Ahh, the nerds in charge are trying to turn off Skype at San Jose State University. Of course the podcasting class is pissed. So, what did they do? They blogged it. Caused a stink. And the stink is getting bigger.

I hope they kick IT’s ass. At Microsoft I couldn’t use Skype either. It always pissed me off. How did I get back at them? I got Verizon Wireless. Why? Cause the f***ers couldn’t block me then. That’s how to fight the man. Oh, and I expensed it so the man paid, too! ;-)  

I’m starting to subscribe more and more to audiocasts and videocasts (formerly known as podcasts). But the usual clients suck. Yes, even iTunes. Especially for viewing video.

For the past few days I’ve been playing with Democracy Player and it sure is nice. Plays videos large. Cool and friendly UI.

What do you think? I also like FireAnt.tv, but its UI looks dated compared with Democracy Player. So does the new iTunes.

Oh, and Microsoft is surveying people about RSS. Should be interesting to see those results. I think the methodology is weird, though. Open Internet surveys are not accurate. To get that you need to do what Nielsen does with TV surveys: randomly call people. But, I filled it out anyway, only took a minute or so.

Hmmm, seems like Apple is sending lawyers out after companies using the word “Podcast.” I wonder if PodTech is next?

Leo Laporte says it’s time for the entire industry to stop using the word “podcast.” I agree. Now that Apple is trying to be onerous about taking ownership here, it’s time to move on.

I’m not sure about Leo’s suggestion of “netcast,” though. I’d like to make a differentiation between different kinds of media. “Audiocast” and “videocast” are better ones in my view. That way I can say to my friends “hey, did you see Ze Frank’s latest videocast?”

What do you think?

UPDATE: Apple actually is going after companies who are infringing on its trademark on the word “pod.”

Steve Ball brings us news that the startup sound in Windows Vista will be optional. Thus ending one of the biggest controversies on my blog in recent memory (more than 700 comments on a single post).

OK, looks like everything is going well so we should be up and running sometime Monday evening with the ScobleShow. If you missed it, here’s a teaser for the first day’s show. Included here are Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, Jeremy Wright, CEO of B5 Media, Thomas Hawk, photographer, Andrew Field, CEO of Printing for Less, Steve Gillmor calls my cell phone, Geoffrey Arone, cofounder Flock, Joe Krauss, CEO of JotSpot, among others. Starting to sound like an interesting show. If it doesn’t kill me first.

Maryam’s driving, I’m answering email. Seems that’s the best time to answer email these days. Today was really busy. Scrapblog is awesome. Like a cross between desktop publishing software and Wordpress. Photographers are going to love it. Jajah is awesome too. But can’t say much more cause they aren’t allowed to talk until they show their new stuff off at Demo next week.

Anyway, I see a few of my favorite readers are tired of me talking about HP. OK, heard and understood. I won’t write any more about HP unless something dramatic happens.

Why do I love Blip.TV (a great videoblogging service)? The CEO, Mike Hudack just posted his cell phone number and said “call me if you have any trouble.” He didn’t do this to just me, but everyone in the videoblogging mailing list. Imagine if every CEO did that.

Patricia Dunn is gone from HP. PodTech was at the press conference and Catherine is working right now on getting up the audio from the press conference as well as a story about what she learned at the press conference although the story is already well out as you can see from Google News about HP. OK, that’s a start. Now it’s time to clean out the rest of the board. And fire the ethics officer who just wrote to his colleagues that he wished he didn’t ask about the legality of the situation — ethics officers need to learn that they BETTER stay on the right line of the law AND of our privacy. And, Mark Hurd too. He’s seriously tainted in this whole thing. He needs to go too.

HP needs a fresh start and a message needs to be sent to other corporate executives that they better not even THINK of abusing people’s privacy.

Oh, this is my first post from the fast lane of FWY 280 while Maryam is driving. Just another day in Silicon Valley.

UPDATE: David Berlind has a podcast and report from the press conference up. PodTech’s is up now.

UPDATE 2: In CEO Hurd’s defense at least he was contrite and took responsibility. Something that Patricia never did. But the smell from this still remains. I doubt Patricia is the last one to go.

UPDATE 3: The ethics officer was fired, along with another employee.

David, just read your blog about the latest in HPGate. I too am amazed. This is a total breakdown of ethics, PR, corporate governance we are all witnessing. It’s amazing that several other corporate leaders cheered. I don’t even know what to say. But you said exactly what I was thinking. Thanks!

I’m at a lunch with Yahoo right now talking about next weekend’s Open Hack Day (next Friday and Saturday). This is a lot bigger deal than I expected. Yahoo is opening its corporate doors to any geek who wants to come and code. I wish I could go, but then I’m not really geeky enough (translation: I’ll be at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo. I’m not geeky enough cause I don’t use a compiler. If you do, you should come on down).

It’s free, open to everyone (but you’ll be happier if you like building Web stuff) and you’ll meet all the top coders at Yahoo and they’ll have lots of goodies and entertainment too. If you’re trying to figure out what Yahoo is doing with its various APIs this is a good place to come too.

Where did the “no weapons please” request come from? Well, Chad Dickerson just put a picture up of famous coder Eric S. Raymond who is holding a gun. Eric is welcome, but not with his gun.

This effort was built on top of earlier camps like FOO and BAR and if you build something cool you’ll have a chance to show it off at the end of the weekend and get your peers’ feedback. Maybe even earn yourself a job at Yahoo or get some PR for your work (Geek Entertainment TV will be there).

The rules are, if you’re in public you can be videoed. As this guy found out. Oh, and if you’re a company and someone says something bad about your product it’s probably best if you just take care of the problem and don’t push back. Why? Cause now Stila caused themselves another round of bad PR. Yesterday I met someone who is going to start a blog just to expose a business in her neighborhood who ripped her off.

It’s http://www.onewebday.org/

Anyway, today is busy. First off to interview Jajah, a web activated telephony company (translation: you call people from your Web browser). Then to Yahoo for lunch. Then to Scrapblog, who has a cool blogging service for scrapbookers. Finally Maryam is interviewing Dori Smith for the ScobleShow (we’ll be in the Petaluma Peet’s coffee at about 5 p.m. That’ll be fun cause she’s the one who got me into blogging. Finally, we’ll pick up Patrick and head home for a movie from Netflix.

Hope your One Web Day goes well!

I love Weird Al. White and nerdy. What a hoot. As seen on Valleywag. If you really want to see something scary, check out Mike Arrington and me dancing (takes a while to load).

Yeah, it probably gets close to infringing on del.icio.us’ trademark, but what the heck. Devlicio.us is a new site for developers who use Microsoft’s stuff.

The Cisco traffic jam continues to harm the reputations of Cisco party planners. I have a few friends who work at Cisco and they are — more than a week later — still livid about how their company handled their annual party. One worker there told me she was stuck in traffic for more than two hours and decided to simply turn around and go home.

So, what happened? Well, 11,000 Cisco employees were told to go to Shoreline for its company meeting. The thing is Shoreline isn’t designed for that kind of traffic inflow during rush hour. It messed up the commutes of many people, particularly those who work at Google.

But internally workers are still stewing. It’s amazing that they took an event that was supposed to generate postive morale but turned it into really negative feelings toward the company.

Lesson for other companies who are thinking of doing parties or corporate meetings? Get busses. Don’t schedule stuff like this for rush hour. Make sure there are plenty of traffic controls. Microsoft gives lots of incentives to take busses to its events in Seattle.

Ahh, the drama that goes on in Silicon Valley.

Almost makes me wonder why we didn’t have big parties at Shoreline on behalf of Microsoft?

Anyway, I wonder if the Del.icio.us party on October 3 in Sunnyvale will cause similar traffic jams? Probably more cause Del.icio.us is a cool way to bookmark your favorite stuff.

The investors speak.

Ahh, so as long as the stench stays contained to the boardroom the investors were willing to ignore it, but as the stench seeps out from under the boardroom door and into the CEO’s office the shareholders decided to get out. Interesting.

HP’s CEO is holding a press conference in about an hour. I wonder if he can clear the air and make that smell move somewhere else?

At the Ragan PR conference the HP problem is a topic of conversation here. I just sat through a session of “PR winners and sinners.” Sinners being folks like Vice President Dick Cheney who shot his friend in the face while hunting. Winners being people like Kyra Phillips, CNN anchor who accidentally took a microphone into the bathroom and then went on David Letterman to redeem herself.

Anyway, I’m getting bored by talking about HP. I’d rather link to Beet.TV who has discovered that Google Video now has a capability for captioning. That’s cool.

I’m off to Chicago’s airport to catch a flight back to California. Stay out of trouble and, remember, no matter how flawed your life is or how sucky a job you have it still is far better than being an HP PR member right now.

One thing I really like about an offline feed reader is that you don’t need to read feeds all the time. Just store them up like a squirrel stores nuts. Then go on a feed reading binge. I use NewsGator for Outlook (it brings all my feeds into Outlook so I can read my feed items offline — most of this post was written using Windows Live Writer at 33,000 feet on the United Flight yesterday to Chicago).

I have an admission to make: I haven’t read any feeds since about 8/18. That’s why my blog has sucked lately. I haven’t been discovering the new little things that people tell me they liked most about my blog. Anyone can talk about HP and how messed up its board is, right? But who will read more than 100 feeds for you and find some cool nugget?

Anyway, one thing I noticed when I looked at my feeds for the first time yesterday is that most of my favorite bloggers publish more than my less favorite bloggers. A lot more. Let’s look at the top posters in my RSS reading list:

Boing Boing. 701 posts since I last read my feeds.
Engadget. 1093.
GigaOM. 466.
Lost Remote. 408.
Make Magazine. 395.
MSDN Blogs. 2886. (not really fair, cause there’s a few thousand people on there, these are Microsoft’s employee blogs).
Life Hacker. 552.
TechCrunch. 212
TechDirt. 278.
TechNet Blogs. 1454. (same problem as MSDN blogs, this one is another group of Microsoft bloggers).
I published 273 items in the same time.

Disclaimer, these numbers aren’t quite for the same time period. Some I hadn’t been reading for a longer period of time. But they are representative of the “fattest” feeds.

Whew, that’s a lot of blogs to read through.

A good comparison is my favorite Microsoft technical blogger, Raymond Chen, only posted about 50 things in the same time. And that’s a lot more frequent than many other feeds.

Interesting, on another, but sorta associated, topic: Maryam, my wife has written her first stab at “10 ways to create a killer blog.”

Me? I think I’d just focus on what a blogger is passionate about. That’s where it all starts. Yeah, there are things you can do to get into Google, or TechMeme, or iTunes, but if that’s how you look at life you won’t be interesting anyway.

Hell, what makes for a good blog? How about some hotel bed jumping? I’m lying in a hotel bed right now. I’m tempted. Heheh. Thanks to Tim Bray for that one.

Anyway, I gotta get some sleep. I’m on stage in a few hours.

Remember Josh Wolf, the guy who got thrown in jail cause he wouldn’t turn his videotape over to the Feds? Well, he lost all his appeals so will head back to jail on Friday. Irina caught up with him and interviewed him for Geek Entertainment TV. Interesting to hear his point of view from him.

I just uploaded a short preview of what will come soon on the first week of ScobleShow.com to my Blip.TV channel. Thanks to Ryanne and Jay for editing this up.

UPDATE: Shel Israel sat in on an interview I did the other day and gives his overly-kind impressions. Thanks Shel, really means a lot to me. I am having a ball. Yes, I definitely am looking to get new ideas and new people on the show. The first couple of weeks I focused a bit to much on people I already knew, but, then this is a bootstrap and it’ll get better. One thing I keep noticing is that women aren’t showing up to our free and open to the public blogger meetups (tonight yet again only men showed up). That’s really causing me troubles cause I like relying on face-to-face meetings with people.

What do I mean by that? Well, tonight I met a bunch of great people, including David Armano who has the very fine Logic+Emotion blog (it was featured in Business Week this week). Now, I’m far more likely to remember David because he made a deep impression on me when meeting face-to-face (he looks a lot like Vic Gundotra, actually) and now that I’m reading his blog I see that it’s an awesome look at design, among other things. Subscribed.

Is there someone else who has a better design blog? Probably. But David is the one who I’ll remember and his feed is in my news reader now so he’ll remind me of him everytime he posts.

Jeremiah has a good writeup and photos from the dinner.

I am in a taxi in Chicago. Sharing with two other guys. Stuck in traffic. Anyway, Robert McLaws just IM’d me and pointed me to his blog where the news that Mary Jo Foley has left Ziff Davis. Wow, congrats to Mary Jo. It’ll be interesting to watch what she does next. She’s been covering Microsoft forever it seems.

Well, just dropped Christopher Coulter off. Had a great few days hanging out with him. Funny, the HP story just gets worse and worse (all the major radio/TV business news shows are doing tons of coverage on the story due to a Washington Post article that shared that they wanted to insert moles into newsrooms). He’s hearing it’s going to get even worse for HP. Why is this board still in place?

Until this board gets kicked out the HP way is just being dragged through the mud, spit on, kicked in the groin, and worse.