PR Week is reporting that Edelman is taking over the Microsoft Windows Vista account. That underscores that Edelman and Microsoft need even more transparency at this time into what they are going to do with bloggers.

This is a big deal and a big loss for Waggener Edstrom.

UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley wrote me and said that Edelman didn’t take the Windows Vista PR account from Waggener Edstrom, just the one-day launch in January. Sorry for the error.

Ze Frank is brilliant. He is getting people to sponsor little duckies.

Yeah, Paul, I was just reading through my feeds (I just shared a ton of items on my link blog) and noticed that Apple has been taking a lot of crap for blaming its shipping a virus on Microsoft. That WAS classless. Paul Mooney called it right.

By the way, I’m hearing about all sorts of problems with Apple’s MacBooks (and Maryam’s MacBookPro runs very hot). Maybe Apple should take the log out of its own eye?

Speaking of saying what I think, Doc Searls did that today on a post about PayPerPost.

I like what I’m seeing on technologyevangelist.com. This is like the ScobleShow, except with better lighting and better editing. Love the little desktop that pops up on the video screen. First interview I watched was with Nicholas Reville, one of the creators of the Democracy Player, which is a nice video and audio podcasting client.

I like that Zooomr has one developer. He’s 18-years-old. And since I’ve started watching Zooomr it’s added a new feature every week or so. Today Thomas Hawk reports on the newest: faves and recent activity.

Thankfully Nick Bradbury and his son are OK. His report of getting hit by a hit-and-run driver is riveting. It takes me back to my own car wreck (the report of which, sadly, is no longer on the Web thanks to UserLand pulling down my server without telling me).

But of all the events that’s happened to me in the past six years since starting to blog, that one event changed my approach more than any other. It wacked me into realizing life is temporary, so might as well live life like every day is your last.

Translation: I want more of that banana pudding I had last week at ConvergeSouth’s BBQ. Boy was that stuff good.

If you don’t know who Nick is, he is a developer who brought us all sorts of cool stuff, most recently FeedDemon.

Today Kevin Burton released a new TailRank. Last week I asked the audience at ConvergeSouth how many people even knew about TechMeme. Very few hands went up.

That totally shocked me. So, thought it was time to look at the memetrackers again since so few people in the world know about them.

These are sites where you go to learn the latest news in the tech world.

First, there are two approaches to reading tech blogs: one, you can read a bunch of feeds like I do with Google Reader. That takes a couple of hours even if you’re really fast like I am at hitting “J” “J” “J” (the “J” key moves to the next post).

But, since I just read my 200 tech feeds and posted a bunch of stuff that had been posted in the past 24 hours I thought it’d be interesting to see how that compared to the new TailRank and TechMeme.

I probably should have included Slashdot and GoogleNews/Tech in this post too, but I got more than 500 emails waiting for me to answer and tons of videos to encode.

Here’s my non-scientific observations (you should do your own homework and decide which site is best for you on your own):

HEADLINE DENSITY

Let’s start with my favorite TechMeme. I loaded all three at the same time on my brand new Apple MacPro and 30 inch screen — this lets me get all three pages side-by-side for comparisons. TechMeme has 32 headlines (17 of which are top level) and three paid advertising headlines.

TailRank only gets 10 top-level headlines (to get more you gotta click “next” which we’ve learned through eye track research that most users will never do, but what I’m really looking at here is information density, and on that point TechMeme wins by a long shot).

Digg/Tech has 15 top-level headlines.

TechMeme wins this one.

UPDATE: I went back and looked at TailRank again. I totally missed the headlines over on the right side of the page. Those looked like ads to me, or a blogroll. Shows how deep my avoidance of traditional advertising is. Anyway, even after noticing them, they aren’t as useful cause there’s no descriptive text. For instance here’s one headline “When it Doubt, Blame CREW.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? Am I really supposed to click on that to learn more? Sorry, I won’t. TechMeme’s headlines at the bottom of the page, though, are almost as useless but they have a little more info which makes them easier to deal with (I can see who is linking to them, which I can use to judge if a headline is really going to be interesting to me). Either way, though, TechMeme wins this one, even after considering the other headlines on the page.

NEWSWORTHINESS OF TOP HEADLINES

This one will be subjective. I’m biased toward more big-paper news. Things like Google buying YouTube. So, let’s look.

TechMeme: has headlines from Richard Edelman (only bloggers really care about ethics of other bloggers, so this is a minus for TechMeme). A report from the New York Times on a reporter who is covering Second Life (snore, is this really news?) A TechCrunch article on Sequoia investing $5 million in Sugar Publishing (news!!) An article in BusinessWeek about YouTube vs. MySpace (lots of people are talking about this, people talked to me about this at every stop so far today). A Read/Write Web post about Moveable Type Enterprise launching (news!!) A Daily Mall article on home entertainment (mushy). A Wired article about a MySpace predator getting caught (news!!) A New York Times article about social software (mushy). AT&T making network neutrality concessions (news!!)

Anyway, to shorten this up, let’s count the news headlines: 17 interest me, out of 32 headlines. Pretty good.

Let’s look at TailRank. MySpace predator story. That’s not the most important thing today, methinks. But it counts. The mushy NYT article on social software. Walmart/Edelman thing, but not as authoritative as TechMeme, that linked to the latest Richard Edelman post. Red iPod story (mushy and old, was yesterday’s news); Another post about Walmart/Edelman thing, albeit older; A personal blog post about Macs sucking (interesting, and I’ll count that as news, although TechMeme has the same kind of post, but lower which is where I think it belongs). Moveable Type enterprise story. Cool. An NYT story about Chinese version of Wikipedia. News. TechMeme had that too, but lower. YouTube vs. MySpace. Yeah, news. Om’s story about Google making $2 billion in increased stock valuation. Yeah, news.

The percentage of articles is higher on TailRank, but unfortunately the quantity wins out, I see TechMeme the winner here too.

How about Digg? Digg is a completely different animal. Every headline is pretty interesting, but has much more niche-oriented news (top link right now, for instance is “useful error pages for Firefox”).

Comparing Digg with TechMeme is pretty difficult cause they do very different things. I couldn’t live without either of them, which brings me to the next section.

SMALL STORIES/COMPLETENESS OF PICTURE

Now, here, obviously, is where reading your own feeds every night will definitely win. In the past two hours I’ve posted about 48 items. Each hand picked from hundreds of items that crossed my screen. A good cross-section of items, including Google Ajax Video Bar, and other fun weird small things (and big things too). To be fair, the front page of my feed only shows nine, though. You gotta click the link at the bottom of the page to see more. Just as tedious as it was on TailRank, but both experiences are better if you subscribe.

Digg, however, wins this game. Digg gets the weirdest newest stuff onto the page. The downside of the Digg page is that much of it is noise to me, cause I don’t care about a lot of the items that get on Digg. For instance, there right now is a 1992 video of Steve Jobs showing off NeXTSTEP. Please, that’s noise for someone who is busy and just wants to know the top headlines of the day. But, to my son, who is a Steve Jobs love child, that’s probably going to be his favorite headline.

CONCLUSION

I’m sticking with TechMeme for my first “must read” page in the morning. Then I’ll go to Digg. Then to my feeds. Then to TailRank.

How about you? Which one do you like the most and why?

POSTSCRIPT: Now that I’ve trashed TailRank, I want to praise it. The memetracker feature is cool and TailRank has a broader range of news than TechMeme. Either way, it’s good to see the competition between these sites.

You might have heard of Wordpress or Akismet (Wordpress is the software/service that hosts my blog here, and Akismet is the service that blocks all sorts of comment spam). They are both produced by Automattic. Recently I sat down with Automattic’s CEO, Toni Schneider, for a 45:33 interview for ScobleShow.

We talk about everything from the future of blogging, to spam detection, to other fun things. If you’re interested in Wordpress, you won’t want to miss this one.

Richard Edelman, head of Edelman*, just called. He wrote a blog post about the Walmart/Edelman disclosure (or lack thereof) issue over the weekend. He says “this should not have happened.” He also said he didn’t respond until he had all the facts, which is why both him and Steve Rubel hadn’t responded until now. Now that he has, he says that they didn’t do a good job here and he’s working to educate his staff so this doesn’t happen again. Steve Rubel also wrote about it and was pretty specific “our firm failed to be completely transparent.”

Richard also apologized for his firm’s error.

That’s enough for me. It’s pretty clear, based on our conversation that this isn’t allowable behavior at Edelman and that he isn’t telling his clients it’s a good thing to do this and that, if a similar site goes up, that full disclosure will be there and will be there from the beginning.

*=I made a mistake of my own and said Richard was a founder, that title belongs to his dad.

It’s code-named Soapbox and On10 has a video of it (and 10,000 invites). Oh, On10 is a Microsoft site. But they disclosed that up front, so I feel better about linking to it than I did about linking to the Walmart thing earlier.

Microsoft says its viewing experience will be better. Jeff Sandquist says that Soapbox supports tagging, RSS everywhere, much higher quality video than YouTube and more. We’ll test that out. Will it be possible to do wide screen?

Someone stole Dori Smith’s license plate in California. It says, simply:

“WEB GEEK”

If you see that plate, please report the slimeball who did that. And if you are said slimeball, return the plates and no questions will be asked

This is why I’m as transparent about my life as absolutely possible. And, what’s wrong with getting attacked for what you’re putting out there? I worked for a company that was attacked all the time. What did I do? I linked to those attacks.

The PR lesson is: be transparent! Explain your biases up front. Where your funding is coming from.

Hide that, and you’ll give your enemies something to use against you.

This is a view I’ve heard before, back when I worked at Microsoft, so I thought it was useful to share so you can see how Microsofties think. Aleem Bawany writes “We don’t need to buy any community, we already have a really large one we can tap into.”

They are right, if you look at it that way. But you can’t have it both ways: you can’t live off your existing community and be “cool” and I know that Microsoft desperately wants to be cool. (They were paying for coolness initiatives to try to get people to see them as cool).

Why? Cause if you’re a consumer company and you want to see growth, you’ve gotta be interesting at minimum.

Why does growth matter? It’s what the stock market rewards.

Now, maybe passing on YouTube was the right thing to do, but lately I’m noticing a lot of cloning going on. That never will be cool. It may, however, be very profitable.

So, maybe Aleem will have the last laugh.

I still think we’re in an audience business, though, and audiences don’t appreciate copies as much as they appreciate originals.

That big audience that Microsoft has? It’s theirs to lose.

Oh, and I think Om Malik’s analysis is pretty funny that Google already paid for the YouTube acquisition thanks to a higher stock price. Of course Microsoft’s stock price has been going up lately too. So, not sure anything can be made out of that here, although it is interesting to note.

Neat story of a photographer who got photos into an exhibition because he posted his work to Flickr.

I absolutely hate LinkedIn. Coding Horror explains why. I don’t respond to any request received via LinkedIn. Sorry.

If you don’t disclose you’re being paid to blog, you’re gonna create a mess, like Edelman and Walmart did. That’s why I don’t like PayPerPost (which sponsored part of the conference yesterday). I don’t mind PayPerPost on the face of it. As long as you disclose you’re being paid, your integrity is intact. The problem is that PayPerPost doesn’t ask its bloggers to disclose the fact that they are getting paid to blog (I talked yesterday with one blogger who is using PayPerPost and says he doesn’t always disclose that fact).

That said, bloggers are selling out too cheap. What PayPerPost is really about is getting better search engine ranking. SEO firms used to charge thousands of dollars to do what bloggers are now doing for $5 to $20 per post. I think PayPerPost is brilliant, actually, as long as Google/Yahoo/Microsoft don’t change their rankings to punish PayPerPost advertisers.

If I were running a search engine I’d actually come out and say “we’re gonna remove any advertiser on PayPerPost from our listings.” Why? Cause any engine that doesn’t allow organized buying into the organic search results that way is going to get good feelings from me. Companies should be forced to buy advertising if they don’t want to do the hard work of actually earning a link and/or coverage.

The nice thing is that when the corrosive effect of money comes into the blogosphere and isn’t disclosed it’ll earn a direct blowback just like is on TechMeme today.

Sue Polinsky, the conference organizer of ConvergeSouth, the conference Maryam and I spoke at yesterday, gave us a tour around Greensboro, North Carolina last night. We started in front of Woolworths.

Out front are four footprints.

The significance of what four people did here on February 1, 1960 can’t be understated.

They sat at this lunchcounter.

And waited for service.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

That’s how the civil rights movement in the United States started. UPDATE: at least that’s what the plaque out front says, although other events, like Rosa Parks’ bus ride, happened earlier.

It wasn’t lost on me as we continued our tour that at one point a couple of police officers passed us. One is white. One is black. Working together.

And the evening was punctuated even further when later in the evening we met an editor of the local newspaper. He is black.

Neither of those things would have been seen here in 1960.

Four people changed the world. It’s a reminder to all of us to speak up when things just aren’t right. Or take our place at the lunch counter and wait for service.

Their footprints are cast in bronze and laid in the sidewalk in front of the store where they changed history.

I remember reading about them in school when I was a kid and I had no concept that someday I’d be visiting the store where they changed history.

Thanks to Ed Cone, Ben Hwang, and Sue Polinsky for inviting us to Greensboro and giving us a tour around town. It was a fantastic day.

On Friday we were given a key to the city. That’s the first time I’ve been honored that way. I thought they saved such things for dignitaries or really famous people. Me? I’m just a blogger. But it was a thrill and quite an honor.

After listening to Elizabeth Edwards speak (really great, non-political speech on value of communities) Maryam and I hosted a session we titled the 10 ways to a killer blog. Luckily people took notes. Here’s Daniel Conover’s Xark notes and Anton Zuiker’s notes.

Edwards was a real thrill to meet. She stayed in our session, which was most gracious, and then gave Maryam a nice interview, which I taped. After the camera was off we asked her if John was really going to run for President and she said that unless something bad happens that’s the way it’s headed.

She’s seen more than her fair share of bad, by the way (I was reading her book). She’s a breast cancer survivor and her oldest son died in a car wreck. Something about her struck me as very real and down-to-earth. Probably cause she’s weathered these tough tests.

I heard that several people decided not to come to the conference because Elizabeth was speaking. That was their loss. I don’t understand that kind of behavior. I always learn something from people who are different, or believe differently, from me. It was punctuated cause Elizabeth didn’t utter a single political word the whole conference, including in Maryam’s interview.

Anyway, thanks to Greensboro. Your hospitality got to us. Wish we didn’t have to go home so soon.

There were no sponsors. Not many tech company CEOs. But, last night’s BBQ was absolutely wonderful — too bad Shel Israel wasn’t here, cause it laid out his new book’s theme of Global Neighborhoods absolutely wonderfully. Out on the front lawn of David Hoggard’s house, we had a BBQ party. It’s the first time I’ve had homemade banana pudding — it rocketed to the top of my favorite desert list.

And, what can I say about meeting Billy Jones? I hear he has a real treat for us at the conference today. Billy is a former trucker and a new school poet (and is a geek, had a street plane he built in Make Magazine). But meeting him you’d understand he’d be an interesting guy to hang around with, check out the video about him for more. “The driver looks like ZZTop, so it’s rock and roll all the way…” Heheh.

Maryam has all the details and all the links.

Thank you to Sue Polinsky for giving us a bed in her home. She’s a wonderful host and definitely a “tech mama.” (She’s an old-school female geek). Ben picked us up at the airport yesterday. Is a geek at Sprint here. Well, gotta go. Talk later, have a good Saturday.

You can read 100 blogs about this. Or listen to 10 podcasts. You still won’t get what Scrapblog does until you either download it and try it yourself or watch a video demo done by Carlos Garcia. Don’t miss the book at the end of the demo. It’s 10 minutes.

I’m looking for more demos like this. Got one? Let me know. I’m way behind on email, though.

Calling Matt Cutts (Google’s #1 blogger). I’m on another plane, sitting in Washington DC. I love Verizon Wireless. But, this guy is having trouble with Gmail. Can you help him? Gotta go, talk from Greensboro.