Interesting, my former boss, Steve Sloan, is offering a podcasting class as part of the journalism department at San Jose State University.

I wonder if it would have been better to offer a “multimedia journalism class” instead (which is what this really is)? But that sounds so “old school.”

The skills journalists will need in the future are going to be a lot more varied than just churning out good text. The better journalists are going to understand how to do that, create illustrations (or at least rough drawings that an artist will be able to take and fill out), capture audio, photos, and video, and edit all that together to tell a compelling story on the Web.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you have two journalists of the same quality. One can only do text. But the other one can capture more media. Which one do you expect will get on DIGG?

Anyway, if I were a student I’d be in this class. Why? Because it would help me expand my portfolio that I could show employers. There are VERY FEW journalism jobs available (we keep hearing about newspapers that are laying off journalists) so if you want to be considered for one of those jobs you have to have a better portfolio than the next person. Especially if you want to work online (TechCrunch, Om Malik, and Huffington Post are all hiring).

One of the things we’re working to do with our audio journalists at Podtech is to get them to do text, photos, and a little bit of video so that their stories are more likely to get noticed.

So, who’ll get hired into “new journalism” outfits? Let’s say Digg was going to hire some professional journalists. Don’t you think they’d be more likely to hire someone who could do more media? I do.

Oh, there’s a San Jose blogger meetup on Thursday. I don’t think I’ll be able to get there, unfortunately, had something else going on that evening already.

One difference between Seattle and Silicon Valley? There are a TON more events. It’s amazing how many more things there are to do here at night.

Another difference? When you enter Freeway 280 doing close to 80 mph and a cop passes you at around 90 mph, you know something is different here. In Washington no one drives over 60 (it seems) and if you do you will get a ticket. Not in Silly Valley.

There’s a minor dustup because it’s been reported that the Firefox team was invited to visit Microsoft up in Redmond. Lots of conspiracy theories.

But this demonstrates that the religious don’t understand how Microsoft works and why it got big.

I remember visiting with developers from all of Microsoft’s fiercest competitors at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. Google. Oracle. Sun. Apple.

This isn’t the first trip that members of the Firefox team have made to Microsoft, either. I remember being in some top secret and high-level meetings that I wish I could tell you more about — but my NDA still holds.

Anyway, the reason Microsoft does this? Because by helping its competitors it helps itself. Think about this: if Windows is the best place to run Firefox, won’t you be more likely to use Windows?

And, for the Firefox team (or any team, really) they get some deep technical help from people who really understand Windows, plus they can go visit the developers who work on Windows and build relationships that are invaluable to understanding things.

Oh, and Firefox team members can even work with IE team members to help make sure that both products work the same, which makes our lives better.

The video camera in these photos gave away a little bit of what Thomas Hawk and I were doing. I was videoing him as he made photos. And, boy, was the night perfect for making a bunch of great images!

Hopefully my video comes out as well too. This will be part of PodTech’s new tech-oriented video show that’ll start sometime in September, not quite sure of the starting date yet.

You can see the originals here on Zooomr and he gives more details on the evening over on his blog.

I love Dave Winer’s trend of turning sites into mobile phone friendly sites for me — a few minutes ago he turned on the New York Times. I’m not sure why I like this better than a full blown aggregator, but I do. I’ve been playing with this for a few days and it instantly became part of my reading behavior. When I was in the hospital room with Maryam’s mom I could just go to the New York Times and it came down fast and in a readable form.

OK, despite what you think of me for being a mondo butthead on Sunday, I noticed one thing: Microsofties are quite willing to engage and fight for their product/service’s reputation. It’s quite interesting that Microsoft is one of the only tech companies (Sun and/or Yahoo are also pretty engaging) where employees are really willing to come out and have real conversations. I might not always agree with them, nor they with me, but I do respect the fact that they are here and are willing to get into the mud to defend their product.

So, why do we give Google and Apple such great reputations when they don’t engage with bloggers (and, actually, the “professional” journalists tell me that Apple and Google are harder to deal with too)?

Is it better for a company to play aloof and stay above it all and not engage in the conversation? After all, why do Google and Apple have such great reputations, especially with bloggers? (Go to a blogger conference and you’ll see more Google and Apple products used by bloggers than are used in the mainstream world).

Been taking a lot of crap for my egotistical elitist dreck on Sunday so it was nice to see what Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug said about what he thought of me after spending an hour or so with Jeremy Wright and me on Saturday.

I talked about the meeting I had with John Hartman yesterday and how he’s using machinima to build corporate training experiences. He just posted a short video that gives you some idea of what he’s able to do.

I was over at Stanford University Hospital today visiting Maryam’s mom, who had knee surgery. Anyway, two weeks ago they computerized their patient records. They have these portable data systems, all hooked in via wifi, all running Windows XP. They call them “cows.” Each one has a unique name. A nurse uses them to track patient data. Doctors can dial into the “cow” from his/her desk. Pretty cool stuff happening in hospitals lately.

Here Daisy Martinez, nurse at the hospital, shows off her “cow.”

If you’re in Silicon Valley, this should be a more manageable and geeky event than last Friday’s big TechCrunch party. Hope to see you there.

I’m spending the evening with Thomas Hawk learning about the photo world. He’s one of the most talented photographers I’ve seen, so wanted to follow him around as he took photos. Tonight we spent a few hours underneath the Golden Gate bridge. He’ll have some of the photos up later.

He’s the kind of evangelist I hoped I would be: an authority on everything photo. Including all of his competitors like Flickr, Picasa, Smug Mug, Riya, Tabblo, Vizrea, Web Shots, Photo Bucket, FotoLog, and others.

He works for Zooomr (three “o”s), but his regularly posts photos to Flickr and other sites. He knows, for instance, that photographers will get more traffic from Google Images than other image search sites (he tries to get his photos listed on them all).

We started talking about Zooomr, which is developed by a single person (Kristopher Tate) and I asked him why he joined up with Kristopher. The answer: because Kristopher added a feature (trackbacks) in one hour when other photo sharing sites wouldn’t do it after months of begging (they still don’t have trackbacks).

Their latest feature? Photo portal notes. Coming tomorrow. Thomas tells me that feature didn’t exist on any planning board before last Friday (Kristopher thought it up on the way to the TechCrunch party last Friday).

Anyway, Thomas told me that he knows developers at all the photo sharing sites and that they tell him that their main problems are keeping up with the huge increases in traffic (doubling small numbers isn’t that hard to keep up with, but when you double millions of users that’s a HUGE problem to work around).

So, it’s very easy right now for Kristopher to add new features, but he hasn’t hit that scaling wall that’ll keep him busy adding servers and building a team to deal with data centers.

Anyway, thanks Thomas for the great photo walk and an insight into your creative process.

I love my Sling Media box. It lets me watch my TV anywhere in the world. So, when Monsoon Multimedia’s Mark Rouchonik, director of IT, called me up and said that I had to see their new HAVA box.

So, I’m sitting here with Mark and Colin Stiles and this thing is very cool.

First, unlike Sling, it doesn’t need to be hooked directly up to your access point via Ethernet. You just need an 802.11g wireless network.

Second, if you’re on your home network the quality is a lot better than my Sling is. A large percentage of the time I’m using Sling I’m just sitting on the couch watching something different than Maryam is watching (hey, sometimes we don’t agree on the shows that we should watch. For instance, I can watch football while she watches old versions of Lost).

Third, it plugs into Microsoft’s Media Center. Which really rocks. Basically it fakes a tuner to Media Center (a large percentage of Media Center machines sold don’t have any tuners, if they have a HAVA box it will extend TV into those machines anywhere in the home that wifi reaches). I’m going to use this on my new Media Center that’ll be in my office upstairs while my satellite TV tuners will be downstairs.

Cost? $249 (there’s a $50 rebate right now until the end of the month). Only available on the Web right now, in retail in US in September, elsewhere around the world like Asia and Europe by the end of the year.

You hook your settop box (TV system) or, really, any video source like a DVD player, into the back. As long as you have an 802.11g network (must be “G”, not just the older “B”) it’ll work fine. You load some software on each client to view the video. Windows only today, but they are working on Macintosh versions. They are also working on mobile versions for Windows Mobile and Symbian (due around September).

Anyway, very cool device. I’m going to get one to compare more fully to my SlingMedia box, but the comparisons I’m seeing here look pretty damn good!

Over the weekend there were several hundred Second Life enthusiasts in San Francisco. John Hartman (he blogs about Second Life and virtual worlds on his Thought Plasma blog) attended the conference and is sitting in PodTech’s offices now showing me some of the cool stuff he’s learned and some of the things he’s working on.

What caught my eye about John’s work is that he’s using machinima (which is a recording of Second Life’s environment and avatars) to do corporate training.

What’s unique about this is you can create virtual sets and presenters very inexpensively.

I remember visiting the set at TechTV (which was a real set that cost millions to design, build, and house). John could build a virtual copy for 1/1000th the real cost.

Some things he showed me was a singer who played a virtual concert. Her avatar was holding a guitar in Second Life. She was singing into a microphone thousands of miles away from the data center that houses Second Life’s computers (at parent company Linden Labs).

He recorded that singer and made a little movie out of it (uses Camtasia). Sorry, the movie isn’t yet up on the Web, he says he’ll try to get it up within the next week or so.

Another thing he does is use a program called CrazyTalk, which lets him animate the mouth of his avatar. He can give a speech and his avatar delivers it. He uses that to do corporate training to dispersed groups of programmers.

Other things he uses? Fraps, which lets you record machinima videos. Used to do Red vs. Blue, he thinks. But he says Camtasia is better for most of his screen-recording needs.

As to the Second Life conference he said the weirdest thing was being in a presence done by NOAA and right next to it was people selling sex toys. Ahh, the joys of a virtual world where the red light district is right next to the science lab. Heheh.

Rivers run Red caught his eye (they are an advertising agency) that are going to let you create your own video game using Second Life.

Oh, Eddie and Irina just got in and handed me a real newspaper all about virtual worlds. OK, that’s just so weird. I’ll get a photo up on Flickr in a few seconds.

Oh, Irina, nice video of the Zombies that attacked San Francisco on Saturday! No, that really has nothing to do with virtual worlds, I just included it cause it shows that real life is sometimes very strange, even stranger than what happens in virtual worlds.

I wonder if Zombies could do corporate training?

I’m taking a lot of heat for trying to hold bloggers to five rules.

I was wrong.

Stowe Boyd, who writes a bunch of words on a thing that DOES comply with my five rules, has the best rebuttal so far. Basically says “let it all hang out.”

Anyway, I’m all about inclusion. Being nice. Not being judgmental. Yesterday was when the egotistical elitist bbbaaahhhsssttttaaarrrrddd in me came out.

Onward.

I’m now tech support for when people are in pain world-wide. Just got woken up by a friend (who I won’t name here, cause it doesn’t matter) who introduced me to a guy who is in pain cause his software isn’t working that he paid for and he can’t get through to tech support for another hour.

The guy is Ed Ingold, editor of Primative Archer.com, a magazine headquartered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

E-Frontier is the company. Application is Poser Artist Application.

What’s wrong? He bought the application. Ran setup. Then he tried to run the application. Says enter your name and serial number. Keeps rejecting his serial number.

He called tech support, got a new serial number, but that didn’t work. But now support isn’t open (they only are available 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific Time, which means he has to wait until almost lunchtime his time before he can get his app up and running).

Basically this guy is super frustrated, and is trying to get E-Frontier’s attention.

Anyone out there?

Contrast this to the customer support you’ll hear about from Printing for Less.

OK, sorry for the turn down a less-than-professional series of posts yesterday.

Let’s get back on track for the week with a great site (on Live Spaces, no less) that tracked 150 cool downloads for Windows XP.

Dare Obasanjo, of Microsoft, just pulled the ad hominem card. In debate class in high school the teacher would instantly award the other side a win if you ever pulled that card. Why? Because it demonstrated you lost your cool and couldn’t win through sheer logic or through a rational demonstration the other side was wrong. And, at minimum it just draws attention to your debating tactics rather than what we were supposed to be debating about anyway.

Hey, maybe that’s why Dare pulled the card out here and slapped it on my kitchen table.

To keep us from looking at the elephant in the kitchen! Brilliantly played sir Dare!

But, since I’m childish, narrowminded, and egotistical or whatever else Dare tried sticking me with, let’s just get back to the elephant in the room, shall we?

What does Microsoft do when it says “we have the most blogs?” Or, when it says really ANYTHING about its Internet services?

It takes them to advertisers and says “pony up, we know you paid MySpace ‘XXX’ and we have the most now, so we want ‘XXX+y’.” See, the little game we’re all playing in this Web 2.0 world is advertising.

The other little dirty secret of advertising? Not all readers are the same. Unfortunately if you’re an A List blogger it’s egotistical (and elitist) to point that out. Since Dare pulled out the ad hominem card already might as well slap this elephant in the ass and make it sing!

Quick. Is Jeff Jarvis worth more or less to an advertiser than this guy? Or this? Or this?

I’ll tell you what executives from big companies (like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, GM, and others) who were at MSN’s OWN ADVERTISING CONFERENCE told me. An influencer is worth THOUSANDS of times more than a non-influencer (influencer is someone who tells other people stuff, which is why blogging is getting so much advertising attention lately). That’s why Google is charging more per click than MSN is (Google has more influential users). That’s why Federated Media is closing advertising deals left and right.

And, why Microsoft’s shareholders are totally uninterested in the fact that Live Spaces has 70 million spaces (you’d think that with such rapid growth that shareholders would be cheering and would be preparing for an advertising profit windfall and that they wouldn’t have balked with Ballmer told them “I’m spending $2 billion of your cash.”

You’re right Dare. Maybe I’m childish. But I’m tired of being told that bloggers don’t matter. Which is what the Live employee told me yesterday. And it’s what you and Mike are saying today. Mike even repeated it just today on his blog. Read his post very carefully. He is saying that bloggers don’t matter. Why did he do that? Well, he’s trying to take the high road and trying to tell people that his service is hip and for them, not like that lamo “MySpace” thing, which is for kids and musicians with weird hair. Not like that “blogging” thing, which is for those elitist “A listers.” He’s positioning Spaces for normal, everyday people.

Which would be great if his marketing department didn’t run counter to his positioning by showing up at BlogHer (totally explains why Live Spaces’ presentation was totally derided by people who were there) and by his executives who try to position Live Spaces to advertisers as “blogs” so that they can get the high CPM ($$$ per thousands of viewers) that bloggers are getting right now.

This is why I’m being called childish, narrow minded, and petty right now. I dared to not let them have it both ways. Either they have most of their inventory done by “normal, everyday people” that’s empty, like every single blog on their service I found today, or they have a “hip, cool, influential” service, like Wordpress, SixApart, Flickr, Technorati, and Blogger have.

You can’t have it both ways. Well, actually, Six Apart is getting it both ways. They have Moveable Type and TypePad and they have Vox, which is aimed at “normal, everyday people.”

Well, this childish, narrowminded, egotistical blogger is heading off to bed. It’ll be a fun day tomorrow when I get more ad hominem attacks hurled my way.

Cause if it does get out of control everyone jumps on it and kicks it in the groin. Like this:

Jeff Sandquist: “Seriously Robert, get over yourself already. A blog that is private is still a blog.” Well, that might be true, but then every Web page out there is a blog cause we can’t define what a blog means. Most people I hang around know what you mean when you say “I just blogged.” And, no, most people don’t think that you put a page up for your mom only to read after she types in a password.

Jeff, is an intranet page the same as an Internet page? So, why shouldn’t there be a different word for a blog that lives inside a corporate or personal firewall?

And, OK, I’ll grant you that my ego is out of control. Blogging is something I’m a weeeeee bit of an expert on. Do you listen to anonymous jerks who come in your office and try to tell you what a good community is or what good software looks like? So, why do you quote such when trying to argue against me?

You wouldn’t THINK of using such a wishywashy quote to convince Bill Gates of something (and you would have kicked me out of your office if I said “this anonymous guy over there said you’re wrong”). Why do you allow such on your blog but not in your office?

UPDATE: Maryam just said “I think you’re full of it. I think you’re picking on the Spaces team because they are easy to pick on. Why don’t you go pick on someone who is hard to pick on?” (She was just screaming because her Mac didn’t display her blog properly).

Remember those old Wendy’s commercials where an old lady yelled “where’s the beef?”

Well, let’s play “where’s the blog?”

First, let’s pull up a list of the most recently posted Windows Live Spaces. I did at 8:29 p.m., which is where this list came from. It didn’t really matter, though. I’ve been watching for the past few hours and the results are pretty much the same.

Aside: as a “blog service” Live Spaces is DAMN SLOW.

http://amerinriocranival.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://brandenbrandenpilot.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry for August. None for July.
http://ebad1978.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry.
http://attractive55.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://tukisasmith.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://fangxiaozheng.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://bebe-1407.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://xacskater.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://irishyankeegirl75.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry, not narrative, though.
http://wwwsu357wut.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://kazkazy.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry (an eighth grader).
http://alejandrajara2000.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “there are no entries in this blog.”
http://jasminefarfar.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry, a photostory with no text.
http://guozhichina.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry, a single line of Chinese text.
http://msstarryeyes.spaces.live.com/blog/ FIRST TWO POST BLOG! But one is about how much the poster loves her cats.
http://ingridcita281.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one entry, but it’s a grouping of photos, no text.
http://dukezh.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://givemeheal.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://zuki21sr.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://ccnaples.spaces.live.com/blog/ has only one post saying he’s not going to keep going if Microsoft’s terms of service say that Microsoft owns his content.
http://stbrcks.spaces.live.com/blog/ has two entries, both photo groups. No text.
http://pebblesstone.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry, but first thing that actually looks like a blog. But, low octane post all about her kids.
http://joanajusto.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry with nothing in it but a comment in Spanish.
http://soccerluver7.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry with one line of text which cracked me up: “I’m bored” it says. Tell me about it! Nice soccer background, though.
http://elchekojando.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://jay-braaks.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://brisoncar.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “no friends have been added yet.”
http://7debora.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://yjiang20.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://hmsgurl.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry that says “Hey!” Hey yourself and write a post.
http://alwayswiggles4u.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry that says “two brats are better than one.” No, you got that wrong. Two posts are better than one!
http://kakakakakkfheg.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one entry that says “I love Cortnie.” Why, did she post to her blog?
http://muayad86.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://montoyita16.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://sarah0720.spaces.live.com/blog/ has three posts, but none originally done, just reprints of “this day is your birthday” kind of stuff.
http://nancynuke.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://psyct-up-space.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://delreepy.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://lilsuntych07basketball.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://ten2downtown.spaces.live.com/blog/ has two friends, but no blog. Isn’t that special?
http://yhosvelito.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://whoisyourdaddy0.spaces.live.com/blog/AccessDenied.aspx?space=whoisyourdaddy0 access denied!
http://09151989.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post that says “this blog is intentionally left blank.” Oh, thank you! I might have gotten confused about that and thought it was blank by accident.
http://bibliofly.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post, just a repost of something on MSNBC.
http://rasiya.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post, just a group of photos.
http://emythepiggy.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post, just says “first day of school was stupid.” Yes, apparently.
http://tf-live.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post with some naughty words.
http://carbendink.spaces.live.com/blog/ has one post with one word: “hey.” Is this code for “Scoble is stupid for trying this.”
http://anandthakker.spaces.live.com/blog/ SAYS “There are no entries in this blog.”
http://campbell1959.spaces.live.com/blog/ has two posts about summer vacation and the poster’s dog.

So, that’s 50 posts. None of which have anthing like a blog that I usually read, but let’s assume I’m an elitist toad and that I should read any blog with two posts or more. That leaves one blog out of the past hour’s worth of posts! That, for those doing the math at home would come out to 2%.

I’m tired. These things took more than an hour to do because the service is so slow. Gotta do other work. I’ll try to do the same for the other blog services (will need to take the posts off of weblogs.com cause they don’t expose their most recently posted the way Live Spaces does).

Question: do these count as blogs?

http://isbeliamoorehead.spaces.live.com/
http://loveableleonamae.spaces.live.com/
http://lno-nd.spaces.live.com/
http://rocoko0525.spaces.live.com/

Question: if you’re an advertiser what kind of person do you want to reach? People who publish empty spaces like those? Or folks who publish real content and have real audiences?

So, when Microsoft says “we have the most blogs” does that even matter to ANYONE?

No. Advertisers see through that smoke screen. That’s why more and more money is pouring into real blog networks like B5 Media and Federated Media Publishing and AdBrite.

Just wondering how Microsoft defines “blogs” if they get on stage and say “we have more of them than anyone else?”

Are all blogs the same? Even ones that have no content in them? (By the way, a very high percentage of the “most recently published Live Spaces” are empty like this — I’ll give you a better count in a few).

Update: Mike, in my comments, thinks my headline is sensationalistic and says he didn’t say they aren’t blogs. We disagree on what a blog is, which is what this whole post is about so I changed it to say that I said that half of all Live Spaces aren’t blogs.

Mike Torres of the Live Spaces team just said that more than half of all Live Spaces are private. Um, Mike, you DO realize that private Web spaces are NOT blogs, right?

In a ThinkWeek paper, accepted by Bill Gates, and discussed with him before MSN even started publishing Spaces (more than two years ago), we (not just me, but MS researchers too) defined blogging as having five things:

1) Easy to do reverse-chronilogical content display. Type in a box and hit publish. New stuff goes at the top of the page. Old stuff moves down.
2) Discoverable. Through search engines (I listed Google, Technorati, MSN, Yahoo, and a few others). I specifically mentioned a ping server as infrastructure too, ala Technorati or Weblogs.com. IE, blogs are public. I would go as far as saying that a site that does not ping a pingserver, like weblogs.com, is NOT a blog (private Web sites don’t ping weblogs.com and are NOT discoverable by search engines).
3) Social. I can track when you link to me from another domain, either through search engines, through trackbacks, or through my referer logs. (I can’t be social with private cross-domain spaces).
4) Permalinkable. I can send you a link directly to a post. (I can’t do that with private spaces).
5) Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content, which lets me read a lot more blogs. (I can’t do that with private spaces).

So, half of all Live Spaces are NOT blogs. They are something else. How about we make up a name for them? “Plogs.” Not to mention but “blogs” got their name from Pyra’s Blogger, which complies with all these things.

I feel so strongly about this stuff that we put this into our book as a common definition of why Blogging is hot. If your tool or service doesn’t comply with all five of these things it might be very cool (and there might be a LOT of them) but you shouldn’t be able to claim that they are blogs.