Rich Levin will forever be famous as the guy who told me, back when I started blogging five years ago, that blogging is a fad and that I wouldn't be doing it very long.

To his credit, though, he had me on his radio show the other day and has put the recording up. We talk about a lot of stuff from Microsoft to our new book.

He's interviewed hundreds of other people (he's been doing a radio show for as long as I've known him and I've known him a lot longer than I've been blogging — his show is on many stations on the East Coast).

You've gotta listen to the first few minutes of the recording. Rich's daughter introduces us. She's so cute!

Oh, and Rich has a blog now too. Heheh.

Steve Ball invited Buzz and I over to a party at his new house tonight. He’s the guy who runs the media teams on Windows. Quite a good guitarist too.

What’s fun is you can listen to his music too.

But at the party I met some interesting technologists. Steve introduced me to David LaVallee.

Don’t know who David is? I didn’t either.

But he worked with Steve Jobs for years and, while at Apple, was the guy who pushed Jobs to buy Garageband. He also worked on the original Java team and at Disney for a while.

He’s now working at Microsoft on the MSN Messenger team. His blog is fun to read.

What else did he do? He helped Steve Jobs do his presentations. We talked about why Gates’ presentations are never as good as Jobs. We joked that he should go to Bill and say “you can only put three words on each slide.”

Ahh, that’s what we do for fun in Seattle on a Saturday night.

Oh, and Steve said the guy who runs the Google Video team was at the party too, but I missed him.

Steve said that he learned that Google video was done by four people over four months. That reminds me to go looking for small teams at Microsoft that are doing kick ass things.

Well, hope your Saturday evening was as fun!

Oh, and while we’re talking about Garageband, I see that Mary Jo Foley says that Microsoft is developing a Garageband competitor. Hmmm, I love it when Mary Jo finds out stuff that I don’t know about Microsoft. I gotta ask about that one on Monday when I’m back in the office.

Robert Cringley says that Microsoft doesn't invite security experts to campus to learn from them.

This is patently NOT true.

We regularly hold "BlueHat" conferences on campus. Why are these called "BlueHat?" Because of the blue color on employee badges. I attended part of the last one (it was held about a month ago). This is for Microsoft employees. On stage? Security experts from around the world.

In fact, the BlueHat team has a blog where they list the security experts and topics that were invited onto campus to speak.

And, even separate of that, we have security experts on campus helping us out all the time. The IE team even hired a 16-year-old who found a few exploits and he worked the summer helping make Windows Vista more secure. (He told me that IE7 is far more secure than other browsers he's tried to hack into).

Other reactions to Cringley's article? Well, for one, internally at Microsoft we know it takes about two months to "fill the channel" with a new OS — we were aiming to have Vista ready for August and when it became apparent we wouldn't make that date the planners knew they couldn't make Christmas. That wasn't a decision made lightly, but I've been talking to people internally and it was apparent that the quality of Vista just wasn't ready for an August release. I'm glad that our executives stand up for quality, even while they are leaving billions of dollars on the table. The pressure to ship is extreme. Believe me, everyone here wants to ship Vista. Our pride relies on it (not to mention our stock price and bonuses and other things). That pressure needs to be countered. In two years no one will remember we slipped. But they will remember whether or not this was a high-quality OS.

Two, we need to treat all of our OEMs fairly and can't favor one over the other. Dell is the wrong one to pick on here. They became very profitable BECAUSE they made their supply chain hyper efficient. They can turn around machines in days, while other companies need much longer turnaround times to get their machines from manufacturing into customers' hands.

Frank Boosman has a different argument with Cringley. He's right. Shipping Window IS an order of magnitude harder than shipping OSX. Just one visit to our testing labs shows you why.

Charlie Owen, of the Windows Media Center team, gives us a look at the quietest room at Microsoft (cool place to listen to music, it's totally soundproof and has anti-sound-wave-reflection treatment on the walls) and then gives us a taste of what's coming from the Media Center team in Windows Vista in an interview I did with him for Channel 9. Then they show how to develop your first Media Center application.

Update: On his blog Charlie links to a couple of people who got Media Center running on their new Macs.

Tamara Pesik has the coolest job at Microsoft. She arranges for cool speakers to come on campus as part of her efforts over in Microsoft Research. Today she had Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga over to talk to Microsoft employees (here's a picture of her introducing Markos, left, and Jerome, middle). They wrote an excellent book (yes, I have read it, thanks to Raines Cohen for giving it to me at SXSW) about the state of politics (from the progressive view) in America. Those who don't recognize these names might not know that Markos started the "Daily Kos" site. Very popular. Gets half a million visits per day. Jerome started MyDD political site that gets more than 50,000 visits a day and they both worked on Howard Dean's campaign.

I didn't realize that many of these talks are put onto the "ResearchChannel" site. If you visit there you'll see all sorts of technical talks given by leading experts around the world with a few business and political talks (Malcolm Gladwell has a talk up there, for instance) interspersed. There's a ton of talks there done by computer scientists (most of whom don't work for Microsoft) that you might find interesting too.

Tamara says that the talk today should be on the site in a few weeks, so I'll point that out when it appears. In the meantime there's a treasure trove of good stuff to watch.

Oh, and if you want to see Jerome or Markos, they'll be giving two more talks in the Seattle area. One tonight, one tomorrow. Details are on their book site.

They worked on Howard Dean's campaign and have many interesting insights about the state of American politics. If you care about that topic, this is a "don't miss."

Markos was on the Colbert Report last night, the CrooksAndLiars blog has links to the video.

Lots of people assume that Microsoft runs as a single entity. That we are lock step going in one direction. The truth is often messier. We're actually more like 100 companies all under the same roof. That messiness is showing up in the RSS icons we're using.

The IE team uses the same icon the Firefox team does.
The Windows Marketplace team tries to confuse all of us and uses both the Firefox icon, and the Orange XML icon that Dave Winer would like the industry to use. Just for added confusion they add the "My MSN" subscription button. (By the way, Windows Marketplace rocks other than its confusion on which feed icon to use).
The Channel 9 team uses the orange XML icon.
The On10.net team uses the Firefox icon with the word "subscribe" added on.
The new Port 25 open source site (opened just yesterday) uses an orange button with the letters "RSS" on them instead of XML.
Our employee blogs on MSDN don't even try to use an icon, instead just have the word "RSS" in text.
MSNBC uses the orange XML icon.
Microsoft's site for the press uses an orange icon with RSS along with the word "subscriptions."
MSDN, the site for developers, uses an orange "RSS" icon.
MSN Spaces, blogs for people like Maryam, my wife, doesn't use any icon, rather has the words "Subscribe to RSS feed."
The Expo Live team (classified ads) uses an orange "RSS" icon.

Whew, this certainly isn't a good user experience. What do you think? Which way do you want Microsoft to go? Why?

Update: the next version of Outlook and Sharepoint will use the Firefox icon.

Developers and Designers party together at DCamp.

I wonder if they'll talk about Microsoft's Expression Interactive Designer (aka Sparkle) there? That's what I always think about when I hear about developers and designers getting together.

Scott Isaacs is the guy who wrote the original DHTML draft specification. Says "Naming was never my specialty." Don't know DHTML? That's what you call AJAX today (mostly).

Tim Bray puts it well: "Scott, how could you ever expect to hit the memescape big-time with a dorky name like "Dynamic HTML?""

Don't know who Isaacs is? You will. He wrote the framework behind the next Hotmail. Live.com. MSN Spaces. And lots of other things.

Why do I love Scott? Cause he keeps fighting for what he believes. He loses sometimes. Wins sometimes. But he's always interesting. I wish I could follow him around all day long but then what makes him interesting is he ships stuff that makes the Web better and I don't wanna mess with that at all.

He's a Microsoft treasure. Keep it up Scott!

Buzz Bruggeman has a fun post about Mac's new ability to run Windows: the Pigs are flying.

Hey, Buzz, I bet we see a multi-button mouse (the blogs will go crazy again and Apple's stock price will go up again) and a Tablet PC, then a Media Center.

But only after the Pigs learn to dance.

Update: Bubba Murarka (he works at Microsoft) tells his experiences of getting his new MacBook working with Windows.

Marc Canter wonders why we need to hear from the same old same old time and time again.

A few disclaimers. 1) I didn't even know Microsoft was a sponsor of Kevin Werback's SuperNova conference before I accepted. 2) My boss would rather I stay home, do more videos, and didn't ask me to speak. 3) I accepted because I'll be in California anyway so it wouldn't cost me (or Microsoft or the Supernova conference) anything to speak.

The session I'm on is called "Business Blogging." Since I wrote a book on the topic and do a video blog for Microsoft Kevin asked me to speak.

But, I'm left scratching my head cause Marc asks Kevin to bring people I've already heard speak. OK, that's a mixed message! So, what is it? Do we want the same people again or not? Hmmm.

The thing is, known names sell tickets. In the 1990s I planned conferences and did a bit of research. If the list of speakers included lots of names that were recognizable the attendance was higher than if we included newbies. Hey, that's why I hired Dave Winer to speak (and Marc Canter too).

By the way, I've been at dozens of conferences in the past few years and on that list I've never heard most of these people speak.

Oh, and if you want to hear people you've never heard speak before you should go to the Blogher conference. Maryam is speaking there for the first time. I'll be an attendee. To be fair Marc attended that last year.

Update: 1/3rd of the speakers at Supernova this year are women. That's much higher than at other industry conferences I've been at this year (only BlogHer is higher). Also, Marc Canter spoke at Supernova last year. Dave Winer spoke at the first one.

I'm particularly looking forward to Amy Jo Kim's session at SuperNova. She spoke at SXSW and got rave reviews (I missed that one but heard people talking about it in the hallways).