be watching these blog search engines to see how fast the news shows up:

Technorati blogsearch for Calacanis.
Google blogsearch for Calacanis.
Ask blogsearch for Calacanis.
Sphere blogsearch for Calacanis.
Icerocket’s blogsearch for Calacanis.

First report coming soon. It’ll be interesting to see how long the news takes to get to Digg and TechMeme too.

Google blogsearch wins. At 10:11 a.m. it is the only one to have this post from Tris Hussey up.

10:17: Technorati is second.

10:20: Ask has a link to my post, but not any others.

10:25: Interesting that lots of other people have posted, like Patrick McCarthy, who has a much more detailed post about Jason’s keynote here, who I’m sitting next to, but they aren’t yet showing up in any of the blog search engines.

10:27: Ask just pulled up a detailed, lengthy, post from Pro PR that hasn’t shown up on other engines yet. If you haven’t read yet, Jason gave one of the best keynotes I’ve heard anyone to and he said lots of controversial stuff, including calling investor Tim Draper out. The Pro PR post did a great job capturing it.

10:35: Drew Meyers blog about Jason’s keynote, also lengthy and detailed, showed up in Google Reader, but not on blog search engines yet.

10:38: Google Blog Search just got Patrick’s post. I posted that to my link blog.

10:41: Ask just got the Blog Business Summit’s post by Teresa Valdez Klein. Nice bulleted post.

10:46: IceRocket and Sphere sucks. Not a single post yet. They are the only blog search engine that doesn’t have a link to a single Calacanis post yet. UPDATE: Looks like I had a bad URL for Sphere.

10:48: Ask has Patrick’s post up.

10:50: Elizabeth Grigg’s favorite quotes from Jason’s keynote just showed up on Google Blogsearch. Dustin Luther’s post shows up in my comments as a Trackback, but not on any blog search engine.

10:52: Here’s the totals: Sphere, zero posts (bad); Technorati, two posts (OK); IceRocket, zero posts (bad); Google, four posts (good); Ask, five posts (best).

10:55 Wade Rocket posts in my comment that his post was posted at 10:02 and still isn’t showing up in any of the blog search engines.

11:00: Jason-Preston posted in my comments that his post hasn’t shown up yet either. Said “a solid and interesting keynote.”

11:04: Google links to Zaadz blog, who has the first picture I’ve seen.

11:05: Tris Hussey posted another post about Jason’s talk, but that one hasn’t shown up yet in blog search engines that I’ve seen.

11:06:  It just showed up on TechMeme.

11:08: I don’t see it on Digg yet. Who’ll be first to submit the story for Digg?

Well, I’m done. It’ll be interesting to watch this over the next day or two.

12:46: let’s compare again. Sphere (3 links); IceRocket (6 links); Google (19 links); Ask (15 links, some duplicates); Technorati (14 links, more spam than the others).

Conclusion: Google BlogSearch is looking pretty darn good!

UPDATE: TailRank has more links to this than TechMeme.