One thing that’s good about corporate blogging is you can correct the record when other news sites get things wrong.

Here’s an example of this. Earlier this week a story broke across the blogs that Microsoft’s Office team was changing the way its new ribbon interface would work in the 2007 version of Office.

Turns out that wasn’t true, according to Darren Strange who is a 2007 Office Product Manager.

Yes Tanja Andrews, Off the Grid brought us lots of hot truck-on-truck video action too! Heheh.

To understand what I’m talking about you gotta watch the videos they shot for their fun show, Freshtopia (which is usually about healthy and sustainable living).

First video is just mostly scenery from Off the Grid.

Second video talks about dna-mutating hotdogs. Oh, more accurately, Udo, talking about such (he came all the way from Germany to Off-the-Grid).

I didn’t know that Tiger Woods once hit a ball into a porta potty. I do now.

Anyway, back to Google video. Did you know you can learn how to use Ruby on Rails from watching video? It’s amazing the kinds of weird things you can find on the Internet now.

Our TV isn’t working (the painters moved it and I need to reconnect it, plus we don’t have TV yet so don’t have anything to watch anyway). So, Patrick had an idea: he’d show me all the cool videos he’s found on the Internet (he has time to do such).

He showed me one awesome video, Ryan vs. Dorkman, and I asked him how he found that. He said that one day he was just thinking about StarWars and went to Google Video and searched on lightsabre fight. Not looking for anything particular, he said. He was so impressed with Ryan vs. Dorkman that he did another Google search (this time on the main search engine) and found this blog post by Michael Frist (who is the guy who did that clip).

I asked Patrick “why Google video and not YouTube or Blip.tv?” He said that Google had more light sabre videos than the other video services.

I said “that’s pretty impressive, Patrick, let’s go watch some Ze Frank.”

Which we did, laughed a lot, and now are trolling for other video.

Ahh, it’s nice having a 12-year-old and no TV to watch.

Of course, I had to do this to Patrick. I went to Google video. Searched on lame video. And showed him the fifth video titled “Mac’s are Bad.” Heheh.

What you watching on your Google TV? What’s your favorite search on Google video to find cool videos? Here’s one: search for “cool car” and you’ll find some cool videos with cars in them.

Patrick just got home, found out there was an Apple battery recall (Maryam questioned “you just found out, MacBoy?”) and promptly said “gotta check if my battery was recalled.” Turns out it was. So, without skipping a beat he said “we gotta go to the Apple store.” His favorite words! Lemming!

Anyway, in other Scoble news, the other day Maryam and I were talking about what’s going on in Iran (she grew up in Tehran) and she told me a story of a college student that had been imprisoned for years and was near death due to constant beatings. She told me that his only “crime” was that the Economist put a picture of him in the magazine. I told her she should blog the contrast between my experience and his. She did, and it’s powerful.

In other news she told me about the latest blog dustup. Forbes magazine printed an article that said it was better not to marry a career woman and that pissed off tons of bloggers. So much so that Forbes pulled the article and then reposted it with a contrasting view. She gave her two cents on that article. Me? Career women are the best! Heck, if Maryam didn’t have a career I’d never have met her (I was on the interview team when we hired her at Fawcette). On the other hand, she managed to steal my job at Fawcette, so maybe that advice is sound. Food for thought.

Anyway, now Maryam is getting us to clean up the house. I hate moving chores (still have a few things to unpack).

If foo, ignore.
Or nofoo, meet us at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay, CA (at the fire ring). Tomorrow. 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Else pass this along to another nofoo.
End.
//you just need a nofoo pass to get into nofoo (I’ll have my EVDO and security will be rampant at nofoo).
//bring $7 for parking in the valet.
//bring a jacket. And a camera.

I was reading Steve Rubel the other day and he said beware of the Web 2.0 business dependency on advertising for revenue.

So, I started thinking “how do you recession proof your business model?” Well, what happens when you aren’t working anymore, or you don’t have enough money? Well, last time around more of us bought more stuff second-hand off of eBay and Craig’s List instead of buying new stuff from retail stores.

Time to call eBay and find out what they are up to. I’m sitting with Greg Isaacs, director of eBay’s developer’s program, and Ali Croft, tech PR manager, and they are showing me a whole bunch of ways that a blogger or a Web 2.0 site could diversify their income stream and be ready for a recession, or another tech bust, should one come.

For one, they have an affiliate program. Add a little box to your blog and if someone finds something there that they buy, you get 40% or more of the eBay revenue they collect.

Little trick of affiliates? eBay pays more as your readers buy more. Hack? Join a bigger network and your fees could go WAY up! As I build a network I’m going to be using this big time as an incentive to get lots of small bloggers to join up. Since most bloggers have micro audiences, this will be increasingly interesting to a lot of bloggers.

But, for Web 2.0 companies? Well, you can build in eBay auctions into your business plan. Look at Mpire’s site, for instance. They are using eBay’s APIs to mashup items from eBay with their own data. If you buy something off of this site they get a cut from eBay.

One thing that’s changed since the last time I talked with Greg: they don’t charge developers fees anymore. So you can try out their APIs without paying anything. You have to join two things, the developer program and the affiliate program, but they are free to join. Lots of tutorials and getting started guides.

Is this paying off for Web 2.0 businesses? Well, I tried to get him to explain how much, say, FatLens (a Web 2.0 site that sells tickets, some of which come from eBay) was getting paid by eBay. He declined to disclose that. So, I asked him “in general, how much could a company make?” He said he has some businesses that are making more than $100,000 per month in revenue.

How are you diversifying your revenue streams?

Dave Winer frustrates me too. Why? Cause he shows me a world I didn’t know could exist. He challenges my assumptions. And, tries to get me to join his world. The baaahhhhssssstttttaaaaarrrrrddddd!!!

I remember when he showed me RSS. I thought to myself “isn’t that nice?” I couldn’t see why I’d use it. But, he kept at it. Everytime I’d be over his house (called “the Internet Hut” by my son) he’d show me RSS again, each time from a little different angle). I still didn’t get it.

Until one day when I realized I was spending most of the day visiting blogs in my Web browser. That was when I started asking him to show me RSS again. “Hey, Dave, can you show me that world outline idea I kept ignoring again?” It was almost two years from the time he first showed me RSS to the day I “got it.”

This week it’s river of news. Lots of lightbulbs are going on about why that idea is interesting. But it took Dave cutting it up, simplifying it, and coming back to us with different views of the same idea for us to get it. He first showed me River of News years ago. The bbbaaahhhhssssstttttaaaaaarrrrrdddddd!!!

Yeah, it does look effortless. But Dave is one of those guys who is tireless. He sees a vision of how the world should be and then tries to drag us all into his world.

It pisses a lot of us off. But, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Oh, and if you ever meet a true visionary they do have this frustration with the rest of the world. I remember hearing that frustration from Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse (it took us 25 years to get THAT innovation!)

Thanks to the innovators who keep showing us their world until we get it. Sorry for the friction and cluelessness when it occurs.

Heheh, that cartoon was posted on http://blaugh.com/ yesterday.

Speaking of interesting blogging trends, this Chinese tech blog looks very interesting but I can’t read it. Major bummer. Someone yesterday asked me about the digitial divide. This divide concerns me more cause there’s tons of interesting blogging going on in Iran and China and other places in the world and I can’t really participate or link or understand.

Ahh, I see that Microsoft has first stab at Video Search (thanks to Brady Forrest’s blog over on O’Reilly).

Everyone is talking about Amazon’s EC2. David Galbraith says it’s the most amazing thing he’s seen. That’s mighty high praise. I asked Tim Bray, co-creator of XML, about it and he didn’t want to comment until he’s really had a chance to build something with it, but it certainly was on his radar screen too. It’s amazing how fast this world moves lately.

Oh, regarding IE 7 RC 1, I loaded it up yesterday. So far I’ve had one crash with it, but like it a lot. Will I stop using Firefox because of it? No. But it seems to have taken IE users into the modern age. Will I put this on my dad’s computer? Not yet. I don’t load pre-release stuff on people’s computers anymore.

This is the first IE 7 release I have felt good about after the first few hours of using, though. So, instead of writing my own review I’ll just link over to Paul Thurrott’s and go “ditto.”

How did I get the name “Scobleizer?” after all? Well, back in OS 7 beta days I’d go around the journalism department at San Jose State University and load the latest Macintosh OS betas on everyone’s computers. People would come in the next morning and things would be different and a secretary there complained to my boss, Steve Sloan, and said “I’ve been Scobleized.”

Aside: PodTech is an official company now. How do you know that? Cause we have T-shirts!

You all thought that Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch party last Friday was big? Wait until you see the BlogCamp in Chennai on September 9-10. I was trying to get there, but it just won’t work out (but I’ll be joining via video link).

How do I know it’ll be big? Because everything in India gets big almost instantly. Americans can’t understand the population density of places like India and China unless they visit. I know one guy, Anand, who runs a .NET user group. It hit 1,000 members in the first year. It took the user group in Silicon Valley several years to hit that level.

Wow, it was only, what, a couple of weeks ago, but it already seems so far away. Probably cause of the startup life. Yesterday, for instance, started at 6 a.m. (we were giving a presentation at 8 a.m.). That went until 10:30. Onto see Maryam’s mom for a few minutes. Tried to catch up on email (totally failed, I’m now only answering about 10% of my email, sorry). Then met with a bunch of PodTechers, took some calls. Called Steve Ball, interviewed Tim Bray. Met with the Stanford students at 6 p.m., stayed at work until 9 p.m.

Whew. It’s almost like working at Microsoft.

Anyway, I just saw Jan’s video come through that she shot at Off the Grid and remembered that Patrick had fooled around while we were there and made a musical composition on Apple’s GarageBand. She used that as the background for her video. We had a lot of fun. Too bad life can’t always be hanging out with creative people who like teaching my son about how to make his own music.

One thing about GarageBand that I like is that it encourages people to create their OWN songs rather than ripping off someone else’s music. It’s a lot more fun and, heck, if a 12-year-old can do it, so can we all!

Last night we met a bunch of smart young people from Stanford University who are part of the Mayfield program. While we were introducing each other, the PodTech’ers explained what they did in their past lives. We have a few professional journalists who came from places like Reuters and NPR.

One of the NPR’ers is Michael Johnson and his NPR influences leaked out in his audio submission titled “This American Second Life.” Good overview of what’s going on in Second Life, lots of voices from the recent Second Voice conference.

I’m on the phone with Steve Ball, group program manager for the Windows Audio Video Excellence team (basically, the team that builds the stuff that plays audio and video in Windows).

First, a disclaimer, before I left Microsoft, I got an intimate view of the process that Microsoft is going through in finding the startup sound (famous guitarist Robert Fripp was working on it).

The idea here (to both paraphrase Steve, and pass along the goals here that I learned) is that Windows Vista should present a common, and beautiful, face to the world. I could go more into it (I think what they are trying to do will be apparent in the shipping release, but isn’t quite there yet — even the new sound isn’t in current builds).

Anyway, let’s go into what Steve just told me on the record:

“The bottom line is that the rumors, stories, speculation about the new Windows Vista sound are true,” Ball said, ”but with a number of extreme qualifications.”

The current plan, he tells me, is that there will be a pre-wired sound that plays when the system is ready for you to logon. This is the plan of record for quite a few months.

You can do other things with your attention and your eyes during cold boot without feeling like you have to watch and wait.

This will be a non-customizeable sound, and that’s been part of the plan for Windows Vista for many months, he said.

However, the plan might change and Steve Ball is reading all the feedback, both on blogs, and in the newsgroups for beta testers, and his team is considering all of this stuff and still has not made final decisions (although they’ve spent a lot of time already arguing this stuff out and are heading down a path of making this a non-customizeable sound that can’t be turned off, just like the Xbox has today).

“Why the hell would you want to do this in the first place?” he told me is a common question. It boils down to two sides of the coin.

1. A spiritual side of the branding experience. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react. You can turn on your Vista machine, go eat some cereal, while your machine is cold booting and then this gentle sound will come out telling you that you can log in. You won’t need to wait for your machine to startup, he says.

2. Volume control in a Windows machine is a wild west. A mess. The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine. Let’s say you muted your machine, and you don’t hear your startup sound, you know you aren’t ready to listen to stuff. The Xbox has a hard-wired startup sound. There is one way to mute it: to turn down the speakers that are connected to your Xbox. Same will be true for Windows Vista.

It basically helps you realize your machine is ready to watch a video like, Ze Frank, without fidgeting with anything.

To add to that these sounds may be included in a bunch of the marketing that Microsoft is doing and will become very recognizable as “Windows Vista.”

QUESTION: Why don’t you give advanced users the ability to turn this off via a registry setting or something like that?

Steve: “we’re considering just that.”

“Did you know that Sony has a built in sound?” he said. ”Did you know that Toshiba has one?”

We went on to talk about the audio experience, how it’ll be a lot nicer than they were in XP and the emotional experience of how sounds will fit into the overall experience of using your computer.

A little bit about Steve. He’s an accomplished musician and cares, more than anyone I know at Microsoft, about how the community perceives Microsoft and its products.

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

This part is MY opinion, not Steve’s:

My own editorial? I can see this from both sides. As an advanced user I want control of everything on my computer. It pisses me off when companies assume they know me better than I know me.

On the other hand, now that I’ve spent the time with Steve and heard the market research, legal advice (yes, lawyers are involved here — they love having trademarked pieces of media experiences that can’t be copied), experience and UI teams (have you sat through user testing? I have, and decisions like these are made because of feedback of normal, everyday users, not just geeks like me and you).

Translation: I’m withholding judgment until I see the final product. This isn’t an “evil” feature like SmartTags that demands an instant pull-out, but it isn’t nice not to listen to your most influential and experienced users either. So, it’ll be interesting to see how this one goes.

Marc Canter lays out how Google is “locking in” developers more every day. But, what I find interesting is the lack of conversation from Google itself, particularly senior strategists. Where’s MarkL??? That’ll end up being what bites Google in the behind in the end game (does anyone notice they aren’t getting quick adoption outside of search and email? This lack of attention to influencers is the reason. They should have learned that from Microsoft’s Hailstorm experience. The kinds of things that Google is trying to do are massive — and scary, if we don’t trust Google anymore, and developers tell me they are headed toward believing Google is the new Microsoft).

It’s just a datapoint, but Marc and Chris Messina have two posts that hurt my head thinking about the strategic implications here. Developers are talking about Google, though (this isn’t the first time I’ve heard these concerns, they are running rampant in the developer networks I talk with).

I am meeting with some parts of Google next week, so I’ll try to get them to come out here and join the conversations.

UPDATE: Pete Hopkins, who works at Google (but says he’s not speaking for Google) joins the conversation!

I’m downloading IE 7, RC1 and while I’m doing that I’m reading some blogs. Translation: avoiding answering email. I hate email. I hate email. I hate email.

This morning Maryam and I got up to speak to marketing executives from a bunch of big companies (as big as Microsoft). They were asking: “how do you get people talking about them?”

So, it’s very good that I have this to point to today. Actually, Eric Sink is a developer, but he plays a marketing genius on the blogs. Seriously, his post on how to get people talking about your product is RIGHT ON!

I’m sending it to everyone at PodTech.

When I said recently “Microsoft doesn’t understand small things” this is EXACTLY what I was talking about.

How did I start my blog? By publishing for two people. I didn’t go out and try to build a huge audience.

Evan Williams (the co-founder of the company that brought us Blogger, and now is founder of Odeo, a podcasting company) has done the research on the competition and posted that yesterday. Interesting charts! Thanks Evan!

Folks testing Microsoft Windows Vista have been emailing me today complaining that in Vista the startup sound that goes off everytime the OS starts up will be forced.

Today in Windows XP you can turn off the startup sound, but from what the beta testers have been told that startup sound will be forced to stay on.

I’ll call Steve Ball tomorrow (he runs the audio team) to find out if he can clarify this. Translation: I have not gotten Microsoft’s side of the story on this one. Will let you know when I hear from them.

I love the new DivX Stage 6 video portal (er, YouTube competitor). The video quality ABSOLUTELY ROCKS compared to other video portals I’ve seen.

One problem? You need to download the plug-in and install it. It worked well on my browsers, but some people might have trouble and it takes a few minutes to wait for your first video.

So, will you rather go to YouTube, which runs on Flash which you probably already have installed, or will you go to Stage6, which has bigger and higher quality videos, but requires a few minutes of setup?

I’m going to DivX, but quality is important for me.

Here’s a session on video blogging from the Sundance Film Festival that I’m watching right now. Widescreen. Sharp. Nice audio.

The other thing to look at is how much processor time these things take. My processor on my Lenovo X41 Tablet PC is running at about 65% while playing that video.

Thanks to Katie Fehrenbacher on Om Malik’s new supersite for linking me to this.

One thing we’re learning about is just how bad the experience is on video.

Seems like we have a few choices.

1) Compress the hell out of the video so it downloads and plays well on almost every connection.
2) Leave it nice and sharp, but that keeps people who aren’t right near one of our datacenters or Akamai (they mirror our stuff so you can get it fast) from getting it.

Even on a fast connection it’s a frustrating experience. But, that’s why connecting video with RSS makes sense, so your aggregator will download the video and it’ll sit on your hard drive after it’s finished downloading.

Anyway, fun video with Geek Entertainment TV who went to Linux World last week and got this interview with Cmdr Taco, founder of Slashdot. Hey, is that Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List in the background? Why yes it is!

Hmmm, speaking of which, I gotta try RedSwoosh. Here’s a link to the same video, but on RedSwoosh. It’ll be interesting to see how that can help with these issues. RedSwoosh is a peer-to-peer piece of software that you load on your machine. A lot like BitTorrent.

If that works, maybe we can put up some really high res versions of our videos. But dealing with HDTV quality is gonna be tough through IP-based networks. I’m encoding the video with Thomas Hawk and it’s massive, even at a non-HD resolution.

Here is a test blog from my cell phone.

Edit: I was just playing around with some software that I can’t talk about yet. Unfortunately I don’t have a cell phone with a keyboard, so it makes this a lot less fun than it otherwise would be, but it’ll let me blog from places where I might not have my computer.

Just a test, this has only been a test, please move onto the next post. Thank you very much! This concludes this test of the cell phone broadcasting network.