Hi Marc Canter! Yeah, I see you posting weird videos to blip.tv. Trying to distract me from exposing Live Spaces’ lack of real blogs. Getting in the way of real journalism. Can’t have THAT here on the blogs.

Yeah, you can distract me by writing “Scoble” on your blog. Technorati is an evil thing. If you link then you distract me twice. Once in my ego search in Technorati (Maryam watches there too) and once in my referer log which shows up everytime I go to Wordpress.com’s Dashboard.

It’s Sunday evening, though. Hope you’re similarly distracted!

Hmmm, who do I want to distract? Bhuvana Sundaramoorthy. He wrote an awesome post on common interview questions and went straight from the “Z list” to the “A list.” How do you do that? He caught a ride on the Digg express!

Oh, why not pander to the A list? I saw Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, at TechCrunch on Friday night. Distracted Kevin?

How about Doc Searls? I was just reading his blog and Seth Finkelstein and Dave Rogers are saying he’s some kind of gatekeeper of the “A list.” Wait a second, Doc didn’t link to Bhuvana?!? I guess that gatekeeper job isn’t as good a deal as Seth and Dave make it out to be.

Update: I already got the cleaned file, thanks to several of my readers! Appreciate the help!

OK, I downloaded the latest change.xml file from weblogs.com. If you don’t know what weblogs.com is, this is a service that most weblog tools will “ping,” or let know that someone has just published.

In the early days of blogging Dave Winer and other bloggers would watch this page like a hawk since it would display when new people had just posted. Remember, when I started blogging there were only a couple of hundred bloggers with only a few dozen posts a day. You could read this page just like many of us read TechMeme or TailRank now.

Anyway, I just downloaded the last hour and there were more than 60,000 entries in that file. Whew! OK, I went through brute force and cleaned up just the “As.” Brute force means I just went through and deleted them by hand, not using any macro or scripts.

It’s taking too long to do it by hand (60,000 URLs is too many) and, anyway, it’d be fun to redo this test over and over to see if the numbers of blogs done from each service change depending on the day of week and time of day.

Anyway, here’s what I need done. This is a perfect job for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. That service lets you spec out a small job, and get someone who has a little extra time to do it to do it for you for a reasonable fee.

On the other hand, I’ll also ask here. Here’s what I need:

1) Take my Excel .XLS file (I’ll clean it up and put it into a column for you) and delete all the URLs that don’t come from blogspot.com; wordpress.com; livejournal.com; spaces.live.com; typepad.com.

That’s it. Easy, huh? Should take one of the programmer types here a few minutes to write an Excel macro to do that. If you’d rather me just hand you a comma-delimited text file, I can do that too. Or, you can just go get the file yourself from weblogs.com (it’s an XML file) and clean it up yourself. I just need the URLs, I don’t care about anything else.

Microsofties take it on face value that they host the most blogs. They even love shoving it in your face. Yesterday someone who works on the Windows Live team was taunting me with “influentials don’t matter, we got to be #1 and we don’t care that there aren’t any influential bloggers using our stuff.”

I was asking them why so few bloggers at BlogHer or Gnomedex use Windows Live Spaces, which is Microsoft’s blog and photo sharing service.

Today I see that George Moore, General Manager of Windows Live, just told a crowd in New Zealand that Windows Live is “now the largest blogging service on the planet.” At least according to Richard MacManus, who I’ve found to accurately report past events, and who is at TechED in New Zealand.

So, that made me itch and when I have an itch I want to scratch it.

Here’s my what’s itching me:

1) Is Windows Live Spaces really used as a blog service very often?
2) Is Microsoft only counting when it’s used as a blog service, or is it counting all uses of Windows Live Spaces?
3) Do other services actually have more “real” blogs? At least percentagewise?

Now, I know that Wordpress.com (currently the service that most of the “in crowd” is recommending) only has about 300,000 blogs. Microsoft is claiming 72 million blogs.

So, over the next few hours I’m gonna do some analysis and see if I can find out how much overcounting there’s going on (there is SOME overcounting, based on my initial looks at http://spaces.live.com and http://www.weblogs.com — I see a whole bunch of things there that don’t look like blogs at all).

First, let’s define what a blog is, at least enough to count for this purpose.

1) Have original content. Spam blogs that are copied off of somewhere else don’t count.
2) Have at least 500 words of new text-based content every month. Things that look like Flickr streams aren’t blogs, sorry.
3) Have at least two posts in at least the past 30 days. If you aren’t posting, you’re not blogging.
4) I don’t care if you have comments, have trackbacks, have blogrolls, or any of that.

Here’s my methodology.
1) I’m going to pull the last hour’s worth of content that was published to each of the services, as reported to weblogs.com as of 3:52 p.m. today (before I post this so no one has time to monkey with the results).
2) I’m going to also visit the home pages of http://spaces.live.com and www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com and www.typepad.com and report on the percentage of blogs that I find that have been published to their “most recently published” pages are actually blogs.

Add all those percentages together and find an average. Then take that average to the reported number of blogs on each service and see if Microsoft is still #1.

Does that sound like a good methodology? Any changes you’d make?

One thing that’ll be interesting is to compare the percentages today with percentages on, say, Wednesday since I’d expect more “everyday people” to be blogging today, while on Wednesday I’d expect to see more corporate bloggers, which, my thesis is, will skew more away from Windows Live Spaces.

What do you think?

What results do you expect to see from such an exercise?

Disclaimers, Maryam, my wife, uses Windows Live Spaces. I use Wordpress.com. Our book blog, Naked Conversations, is on Typepad. My son used to be on Google Blogger, but he is now on Wordpress.com too.

Steve Newson talked about Boing Boing’s discussion of a new Google Writely (word processor for the Web) and then said something I found interesting cause I was thinking it too: “For now I’m going to stick with Live Writer…”

Why?

Cause I don’t use Wordprocessors much anymore and when I do (to print out a fax cover page, or something like that) then I just fire up my copy of Word 2003. Now, would I write a book in Writely? Maybe, it sure would have made collaborating with Shel Israel easier. But, really, what I wanted to do was just stay in my blog tool anyway.

The only reason we used Word was cause our publisher told us to. Hey, they were paying us money so we weren’t gonna argue with them.

One little aside: did you notice that Newsome didn’t link to Boing Boing? Damn, how did I find it? Easy, I subscribe to Boing Boing, by his talking about Boing Boing I just made sure to check out the Boing Boing feed and away we go. No link necessary.

Oh, there are some of you who don’t subscribe to Boing Boing? What kind of freaks are you? Heheh.

Anyway, back to Writely, why do I like offline editors better? They just feel better for editing blogs. Plus you get a separate icon on the Taskbar, so you can switch between browsing and editing without making a mistake (how many of us have stupidly clicked on something to watch our blog post disappear as the browser refreshes?)

I also like being offline incase Internet connectivity goes away. I’ve had it happen more than once that something goes wrong and my Web browser decides to refresh for some reason, wiping out a post.

It’s why offline is so good.

We’re in the middle of a site redesign. PodTech’s site sucks, James Robertson says. I agree.

You’ll note I have been linking to everything BUT PodTech lately. Why? Cause PodTech will need to earn links just like everyone else.

The home page is a disaster. I can’t figure it out either. Funny enough, even inside a startup there are “portal vs blog” disagreements and just last week I’ve been involved in some meetings that reminded me a lot of executive review meetings at Microsoft — even in a startup you have to convince people that your way is the best. It’s why at Google and at Microsoft they measure measure measure everything. If you wanna go into Marissa Mayer’s office and tell her she’s wrong you BETTER have the proof to back up your theories.

I want a simple aggregator view on the home page. Something like the one on Share Your OPML. It’s ugly, yes (that can be fixed with the help of a good designer like Bryan Bell) but it works and it lets me fish through tons of posts.

Ugh, I just noticed the aggregator is busted there, gotta give Dave a call. But, you can see the format anyway.

It’s my thesis that people will scroll almost infinitely. Just give them high-quality stuff. At Microsoft they did research and found most people won’t click on the “next” button. But, they will scroll. You’ll notice that the search engine at live.com doesn’t ever end. If I remember the research right they are finding that people look at something like five times more information if it just keeps scrolling than if they have to click next.

But some of the team believe that everything needs to fit into one screenful. They want a portal model.

“But won’t people have trouble finding our other pages if there isn’t a link to everything we do?”

“Um, no, what do you think Google does?”

Google doesn’t use graphics. Doesn’t have long columns of text next to each other (Google goes vertical when it needs to present more information than fits in one screen — at least most of the time, Google News breaks that mold a little bit, but not really — even there it goes on to scroll baby scroll). Doesn’t do much of anything other than six simple text links.

How boring! Especially when compared to Yahoo’s home page, right? That uses graphics, tons of links, more graphics. More links.

Intuition would tell you that Yahoo’s page works better, right? Well, let’s examine some of the facts.

Compare Yahoo to Google’s stock chart. NOT BORING!!!

I’m gonna win this argument cause of that chart. Simple is better. Text links are better than graphic color crap (my eye filters out such as advertising, doesn’t yours?) People link more on simple blue-underlined text than on color crap. That’s why Google accidentally found its AdSense business model: they stopped to WATCH what the users actually DO, not what they WANTED the users to do.

One place a little bit of color does help, though, is the top news flag on MSNBC. I love that site. Why? Cause every few hours some editor in Redmond sits down, picks a story, then designs a photo flag for it with a headline and several links.

So, let’s compromise, I told the team. Do an MSNBC-style flag, with an aggregator underneath it. That way they get their editorial old-school style control and portal instincts fed, and I get my river of text and links, which makes users happy (anyone notice DIGG? Text and links baby! Oh, and with the usual rounded corner graphics. I’ll bet we have to pay some design house tens of thousands of dollars to come up with some rounded corner graphics. Heheh.

DIGG is growing faster percentagewise than any other site I know of. If you argue against Digg, you BETTER have those measurements to back up your claim. And saying “Yahoo has more viewers” is NOT a good argument. That’s like listening to DEC back in 1977 when the CEO there said the world doesn’t need personal computers.

Growth is more important, especially to a startup, because that’s where the opportunity to kick the old school in the groin exists.

Anyway, until we make the home page much more Google-like James will continue to be right: our home page sucks.

I’ll let you know when the redesign comes up. Until then, go watch Ze Frank or Rocketboom.

Donna Bogatin, over on ZDNet asks what’s wrong with a little party? Or even a big one?

It’s cause we still have the scars from when we all partied in 1999 and then got laid off in 2000-02. So, we deal with those scars by being snarky about the 2006 series of parties.

It’s a defense mechanism so that if we get laid off again we can say “well, at least we saw it coming this time.” Of course, we’re working our behinds off trying to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Greg goes further and asks why are party mentions on top of TechMeme and isn’t there something more important to cover? He, too, makes it sound like TechMeme is done by human beings. It’s not. It’s done by the linking behavior of bloggers. If bloggers link to something it gets on TechMeme. It’s that simple.

And, of course when you have a party with 700 of the world’s best-known geeks it’s going to cause discussion on blogs. Duh.

I did want to point out that Jeremy Wright’s business card was custom done just for the TechCrunch party. That’s killer. He ordered them from Printing for Less (the ePrinting company we visited in Livingston, MT — I predict that PFL will be in BusinessWeek within six months, it’s a remarkable business, but I’m holding out what I learned from its CEO for my first show — Andrew is now my business hero, you’ll find out why on that show). I’ll have to add that tip from Jeremy onto my business card best practices. I’ll never forget where I got this card from Jeremy. He says it only costs $20 to do a set of cards for a big event. I also like that on the back he has some attitude and puts “kickass bloggers” to describe B5’s network. I’m gonna get some of my own cards done (hey, Hugh, wanna do me a PodTech card?)

Thanks to Irina Slutsky for keeping the Flickr stream for me so that I know what she’s doing without having to bug her — hey, I wonder if she will get hazard pay for dealing with Zombies? Can’t wait to see the interview with Linden Labs’ founder!

OK, I discovered a new interviewing technique.

You take VIPs to the very swanky Half Moon Bay Ritz (walking distance from our new house) and buy them Peach Mojitos. Not cheap for the expense budget (they cost $14 each, but are worth every dollar in the top secret information you get from business leaders). Then you take them out onto the back lawn, let them soak up the real estate (it’s stunning) and then you turn the camera on.

I’m gonna call it the Mojito Show. We don’t really care how it comes out cause we’re having too much fun.

Anyway, Jeremy Wright, president and co-founder of B5 Media (pictured above), just spent the day here at the Ritz and then at the house (which is in total disarray, hopefully Valleywag won’t get a picture of the house when it’s so messy).

What was fun was Don MacAskill, CEO and Chief Geek (can I get a title like that?) of SmugMug was vacationing at the Ritz with his wife (it’s their sixth anniversary, congratulations!) and saw my Google hat and wandered over. Later she took a nap and he snuck out to talk geek with us. I got that part on tape for my new show, hopefully it’ll come out (the mojitos might have affected the quality too much, but like I said, who cares, it’s Saturday and the mojitos were good!)

Anyway, I was trying to get Jeremy to tell me a bit about the secrets behind his B5 Media network. He wasn’t giving up the good stuff (at least on camera), but the stuff he gave up after his mojito was pretty interesting. He has about 100 bloggers in his network. Everyone from a gold medal swimmer to a group of scientists to a celebrity blog about Lindsay Lohan to someone who writes about RSS (who would read THAT? Heheh.)

He’s proudest of a couple of blogs that write about autism and diabetes.

OK, notice they all link to each other (look at the blog roll on the right side)? That’s the advantage to joining a blogging network: that gets them all more traffic. They get better Google rank that way, and they also share traffic. Jeremy told me that a good percentage of people who’ll visit one blog will visit other blogs.

Anyway, I learned that the celebrity blogs that B5 does are the most popular and are easy ways to earn traffic. I remember meeting Adriana Foley, the blogger who keeps 17 blogs, including the one on Linday Lohan. She actually says she hates doing the Lohan blog, but that’s what pays the bills so she does that to fund her other blogging.

Other things Wright shared after having his mojito? That Google Adsense advertising doesn’t pay bloggers as well as other advertising networks do. He says that most of the time Google only pays about $.50 per CPM (thousand page views). He says that B5 network is getting paid somewhere between $10 and $15 per CPM on most blogs. Has sponsors like Speedo.

He says his top bloggers are just now starting to earn enough to quit their day jobs ($1,000 to $4,000 per month) but that he hopes to be able to pay them a lot more soon.

Another advantage to joining a blogging network like Jeremy’s? The private chat rooms (hey, do you get to get blogging help from both a scientist and a gold-medal swimmer? Didn’t think so). He says the community that comes along with such a network is what keeps him excited working on behalf of the network.

As to Smugmug, Don told us both about how he has about 150,000 subscribers paying $40 a year to host photos on Smugmug. He raved about a bunch of features that Smugmug has over the other photo sharing services, but what caught my ear is the Google Map support that Smugmug has. That alone might get me to pay $40 a year.

Anyway, next Saturday we’re getting together at 2 p.m. at the firering at the Ritz. Several people have already RSVP’d. Bring $7 for parking and bring a jacket (it gets chilly outside). Anyone is invited although I might get you to drink an alcoholic drink and then turn on the camera and see what I can learn.

Oh, and, yes, there’s wifi at the Ritz. Next Saturday I’ll be the geek drinking the Mojitos. Oh, and we found out tonight that there’s a guy who plays bagpipes an hour before the sunset.

Hope your weekend is filled with Mojitos. See ya next Saturday! Disclaimer, I can’t buy everyone Mojitos, sorry.

Who else will be there? Oh, and Nick Douglas, you’re invited, we won’t have any security trying to keep you out. Just beware, I might hand you a mojito and put you on camera!

I’m still recovering from last night’s shindig. You know, what’s the deal with these parties? They are getting to be media events, that’s all. Be seen, and see. Take photos or videos, get videoed or photoed. Talk about tech? I tried. But it was just too noisy to have a decent conversation on video.

Don’t worry about missing these. They are just great ways to collect business cards and meet the hot geeks. The bubble is back!

Thanks to Scott Beale who was the official photographer and Thomas Hawk and Dan Farber and Gabe Rivera and the other people who put up photos. Here’s the photos that have been uploaded to Flickr with the TechCrunch7 tag.

Eddie says I have a cooler tripod than he does, mouse over this photo to see why.

First, stare into my lens and say hi!

This is me begging Nick Douglas, of Valleywag, to blog some dirt about my book co-author Shel Israel. Really, no. I was just asking him how he snuck into the party and what the story would be. He didn’t have a good answer to either. In between us is Gabe Rivera, founder of TechMeme. He explained a little bit about how TechMeme works. Lots of people think he does that site by hand I learned. Not true. It’s all algorithms baby!

Guy Kawasaki is always the life of the party. Whenever he’s around you feel good.

Thomas Hawk captures me with the man of the evening: Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. Lots of people were asking me about the “Oakridge” Apple shirt. Oh, that’s from the Apple store opening at Oakridge Mall in Silicon Valley. It was my way of saying “I don’t go for the status stores like Palo Alto or San Francisco but go for the ghetto Valley Apple stores. Of course Oakridge isn’t too ghetto anymore (I once worked at a camera store in that mall and my dad lives a mile or so away). I wore the Apple shirt so my son, Patrick, would think I was “cool” cause he thinks everything from Apple is cool. I’m such a sell out. I can just hear Patrick saying “dad, a shirt won’t make you cool.”

And another one from Flickr:

Speaking of Mike, he was having a good time posing for pictures.

What happens when you open a laptop at a party like this? Funding event!

Hi boss! Damn you, use both hands like I showed you. Otherwise you get too much camera shake on those little Samsung Sanyo Xacti cameras. (They are fun, cause they record straight to SD cards which makes your workflow a lot nicer, just drag onto Blip.TV and you have a video blog).

The music was cool, thanks to Tom Conrad, this guy, of Pandora.

TechCrunch 7 food was better and more plentiful than earlier Crunch parties, but nothing spectacular so don’t feel jealous. The wine, though, was great and I got a poster designed by Hugh Macleod, marketing genius.

I’m hearing from a bunch of conference planners that most conferences don’t allow kids cause it costs extra to hire more security guards if you allow them (that’s Moscone’s policy, one conference planner just told me, which matches other feedback I’ve heard). Microsoft’s PDC had the same policy. Turns out the conference venues are afraid of being sued so they ban kids unless you take additional measures, which cost money, so most conference planners don’t do it.

Funny aside: one year a 12-year-old showed up at our VBITS (Visual Basic Insiders’ Technical Summit) with his dad. Turned out he had already scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT, had already been accepted to college, and had been programming since he was four years old. I wonder what he’s doing today?

Sorry for picking on LinuxWorld, but they could have made a funnier sign and demonstrated some humor. Expect such things to get on Flickr in the future.

Richard Brownell had a good point in my comments a few minutes ago:

“Robert. Maybe I’m being greedy, but could you let us loyal readers know what is missing from Google Calendar? I don’t use it (though I have toyed with it), but I’d like to know what Outlook does better. If I just wanted to hear somebody say they “hate hate hate” something, I’d read a livejournal or a myspace blog

Someone on the Google Calendar team just wrote me and asked the same thing.

Sometimes I forget that people are actually reading my ranting and expect more than just “I hate it.”

So, let’s dig in. First, I have to explain my biases. I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook since it was Microsoft Mail and Schedule Plus. Funny story, if you work inside Microsoft and you want to schedule someone for a meeting you say “I’ll S+ you” not “I’ll Outlook you.” Now you know where the “S+” lingo came from.

That, alone, demonstrates the problem that the Google Calendar team is up against: human behavior. We hate changing, particularly something that is used so often as a calendar app (I use it CONSTANTLY).

That’s another bias. My calendar has to be available and trustworthy. Everywhere. Not just when I’m hooked up to the Internet. Outlook is. If my computer stops working my SmartPhone still has my calendar. If my computer isn’t on wifi or I’m too lazy to plug in my Verizon card Outlook still has my calendar.

So, I’m biased against Google from the start. Sorry, but I am. And most normal non-geek people will be too. I watch how people use computers in airports and Outlook is the most used app that I see.

OK, now that you know my bias, there’s a few other things I’ve found.

1) In Outlook my email and my calendar are integrated. Here’s something I learned long ago. If you send me an email saying “can we meet for breakfast tomorrow at 9 a.m. at the Ritz in Half Moon Bay” I can just drag that email to my calendar button in Outlook and it’ll add a calendar item automatically. In Google’s system? I haven’t figured out how to do something like that, so I’ll need to copy the email from Gmail or from Outlook and then paste it into Google Calendar. Outlook is simpler.

2) Enterprise Contact management. When I got to Microsoft every single employee was autoloaded into Outlook thanks to Exchange. I just typed “Bill Gates” into Outlook, hit Alt-K to parse it into an email address (if he no longer worked there it wouldn’t parse, so I’d know whether or not it’d work), and away we went.

3) Scheduling coworkers for a meeting. OK, I want to meet with John Furrier on Monday at 10 a.m. So, I add john@podtech.net into Google Calendar’s “create event” page (I clicked on “create event” to get there). But where the hell is his calendar? Oh, I have to click on a separate “manage calendar” and look up his calendar separately. In Outlook it just shows me under scheduling tab whether or not he’s available for a meeting or not (again, need Exchange for this to work, but most companies have that, all three of my prior companies had it).

4) Google tries to be too smart. I accidentaly click on the calendar somewhere and it assumes I want to create an event so it pops up a dialog. Aarrgghh. On the other hand, when you get used to this it makes it easier to create an event than the Outlook model of click, drag, right-click and choose “New Appointment.”

I’ll do some more thinking about this as I use it more over the next weeks (this was really my first full-time week using it) and see how my opinion changes.

One thing that’ll dramatically change it? When my Mac arrives (I’ve bought it, but it hasn’t arrived yet). Working cross-platform will probably frustrate me greatly which will swing me back to Google since that should work the same on both Mac and Windows.

Another thing that is great about Google Calendar? It’s free and usable by anyone. Outlook and Exchange are not things you get for free.

What about you? What do you like or hate about Google Calendar?

What would you like to see in future Google Calendars?

Paul Colligan says that Zune (Microsoft’s unreleased new portable media player to compete with Apple’s iPod) has no podcasting features and points that out to me.

Sad that Microsoft still isn’t getting that big-company power will come from letting your customers participate, not just consume. It’s funny, cause some parts of Microsoft are getting it (the Windows Live Writer editor demonstrates that).

What’s funny is that Paul says this makes Zune great for kids. Hmmm, you should have seen what Patrick listened to all week long on our off-the-grid thing last week — Podcasts.

I hope that Microsoft is holding back some podcasting stuff for announcing at launch. But, I won’t be suprised if they don’t get it, either. At least Apple got on the podcasting consumption bus more than a year ago. It’ll be interesting to see which company gets on the podcasting creation bus first.

It’s interesting, when we did our off the grid camp last week Richard White, who worked on the UI of Kiko, showed up. Clearly a very smart guy (and his new timing app already had other customers who didn’t even know Richard before last week).

But I had no idea that Kiko was going to be such an interesting story this week. Just goes to show you that I don’t recognize interesting stories that are sitting in front of me.

Anyway, I found his post on the failure of Kiko one of the most interesting I’ve ever read. Highly recommended reading for any entrepreneur (or, really, any employee of any company, since we’re all responsible for keeping our companies running).

Oh, and James Robertson says he likes Google Calendar but admits that he doesn’t work in a corporate office.

I like some of it too. So, now that I’ve bashed it I’ll write something soon about what I like about it.

But, it still isn’t there for most companies to use. But that shouldn’t make Microsoft celebrate and rest on its laurels. It’s pretty clear that Google is going after the general Office worker with a range of apps. The next few years should be interesting to watch the big boys duke it out.

It’ll also be interesting to see what entrepreneurs, like 37Signals (we use their stuff at PodTech too) do to change the game under the feet of the big elephants.

I note that competitor 30Boxes founder participated on the comments on Richard’s post. AirSet also emailed me and told me that its calendar works on mobile phones (but, not, alas, my SmartPhone).

Maybe I should get together with Scott Mace who keeps the Calendar Swamp blog and do a whole show on calendars so we can show you what the do well and what they don’t do well.

I was having breakfast with Guy Kawasaki when Dave Winer called. I hit ignore cause it’s rude to talk on the phone when you’re having breakfast. Anyway, when the breakfast was done I listened to the voice mail where Dave told me about a little experiment of his http://techcrunch.scripting.com (try it on your mobile phone, compare to the original TechCrunch).

Now, a little bit about that first. A few days ago I was complaining to Dave about various bloggers who make their blogs impossible to read on cell phones. TechCrunch was one of the worst. It takes two minutes to load and even then it isn’t really usable due to having to scroll around the navigation stuff.

So, what did Dave do? He said that he could give me a server-side-RSS version.

This rocks. Rocks. Rocks. Now I can read TechCrunch while walking around tonight’s TechCrunch party.

I hope Dave wraps up this server-side aggregator and gets every blogger to implement it so I can read every blog on my phone.

Thanks Dave for scratching my itch.

I was reading Don Dodge, former executive from Alta Vista. He’s seen his share of failure so I always learn something from him. Anyway, he links to an interesting analysis of why Kiko (a Web-based calendar) failed.

Heck, I’m nearly being forced to use Google Calendar and I really really really hate it (sorry, I’m an Outlook addict). If Google can’t get me excited about its calendar there’s no way that I’ll use a calendar from a company I’ve never heard of, don’t trust. Sorry. That’s the entrepreneur’s challenge. Google can win me over just by sheer momentum. Translation: my boss will say “you vil use Google and you vil like it.”

Actually I’m making Google sound worse than it is, but I need a calendar that synchs with my SmartPhone, that lets me work offline, etc.

A friend who works at Google says that they aren’t even using Google calendar internally right now. I hear that Google’s employees hate the Oracle-based solution they are currently using, but that Google Calendar needs more work to be usable for an enterprise.

I can tell you that is true. I’m using two calendars. One in Outlook, one in Google. Why? Cause the rest of the company is on Google.

Anyway, back to the headline. Does it predict more failures?

Yes.

There are simply too many companies chasing too few users.

I can not keep up with the flow in my email box. I’ll share some of that with you real soon.

Getting the cool kids to try your technology isn’t the same thing as having a long-term business proposition.

It’s my challenge too. If I don’t get an audience and keep it I’ll be laying myself off someday after our VC money runs out (that’s what I did last time the bubble burst).

Onward.

Note: some of these things will win. That’s why we all play the game. Google survived the last bubble&burst. Who’ll do that next time? Not Kiko.

They’ve gone Zunecrazy on blogs.

Just tell me the format I need to encode my videos in so that folks who have a new Zune can load my lame stuff up.

Ahh, when the Open Source folks wonder why using Linux isn’t “cool” you have no further to look than this sign for the reason — any conference where I can’t take my son and walk around is just something that’s going to have a hard time impressing me (hint: we both went to MacWorld with Dave Winer and then walked across the street and bought a Mac):

Thanks to Scott Beale for the photo.

Another data point? I haven’t been in Second Life since they told me my son isn’t welcome. Why not? Cause our time together is limited and might as well do things that let us play and learn together.

A big reason I am buying a Mac is so I can use iSight and iChat with Patrick (it’s a lot better quality if you have Macs on both sides of the conversation).

If you want me to use your technology you better figure out how to get Patrick first.

Anyway, everyone knows that 12-year-olds are a lot cooler and more up-to-date on technology than fat, white, 41-year-olds.

Aside: it’s nice as a manager to get photographic proof that your employees are working instead of playing Pacman or sitting on the beach. Damn, Irina and Eddie are getting some cool interviews lately! (That’s Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List, sitting behind Irina, and she’s interviewing Cmdr Taco, founder of Slashdot). Nice new Sony camera, huh?!?

Three words: Lack of power.

I flew SAS flight to Copenhagen 1.5 years ago and paid my $30. But I could only use the Wifi service for two hours because my laptop’s battery wouldn’t last longer than that.

Om Malik opines that this is a time when listening to early adopters didn’t pay off.

Sorry, normal people will do without wifi if they have to pay $30 for two hours.

But, I was talking with some of Microsoft’s Dynamics managers and employees a few months back. That team does a LOT of travel back to Copenhagen. You’d think they would be very active users of the wifi.

I was suprised to learn that they enjoyed the 10 hours “off the grid” where their employees and managers couldn’t talk with them.

Anyway, what killed this was cost. When I met with the Connextion team they told me it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to outfit a single plane with wifi.

The profit margins in the airline industry are razor-thin, if they exist at all (many domestic airlines are losing money) so there was no way they would invest in something like this, especially in the face of rising fuel prices.

I’m sad to see it go.

No, it’s not Google’s wifi network in Mountain View (although that could probably use a money-business-resistant design). Rather it’s a wifi network in India, cobled together from thrown out USA junk.

One of their main design constraints? It has to put up with abuse from monkeys.

Hmmm, I have a router to donate. Wonder where I can drop it off? Anyone know which Silicon Valley Computer Recycler is best to use?

My brother, Alex, writes for Computer World. Now, you’d think that his obscure little blog would be safe from 14-year-olds everywhere. But, he posted his thoughts about Xbox vs. Play Station 3 and the kiddies show up and start bashing him.

Here’s the quality of the commentary that’s showing up:

“Let me just say Alex Scoble is incredibly naive one sided, retard, You sir have revealed your stupidity in this pointless article. Xbox360 is yesterdays news. You’re reading up on way too much Xbox crap, because if you get your head out of your ass and research a little, you’d know there are thousands if not millions who would plunk down $600 for a PS3. (What the heck is Microsoft thinking releasing external HD DVD drive? Who’s gonna buy it???)”

Oh, boy. That kind of commentary makes Slashdot’ers anonymous cowards look downright erudite.

What the 14-year-old fanboys totally don’t get is there’s a new gameplaying market out there that’s going to prove many many times bigger than the 14-year-old market.

You’re looking at it.

That’s Kim Sacha who has one of the world’s highest scores on Zuma on Xbox 360. My son totally thinks that game is lame, but Kim has introduced me to a whole subculture of people who play Xbox 360 games that you wouldn’t expect to see.

One thing about these women? They have money. And time. And they kick ass.

That’s Kim playing during my party. She played the entire game through, losing only one guy. It’s a joy to watch someone like that.

Hint to the guys who want a big HDTV screen: bring your women over some guy’s house who has an Xbox 360. Let her play Zuma for a few minutes. Then watch what happens.

One downside of doing that? You’ll never be able to play your Xbox without getting her out of the house.

Yes, Maryam, I’m talking about you.

Shhh, don’t you DARE tell Maryam that they released Pacman on the 360. I’ll never get to play if you do.

As to the kids. Patrick says the Xbox 360 rocks. To tell the truth, he took it home while we were moving the big screen and he hasn’t brought the thing back. Sigh. I might have to buy another one.

My brother is right. The games are what sells the console. But there’s more to the Xbox too. Media Center is gonna be important here (you can play your pictures, audio, video that’s kept on a PC somewhere else in the house on your Xbox through its Wifi connections).

It’s stunningly sharp. Every kid who came over and played this summer was jealous.

I just hope those kids don’t come over and flame me. Go talk to my brother.

Hint to the kids: if you think this kind of evangelism impresses anyone, keep doing it.

I was just reading David Berlind talking about Tim Bray’s use of Linux over the past couple of weeks (he’s going back to the Mac). I know what keeps me on Apple and Microsoft OS’s, though, and it might not be what you expect.

What keeps me from using Linux? Three things: readability. Fonts. Aesthetics.

Geeks don’t think they matter. But at Gnomedex I could always pick the one or two Linux users out of the crowd instantly. Why? Their fonts looked ugly and weren’t as readable.

Maryam’s new Mac’s fonts are blurry compared to Windows too, but they still are a HUGE advance over anything I’ve seen on Linux.

Why is this? Because font designers like Matthew Carter don’t work for free. One typeface might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. Even millions. Hinting fonts takes a LOT of technology (Microsoft has at least two teams that I know of working on font and reading technologies).

It gets even worse if you’re Chinese or Russian or Japanese (I hear there’s a few people living in those countries). Why? Their font families take longer to develop and are harder to do. When I visited Bill Hill (his team developed ClearType and commissioned most of the fonts you see in Microsoft’s default pack on Windows) he was raving about his team’s work.

Why is this important? Name the #1 thing you look at most on your computer screen. For me it’s the characters on the screen. If one OS has better looking characters than another (Windows Vista has a whole set of new fonts coming) then that OS will win with most users who aren’t geeks.

This is the #1 reason why Linux hasn’t seen any significant adoption on the desktop/laptop yet.

Fix that problem and you’ll see a serious third competitor for everyday consumers.

But the problem is that Matthew Carter (and other typographers like him) don’t do their work for free. That means Apple and Microsoft will win this game.

The best fonts win.

Oh, and Microsoft, you better hold onto Bill Hill. If he goes to Google then I’ll know Google is building an OS.

Bill told me that the guy who decided to invest in fonts on Windows was another Bill. You might have heard of him. I think that decision will turn out to be the smartest “keep Windows important” move Gates ever made.