AVC posts an MP3 from the Violent Femmes and calls it his MP3 of the week. I had a listen and it's pretty good. You can pull it up and listen to it while you read the rest of this post.

I read on Kathy Sierra's blog that Eric Freeman is now the vice president, technology, for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts online. Wow, that sounds like a fun job! I bet Eric'll get lots of requests for free tickets and tours, now. Speaking of which, I'd love to do a 10 video about the technology behind Disney!

Hey, Chris Abraham, I'm an anti-smoking fascist. It's one thing I appreciate about California. Have you noticed that the housing prices have gone up continuously since smoking was banned there? Hmmm. Glad to hear Scotland is joining the fascist groups. When we got back from Europe EVERYTHING stank. Yuch.

Oyvind Solstad blogs about computerized gyms. Yeah, yeah, I gotta get meself into the gym. Getting some exercise would be a good way to deal with stress.

Susan Kitchens links to the WorldMapper and the Map Room. Cool stuff! How did we ever live without computers? Speaking of maps, Mikel Maron links to the Worldkit 3.0 and optimized OnEarth Landsat. Stunning, he says.

Lo-REST? Interesting conversation about REST APIs for Web services developers has been happening over on Steve Maine, Don Box, and Dare Obsanjo's blogs. Steve has the links.

Microsoft's first blogger, Joshua Allen, talks about all the fun Microformats stuff that happened at Mix06 last week. Hey, guys, we need Microformat applications to demonstrate all the cool stuff you are talking about. Without applications all this stuff just is talk.

Google's Print Auction, last week, got bashed by BusinessWeek.

John Nack, over at Adobe's blogs, continues finding the coolest stuff to look at. This time he shows you an image that took 720 hours in Illustrator to build. Wild.

Thinking of dating an experience designer? You should check out the OK/Cancel comic first. Heheh.

Susan Kitchens, again, found this amazing video of juggler Chris Bliss.

Jeff Atwood, author of the coding horror blog, says that Windows Live Local's having two entry boxes is too difficult. Oh, I totally agree and have told the team that. They are working on it.

You can now Ether Tris Hussey. I wrote about Ether a few weeks back. It's a service that lets you add a phone number to your blog. Call the phone number and you get an automated assistant who'll find an open spot on your schedule and arrange payment for services.

Dave Huth's video blog on "where does laughter come from?" is, as you might expect, fun! This is a whole new way to embarrass your kids when they are older.

Caterina Fake (she is a cofounder of Flickr) says now is a bad time to start a company. David Heinemeier Hansson, the guy who wrote Ruby on Rails, says, in response, "it's a great time to start a business." My thoughts? It's getting harder to get noticed now than in 2001, but if you have a killer product you'll get noticed. Didn't Google start at about the height of the bubble in the late 1990s? Great ideas and great companies will withstand all tests.

Developer Scott Hanselman is trying to raise $10,000 for diabetes research.

Darren Barefoot writes "God Bless Seat Guru."

Two design students came up with a desk that lets teenagers hide their porn. Oh, boy. My son just built me a desk in Second Life. I wonder if it has this particular feature. Hmmm.

Wanna win $10,000? Try out the Made in Express contest. Dan Fernandez has more on that on his blog.

Andrew Stopford links to some cool Windows Presentation Foundation demo videos that were shot at Mix06 by the 10 Crew.

Back to work.

Update: I pulled one link out of here because it was old and I didn't realize it. 

I've been following this discussion over on Dave Winer's blog. Jarod Russell says there's no way that Second Life is gonna be the next OS.

I think he hasn't seen inside of Second Life yet or seen just what a developer can do with it.

You can store files there. You can script things (there's a whole API). In fact, it's a platform. You can build a video game inside of second life. Or a music store. Or a dance studio. Or a city. Or a helicopter. Or a video screen that plays whatever content you want. Or fountain that spits blood.

Or, pretty much anything you can dream up. And it already has a monetary platform so people are willing to pay for things you develop!

Soon you'll be able to blog inside Second Life. Soon you'll be able to run more applications.

This is why I think Microsoft needs to pay deep attention to it and why my son says it's the most addictive thing he's done so far.

It's easy to ignore right now. It takes several hours to really get into Second Life (unless you're 12, then it just takes a few minutes). There aren't very many people in there yet (wait until the hoards show up, though, the traffic is going up about 17% a month). It has a wild frontier feel about it (which means it's easy to get a business established right now — in four years it will be far harder to get noticed).

But, back to the point. This is a platform inside of a platform. Eric Rice was the first one to really explain that to me.

Hey, maybe I should go all Steve Gillmor on you and say "Google, Yahoo, Microsoft are dead." Well, everything has a second life.

One of my coworkers, Tim Sneath, and I were just talking and he said he saw that some people were confused by the news last week (he's getting calls). Some people thought we had announced that there would be a business version, released in November, and that a different version would be released in January. Not true.

Same version, it just takes two months to get it into the retail channel. This happens every time Windows is released (I was on the betas of Windows 95 and had the final code almost two months before it was on store shelves). MSDN Subscribers who get Windows OS releases will get the gold disks sooner than you'll be able to buy Windows Vista from, say, Dell or Acer.

Oh, and how complex is Windows Vista to ship? Well, take a look at this post/picture from J. P. Stewart. He's a test lead on one of the networking teams. He posted a picture that shows how many new features Windows Vista's networking stack has. Now, remember that that's just for Networking. There's a similar team for security. A similar team for audio. A similar team for video. A similar team for imaging. A similar team for printing. A similar team for UI. A similar team for kernel. And on, and on, and on, and on.

If one of those squares isn't ready to ship, it can hold up the whole boat. So, when people are looking for me to point fingers, or explain why this is late, there's no real way to do that. Not unless I get around to every team. I've been walking around Microsoft for two years with a camcorder. That has turned into more than 600 interviews. Out of 60,000 people. Getting a complete story just is very difficult. But, I come back to that image. One square. If it's not ready, we shouldn't ship.

Anyway, there's a ton of cool stuff coming through my aggregator. I'll try to get a bunch up in the next post.

Dominic Jones: Something must really have gotten up [Scoble's] nose. Perhaps a dose of truth?
Phil Sim: I really am quite aghast at Robert Scoble's latest post, following on from the Vista controversy. (Scoble's note: who said a Naked Conversation can't be heated and can't include me telling the world to go fly a kite?)
Mathew Ingram: [Scoble] has definitely flown off the handle, however.
Dennis Howlett: [Scoble's] doing himself, Microsoft and the cause of social software a disservice. (Scoble's note: Wait a second, Dominic says I'm not a credible spokesperson, you guys have me so confused!)
John Dowdell: If I were Scoble. (Scoble's note: Sometimes I wish I were sane like John).
Scott Karp: Well, that’s what happens when the “community” is in charge of the facts.
Larry Borsato: Robert is entitled to his opinion, but so is everyone else, even if they don't share his.
Joe Wilcox: And speaking of laughing, a purely personal response to Robert: I would never laugh at you.
Scoble's Note: One correction for Joe, when you say, about Channel 9: "There is no third-party process, such as a journalist interviewer" that's not true. Every video has a spot for people to ask more questions underneath and they often get detailed answers too (and we don't pull down posts, even ones that disagree with us).
Charles Wright: [Scoble's] clearly in desperate need of a week or two communing with trees….
WR (of Smarthouse — the folks who wrote the "60% story", in my comments): It also appears that Scoble has a bigger ego than Donald Trump and is more emotional than John McEnroe with a bad line call.
Finally: I found a way to get Shelley Powers to link to me!

There were some nice things said too:
Tom Mertens: [Scoble's] right.
Curt Hopkins: [Scoble] made a perfectly reasonable call for bloggers not to link to unsupported posts, for which he was repeatedly attacked, by, I presume, people who perhaps are not fond of Microsoft.
Christian Gross: Some People Are Missing the Point.
Mini-Microsoft: Don't rely on one guy [Scoble]. Blogging is not his day job. (True!)

Oh, and tomorrow the New York Times has an interesting article titled "Windows Is So Slow, but Why?"

Finally, tonight I talked to someone who works at one of our OEMs. He didn't want to go on the record, but told me he was very disappointed with the Vista slip and that they were counting on having Vista shipping this Christmas.

To him, and all of our OEM partners, I'm sorry we didn't get the job done on time (I told him such on the phone).

Further apologies to Mark Purdy of the San Jose Mercury News (he regularly runs columns under the title "Better Mail than Jail" and I copied his concept).

I'm glad I gave Joe some enjoyment this weekend.

But, I'm left wondering. Does Joe care about accuracy in reporting or not? His post here seemed to defend journalists, even those who just do shoddy reporting, while making ye olde attack on bloggers.

He also pulled out an old post of mine where I said getting it first is more important than getting it right.

I was wrong in that belief. Let me repeat that so it's very clear. I WAS WRONG. Getting it right is more important than getting it first. That's why I wasn't the first (or even the second, third, fourth, or 20th) person to comment on the Vista slip last week. I waited until I had some real information and watched the blogs to listen and see if the reporting was accurate.

One difference between bloggers and those who run their work under a brand, like Joe's Jupiter Media. News that's published under a brand spreads MUCH faster. Why? Because we tend to believe journalists who work for a living under a company structure more than we tend to believe individual people.

Joe doesn't seem to see the difference, or the difference in standards that the two should be held to. When you come here you're getting +my+ opinions. When you go to Microsoft Monitor you're getting Jupiter Media's opinions. There is a difference. Just ask the guy who's paying Joe's paycheck. When I post over on Channel 9 my work is held to a higher standard of accuracy than over here too. Why? Because that's a Microsoft-owned Web site. Here this is NOT owned by Microsoft.

By the way, Channel 9 wasn't designed to get around the press. I often post things there FOR the press so that they can get our point of view.

Updated: Joe Wilcox responded to my response. 

Last week they went after Microsoft.

This week they are going after Apple.

You know, I'm seeing a trend here. Some bloggers don't know who is a credible journalist and who isn't. Hint: anything the Register writes is NOT credible. Why do I say that? Cause they lied about me last year and didn't even care about the damage they did to their brand. They just want you to visit and click on their ads.

Sorta like the gossip magazines in the grocery stores want you to buy them. And many people do, even though they are filled with complete fabrications.

But, we should now start deriding people who link to non-credible sources. I will. Anyone who links to that jerk down in Australia anymore is simply not doing bloggers any favors. Same for anyone who links to the Register. I don't believe a word they write. At least not while Andrew Orlowski works there.
Om Malik chimes in and corrects Andrew's latest against Apple's chief, Steve Jobs. So does Apple Insider. And so does Michael Parekh. And so does Zoli Erdos.

We need to be vigilant against bad journalism. Here's a hint: when you see a story about a company and that story doesn't even attempt to get that company's point of view, then it probably is a non-credible journalist writing it. All credible journalists will get at least three sources to every story and will try to remain objective and impartial.

Here's another hint: when a story or a blogger doesn't link to anything outside of his/her article. The other day I made a mistake in one of my posts about Adobe. But, I LINKED so that you could check out the story for yourself. Another hint? Lack of comments on articles. Tells me that the writer can't stand up to criticism. Yeah, I've gotten close to turning them off cause the anonymous jerks do get to you after a while, but this is the reason I don't. Another hint? When a story contains only one anonymous source. Come on, if you really have a good story about a company you should be able to get one on-the-record source. Yeah, I can see reasons to not require that, but they are rare exceptions, not the rule. Another hint? When there are more anti-the-article links than pro ones. Another hint? When no one credible will defend the article.

The problem is, some people want to believe certain stories and use them against companies for whatever reason. That's wrong. I hate it when it's done against Apple. I hate it when it's done against Microsoft.

Thanks to this group of bloggers for digging into the truth and keeping these guys from perverting the blogosphere!

What's worse is that by linking to the Register, even to deride this article, it pushes this article up and makes it far more visible, which gives the Register exactly what it's seeking: an audience. Why do that? Audiences also bring advertising money.

I wish Memeorandum (and other memetrackers like TailRank) had a "no follow" link so that when I link to something I can tell Memeorandum's engine that I don't want the linked article to go up.

I’m on my way up to San Francisco to meet Ernie the Attorney. I think I’ll have a good stiff drink. After this week…

I see that someone in Acer is being quoted about Vista having “major problems.” Oh, I love this game. A marketer, down in Australia, working for one of our partners, gets to attack Microsoft through an unprofessional Web site that doesn’t try to do any fact checking or give two sides of the story. Well, enjoy your time at the top of Memeorandum.

Really, no matter what I, or anyone else says, there is no winning at this game. The Xbox team denies, on its blog, that Xbox programmers are moving over to Windows and confirms that Windows Vista is now feature complete so there won’t be any massive rewritting of Windows Vista code. The Windows team (and, yes, I’ve been calling around to friends on the team who’ll tell me the unpleasant truth) are totally denying that they will be rewriting any major pieces of code. They are in bug fix mode now, not in rewrite mode.

Even the evidence denies this story. At Mix06 last week we had Media Center PCs for people to use, running, gasp, Windows Vista. An entire keynote (damn cool demos too) ran on Windows Vista and it didn’t crash the entire time. That doesn’t sound like something that needs a 60% rewrite. Or something that isn’t on schedule to ship.

But, here’s a fun experiment. Why don’t you hang out with the guys who run Neowin? They religiously watch our binaries for changes (they often know about new features before I do, because they get leaks of the latest builds and look inside each DLL looking for new stuff). Ask them to track how much of our code changes between now and launch.

Loren Heiny says that maybe what the guy is talking about is actually past tense. That’s very possible. Windows Vista has new UI code, a rewritten audio stack, a rewritten networking stack, dramatically new code in Windows Media Center and the Tablet PC and speech recognition and browser pieces. So, over the entire five years that Vista has been worked on there is a good chunk of new code in there (and all the code has been recompiled with a new compiler, which adds more security features, among other things) but there is no way that 60% of Windows Vista is going to be rewritten between now and November. That’s just ridiculous on its face.

Here's some quickfire blogging before I go to sleep.

Larry Osterman, a developer who's worked at Microsoft for 21.5 years, laughs at the report that Microsoft would rewrite 60% of Vista in two months: "Anyone who's ever worked on a project that involves more than a thousand or so lines of code understands how utterly laughable that is."

Yeah, Steve Rowe, I'm disappointed that blogs didn't jump on the headline faster and harder too. But, that just shows why corporations need blogs too (to make sure things stay factual out there and participate in the conversation, even when the conversation goes ugly).

Scott Byer, of Adobe, explains why Adobe can't release Intel versions of all its Macintosh applications right now (universal ones are coming soon, he says). Microsoft's Rick Schaut adds more to the conversation.

Yes, I too saw Charlie Owen's demo of a new RSS aggregator for Media Center at Mix06 and I too was enthralled with it like Giovanni Gallucci was.

I've been through many of the notes from Mix06. Here's my favorites. Randy Holloway. Dion Hinchcliffe. Alex Barnett. I love what Trapper Markelz said: Everywhere you went, you heard lots about RSS. Kelly Goto (awesome designer!) said Mix06 was "quite an event." Chris Adams. Mike Swanson reveals that we're gonna make Mix06's content available to everyone for free. The Ajaxian blog reports on Ajax stuff at Mix (Atlas) and says "the demos of WPF/E were very impressive." WPF/E lets you run Windows Presentation Foundation applications on both Windows and Macs. More to come on that soon. Oh, Harry Pierson reports that at Mix they were promising Linux and Firefox support too.

Tara Hunt is a pinko marketer. Marketing folks? You MUST read her blog for the past two weeks. Good stuff, along the lines of Cluetrain Manifesto (Doc Searls linked to her, thanks). Tara, you should do a book with Malcolm Gladwell.

Microsoft releases RSS in CRM? Yeah, cool. (That's on Satya Nadella's blog. He's corporate VP on the Dynamics team and they are announcing a bunch of stuff over the next week. He's also on Channel 9, along with a bunch of other Dynamics team members). I love the name of the "Freaky Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Blog."

Richard MacManus noticed that a Google employee at Mix06 was “very bullish” on Atom while Microosft seemed to be bullish on RSS.

Congrats to Michael Lehman, who did that interview and did a TON of others at Mix06.

When Dave Winer says that RSS is going to embrace Microsoft, he’s right. So far we’re listening to what the community actually uses and haven’t gotten ahead of the community (which includes publishers like the BBC and the New York Times) and tried to tell the community which way to go. I think that’s a good thing.

That said, our RSS platform is reading in Atom too and we’ll support whatever the community adopts. Hey, has that Jeff Sandquist guy (aka my boss) been fired yet for supporting Quicktime and PSP? No!

I love this company!

Update: Richard wrote even more on this topic over on his blog.

Steve Gillmor says that if we wanted a really interesting conversation that he should have been at the Bill Gates lunch. Hey, that’s really selling the skills of Albert Lai, Mike Arrington, and Lynda Weinman short. If Bill Gates was so bored by the conversation, why did he not eat his lunch? Seriously. He was so engaged with the conversation that he couldn’t even get started on the steak that was put in front of him.

But, I’m not gonna get into a fight with Steve or any of my friends. There will be more of these events, though, so don’t be suprised if Steve gets invited to something.

One thing: I gave free tickets to any Mashup Camp attendee. In fact, Steve, if you had asked for a ticket I would have gotten you in. We did NOT pay for travel and food and entertainment, though (one of the news reports said that, which I thought was funny, if I had a budget like what most people think I do I could really have a killer event).

Another thing: the BillG lunch thing was planned just a few days earlier. In fact Albert was invited the day before and I had to choose from attendees of the conference (since Steve wasn’t an attendee, I couldn’t get him in — not to mention that I had to pass up everyone else too, when you are only given a few spots you have to make some tough choices and deal with those). And, yes, I do need to talk other people into approving these choices. Mr. Safe is definitely in control, but then there are lots of factors that go into these kinds of choices.

“When Mike reports Bill was bored, or that Bill doesn’t get the preoccupation with thin Office plays like Gmail, it’s not me who loses the opportunity to resonate with the audience, it’s Bill. The users are in charge, not Microsoft.”

Steve, I get this. But by saying it the way you did you denigrated the guy who is on your own show. Why did you pick Mike to be on your own show? I figured he’d be a great one to bring your message to Bill and he was.

But, I get the reality check. Is it just me or does that mean I have to pick up the check for the next dinner?

Update: oh, and if you think this lunch was payback for “falling in line” consider that Mike Arrington was a lawyer on the Netscape account at Wilson Sonsini (famous law firm in Silicon Valley famous for kicking off the anti-trust action against Microsoft). Bill and Mike shared a laugh about that. Oh, and Lynda is the founder of the Flash Forward conferences (and an even bigger training company that mostly trains people on non-Microsoft technologies).

Update 2: Google’s Gmail never came up during the conversation that I remembered, but Hotmail did. Gates said it was one of his favorite acquisitions from the 1990s. The discussion was centered around all the hype that Writely was gonna make Microsoft Word obsolete. That’s ridiculous on the face of it (Writely doesn’t have close to as many features — making such a claim would be like saying Microsoft Notepad was going to make Word obsolete). But, either way, Gates’ love of Hotmail (which has 200 million unique users in the past 30 days) demonstrates that he understands thin clients very well and sure isn’t bored by them.