We’re off to another flight, this time to North Carolina. In the meantime, damn there’s a lot of good blogging going on. I shared the best with you on my link blog. Google Reader still rocks.

I’m very fortunate to be able to get around and see a wide variety of companies and entrepreneur’s from the biggest like eBay and Google to the smallest of startups.

Here’s Evan Krauss, CEO of Cuts (in two segments: six minute demo and a 13 minute interview). Cuts makes a system that lets you edit movies. Turns out there’s a lot of parents out there who want to cut out violent or sexual material from the movies their kids see and Cuts lets you do it. It also lets you mashup your own movie compilations.

David Dalka called me up tonight cause he read that Maryam and I were hanging out in Chicago for the evening. That was a nice surprise. He is excited about giving his first public speech at the eComXpo on October 24-26. It’s a free to attend virtual conference.

I remember the first time I spoke in front of a conference audience. Don Box was there (he’s one of the best speakers I’ve ever seen). I was so nervous! I couldn’t hold my hands steady.

It felt like I had just jumped into a pool of icewater. I couldn’t get my breath.

So, I’m always happy when more people try it out. I still suck at it, though. I’ve been thinking about going to Toastmasters to get better at it.

When I interviewed Woz last week he said when he was a kid he’d never go on stage — had to be prodded to show off his Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Society.

How about you, what keeps you from giving speeches at user groups or conferences?

Our plane, which is running late, is gonna get in at about 10:02 p.m., so can’t get into Chicago in time for the TechCocktail in Chicago tonight. We’ll just stay in a hotel near the airport. Bummer.

If you enjoy talking about things like Flickr, Vizrea, YouTube, BlueDot, LinkedIn, WordPress, TypePad, MySpace, or if you’re someone involved in building such you probably would enjoy Chris Heuer’s new Social Media Club. The first meeting is on October 23. Lisa Stone, of BlogHer, and I are giving an interactive workshop for high tech communications professionals.SAP, PR Newswire, Fleishman Hillard are sponsoring.

Of course we could argue about whether this Nokia advertisement on YouTube helps or hurts their brand. Chris Locke, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, talked about that ad. So, first goal of advertising (to get you to think about the brand and talk about it with your friends) has been accomplished. That ad was created by Brand Tacticians. What’s the second goal? Get you to start a conversation. Back in the 1990s when I did advertising for a small camera/AV store in San Jose, my advertising was always aimed at getting you to come into my store. I knew that if I could get you to come into my store there was a pretty good chance of getting to third goal, which is to buy something. Home run? When you came back a second time. That’s when I knew I had converted you into a longterm customer.

Anyway, come join us, will be fun. A few spaces are still available. Costs $150 (I am doing this for free).

Brad Chase. Remember the name? He was the Microsoft executive who led the Internet Explorer team against Netscape.

Recently he dropped by my office for a 16-minute long chat and a look at Vizrea, a cool mobile photo and video blogging service that he is on the board of directors for. He did a separate 12 minute demo, in case you’re less interested in what Brad has to say and what Vizrea does.

More videos coming tomorrow (and every day for at least the next three weeks).

I can tell you DEFINITELY YES. But more on that after using it for more than a few hours. In the meantime, other people are talking about how much productivity a big monitor (or multiple monitors) adds.

My boss took his little camera (we must get him a tripod) over to Office 2.0 conference yesterday and got someone from Google to show him its new Docs and Spreadsheets.

My wife Maryam is bragging about the traffic she’s getting from the What’s Your Story page. Turns out she’s gotten about 13,000 visits today, thanks to being featured there.

I guess that’s a good thing, cause we’re both speaking together on Saturday at the sold out Converge South. Our topic: 10 ways to create a killer blog. Hey, if I blog enough I’ll die. Think about that one for a while. It’s true. I read it on the Internet.

I was just adding stuff to my linkblog, cause we missed our plane to Greensboro (got another one that leaves at 1 p.m., we’ll be spending the night in Chicago) and I saw a couple of things that got me to write about the coming Microsoft/Adobe developer/designer death match.

Both Microsoft and Adobe are readying their armies for a massive fight with each other next year over both developers and creative professionals.

Microsoft fired its big gun with the Visual Studio 2005 vs. Dreamweaver page. But, don’t count Adobe out of this fight yet, this is only the first battle in a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar battle. I was over at Adobe yesterday and they have some major things coming next year that’ll play off of Adobe’s strengths and take the battle back to Redmond.

Looking at Microsoft’s list it’s interesting to note what’s not there. Some things that come to mind?

1) Video. Adobe’s Flash is what YouTube used. Microsoft doesn’t have a good video story anymore because it pulled out of the Macintosh, which is where a lot of video folks spend their time.
2) Web standards. Yeah Visual Studio supports most of them, but weird that they didn’t call that out. For designers this is the #1 most important thing whenever I hear them talking at conferences or on blogs.
3) Integration into print workflows. Adobe’s strength is its Acrobat franchise. That came from print fidelity. Things look the same on screen as they do in a magazine. Microsoft is just getting onto that bandwagon with Windows Vista printing. Also, because Dreamweaver rarely sits alone, but as part of InDesign and Acrobat, it has a strong print-centric workflow (ask Printing for Less’ CEO what designers use to create printed items and he’ll tell you largely Adobe software).

So, you can see how Adobe and Microsoft are going to attack each other over the next year. Adobe comes at it from design/video/print/layout. Microsoft will come at it from the programmer’s point of view. Tools. Protocols. Source code control. Debugging.

You’ll see both shoring up their offerings where they are weak. Winners? Both designers and developers who’ll have a raft of new tools and approaches to choose from.

Oh, and me, cause I’ll be videotaping this battle from both sides.

Some of the battlefields where this will be decided on?

1) Security. Who can make it easier to build secure corporate systems. For instance, what happens when your laptop is ripped off? Does Adobe or Microsoft protect your corporate data there?
2) Openess. Which systems really will be most extendable and usable on all platforms. Important now that Apple has been gaining market share again.
3) Collaboration. Which systems let disperse development and design teams work together best?
4) Faithfulness to original creator. If you shoot a photo and on one system it keeps its color integrity, no matter where it’s displayed or printed, and on another it doesn’t, the one that’s faithful will win.
5) Blog-centricity. More and more corporate systems are going with blog-centric content management systems like Moveable Type or Wordpress. Even big ones that you might not expect. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe has gotten on these bandwagons yet, but this will be a more important point over time.
6) Multi-tenant system development. More and more of our Web data, especially inside corporations, will be stored on multi-tenant systems. Salesforce.com shot its big guns off with “Apex” which is a toolset to make it easier to develop systems that’ll reside on dozens or hundreds of servers. Watch for Adobe and Microsoft to help developers build these systems too.

Anyway, what do you think? Will designers move to Microsoft? Will developers move to Adobe?

Oh, and Ajaxian points out that we can’t write off Google or third party companies in this battle either.

Damn, I saw some people talking about how much better Microsoft’s Live Search was and I just tried a few searches and, indeed, it’s a lot better than it used to be. They’ve significantly closed the gap with Google.

How does it do on your favorite searches? I even picked out a random Windows API call and did a search on that. MSN used to always suck on those. But Live.com gets it right.

It’s also fast and the UI is nice. I think it matches Google all the way around on search.

Google is still slightly better on some searches (I think the result set on Google for Scrapbooking Blog is better than that on Live.com for Scrapbooking Blog, for instance). But, it’s much harder to tell the difference than it used to be. Live.com even does well with all my stock quotes (it used to be far less consistent than Google) and on my ego search for “scoble” Live.com is much better than Google (Live.com lists my current blog first, Google lists my blog that I haven’t posted to for a year first).

How does it do on your searches?

Now, the problem is, if Microsoft matches Google, who will switch away from Google? I won’t. The trust I’ve built since the late 1990s of searching Google many times a day without a problem is going to be a very hard thing to beat. To get me to switch Microsoft will have to be better than Google.

How about you? Does Microsoft (or Yahoo or Ask) have any hope of getting you to switch your default search engine?

I love Ask a Ninja. It’s one of the fun things I can do with Patrick.

Fun to see the two guys behind that videoshow on Geek Entertainment TV.

Do you watch that?

If you don’t like that, well, Ze Frank has the worst sex toy … ever.

Here’s the trick to learning to love Google Reader. First, I visit http://reader.google.com. Second, I import my OPML file from NewsGator. Third, I go to “All items.” Fourth I learn to use the “J” and “K” keys. J goes forward through all the items. K goes backward. Then I click on things that I want to share with you.

There’s a meme out there that only rich people will be able to afford Playstation 3’s. That’s bulls**t.

Let me tell you how it works in the US of A. You walk into Best Buy. Ask for a credit application. Fill it out. They approve you for $10,000 on the spot (as long as you’ve paid all your credit card bills on time). You head over to the big screen department, pick out your $4,000 big screen and your $600 Playstation 3, and a $500 HD-DVD drive. Then you pay something like $140 per month in payments.

Can’t afford that much? Then get a screen that costs about $1,500 instead.

Now, how much is that? Well, a movie, hotdog, and Coke, for four people will cost you about $60. So, for two movies with your family you can afford a kick ass bigscreen and gaming system.

There is WAY too much being made about the price of these things.

I was reading Steve Ballmer scratching his head in BusinessWeek where he was wondering about the valuations that are getting paid out for companies like Skype and YouTube.

Good to hear that Ballmer’s leadership on the social software industry has remained consistent since he turned down Flickr when that sold to Yahoo for $30 million. I, and others, told Microsoft’s execs to start buying everything that moved in the social software space cause we knew that valuations were gonna be much more expensive later on. The executive leadership at Microsoft didn’t believe us. Still doesn’t.

Don’t miss Ballmer’s question here: “[You’ve got to ask] could Google do whatever it is they’re hoping to buy without paying $1.6 billion?” That’s Microsoft’s engineering culture coming through. Clearly Ballmer believes he can build YouTube for less.

The thing is, YouTube is two SEPARATE things: 1) the technology. 2) the community/brand.

Doing the technology is fairly straightforward. I’m sure that could be built for $100 million or less. Probably far less if they really are smart about how they go about it.

But duplicate the community and brand (er, those eyeballs, as Ballmer calls them) is far far far more difficult. The fact that he insists on calling me a set of eyeballs tells me Ballmer doesn’t understand the trend here. Why we love YouTube isn’t cause we can watch other people’s videos. It’s cause we can upload our own lame videos!!!

Now, will Microsoft be able to spend less than $1.6 billion and build their own YouTube? Maybe. Why? Cause Microsoft will have to spend hundreds of millions (probably more than a billion) in advertising just to attempt to appear “cool” and get people to try its video service.

Even then, as AT&T has demonstrated, spending a billion on marketing is no assurance you’ll come out the other end with a good audience and with people thinking you’re cool.

Google realized it couldn’t make its own video service look as cool as YouTube. Too bad Ballmer still hasn’t figured out he can’t buy his way into cool without buying some things that are cool.

Back to Facebook. Is it worth as much as YouTube? I don’t think so because only college students associate with that brand. With YouTube everyone from 80-year-old friends to my son were using it and talking about it. Facebook is struggling to make its brand interesting to non college students. So far it has failed, which is why I don’t think it’s worth as much as YouTube.

I’ll never forget Dori Smith’s prodding to learn about blogging back in 2000. I’m glad my wife interviewed her for the ScobleShow. Oh, yeah, she knows some other stuff too. She wrote the book on JavaScript (actually, quite a few books, check out the list on her sidebar). Plus she has the coolest office I’ve been in so far (less than a block from the nearest winery too). Her office is actually in a permanently-parked RV in Healdsburg, CA.

I’m glad to play cameraguy for my wife — especially when the conversation is so interesting. Ajax. Development tools. Mashups. Macs. PCs. Women in programming careers. Learning programming. Her son, who is studying bioinformatics. And much more. We cover Java vs. Javascript and keep the programming discussion pretty high level. If you’re just getting into programming this is a good overview.

This was Maryam’s first interview — ever. I thought she did a good job and even told me to shut up at one point.

I learned that Eric Billingsley designed nuclear power plants before coming to eBay. Since joining eBay he designed its new search engine, among other things. I talk about all that and more (and get some cool eBay demos) with Eric Billingsley.

The search engine he built is really interesting and hearing Eric talk about trying to make Google and other engines work is fascinating. Remember, everything in eBay needs to be found in the search engine and found NOW. Google doesn’t get new items into its index for days. That’d be totally unacceptable for eBay.

Lots of good stuff on my new link blog (done thanks to Google Reader). I read hundreds of feeds so you don’t have to. There’s a feed here too. Everything on there is less than a day old right now, so feel free to surf through all the pages.

While I was reading my feed I saw Matt McSpirit talking about Blinkx, which is a video search engine. So, why didn’t Blinkx close the $1.65 billion deal that YouTube did?

Well, for one, the name. I can say YouTube even after drinking four beers. Now, how do you tell your friends to use Blinkx? I can’t even spell it. I had to look at the logo three times just to make sure I was spelling it right. If I can’t tell my friends about something new your growth won’t be as fast. Make sure I can say your name on radio. Or on stage when I’m talking. YouTube works. Blinkx doesn’t.

Also, the home page is WAY overbearing. Too many moving things. And one design principle I learned in college: pick ONE thing and make that twice as big as anything else on the page. YouTube wins here. Why? Because your eye needs something to enter the page with. If everything is the same size, as it is on Blinkx, your eye feels uncomfortable. Doesn’t know where to look. And instead of picking something will just leave. Dave Winer reminded me of that last night when he said he hadn’t watched any of my show because there was too much for him to pick from. He wanted a page design like Ze Frank or Rocketboom have: just one video. On my ScobleShow, I pick one video and make it bigger than the others.

Back to the home pages, Blinkx has lots of big-name videocontent. Movies. TV shows. Etc. YouTube has lots of “small-name” videocontent. Kittens. Goofy videos. We’re all looking for different kinds of content. Stuff to impress our friends with that they probably won’t have seen. Here’s a hint: your friends and family have probably already seen the latest Lost. But they haven’t seen the latest cute kitten video. Microsoft makes this mistake too (remember IE 4 with ActiveDesktop? What was there? Big name media companies. No small guys. I wonder if Microsoft will learn that it’s the small guys that make an experience different and interesting?)

It’s not hard to see why YouTube built a brand name and audience worth paying billions for. And why Blinkx didn’t.

When I was at Google today I learned that about a week ago someone erased the entire Google Master Plan.

Now, this is a big white board in building 41. It’s more fun than anything serious. But, already new things are being drawn into the Master Plan 2.0. I didn’t have my still camera, but filmed it, will try to have that up soon. If anyone is at Google, can you take a new picture?

Oh, while we’re talking about Google. Matt Cutts just recommended the Daily SearchCast. Matt is Google’s best known blogger and the Daily SearchCast is done by Danny Sullivan. I’m listening, I don’t know how I missed this. It’s awesome! Daily Danny. Does it get any better?

I’m a narcissistic boring blogger. At least that’s what LayZ tells me. But, even I have to admit that David Gray is right and that I’m bored with being at the top of the Wordpress.com blog list everyday.

I want to discover more new bloggers who don’t have audiences yet, but who are good up and comers. Actually, inside Wordpress.com I have a Dashboard where it shows the fastest growing Wordpress blogs. I find good ones there. I also like the Wordpress.com home page where they show “hot blogs” and “hot posts.”

Anyway, let’s all click on David Gray’s name and see if we can get him up the food chain.

Seriously, though. The only way to get to the top of the Wordpress blog charts now is to do something outrageous. Or get onto Digg, which usually happens cause you did something outrageous.

Later today I’m going to Adobe, then Yahoo, then SayNow. Whew. Another full schedule. When will I have time to answer my email?