Dave Winer is worried that Microsoft is going to throw its weight around when it comes to RSS. I worry about that too. A lot.

I agree, too, that things have changed. For one, Microsoft is far more transparent than it used to be. If we do something evil you know who to call. I have the head of Internet Explorer team, Dean Hachamovitch on IM and have his cell phone number.

Also, I am here at the Lift conference. During the last session I stood in the back and watched how people were sharing information. Blogs. IM. Email. All live. People are so connected now. If we do something evil it spreads around the world within an hour. Or even faster.

Finally, it takes minutes for this connected world to figure out whether something is good or not. If it isn’t you’ll know and know in a violent manner.

What does this mean? First, if we don’t work with the community we’ll fail. Second, if we don’t have the best products and services, we’ll fail. Third, if we take too long to react to market demands we’ll be left out of the conversation and rendered irrelevant.

Hint: I am using Dave Winer’s aggregator. That said, I wish Dave’s aggregator told the RSS platform when I read a post so that other RSS reading apps on the system (I have several) will know that I read an item already.

Steven Sinofsky, check this out! (Steven is the guy who runs the Microsoft Office team and I believe is the highest ranking blogger currently at Microsoft).
I just was given access to an early version of 30 boxes and it’s going to be hot when it comes out. I have one word for my first trial: wow.
Thomas Hawk has the details. It’s beautiful. I wish Microsoft would buy this company and build this into Office Live and Windows Live.

Along this topic Scott Mace is doing a “Calendar Swamp” blog and is asking questions about the calendar that’ll come with Windows Vista. Steve Makofsky is blogging about the new Windows Calendar (those screen shots look awesome!) I’ll definitely follow up there with a video. I just subscribed to Calendar Swamp. Calendaring is joining mapping as an interesting space to watch.

The Internet Explorer team released a new version which includes our new RSS platform. We posted a new video with the team up on Channel 9 (and that links to all the important stuff). Thanks Charles Torre for getting this up. Dave Winer promptly posted his thoughts. We were promptly Slashdotted.

In other news…

Rebecca McKinnon notes that we have a new privacy policy to deal with government organizations who want us to do things. Great first step! Now, start a blog and be transparent. Let us know EVERYTHING that comes in as a request to see data, whether we think it’s important or not. Great job Rebecca on reporting this and keeping our feet held to the fire, thanks!

TDavid reacts to my request for bloggers to make it easier to deal with them in email. Says that he doesn’t like email. Oh, neither do I, neither do I, but sometimes there are times when I need to get ahold of you privately and not in chat rooms or blog comments (and not via Skype or MSN Messenger either). What else is left? Email.

Oh, Marc Canter, you’re so funny! All I have to do is snap my fingers, huh? Truth is I’d jump if Marc told me to too. We’re all jumpy. I see that JD, over on Marc’s blog, left a comment about audience participation via little clickers. Oh, the first time I saw that done was at CNET’s Builder.com Live conference. Not sure who came up with that idea, but Dan Shafer, the guy who ran that conference liked those. Anytime someone got too commercial you’d hear tons of little clicks. It was even funnier if the speaker wasn’t in on the feedback mechanism. Then it turned into a game. Click. Click. Click. Click.

I’m in NJ right now, leaving to fly to Geneva soon.

Is search done yet? Quick, find a list of 100 bloggers. Now, quick, tell me what their email addresses are.

You can find mine pretty easily. Just go to Google or MSN or Yahoo and type:

Scoble email

And you’ll find it within the first few links. Why? Cause I put my email on my home page. It’s amazing how hard many bloggers make it to find their email address. I should just be able to go to your home page and search for the @ character and find your email address.

But, this all got me thinking. What if we could get things into search engines? What if we could just post one post with all the stuff you’d want to appear in Google or MSN or Yahoo for when people search for your name? Wouldn’t that be cool? I think so. It’d let me get some sleep.

Oh, and if you think I have a deep rolodex? You’d be confusing me with Buzz Bruggeman. I’d rather just find you in a search engine. If I can’t find your email address in a search engine? Well, then, I can’t invite you to cool things, can I?

Here’s my post for the search engines:

Robert Scoble’s email: rscoble@microsoft.com
Robert Scoble’s cell phone: 425-205-1921
Robert Scoble’s mailing address: 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052
Robert Scoble’s birthday: 1/18/1965
Robert Scoble’s best friend: Dave Winer
Robert Scoble’s significant other: Maryam Ghaemmaghami (married November 2, 2002).
Robert Scoble’s offspring: Patrick Scoble (born January 14, 1994).

What else should we put into the search engines? Yeah, I’m doing this just to see what’ll happen on my search query. By the way, have you searched for your name lately on Google? They’ve been displaying more stuff lately.

You ever been on a team where something starts out as a fantastic idea but then gets worse and worse over time?

I’ve seen this happen and talked with Kathy Sierra about it last week at Search Champs (she used to work at Sun Microsystems and saw the same thing happen).

Out popped this fantastic post: Death by risk aversion.

I present to a lot of corporations. Everywhere I go I smell the fear. People are scared to do something different.

In big companies taking risks really isn’t appreciated. Oh, yes, I know I’ll get 50,000 examples emailed to me in an hour, but come on.

Here’s an example that someone I know (who doesn’t work at Microsoft) told me. He was looking at changing groups at his company. But doing so would need building up a reputation with a new group of people, would mean working harder, taking on new responsibilities, for no increase in salary (and a very real chance that he’d fail in his new job since it was something he hadn’t tried yet).

But, if he left his company to try something new, he’d have the same risks, albeit with a higher salary and with more upside if the company succeeded.

Three years ago I took risk after risk after risk and it paid off. I now have a great job that I love, a book that looks like it’ll be successful, and lots of great friends who are interesting (and lots of great readers who tell me off when I write something stupid, which is often).

But, am I taking enough risks? Well, I’m gonna speak in front of an audience I never thought I would be speaking in front of, and then I’m gonna go skiing in the Swiss Alps this weekend. That’s enough risk for this week.

Are you taking enough risks?

Interesting article in New York Times today about Microsoft’s efforts to bring computing to the poor. One of the images that still stick in my head of visiting China eight years ago was a guy riding down the street on a rickety bike talking on a cell phone.

Over on TeleRead David Rothman says he hopes that MIT’s approach wins cause it’s easier to read on a big-screen device. Hey, I agree with that, but most of the world doesn’t. Go visit London. I rarely see someone reading a laptop or Tablet PC, but EVERYONE is staring into their cell phone screens. It’s really a huge cultural difference between the US and Europe (same can be said of US and Japan too).

Also, don’t underestimate the readability on the new high resolution screens. I read thousands of words per day on my cell phone. It’s amazing how many things you can do on a two-inch cell phone screen.

I also watch the kids around me. They’d rather have a cell phone than a big computer. Why? Cause they can talk! And they can carry the thing around with them everywhere. Oh, and it’s affordable. Very few kids can afford a $1,000 laptop.

What do you think?

I start up Memeorandum/Tech and see that VC’ing is causing a lot of conversations to start, so is Jeff Jarvis’ comments about the inadequacies of the conference model.

Now, I used to be a conference schmuck. Er, planner. And I’m involved with Mix06’s implementation and promotion.

First, about costs of conferences. Jeff has his economics way wrong. Turns out that if you wanna do a 40 person conference you can do it for free. I was at one yesterday (the Entrepreneurs 27 event was free for everyone — someone even donated a few snacks. Both presenters and attendance was free. Awesome, right?)

If you wanna do a 400 attendee conference you can do it pretty inexpensively. Gnomedex was done for about $100 a person for years. Many other 200 to 400 attendee conferences are low-cost.

But, wanna do a 1,000 attendee conference? Costs per attendee start going up exponentially.

Why?

Because there aren’t many places in the world that you can hold a 1,000 attendee conference. Even in San Francisco there are only a handful of places that can do that (I know, our VBITS conference started at the Marriott by the airport, moved to the Hyatt, then to the Marriott downtown, and now it’s being held at the Moscone Convention Center.

Now, do you have any clue how much we paid for a hotdog lunch? How about around $30 per attendee. How much for a Coke? $5. How much for an urn of coffee? $1,000.

These were not negotiable.

Oh, and you had to guarantee you’d sell a certain number of hotel rooms. Don’t sell those rooms out? You might be in the hole for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Everyone keys in on the successful 2,000 conference events. But you don’t remember the baths we took on conferences that we had to cancel.

Oh, and you can just rent a normal projector for a 200 person event. But remember at the PDC where we had thousands of attendees? We had 32 projectors, each of which cost more than $120,000 (Dylan has photo and info here on those). You don’t just rent these at your local Best Buy.

Not to mention about promotion. Even at Mix we’ve already spent quite a bit of money on that. Ads in Wired Magazine aren’t free. Getting an audience is tough work and doesn’t happen by accident.

If you make money at conferences it’s really rare. At Fawcette the conference business did make a bit of money over the years and when that happened it subsidized other things like magazine editorial (without a magazine Fawcette would probably have never sold out a conference in the first place).

Now, onto editorial.

Even at Mix we’re trying to put into play a lot of the things Dave Winer pioneered with the BloggerCons. But, holding a conversation with 200 people in a University setting is a whole lot different than holding a conversation with 2,000 people in a Las Vegas conference venue. It’s not going to be easy to get audience participation and that’s even if everyone brings a laptop and joins in the various chat rooms and blog networks that we put into play.

Regarding content, I don’t like panel discussions either. They always sound better when you’re planning a conference than they actually turn out. Why? Because it’s hard to pitch a real idea out to the audience and really chew on it for a while. I watched Gary Flake give a talk to search champs. He setup the idea, pitched the idea, then explained it in the course of an hour. It was wonderful.

But, if we had a panel on “live labs” it would have sucked. Why? Cause getting five people to work on an idea just wouldn’t have worked.

Panels can be entertaining, though, if you have something where people disagree about. Then you might be entertained and you might learn something. Might.

Anyway, back to the point. What we need to do is figure out how to keep event size at about 400 people. If we do that, then we’ll be able to keep the economics at a great level per person.

++++++++++++

Back to VC’ing. Rick Segal wrote a followup to all the VC talk out there. I love Rick’s thinking and am glad he’s getting some focus on the funding part of the industry.

It’s interesting, some of the anti VC points (and anti blogging points) I’ve heard lately are “you guys have created another bubble.”

Listen, the event yesterday was with young entrepreneurs. They didn’t pay anything to be there. I didn’t pay anything to be there. There was no lockout, no exclusivity. That sure doesn’t seem like a bubble to me. The thing that’s changed is the word-of-mouth network is far more efficient. In the old days you’d never have heard about a meeting like this. Today everyone around the world was dragged into that room. I love this new world. I don’t have to attend conferences anymore to hear the best ideas or see the newest products. I do notice that eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft were there to build relationships with new businesses and see if there’s some talent there that’s hireable.

Where did the Rolling Stones come from? They didn’t just walk on stage and become popular. They started in small rooms. Er, bars. High school auditoriums. And such.

Another criticism I saw of my post yesterday? That ideas aren’t what’s needed. I hear this all the time “ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive.”

Oh, really? How many of you thought up RSS? How many of you thought up Flickr? If ideas are so cheap, where’s the new ideas? I don’t see that many being put out there. And, inside big companies I get to see idea generation at work. They simply aren’t there.

What IS cheap? People who tear down ideas. I see that all over the place. “That idea won’t work because…”

But I don’t meet many people who have consistently awesome ideas. They ARE valuable. Companies like Microsoft pay those guys big bucks for a reason. There aren’t enough of them.

Quick, tell me again how you’ll make a search engine better than Google’s. You got an idea? Write it down. If it really is a better idea it’s valuable. Yes, its value will only be exposed if that idea gets turned into an algorithm and put into a search engine. So, you do need implementation, I’m not arguing that, but Google started with an idea for a better algorithm. Let’s not forget that. People often do. To me, the idea is just as brilliant as the implementation.

Yeah, selling the idea is difficult. But, it’s not impossible. Just start a blog and explain why your idea is better than Microsoft’s or Google’s. If you can do that then let me know and we’ll figure out how to proceed.

Anyway, I’m off to travel back to Seattle today. Have a good one and keep the conversation going.

Remember that gay rights bill that got a local church here in Washington all up in arms and got them to threaten to boycott Microsoft? Well, the church followed through on their threat last week (is now boycotting Microsoft even though many of its parisioners are members of Microsoft) and the bill just passed after eight years of attempting to get it through.

There’s a rumor that Microsoft is buying Seadragon. I can’t comment, but I got a demo this week and was blown away. The details on the rumored acquistion are on Channel 9.

Robert Fripp is a famous guitarist. He’s in the audience aggregation business. Same business that Google, MSN, Yahoo, and many companies that appear on TechCrunch are in, by the way. He has a lengthy post on why he chose to do business with Microsoft. It’s a must read for businesspeople, particularly with all this venture capital talk that’s been going around lately. Here’s a key line:

“In business, personal connections are not everything; just, nearly everything.”

Oh, I grok that. It’s why my cell phone number is always going to be on the home page of my blog. You can call me anytime (if I’m sleeping I may not answer, particularly if Maryam is throwing my phone against the wall. Heheh). At Microsoft you always have a personal connection (or you can build one).

I’d go even deeper than Robert Fripp. I do business with people I know and can read and can find in search engines. If you can’t be found in Yahoo, Google, or MSN’s engine, well, how about fixing that particular bug?