Since we’re living mostly off the grid up in Montana (IE, not hooked up to the Internet) it’s an interesting thing to watch what people can’t do without.

Me? Email, my WordPress comments, and TechMeme were the first things to check.

But WTF is Dodgeball? Damn, everyone in my van is on that. Freaking cell phones were dinging every few minutes all the way here. Whhhheeeee, we know where Tantek is (he’s one of the top users in San Francisco of Dodgeball). We know what parties Eddie’s friends are at. Every single one of them. Very freaky. But very addictive. Especially on a long roadtrip where we’re jealous of those who are at the cool Wiki and Wordpress conferences.

When I get back on the grid I’m signing up. Seems stupid but it was a lot of fun.

What caused me to write this? Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin are talking about the no-bullshiitake test for Web 2.0 technologies.

Mine? If you go off the grid and get nervous about missing it you know it’s bad.

We’re having a ball here in Montana. Spent the day soaking in the Chico Hot Springs with a few geeks. I’ll bet the pictures will be on Valleywag sometime soon. “Fat white guys soak in bubble pool” will be the headline.

Heh.

Anyway, I already found the wifi in the state and the two biggest geeks. Had dinner last night with Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow ($110 million in revenues, publicly traded). He indeed was as interesting as I expected him to be. But the total shock was meeting Andrew Field, CEO of Printing For Less.

He told me his mechanic firm fixed my mom’s car in the 1990s and she was their best customer.

Small world. He has 150 employees. $24 million in revenues. Privately held, but the buzz around the party we were at last night said he was heading toward going public.

Both are hiring. And quickly too. Greg says he’s hiring a new employee every day right now. Maybe that’s why they call it “RightNow.”

Anyway, that’s enough geek talk. These two CEOs will be dropping by my mom’s house this week for “OffTheGridCamp.”

Tomorrow we’re going to Yellowstone. Talk to you later. Hope things are going well for you.

Oh, David Petersen of XML.com came out to visit us in Salt Lake City (so did a few geeks from the Mormon Church) and he’s put up some photos and recordings of the interesting conversation we had.

Thanks to Steve Sloan for taking nice pictures of Maryam, me and Patrick at BlogHer.

Michelle Quinn at the San Jose Mercury News interviewed me about my new job and I hear it’s on the front of the business section but they don’t distribute that paper in Montana, so I’ll have to be happy with seeing the bits online.

Oh, PayPerPost is paying bloggers to take potshots at me. Wonderful. Someone doesn’t agree with your approach to blogs so you build your own mob to attack. I love how this guy doesn’t disclose he was paid to write this blog post (someone else sent me the “hit notice” that they have out on my head).

Yeah, I’m not at WordCamp. We have our own WordPress camp going up in Montana, though. But I’m bummed that Matt Mullenweg isn’t at MY camp. Heheh.

Hope your week is full of geeks and fun.

I’ve been getting a TON of speaking requests, including for places like India and Korea and Italy. Yikes. I could spend all my time speaking and no time doing my shows or building PodTech’s network.

Anyway, one that I’ll be at is the Blog Business Summit, in Seattle in October. That should be interesting this year cause there’s a LOT of new businesses blogging. Heck, just check out all the real estate agents getting into blogging lately, thanks to the Inman Real Estate newsletter, which Stan tells us is the one that agents follow most.

While I’m off the grid I’ll look at my calendar and make some decisions. Sorry if I haven’t gotten back to you yet. I’ve been VERY bad at answering email the past month. Naughty, naughty Scoble.

Anyway, I did set up a wiki for our off the grid campout. My mom’s house is totally full, but if you’re up in Montana next week, please do stop by. The beer is free. Just be warned that you might be videoblogged.

Brian Oberkirch talks about having one of his sites pulled down (an important one, too, on the New Orleans disaster) by an ex partner.

Oh, I hear ya on that one. Userland pulled down the first two years of my blog and never put it back up.

Breakage happens all the time. It’s unfortunate. But there are ways to route around the damage. Unfortunately they didn’t crawl everything.

A friend asked me why I don’t get mad about stuff like that. “I’m gonna end up in a box either way,” I answered.

Anyway, I’ll be offline until August 13th. Visit TechMeme, which is my favorite news site. Enjoy life.

MSNBC is reporting that AOL is laying off 5,000. Ouch. But we saw this coming, didn’t we?

One thing I watch closely is how people use computers. When I visited Montana and went into everyday people’s homes and saw that they were on broadband and used Google, that told me that things had totally changed. Not to mention the Wifi signs in restaurants in Montana. I grew used to them in Silicon Valley, but when things get outside the valley’s bubble then you know things have really changed.

On Friday evening or Saturday morning I expect we’ll be with the hoards of tourists looking at Old Faithful.

The fact that I’m looking at a Yahoo property instead of an AOL one tells you something.

I’m gonna go up to tourists with my videocamera and ask them about photo sites they use and see what I learn.

Old Faithful is the one place in the USA that I’ve been where you’ll see, in the parking lot, license plates from every state in the nation (no one lives there, it’s a totally tourist population).

Sorry to the AOL’ers who now have to find work. If they lived in Silicon Valley they’d be sucked into the infrastructure here cause lots of companies are hiring, but I imagine most of the AOL workers are tech support types and they won’t find lots of jobs available, I’m guessing.

So, we leave San Francisco at about 2 p.m. today and head east on 80. I expect we’ll drive all the way to Salt Lake City, which is about a 12 hour drive. So, that’s about 2 a.m. or so.

We need to get a little sleep and a shower, so why don’t we meet for brunch at 11 a.m.? That way we can get on the road at around 12:30. Come and join us!

How about meeting at the Lion’s House Pantry, which is real near the Mormon Tabernacle? Even if you’re not religious, this is a sight to see.

Traveling will be Irina Slutsky and Eddie Codel of GeekEntertainment.tv, Ryanne Hodson (she wrote the book on videoblogging), Jay Dedman, me and Patrick.

Oh, Irina announced that she’s working on putting together a videoblogging awards show to help bootstrap the community that’s doing that. If you’re a videoblogger you should drop Irina a note. We’re working on categories in the van today.

As always, my phone is on. 425-205-1921. Please do call us while we’re on the road. We love hearing from geeks, bloggers, video freaks, and even normal everyday people.

This is the best post I’ve found on Google’s new Code Project Hosting. From //engtech. Author unknown, he keeps his name off the blog for fear of hurting his career. Bummer, this blog is very good. I’d hire whoever did it.

To everyone who has been emailing me stuff for the blog. I’m sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. I’m WAY overloaded on email. I’ll try to catch up while other people are driving the van today. But, I won’t be answering email until next Saturday.

He’s really bent that he isn’t going to be able to be near an Apple store next week. Steve Jobs has him wrapped around his little finger. Seriously. That kid checks the Apple site about three times a day hoping to find new information. Reads Engadget and Gizmodo. Listens to his favorite Dawn and Drew (cause they were marked “explicit” in iTunes and then he grew to appreciate their humor) and the MacCast (cause, well, guess).

I’m sure right now he’s reading blogs like TUAW, AppleWatch, Cult of Mac, The Apple Core, MacSlash, or MacSurfer (my favorite).

What are the MacHeads talking about today? They are going crazy over the banner hanging at Moscone trying to read secret signals into that.

Apple is really positioned well to take over the consumer marketplace. Sure is a change from the 1990s when magazines told the faithful to “Pray.”

So, why is Patrick pissed at me? Cause he wanted to watch Steve Jobs’ keynote and be at the Apple store first thing to buy his new Mac. (We promised him a new portable if he got all A’s, which he did). Instead we’re going to be “off the grid” until next Saturday in Montana.

Speaking of Montana. I don’t have my EVDO card. It got packed accidentally and our movers won’t arrive until after we leave for Montana this afternoon. Crud. I guess fate wanted me to truely get “off the grid.”

Anyway, I will have my cell phone and we’re hanging out with 40 other geeks, so I’m sure we’ll hear all the details about Steve Jobs’ latest stuff.

Maybe if he’s I’m a good kid we’ll stop at the Apple Store in Utah on the way back.

Hey, Patrick, why don’t you load up Steve Wozniak’s speech from AlwaysOn last week on your iBook for our trip? People who were there said it was one of his best they’d seen him give.

Let’s see, I don’t link to Fred Wilson’s blog, but Fred notices anyway. Diane Ensey, over on A List Review, says me and Gillmor are keeping blogs for the elite. I almost didn’t link to Diane. I only don’t link to my very favorite blogs. So, I’m keeping Diane out of the elite just by linking to her. :-)

No, I think we both noticed that there are lots of ways to draw attention to someone. Here, try this: Matt Mullenweg is the #1 Matt in the world (according to Google). I won’t link to him. He’s already part of the elite — and is one of my most favorite blogs. How do I know that? Cause he wrote on his blog that he got invited to a wedding via Facebook. Speaking of which, there’s a little “I love WordPress” icon contest underway.

Oh, and Shelley Powers? I ain’t linking to her either. She’s part of the blog elite too. Is the #1 Shelley Powers on Google.

And Jory Des Jardins? Hell no. I ain’t linking to her either. She already runs the world. How do I know that? She’s the #1 Jory.

Whos’ the #1 Joel? Guess. He’s one of my favorite blogs too. I don’t even need to use his last name. You’ll still find him. I loved his post the other day where he asked “does your programming language do this?”

When I say “Doc.” You know who I’m talking about, right? Well, he’s #2 on Google for that word. His post today was about the Religious broadcasters creativity in getting onto his Sirius radio.

And Dave Winer today notices I’m going on a road trip. You can find him on Google too.

Damn elites.

Seriously? I’m not gonna stop linking. I actually don’t agree with Gillmor either. But, I do appreciate that he tries to do something different which gets a conversation to start. If we were all the same this world would be so damn boring.

Jim Posner just asked me in email “any thoughts?” about Ray Ozzie’s speech recently at Microsoft’s annual financial analysts meeting.

You might have missed it, but about halfway down the speech Ray started talking about “optimization.”

That’s code for “all your attention data are belong to us.”

OK, OK, call off the black helicopters. This is the new “fuzzy bear” Microsoft. And, anyway, they are just copying Google.

You think that Google’s datacenters are just holding search indexes?

No, now Google is holding Scoble’s corporate email too! And, those servers know which emails I delete, which ones I forward, which ones I click on. It even “optimizes” those emails by pulling out spam. How nice.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. I went through and read Ryan Stewart’s thoughts on Microsoft. That brought me to Richard MacManus’ thoughts. Which brought me to Dana Gardner’s thoughts. Hey, ZDNet has some great bloggers, doesn’t it?

But Dana brought me to Joe Wilcox’s thoughts. The experience hub.

That’s all very interesting, but I think we’re all looking in the wrong direction.

It all starts with the blog. Now, why can’t I put my blog on the map? When you go to Live.com and search on “Scoble” why can’t I customize my results there with more information for you?

When I search on “Office Furniture” why is the first thing I see stores? I don’t wanna see freaking corporate info. I wanna know what HUMANS like to use in their offices.

None of the big search companies have figured out that it’s the humans who “optimize” the Web.

They just wanna collect the big company paychecks.

I’m hearing that too here at Podtech. It’s all bunk. If there is no audience, there is no advertising. I’m not an “eyeball” to be tracked, or optimized.

I’ll be looking for who lets me get to the other humans the fastest.

Here, let’s try this. If I can spend less than $500 for an office chair, which one is best?

Optimize that!

Get me the humans and you’ll add $2 billion in value. And, yes, Ray, I believe you know how to do it. You’re still the only Microsoft executive to show up at a grass-roots event in Silicon Valley.

Remember Active Desktop and Channels? Microsoft could have OWNED the blog world and RSS. Why did that fail? Cause when we looked at it all we saw were big companies.

If you optimize for them you’ll fail.

My attention data +is+ valuable. But if you forget about the little people we’ll remember and we’ll go with systems that put us on stage. Why was Channel 9 magical? Not cause of the shaky video camera work I did. It was cause it was the first corporate site that put CUSTOMERS ON THE HOME PAGE!

I’m missing the humans when I visit Live.com. Actually the new Spaces thing got us to pay attention to Live.com again. Take heed off of that.

Give +us+ control of our “optimizations” (er, attention data) and we’ll be on your side. Behave like Microsoft of old and we’ll just stick with Google.

Larry Larsen works at Poynter Institute. They are the R&D arm of the newspaper industry (their eye track research led to the development of USA Today back in the 1980s).

Today eye tracking machines are getting cheaper, smaller, faster, and easier to use. As evidence of this Larry put up some videos of him using his eye track machine while doing things like playing Xbox games. Lots of fun.

I’d love to have one of these and run my friends through it while using the Web so I could learn from how they look at various things.

I always hated going to my wife’s blog, Maryamie, cause MSN Spaces just felt ugly and old. Today I visit and, wow, it has a much nicer design. Feels more like a blog.

It makes me wish that the Spaces team had done a much better job at BlogHer last weekend. Why didn’t they just say “check us out next Wednesday?”

Oh, I visit TechMeme (still my favorite news site, have you noticed it’s getting better lately?) and see that lots of people are talking about it.

How do you treat your customers when you let them down? DreamHost did about as good a job as I can imagine after they were down during a power outage that they couldn’t control. Read the comments where customers are coming back — corporate blogging done right. Thanks to Dylan Bennett for emailing me this.

A guy I know, Josh Wolf, was just thrown in jail for refusing to hand over some videotapes he made of a July 2005 demonstration in San Francisco. The San Francisco Chronicle has the details.

The government has scary powers and is using them. Interesting to watch this case evolve and see how Josh is using his blog to get word out to his friends. Josh, on his blog, writes that he is planning to appeal this case all the way. That’ll cost $10,000 to $15,000 in legal fees. Whew.

Hey, there’s a road trip ahead. A group of videobloggers and Patrick and me are getting in a minivan on Thursday afternoon and we’re gonna drive from San Francisco to Emigrant, Montana. Stops in Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City, Jackson Hole are on the schedule.

Anywhere else we should stop? Want us to come and visit you? You’ll be famous. Or something. Your video will be on the Internets. If the tubes remain unclogged. Maybe if we’re really lucky we’ll get on Valleywag.

Maybe we should do the “Valleywag Tour of Famous Datacenters in the Middle of Nowhere, USA”. This entry on Valleywag about Google’s new fantastic datacenter gave me that idea. Maybe Sergey and Larry could fly their plane up to give us a tour?

Rory Blyth: I love Google.

One of Rory’s best posts. Geek gets girl through Google.

Ahh that’s a fun theory.

But it’s easily disproved. Jay Greene at BusinessWeek has met both of us. He’ll verify that we’re not the same.

Oh, hell, while we’re talking about Mini, a friend of mine said he had compared notes with all the journalists who’s met him and he thinks that Mini is done by a team of people. I don’t think so, though. It’s VERY hard to fake the writing style of someone else.

Whew, the comments on my Windows Vista ship date rant are coming in hot and heavy. I usually would answer them in the comment area, but I think some of the thoughts posted there need more discussion. So, let’s go.

Cody says “Windows Vista is the wrong direction for Microsoft. Instead of putting in MORE bloat, they need to seriously re-work Windows, and make it lean and mean.”

Um, sorry, I TOTALLY disagree. This is SUCH a engineer’s way to look at the world. “Take out the features,” is what he’s really saying. Sorry, I want an OS with more features. I want an OS that’ll protect me against phishing attacks. I want an OS that’ll play videos better. I want an OS that has handwriting recognition and speech recognition built in. And a lot more. You want an OS without all those things? Then load up Linux and take all the crud out and build your own OS. It’s not what the market wants or needs which is why more people use Macs than use Linux on laptops.

Anona says I said that Vista would never slip more. I never said that. I attacked a “journalist” for saying that he knew that for sure. That isn’t something that was possible to report (still isn’t) so that’s why I attacked that journalist, cause I want news to be news and opinions to be opinions. Hint, what I wrote last night was an opinion. Just to make it clear. And you know what they say about opinions, right? Everyone has one.

For the record, go back and read what I wrote when I worked at Microsoft in the last six months: I said I didn’t know when it would ship and that Microsoft should make sure it ships when it’s ready, and not feel pressure to ship sooner than that.

Cody again: “Why does an Operating System need to use so many damn resources? Why?”

Cause it does more. If you don’t like that, go back and use Windows 3.11. It ran on a machine with 4MB of RAM. (Not 4Gigs, 4 megs).

Christopher Coulter says the world won’t forget about Vista’s slip. Well, that might be true, but for Microsoft it’ll be far worse to be remembered for shipping an OS that isn’t finished than shipping one that’s a few more months late.

Asssuck says: >you suckass worm….remember when you were pimping this ?

Go back and look at the last year’s worth of my posts. I think they stand on their own. I do like Vista, still do. But I want it to be a great OS, not one where my friends are reporting tons of troubles cause they didn’t take the time to do it right.

Garth says: “Also is Vista not supposed to make our computing lives easier and simpler or are they trying to shovel everything including the kitchen sink onto our desktop to justify the pricetag ???.”

Huh? I believe Vista DOES make our computing lives easier. The desktop search features are a huge advance. The multimedia capabilities are WORLDS ahead of anything else I’ve used. And the Tablet PC, Speech Recognition, and Media Center stuff that’s in there is WORLDS ahead of Apple. Although watch Apple in a week. Hint hint.

JuanDG writes: “Shame on you scoble, I know MS is not the hand that feeds you any more, but you don’t have to turn and bite it. Shame on you. I was waiting for a reason to unsuscribe, and I guess this is it…”

You should have unsubscribed long ago. I attacked Microsoft before I worked there (told Bill Gates to split up the company). I attacked Microsoft when I worked there (on many many times). I will attack Microsoft now when it does things that I don’t like. If that’s not something you are comfortable with you shouldn’t be reading me.

Booger: “Who are you and what have you done with the real Robert Scoble?!? Or is this real Robert Scoble unmasked?”

I said pretty much the same stuff when I worked at Microsoft. Yeah, my tone was probably nicer.

Myles: “They have to have something special in Vista for the people who are satisfied with XP.”

Let’s just start with TONS BETTER SECURITY.

TomB: “MSFT had a chance to re-work the OS and put it on top of a BSD or a LINUX kernel. They chose to stay proprietary instead. The customers will continue to pay a price for that decsion.”

Sorry, throwing application compatibility out the window would be monumentally STUPID. Stop thinking like an engineer. Start thinking like a customer.

Jeff: “From what I’ve seen, much of what the consumer is going to *perceive* as being “Vista” can already be accomplished by skinning XP and maybe some add-ons.”

If that’s how they preceive Vista then they simply aren’t listening. Maybe that customer would be better off with a Macintosh anyway. Oh, and I’m gonna run Vista on my Mac if they come out with what I hear they are gonna come out with next week.

Miles: “Robert, I’m amused that you post this now. There’s no way you would have posted this as a MS employee. You would have self censored it, or at a minimum, sugar coated it somewhat.”

We’ll never know for certain, but I think at some point I would have said pretty much what I said last night. I never was one of those who cheerleaded trying to ship crap.

John: “When things are working correctly, STFU already. If I have all the drivers to make my USB device work, I don’t need to know that.”

John, have you ever worked on the customer support lines for Windows? Sorry, many users are NOT like you. I agree with you, by the way, but if I designed an OS for myself it’d have 10% marketshare. Or worse.

Jared: “I agree that Vista is not ready to ship but I put the blame on the managers at Microsoft. You have a product that is two years late and you answer “it will ship when it’s ready” at your annual finance meeting? I believe Microsoft is losing their best programmers because they can not offer better benefit packages. They can’t do this since their stock is no good because they have no product(Vista).
Balmer is a good CEO if you need a cheerleader. Microsoft needs better management.”

Jared, you must have mistaken me for Mini-Microsoft. There’s enough blame to go around. When a team doesn’t do a job on time the blame can’t just go to the ones on top. Sorry. I know of plenty of ways that employees made promises that they couldn’t keep either.

This is STILL software. Software is a human endeavor. It’s not something done by a machine. Until a programmer cranks the code out, and it compiles, gets tested, gets integrated with the rest of everyone else’s code, gets tested again, etc etc there’s really no way to know when it’ll be ready. Anyone who says they can accurately predict when software will be ready is a liar. If you expect accurate ship dates in the software industry you’ll constantly go unsatisfied.

James Clarke: “5472 is way better and pretty much usable where beta 2 was an abortion. 6 months is overkill if it keeps getting better at this rate.”

I totally agree that Vista is starting to feel good in lots of places. I’m just going off of my past experience with Windows and Macintosh betas and where they started feeling good in their ship processes. That tells me that October won’t be the date (which is what they needed to nail to get it out in January). What will the real date end up being? That’ll be very interesting to watch and see. I just want them to take the time to really nail this.

I don’t want to see blogs that, when it finally ships, says “wait for the service pack.”

E3 (the big game conference) is dead. Great analysis.

The truth is you gotta look deeper than that. Look at how you heard about when I quit Microsoft. I talked to 15 people. At a freaking blogger conference which cost almost nothing to put on. And it got, according to one PR guy I know, 50 million media impressions.

So, why does anyone need to go to a big conference to hear the news again? Simple: you don’t. It’s not worth doing.

Not when a CEO can write a blog, get more people to visit it in 36 hours than would probably visit his booth at the Detroit Auto Show.

How do you get news out? Invite a blogger over for lunch. It doesn’t matter who the blogger is. If the news is interesting it’ll spread and spread fast.

I wonder how long CES will survive?

Blip.tv was talked up all over the place by BlogHer videobloggers — it was the top recommended site for people to move videos off of YouTube onto. So, this got my attention: CNN.com opens its doors to user generated content.