I’m at the hot company of the day, Blue Dot. They just got written up on TechCrunch (Mike Arrington has been telling friends that he’s using Blue Dot instead of Del.icio.us). I just met the entire company (10 people) and they have a cool way to share Web sites with your friends. This is the next Digg. Instead of sharing stuff with the world, you can share with groups. Sounds lame here in text land, but when you see the video demo it all will make sense.

Anyway, here’s some exclusive news. They just told me about their mobile service. Go to bluedot.us/m and you can get to your Blue Dot groups from your mobile phone. Doesn’t always work on every phone, but if it does it’s very cool.

Today was absolutely incredible. Zune, Microsoft Research were both excellent videos. Research showed me something that just blew my mind. But you gotta see it on video. I’ll let you know when that’s up.

More on Zune later, but I’m just running my ass off. Gotta go get ready for the Woz interview. Hope you’re having a good Friday.

Got a very warm welcome back at Microsoft yesterday. Hung out with some of the top Windows Vista folks, was over at the Tablet PC team hearing about their latest UMPCs, spent a fun hour with Buzz interviewing the Windows Quality team (the folks who get your reports after your computer crashes), then hung out with the MindCamp folks for a fun party and dinner.

Today is just as packed in. Interviewing the Zune team, getting a tour of Research, before heading over to Pioneer Square to see some startups (Pluggd is first on list) before heading to University of Washington (Keene Hall) to interview Woz in front of an audience of hundreds of people tonight.

Anyway, I got an interview with Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot up (he was also a founder of Excite at Home, so he’s seen the ups and downs of Silicon Valley).

I’m sorry about only having one microphone so you can’t hear my questions very well. I have several more interviews I did that way, but now I have a second microphone so in the future this problem goes away.

I’m sitting on the plane heading back to Microsoft. In honor I’m wearing my Longhorn jacket and my Channel 9 t-shirt. If anyone wants to meetup, I have a slot at about 4 p.m. Be warned, might get filmed for my show. Got some slots tomorrow too before I interview Woz tomorrow night.

I filmed a fun segment for the ScobleShow (won’t be up until at least October 11th cause of a “frieNDA”) with Ryan Block at his house last night. He’s been writing for Engadget for, it seems, ever. Anyway, that dude is one serious gadget freak. I’m jealous. Although my HDTV is bigger (and I think sharper) than his. Neener neener neener!

Dude had something like six Xbox 360s sitting on the floor (Engadget is giving them away in a contest).

His girlfriend, Veronica Belmont, I learned, is on CNET TV. She gave me a tour of their new interface. Very cool. One thing that I didn’t like about the new UI is I can’t figure out how to link to a specific video. Not good. It’s why I like a simpler, less “cool” interface that makes it easier to link to specific video posts (Veronica has a good one on how to videoblog, for instance, but I can’t share it with you cause I can’t figure out how to link just to that video. Sigh).

Microsoft Live Spaces has something like 75 million spaces, and about 125 million unique visitors a month (at least those were the last numbers I saw shared).

Wordpress.com, according to Automattic’s CEO (that’s the company that makes Wordpress), Toni Schneider, in an interview I had with him yesterday, has 400,000 Wordpress.com blogs, but has 25 million unique visitors per month.

Which service is going to be more attractive to advertisers? Which one builds a better business?

I wonder if anyone is doing a comparison of readers per URL among all the blogging services (and MySpace and FaceBook too)? Anyone doing research on these kinds of metrics?

Now you know what we were really talking about when we were drinking Mad Mojitos with B5 Media’s CEO, Jeremy Wright (he only hinted at what was coming, but told me a little more after the camera was off).

Congrats!

You know, if I were really thinking like Jason Calacanis often does (I remember his offer to Digg’s top diggers), I’d get $15 million from a VC firm to start a new content network, go to all the ZDNet bloggers, and get them to start a new company and give them equity and video cameras and mo money. That’s a killer blogging network just sitting there for the picking. I wonder if they have exclusive contracts?

Dan Farber (the ZDNet visionary who put this network together) doesn’t have to worry, though. I don’t have $15 million.

Tonight I had dinner with Ajit Jaokar, CEO of Futuretext, a publishing company that publishes tech books like Mobile Web 2.0 and Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger (he writes a VoIP blog over on ZDNet, but also has political blogs and other blogging jobs over on Weblogs Inc, among others).

Anyway, during dinner we talked about some of the trends and things we were seeing. One thing Amit and I both noticed is Skype’s new “Click to Call” feature in its latest beta.

What does it do? Well, it turns a phone number like 425-205-1921 into a clickable number (using Skype of course). That’s pretty darn cool, right? But, I wondered what would happen if MSN Messenger started doing that? Who would win? The most recently installed? Or would you see two links for every phone number?

Why does that matter? Well, it’ll add up to big bucks for whoever gets their little utility installed on the most machines. Skype, obviously, gets installed on lots of machines so this functionality really takes over and makes it possible to do a lot more calls.

On my machine I forget that Skype is even there. I just take it for granted. I click the number and Skype calls it. I don’t even need my cell phone anymore.

This is really pretty darn powerful. And wait until it comes to your mobile phone.

Anyway, remember how we were all mad that Microsoft tried doing something similar in IE 6 betas? Yeah, we were pissed cause Microsoft was putting advertisements on top of our content.

How is this any different? Yes, it’s useful. Yes, its scope is limited to only phone numbers (today). But, aren’t we on a slippery slope here? I can just see a bunch of toolbars trying to do the same thing and the user experience going downhill. But maybe that’s just me. What do you think?

Oh, and Amit has a whole post titled “I am a tag not a number!” to further get you thinking about the implications of this new trend.

I’m sitting with Denise Howell (who, sometime in the next week, will start a “ThisWeekInLaw” show along with Leo Laporte) and she says the latest Gillmor Gang is quite excellent. It’s the one where Jason Calacanis and Steve Gillmor and the rest of the gang go on and on about Adam Curry and PodShow’s latest $15 million VC funding. Jason Calacanis told me this could be the last Gillmor Gang because of what was said about Adam Curry (the show is hosted on Adam’s Podshow network).

Buzz and me will be at the Seattle Mind Camp pre-party tomorrow night. Why don’t you come and say hi!

This is why I appreciate the sponsorship of my ScobleShow that Seagate paid for. They aren’t asking me to run stupid video advertising, like the Wall Street Journal talks about today, that pisses off my audience. I don’t get why companies try to force their brands down our throats. There’s a lot better way to get adoption than by doing that. Heck, you get more good feelings by supporting the community (like what Yahoo did last week by getting Beck to play a free concert) than by buying stupid interruptive advertising.

It’s a good thing that advertising agencies still don’t have a clue what Hugh MacLeod is doing with his little cartoons and by giving free wine to bloggers. Why is it a good thing? Cause if Hugh is the only one doing this new kind of advertising then he’ll continue to see huge results. He stands out cause he’s doing “clued-in-vertising” while everyone else is doing the old style advertising.

I can’t wait for the ROI reports that show that Web 2.0 advertising doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t. But what Hugh is doing DOES work. Not only did Stormhoek (the wine that Hugh pitches) win a marketing award recently from the wine industry, but he doubled sales. And, he implanted Stormhoek in my brain. I live two hours from Napa. The idea that I know more about a South African wine than most of the wineries in Napa is simply heresy.

So, keep going advertisers. One thing — you can’t get on my blog unless you do something for the bloggers. Seagate is (I can’t share what yet, but they are doing some fun things — particularly around the CES show).

I’m sitting with a bunch of suits right now. It’s the Savvis Web 2.0 conference. Almost all men. A large percentage of whom are older than me. This is NOT the YouTube generation. Although they sure talk about it and talk about MySpace (one speaker suggested that everyone should have a MySpace page for each of their products).

It’s interesting to see the difference between this audience and the folks who showed up at the Podcasting Expo last week. There was a lot more energy there. But a lot less money and power. This room reeks of power. That room reeked of creativity and fun.

I’m seeing this “geek vs. suits” separation more often lately.

Yesterday I went to lunch at a country club over on Sand Hill Road. They wouldn’t let me in because I was wearing jeans. “Excuse me?” I said in my head. After all, it was people in jeans (denim, they called it) who made the products and services that made all those VCs so rich that they could have a private club to hang out at and play golf at.

They made me sit outside for lunch. Which was just fine. My host (who helped fund the country club) and I had a good laugh about that.

It reminded me of the time when I worked the counter at LZ Premiums in San Jose. A guy came in with ratty jeans and a T-shirt. I treated him the same way I treated all the suits that came in. He noted that and bought a nice camera system. Later, after he kept coming back in and buying a lot of stuff, I learned he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Said that I was the first sales guy who treated him well, which is why he brought his business back to me.

Last night I saw it again. I wore my standard jeans and T-shirt to a press meeting hosted by Become.com (a cool shopping search engine, they released a research report that found that people liked their shopping search engine better than Google). Everyone else was dressed up.

I’m gonna put my jeans on and hang out with the geeks this weekend at Code-Camp in Silicon Valley. No Beck, but no suits either.

The real action in the valley is still with the folks who wear jeans and T-shirts. No matter how much all the suits try to avoid that.

When did Silicon Valley go all suity on me? It’s certainly a sign that we’re back in a bubble. In 2001 when everyone was unemployed I rarely saw suits. Now that the money is back I’m seeing a lot more suits.

Not a good sign.

It was my first time doing an “unkeynote.” I started out by telling the audience “if a keynote is where one person stands on stage and teaches you, an ‘unkeynote’ is where the audience teaches the person standing on stage something.”

And I did learn a lot, got some great new podcasts/videoblogs to listen to (more than a dozen, in fact) and found out how people are measuring traffic on their own podcasts. Thanks to Podango for inviting me to do this (and I was not paid in any way for doing it, or mentioning it here).

Jason Miller has a bunch of interesting video interviews from the Podcasting Expo.

Two new ScobleShow segments just loaded:
1) CEO of Kaboodle, Manish Chandra (Kaboodle is an interesting service that helps you track Internet sites and data — for, say, when you are trying to keep track of a bunch of hotels like Maryam is right now for the CES show in Las Vegas).
2) CEO of Wikia, Gil Penchina (sister Wiki company to Wikipedia).

More to come soon. And, yes, I realize these could probably be turned into audio-only segments. In the future I’ll do that.

The good thing is that with both of these you can just play them in the background while you work and listen along.

Jason Calacanis is interviewed by John Furrier on video. Jason is a SVP at AOL. If you’ve never met Jason before you know that what he says will be controversial. I’d recommend downloading the video and playing off your hard drive.

I’m even more jealous. Geek Entertainment TV got to hang out with the band at the Yahoo Open Hack Day last week and got it on video too (they got the hacking puppets too).

Lunch with Dave Davison, retired VC’er. Meeting with editorial crew. Meeting with Paul (Maryam’s boss). Interview at Automattic with Toni Schneider, CEO (they make the blog tool you’re reading my words on). Interview at Become.com. Interview of Ryan Block, writer on Engadget (he has some cool toys to show me). Drop off tapes at Ryanne’s. Whew.

Anyway, catching my eye this morning. Wired has an article on Microsoft’s rebuilding. Go Ozzie Go!

Chris has a nice list of feeds of interesting bloggers, mostly centered around .NET programming.

Jason Lee Miller shared a beanbag last week with me. Bummer that Nick Douglas wasn’t there. That would certainly have gotten on Valleywag if he were. Coverage from the Podcasting Expo is now up on NoodleScar and Rocketboom.

CIO Insight magazine’s Ed Cone did a Q&A with me, which is now up.

Hey, maybe I should get a referal fee from TechMeme for those new advertisers. Check out the graph of where TechMeme’s traffic comes from. Heheh. Just kidding Gabe. I love TechMeme.

Gotta run. Full day today. I’m working on getting some stuff up on ScobleShow too. Later.

Damn, I don’t even have time to sneeze the next four weeks.

This week I travel to Seattle to interview a bunch of folks at Microsoft and other companies, and interview Woz on stage at the University of Washington.

Then next week we head to Converge South in North Carolina, where we have a meeting slated with Elizabeth Edwards, among others, and Maryam and I are giving at least one presentation.

The third week of October we’re going to film and post a new show — from San Francisco — which we’re calling “the Lunch Show” for now (it probably will get a better name later). If you wanna be on, please drop us a line — Irina and Eddie will host this daily show from the lunch room of Technorati! Geeks with something cool to demonstrate are what we’re looking for. We’ll film that from noon to 1 p.m. every day and hopefully have it up by 6 p.m. — we’ll see how that goes, doing a daily video show isn’t going to be easy. But we’re excited that Dave Sifry and club have supported the project wholeheartedly and we have lots of fun guests lined up (with more — like you — needed).

The fourth week we head back to Seattle for the Blog Business Summit where we just learned we’re going to be guests on a private Lear Jet trip to Walla Walla (the guy, Steve Broback, who hosts Blog Business Summit is taking several bloggers to dinner, courtesy of Greenpoint Technologies who is a VIP jet completion firm and is sponsoring the trip — details here on the Blog Business Summit’s blog).

I’ll bring my video gear along. It’s quite something to get a ride on a jet that I never would be able to afford otherwise.

I guess I just did a “PayPerPost” here, didn’t I? Well, if you’re gonna sell your soul, why settle for only $2.50? My soul costs more than that. A ride in a Lear Jet is getting closer.

Oh boy. When I heard about French Maids at the Podcasting Expo last week I had no idea what their show was about. Let’s just say this is a show aimed at the male half of the gender side. Oh, and GoDaddy paid for this show about how to register a domain. This is pretty darn close to soft porn. But, it did cause lots of conversations on the floor of the podcasting expo. They also are one of the top podcasts on iTunes. Which just goes to show you: nothing sells like sex.

Oh, if you want a more serious report from the Podcasting Expo, check out Podonomics report. Leesa Barnes reports and includes interviews from Tim Bourquin, founder of the Podcast and Portable Media Expo and Ron Moore, executive producer of Battlestar Gallactica. Leesa’s report is excellent. Listen to what she says about Adam Curry and Podshow too. They are a competitor of ours, so I won’t say anything, but Leesa has a good point and one I heard many times from the show floor.

In his interview, Tim Bourquin talked about the Apple Computer cease and desist letters that were sent to companies using “pod” in their product names. John Welch gave me crud about sensationalizing that last week, trying to make it look like Apple was coming after all podcasting companies. That’s a fair criticism. Tim handles it a lot better in his interview.

Make Magazine is so cool. Here John Tokash takes us on a video tour of the new TechShop, where Make Magazine is one of the stores inside. TechShop is a place where you can work on your own projects. I bet you’ll find lots of Make Magazine folks inside too.

I hate partial RSS and Atom subscription feeds. So, of course I signed the fullfeeds petition.