I’ve just been nutty busy lately. I got my email down to zero by the time I left for home at about 9 p.m. (was at work at 8:30 a.m. so long day). How high is my email flow? By the time I got home 25 minutes later my cell phone showed 10 new emails. Knock, knock, how do you make a blogger boring? Send him email!

Anyway, one of the four interviews I did yesterday (whew!) was with the Microsoft Interactive Designer team (aka Sparkle). Today they released a public beta so you can try it out for yourself! Here’s the video and links to the beta.

I was pretty harsh on the team. They have a long road ahead of them because Microsoft has not been seen as a good vendor in the design space. They answer that this tool enables a paradigm shift in how designers and developers will work together.

I did love that they used Flickr to build their demo. Yahoo will love that!

So, what do you think?

The game isn’t even over yet, but Mike Woycheck of the Pittsburgh Bloggers has already sent me email asking if I’d want to do a “friendly bet.” Seattle just beat the Carolina Panthers 34-14.

See, Seattle and Pittsburgh are going to meet in the Super Bowl. Pittsburgh has a deep football tradition. They are gonna be a very tough team to beat.

I’ll display my Terrible Towel in my office that they gave me for my birthday but I’m a Seattle fan.

So, wonder what the bet should be? Hey, we just bought a case of Windy Point wine made here in Washington. I’ll put that up for the Seattle side of the bet (we served it last night at our launch party to raves).

Mike, what will it be?

(If you’re outside the US, this is like the World Cup to Americans. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen owns the Seattle Seahawks and many Microsoft employees are fans — tickets to the game were extremely hard to get).

Update: Mike has the details on the bet.

You only need to watch the PR (by Nathan Weinberg on the Inside Microsoft blog) that Microsoft received over the past week to understand that more transparency would be a good thing. Danny Sullivan, over on Search Engine Watch made the same point several times.

As I flew across the United States yesterday this story was at the top of page one on every newspaper I saw.

Note to Microsoft employees: if you aren’t transparent about when you deal with governments you will hand your competitors a huge advantage. If it were up to me I’d blog whenever governmental requests come in. One area that isn’t possible is when there are crimes involved, though. Companies regularly turn data over under subpoena.

One last thought on this story. It’s real easy to trash customer trust and very hard to earn it back. Transparency is the way here.

I’ll be at the Search Champs meeting with MSN too and will make these points again there.

How would you handle it if you were running a search engine or blog service and a government asked you to do something, even something with great ends? How would you have handled this case?

I missed the Microsoft employee meeting today. Douglas Mahugh has a report on it. I will watch it over the weekend. It’s really great that our execs are meeting with employees again.

Me? I’m sitting on the floor in Chicago’s O’Hare airport. I hate airports that only have Wifi in certain places (it cost me $7 to get on here, and that was after struggling to find a user name that would work — I forget my old password I used last time I was here. Sigh.)

I am SO getting an EVDO card and service now. By the way, if you buy a laptop, make sure you can use one of the new EVDO cards from Verizon. You’ll probably want one at some point in the future.

Next stop? Oakland. Sigh, I gotta find better flights next time. On the other hand, not being online is letting me catch up with email.

Yesterday I spent most of the day hanging out with professors and students at Carnegie Mellon. What an amazing place!

First of all, the robotic lab is oooohhh sssoooo cccoooollll. I got an hour tour through four of their labs and I’ll get that video up in a couple of weeks.

Second, I spent an hour with Randy Pausch, co-director of the Entertainment Technology Center. You know how sometimes you meet someone, you have no clue what they do, but within the first minute you realize they are just freaking smart and you’re going to have an interesting conversation? That is what happened in the first minute of meeting Randy.

And, it wasn’t exactly an easy conversation either (smart people often challenge you). He took Microsoft to task (and really all of the industry) for not doing enough to build relationships with academics. He says it’s a rare day when he gets a call from a hiring manager at Microsoft. Says that five minutes with him on the phone will teach you more about a candidate than a day-long interview. Great lesson for anyone hiring students (and Carnegie Mellon has more than its fair share of the best).

Anyway, Randy also showed me Alice — a new programming environment that makes it fun to learn how to program. This is a HUGE advance in the ability to make programming fun for newcomers. I got video of Randy showing it off (Randy has been working on this since the early 1990s). Stephen Figgins over on O’Reilly has more.

Thank you CMU for the wonderful day!

I’m coming back home and I’m exhausted. I have so much blogging to do it isn’t funny. And my email. Oh, my email.

In there, I see lots of people asking what I think of the latest government action that Microsoft gave in to. I’m too tired to say anything, but it isn’t a proud day for Microsoft or our country. There are lots of opinions on this one — it’s at the top of Memeorandum. It’s also being discussed over on Channel 9.

Just a note on Pittsburgh. It’s been very good to me. The panel discussion last night was interesting and sometimes even a bit controversial (very few businesses in Pittsburgh allow blogging, I learned, and there’s lots of people out there who are trying to get their management to let them do it.) It was recorded so hopefully the recording will be up soon.

I’ll try to check in from the road. I think I have a stop in Chicago on the way to Seattle. Have fun!

Oh, I’m suprised at how few of the people who read here follow Memeorandum. I’ve met quite a few people this week who say they regularly read me but don’t follow either Memeorandum/Tech nor Memeorandum/Politics. After I show them those pages they always say “that’s cool.” It makes me realize just how tough it is to get people to try something new.

I love this team: Microsoft Max. They break a lot of “Microsoft rules.” Starting with their name. It isn’t some boring descriptive name. Meet the team on Channel 9.

This is a fun one to play with.

MSR Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image.

Fortune on CNN is wondering if Google and Microsoft would join forces to go against Apple.

Sigh.

I’m tired of these “who will defend against whom?” articles.

I’d rather hear what each company will do for customers and what they’ll stand for. Not against.

That’s how we’ll build great value.

Look at my mobile post yesterday. I used Google on a Microsoft SmartPhone to make my life better. Value was created.

That’s where we should focus our energies in this industry. I see tons of camera phones. Not enough applications that use them. I see tons of RSS feeds and still haven’t seen an RSS aggregator that really makes me happy (have you tried Dave Winer’s NewsRiver yet? You can get a preview here. I’m trying it and like it.)

We need more partnerships in this industry, not more fighting. And where we fight needs to be done because you have a better idea, not cause you’re trying to tear someone else down.

Another RSS conference has sprung up and I’m speaking at it: The RSS Summit at Hyatt Regency Cambridge in Cambridge, MA.

The marketers are still trying to figure out why RSS took off and how they should react. They see that even major news sites like the BBC are getting into RSS (nice new site, by the way) and that Microsoft this year will release a browser with RSS built in and they know something is up, but don’t know why, or how.

The geeks who invented this stuff probably will find these conferences not worthy, but that’s OK. RSS is crossing the chasm and now different kinds of conferences are needed.

I am gonna yell at their marketing team, though. That site is particularly lame. No RSS. No blog.

If you’re doing a conference you NEED an RSS feed and a blog. At minimum. Check out the Mix06 site, for instance.