Eric Rice has a podcast with Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, John Gage, Sun Microsystems, and Chris Melissinos. It’s a Sun Microsystems’ press conference in Second Life. Thanks to Shannon Clark for letting me know.

This is very cool, but one problem: you can only get about 100 people into one press conference. So, if something is really hot you’ll make lots of people mad unless you take video out of Second Life. Even then some will get mad that the can’t get into the main event.

I was over today at the Salesforce.com conference getting a look at their new Apex. It’s a big deal.

Remember Visual Basic? It made building business apps for Windows easy.

Drag and drop a few things onto a form and you have a working Windows app.

So, what’s the equivilent of Windows today? Multi-tenant datacenters. You know, services that run on things like Google, Amazon, eBay, MSN, Yahoo, or Salesforce.com’s datacenters (which run on thousands, or even, hundreds of thousands of machines — all that look like one system to a developer).

But building those apps and deploying them to the servers before has been a pretty complex job — Apex tries to make it all easy. I’m too tired to explain it all, but there’s plenty of great reports over on TechMeme. It’s quite impressive, though.

I also note that they have a way to build your own custom server-side extensions which you can then bundle up and share with other Salesforce.com customers.

To take that into another arena, imagine if one of you built a killer Wordpress.com extention and then I could run it on Wordpress.com (which is also a multi-tenant app). Imagine if the system were smart enough to let me load that extension without taking down the performance of any other Wordpress.com customer.

The only problem is that Salesforce.com doesn’t have even close to the reach that Windows does, so saying that this is as significant as Visual Basic is a bit of hyperbole, but it is a pretty significant jump forward for enterprise developers.

Of course check out Dan Farber’s reports, which include a rebuttal from a Salesforce.com competitor, Netsuite.

Buzz Bruggeman is staying at the house, attending the local Office 2.0 conference tomorrow. Tonight he came in saying “this is the coolest swag I’ve ever gotten.”

When Buzz says that you know that he got something very cool.

And, indeed, he was proudly showing off his new iPod Nano, which he got for attending the Office 2.0 conference. It has notes and stuff on it too.

But, don’t despair, the rest of us all get something too: Google is launching “docs and spreadsheets.” Oh, and the conference team is publishing a bunch of Office 2.0 Podcasts. I wonder, does Microsoft hear the Google engine roaring to life?

Oh, Ze Frank does Ze Frank.

Jeff Pulver doesn’t have Ze Frank on his top 10 videoblog list. That’s just nutty. Maybe little duckie fans don’t count. Oh well, I’m a Ze fan. Deal with it.

I’m a very lucky guy. I’m watching the Oakland A’s playing the Detroit Tigers over at Dave Winer’s house. He got a brand new Sony 46-inch HDTV. Top of the line. It’s stunning. The A’s are getting beaten pretty badly by Detroit. So far down 5-0. Anyway. His screen is thinner than mine, smaller in size too (but cost almost as much). But has better sharpness and color and when a computer is displayed on his screen it’s much better than mine. If you haven’t had a chance to watch baseball on a real HDTV screen you’re missing out.

Yeah, I’m in the New York Times today thanks to my blog. Page C8. Talks about cool people I meet when I’m traveling on planes. I wonder who Maryam and I will sit next to when we travel on Thursday to the Converge South conference.

Anyway, today was busy. First over to Google’s Reader team.

Hey, my Link Blog is back! I am reading about 200 feeds right now. I hit “j” to scroll down through all my items. When I find something cool I click on “share this” and it goes to this blog. Oh, there’s a feed too.

The Google Reader team showed me that I can share each blog item that I like as I read it and now you can follow along.

Just was over at Byron’s blog and see that Intel has started blogging and that he did the design. Cool! You can get directly to the Intel blogs here. The one on top is from Marty Menard, director of high performance computing. This will be interesting to watch. Subscribed!

I’m off to see the Google Reader team later today (among others, I have another day packed with interviews, will head over to Salesforce.com’s big shindig in SF in the afternoon).

I might be boring, but Google Reader’s team has a sense of humor. Maybe I should make a “how boring is Scoble meter?”

Well, on one side of the meter would be Dare Obasanjo’s blog today about meeting Bill Gates. Next would come Shelley Powers’ writings about JavaScript and her photography (which rocks). Heading down the graph would be something like Doc Searls, which I find exciting, but is decidedly less exciting than meeting with Bill Gates, although today we learn that Doc listens to (or tries to, at least) Howard Stern.

Anyway, since I’m on this boring narcissistic kick, might as well talk about Pier 38. That’s where the cool kids hang out now. I was there today and saw Om. Niall. Irina. Eddie. Toni. Among others.

That’s where True Ventures is (the venture capital firm that funded Automattic, the company that hosts my blog).

Actually Eddie and Irina were over there for a meeting. Someone came over “oh, so Wordpress hosts your blog for free and now you want free office space too?”

Guilty as charged.

Anyway, back to Google Reader. I am growing more and more enamored of it. What would you want to see the Reader team do? What would you like me to ask them?

Me? I want a bigger reader window, especially for when I just scroll through the latest items in a “read the river” fashion. I also want to resize the various panes. I can’t see the ends of some blog names, for instance, which also blocks how many items that particular blog has.

I also would like to see Google Reader join the Attention Trust (they were one of the RSS reader teams in attendance last week at the Attention Trust luncheon, by the way. Dan Farber has the details on that).

All our attention data are belong to us.

What?

You know that these tools know what blogs we’re really reading, right? Clicking on. Emailing around. Voting on (or, in Google Reader parlance “starring”).

That’s attention data. Why don’t we have access to it? Or, at least know what is being collected?

I guess we’ll find out when the government starts asking for logs.

Hey, you’re not allowed to read boring blogs! Only those cool government approved blogs.

You think you don’t live in China? Give it a few years.

Microsoft has Mini. Apple has “masked.” What’s funnier is that over on Masked comments a Dell blogger (who isn’t anonymous) shows up to try to improve Dell’s image. I say “kudos” to Dell. That’s the way to do be part of the conversation.

I don’t like anonymous blogs, but Apple deserves a raft of them. Apple’s PR department has employees freaked out about having conversations with customers in public.

Here’s a question for Apple’s PR: what happens when only anonymous employees can blog? Hint: your PR will be controlled by anonymous people!

One thing for the anonymous bloggers, though: you better hope that no one can figure out who you are through your IP addresses. You also better hope that Apple doesn’t hire HP’s investigators.

I would rather play it straight. If you’re a corporate employee, tell your boss you’re going to write a blog and if he or she doesn’t like that, then I’d find another job (or another boss) before posting again. It’s not worth your career.

I wouldn’t work someplace that didn’t let every employee blog, and blog openly. But that’s just me.

Last year’s Les Blogs conference in Paris, France, was a real humdinger. I can’t make it this year (some guy named Chris Pirillo asked me to be best man at his wedding). But, it’s one you should go to. Loic LeMeur announced the dates as December 11 and 12. Oh, and if you’ve never been to Paris, that’s a real treat too. If you really want a thrill better than my boring blog, have Loic show you how to drive in Paris.

What if the “crazy folk” who bought YouTube were actually at Microsoft? What would that have caused? I’ve been thinking about that while driving Patrick home. Now Maryam is driving and I get to write you my thoughts from HWY 1 near Pacifica. Hopefully we don’t go over Devil’s Slide, although that’d probably make LayZ happy.

Anyway, what if?

Last year I was at Google’s Zeitgeist conference. That’s where Google’s best customers (er, advertisers with big bucks) showed up. Later I was at MSN’s similar deal. I met advertising buyers from Kraft. Procter and Gamble. GM. And lots of other big companies.

What could have Microsoft done with YouTube?

Used it as a wedge to get into Google’s search and charge per click advertising.

Huh?

Well, one buyer from one of these big companies could buy hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising.

Now how much of GM’s media mix in 2010 will be done in online advertising? Let’s pick a number out of the air and say 55%. That’s not unreasonable, is it? After all, someone who is willing to watch a video is a better advertising candidate than someone who’ll just read text.

Why do I say that? Well, past behavior. Is TV advertising more effective or newspaper? I tend to remember that advertisers will pay millions for a one minute SuperBowl ad but the San Jose Mercury News doesn’t even charge $100,000 for a full page. Yeah, not quite a fair comparison, but a TV ad is often more persuasive than a newspaper one, especially for things like cars.

Anyway, it’s pretty clear that billions are gonna be spent on video services like YouTube. Now, imagine that one of these ad buyers comes into a Microsoft salesperson’s office.

“Hi, I’d like to buy $100 million worth of ads on YouTube for these keywords.”

“Oh, that’s awesome. Hey, did you know we’re running a promotion where you can also get those keywords over on our Microsoft Advertiser Points program too for a minimal investment?”

Now, why does that matter? Well, see, once you build a relationship with an ad buyer, getting him or her to also put those same ads on Xbox, Live.com search, MS-sponsored blogs, and other places, is real easy.

Let’s turn it around and look at decisions bloggers will have to make over the next few years. Which ad system should I run if I were to use one? Well, of course I’ll go with the one that has the most advertising.

So, if Microsoft had bought YouTube, they would have built relationships with advertisers, would have gotten those advertisers to also put their stuff on Microsoft’s blogad programs, which would have gotten me to chose Microsoft’s advertising bar instead of Google’s.

Ahh, so that’s what Google is getting with its $1.6 billion. It is building a moat around its advertising sales force and saying “you can’t get your hands on our advertisers.”

It also told every blogger and videoblogger in the world “deal with us, we’re gonna make sure the best advertisers stick with us.”

Heheh, and it gave Eric Schmidt another way to poke Bill Gates in the ribs. What could be better than that?

UPDATE: Todd Bishop of the Seattle PI also wrote about this and did some analysis. Looks like Microsoft thought the price was too high. That’s been the strategy lately. Don’t buy best-of-breed — copy those — and buy stuff that’s more reasonably priced. Thing is, a copy of YouTube won’t have the audience (Microsoft still thinks it can build a big audience by cloning the technology. Hey Steve Ballmer, that strategy won’t work! You can’t clone the Beatles — this is NOT a technology-only play!)

No audience, no way to get advertisers to join your ecosystem.

If you are like me, and have a 60-inch HDTV, and want the latest gear, you should be at a store tomorrow putting in an order for a Sony PS3. They go on sale tomorrow YouNEWB reports. At up to $600, though, these aren’t gonna be cheap Christmas gifts. Also, if you don’t have an HDTV yet, you’ll want to get one of these otherwise why are you buying a game system designed for HD? So, there goes another $1,000 or more (mine is still about $3,500 at stores). Whew. Just to play games.

I already have an Xbox. I’m not sure I’ll get a Playstation yet, though. I don’t have enough time to watch the HD-DVD’s that Netflix has been sending me, so don’t think I’ll need BlueRay.

But, want to know which system you’re going for? So, do you have an HDTV? Which system are you going with? Xbox 360 or Playstation 3?

Every so often I get a weird phone call that turns out to be from a pretty brilliant guy (my cell phone number is always on my blog, just look to the right column — if I can answer the phone, I will happily talk to you, I don’t return voice mails, though). One of those happened last Thursday when I was driving. I answered the call and a guy said something like “I saw your picture on Valleywag where you were drinking a beer and I thought I’d give you a call.”

Turned out that guy was Dennis Buettner and he runs the U.S. Beer Drinking Team.

I was about to hang up. But, luckily I had nothing to do but drive home from Seagate to my house. An hour of highway with nothing to do except listen to more netcasts or talk radio. So, figured I’d hear him out.

As he talked I liked him more and more. I came to learn that his business is a serious one. Big bucks. He’s been on Oprah! Who is his biggest customer?

Women!

Turns out they buy U.S. Beer Drinking Team T-shirts by the bushel for their guys (among other things). I wish I thought of this business. They are available in 16,000 convenience stores as well as the Targets and big stores. The concept was endorsed
They even have an official netcasting station.

How did he pick beer as a good place to start a business? Well, he just looked up and saw that far more beer than movie tickets are sold in the world. Marketing 101: go where the money is.

Are you asking yourself, like I did, “why didn’t I think of that?”

Oh, and this business was started as a joke. It’s no laughing matter anymore.

But, now you know why I was drinking beer in Golden Gate Park yesterday. Anyone wanna do an unofficial SF Beer Drinking Meetup? We might even get Dennis to come out and join us. That guy sure loves his beer.

Disclaimer, Seagate is the only sponsor so far of the ScobleShow. This post, though, wasn’t included in our deal, though it’s important for me to disclose that.

I do appreciate that Seagate is trying different approaches than just interruptive advertising on the Web. Here’s one, where they are sponsoring a design a new portable device contest, hosted over on MySpace.

I was talking with Seagate’s CEO last week (you’ll see that interview too soon, as part of the sponsorship deal) and I asked him why he sponsored my show. He wants Seagate to be seen as the company used to store your life and gave Thomas Hawk an 8GB Compact Flash card to use on Photowalking, which he did yesterday. Interestingly enough, Thomas Hawk had already bought two 750GB Seagate drives before my sponsorship came through. Says they rock. My show is done on a 500GB drive.

Anyway, this kind of advertising is a lot more interesting than if I stick an ad in your face. At least it lets me continue doing my show and bringing other stuff, like this interview with Atlassian’s CEO (they do an enterprise wiki, among other things) - Atlassian didn’t pay for that interview, but I’m appreciative that Seagate is helping pay my salary, buy machines for me to edit with, and helping pay bandwidth costs.

Speaking of bandwidth costs, wanted to call out to CacheFly. I met several of their team members at the Podcasting Expo a week ago, and they host several big-name sites like Digg, TWiT, and Revision3. How much do they charge? $.14 a gigabyte. Bandwidth gets expensive very quickly when you’re throwing around files that are more than 100megabytes. Leo Laporte says CacheFly rocks. That’s good enough for me.

Update: Christopher Coulter just called this the “GooTube” merger. Heheh.

Wow, Google just sent me a press release that says it’s true. It has acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock (update: sorry for the typo, I said millions earlier). Here’s the press release — congrats to everyone involved, and thanks to Google’s PR department for getting all journalists and bloggers this info at the same time. Great improvement over last press release.

TechMeme is going crazy about this news.

Will this work out for Google? I think it will. First of all, it makes Google a more interesting company to watch. Second of all, it makes it very clear to advertisers that Google is in the video business big time. This has caught the attention of all the big media buyers at places like General Motors and Procter and Gamble. These folks spend billions on advertising.

Now, will Google get sued over and over? Probably. But if you think that matters then you are missing the point. Did Microsoft’s legal troubles slow down its cash generation machines? No. Neither will Google’s. Plus, Google has demonstrated it’s fairly adept at working out deals with folks who produce content, or own it. Yeah, they’ll probably lose a few battles in court, but that’s like losing a battle or two but winning the war.

I do note that Google’s stock is up. Yahoo and Microsoft’s are down.

Another angle? Google is getting over its initial engineering-driven arrogance. You know the kind. Where when you show engineers/geeks/developers something like YouTube they answer “we can build that in a few weeks.”

I heard that over and over again at Microsoft and my friends at Google say it a lot too. It’s called “not invented here” syndrome. The fact that someone told the Google Video folks to sit down and be quiet during this deal is pretty significant. That’s a sizeable change from previous times when Google was looking to acquire companies.

It also means that the price for new companies has just gone up dramatically and that the venture capital barn door is gonna totally unlock as investors chase down “flip to big company” deals. I’m not saying there will be another YouTube, but investors get ancy when they see other people making big bucks.

Update: My brother, Alex, just IM’ed me: “another missed opportunity for microsoft.” Exactly. What are those bean counters doing with all that money? I guess they want the entire advertising world to go to Google, huh?

I’m sure more will be coming (in a little more than an hour Thomas Hawk made about 500 images) but here’s the first images from last night’s photowalk around Half Moon Bay’s pumpkin farms. I wish I had Thomas’ talent. While we were walking around (following Thomas is quite a workout, especially since I need to go everywhere he does, except I do it by walking backward) I noted that we’ve gotten lucky twice in a row with the light. It was beautiful. All week long it had been overcast, foggy, and rainy, but yesterday the sun was out and it made all the pumpkins extra orange. I wanna go buy a pumpkin and carve it with an RSS icon on the face. Hey, it’s orange. And I’m boring. Hope your Sunday includes some pumpkin pie.

Oh, Thomas is loading photos up while I type. I just went back and two more images were there.

Enough said.

I’m boring, but Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2, released yesterday, isn’t (TechMeme has the details). It’s way faster and I like its UI a lot better too (it has the improved tabs that IE 7 has, where the close box is on the tab itself, much nicer).

But, really, this sucker is just faster everywhere I poke. Very nice.

Krishna, you’re not the only one to notice that my blog has gotten boring. It’s going to be boring for a while. Why? I was talking with Guy Kawasaki about this a few weeks ago. A good blog post takes time. Some of his, he told me, take six hours to do.

Now, most of my posts are faster than that, but lately I’ve had my attention other places. Like, tonight, we filmed another Photowalking with Thomas Hawk. We had spectacular conditions so we went to the Half Moon Bay pumpkin places and got some awesome photos. You’ll hear more over on Thomas’ blog soon, I’m sure. Oh, and his new Moocards are cool. Not quite as cool as a laser-etched metal card that can cut steak, but cooler than 99.9% of the business cards I’ve collected over the years.

A new video will pop up every day or so from now on over on ScobleShow. Here’s our new friend, David Chamberlain, who runs a philanthropic travel agency. Really it’s just an opportunity to share the beach by our house with you. I believe in getting your feet wet while you’re working.

If you’re bored go and check out Doug Kaye’s new Levelator. It’s free and makes your audio levels come out better. I gotta figure out how to use this for my videos.

Tomorrow is a full day too. We’ll be out on San Francisco’s waterfront for Fleet Week and the Blue Angels. If you’re at Bucks at about 10 a.m. we’ll be there for breakfast with my dad. Afterward I have work meeting with Jay and Ryanne who are heading to India this week for a month (they have been doing all the editing on my ScobleShow).

Oh, something totally non boring showed up at the house today: a 30-inch Apple monitor. My new Mac Pro hasn’t arrived yet, though. I decided to go with that rather than a laptop after Dan McVicar told me his made him 10 times more productive (he also has a 17-inch MacBookPro).

Speaking of Dan, yesterday he announced the Late Night Mash. I’m excited about this new show. Dan’s not boring like me.

Of course, I guess I could always get fired like this guy did (did he really get fired for quoting me?) Getting fired always makes you less boring. But, his employer is saying he didn’t get fired for his blog. Not a good move, though, on his employer’s part.

Maybe I should get fired for writing a boring blog, though…

Ever want to look into a podcast, er, netcast without listening to it? Well, Pluggd.com is your service. I visted them today and they crawl the Web looking for audio (and soon video) content, like Leo Laporte’s TWiT program. Then they index it, convert the speech in it to text strings (not full text, but enough text so you can do searches on what was discussed).

This is cool cause then you can see where, say, Tiger Woods was discussed, in a sports podcast without listening to the whole thing. Get a demo of the HearHere technology I saw today. I can’t wait until they do this for video.

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Woz (co-founder of Apple) was lots of fun tonight, had more than an hour of asking him lots of stories about his experiences at Apple and other things. Even talked about his love of Tetris, laser pointers, and the new US Festival that he’s planning for next year. The interview I did with him was the eighth speech he did today alone. Damn that guy has a lot of energy. I got three of his very collectable metalic business cards. I have more than 1,400 business cards and his is definitely the coolest. It’s all metal and etched out. He told me that someone sold one on eBay for more than $500. I’m not selling mine, though. They totally rock and I’ll treasure mine forever.

I did videotape the interview. Well, actually David Geller, CEO of What Counts, ran my camera while I was on stage. He did a good job, but the audio was a bit overdriven (not his fault, that’s what came off the sound equipment). I’ll still get the video up sometime soon cause even though the audio isn’t perfect it’s still a good Woz speech (one of the book tour planners said it was her favorite of the past two days that she’s been listening to). I wish I could get the video up faster but it takes time to encode, and edit, and I don’t have a machine on the road capable of doing it.

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Nicole is taking my wife to Ikea? Oh, great, I can smell more funky stuff for me to put together. What did I do? I leave Maryam alone for a few days and now she’s taking Nicole to Ikea. Help! Heheh. Hey, Nicole, have the Swedish Meatballs, they are my favorite thing to get at Ikea.

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Ever wonder what the big deal about Flock (new browser) is? Well, here you can see one of the co-founders giving a seven minute demo of it and showing you the coolest features of the latest version. I love a good demo, and this one is great. I’m the monkey running the camera, filmed this for the ScobleShow. I thought the demo idea would be stupid, but I like how these are coming out. What do you think?

Everyone I met today asked me what I thought of YouTube’s rumor. The blogs certainly are lit up, which demonstrates well that if you get blogs to talk about you, it’s probably a pretty good predictor that other people are talking about the same thing too.

$1.6 billion. Whew. And all I got was a cool YouTube sticker for my tripod. Heheh.

Lots of people think Google is nuts for buying YouTube, if this rumor proves to be correct. I don’t. When you have an audience that large and that engaged you’ll be able to find a way to turn that into dollars. And, for someone like Google, it means more than that even. It means a way to keep it out of Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s hands.

Engineers always talk that way, though “I could build that in a week.” Bullshit, I answer. You might be able to clone the technology but you’ll never get the community to move.

Remember all the eBay competitors back in the late 1990s? I do. They almost always had better technology than eBay, but still failed. Why? This is a rock star business.

You can’t copy the Beatles. If you try you’ll be destined to play in high school auditoriums forever.

That’s why YouTube is worth the $1.6 billion. It’s the access to a group of people who won’t move anywhere else.