Tom Foremski reports that IBM knew it was being disrupted by forces outside of it (aka Microsoft) and was powerless to stop them.

Someday I’ll print an email that proves that Microsoft’s top executives knew it was being disrupted in 2005 by Internet forces and was powerless to stop them. Someday. That email I’m thinking of was written before Yahoo bought Flickr and got a response that included the words “business value” repeated 13 times.

Now THAT is a gesture!

And this whole blog post is a gesture too. Can you figure out what the gesture is? Heheh.

This is cool. Last week Heather Champ sent Aaron Straup Cope a gesture: “I’m jealous” she said at BlogHer about Aaron’s technology to do cool things to cell phone photos between the time they were snapped and the time when they got up on Flickr.

Well, today Aaron answered her gesture: filtr.

Wonderful.

This morning started with an alarming email from Rick Goff titled:

Paradise Valley Fire.

It said simply “not sure if you’ve seen this yet, but I figured I’d pass this along. There doesn’t seem to be anthing on inciweb about it yet, but I’m guessing that your mom’s house was in that area.”

It sure was. Just a short distance away. I quickly wrote a note to our friend there, got confirmation that my mom’s house wasn’t affected (it isn’t easily reachable by fire) and was relieved, but sounds like there’ll be some stories to hear when we get there on Saturday.

Anyway, what really happened here isn’t the fire.

It was the gesture response.

I told Steve Gillmor the story and said “I get what you mean by gestures now.”

Now, Rick isn’t a close buddy. Or anyone I really know. I don’t think I’ve ever met him. But, he remembered that my mom lived in Emigrant, Montana. How did he know that? Cause I blogged about that a few weeks back. That was my gesture to the world. It let you know that I might care about that part of the world. That I might pay attention to it. Cause I now owned property there.

So, when Rick saw that article he returned the gesture and sent me some very valuable news.

He was faster than even Google News was (I went there as soon as I got the email trying to find more info, there was nothing on Google about this fire, although there is tonight).

Now, Steve Gillmor is trying to find gesture algorithms. You know, algorithms that do what Rick did. Return gestures.

Can algorithms fill this role? Sure. For instance, read yesterday’s post by Fred Wilson. What gestures do you see there?

I see that he enjoys personal, authentic information about Venture Capital, music, and that he already reads the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal so don’t bother sending him anything that already exists in those two publications. I can see the beginnings of an algorithm right there. First step? Visit Technorati, bring back music info from anyone with any authority. Then you start applying filters. For instance, I see two posts with Chinese language characters. Fred’s blog is in English, so we can make an assumption that he likes English (he can always tell the Gesture system that he can speak other languages, but we’re building software here and software needs defaults, so might as well pick the obvious ones).

Then, I know that Fred is educated and has sophisticated tastes (based on his past posts) so we can delete that post with all the exclamation points — that’s a gesture of a teenage/unsophisticated mind so can be safely filtered out).

What other gestures do we see on Fred’s blog? Well, I know he likes new/undiscovered music. He also has eclectic tastes. And he is looking for music that rises above the noise level. We can further filter the result set with that. For instance, look for words like “love, new, discovered, etc.”

Anyway, my point is that bloggers send gestures to the world all the time and most of those gestures are lost. But, when heeded they could form an important new information retrieval system.

Oh, I sent a gesture over to Steve Gillmor in a recent post wondering what was up with InfoRouter. Last night over dinner he returned the gesture: http://gesturelab.com/inforouter/

One other thing. I didn’t link to Fred Wilson’s blog. Why? Cause if you really cared you’d have read it by now, right? I assume my readers know how to use Google and TechMeme. Cause you’re smarter than me and I can find Fred in both places right now.

Yeah, Steve Gillmor explained to me why NOT linking is better than linking. Tell me Fred, did your traffic from search engines go up today?

I’m sad to agree with Robert McLaws about Windows Vista’s ship schedule. This sucker is just not ready. Too many things are too slow and/or don’t work. I’ve been on the betas of every Windows OS since Windows 3.1 and Vista is starting to feel good, but it doesn’t feel good enough to release to the factory in October. It feels like it needs a good six more months than that, which would mean a mid-year release next year.

Some things that need to be fixed? UI issues (see Chris Pirillo). Speed/performance issues (unless it’ll only be run on super-fast new computers — I went back to XP on my Lenovo Tablet PC because Vista was sluggish and the drivers weren’t reliable). Application compatibility (I’m hearing that many apps are having problems). Driver compat (my Dell computer at Microsoft never worked completely, and a coworker called me a few days ago to ask “did you ever get the soundcard working?”)

Remember: no one will remember whether this thing slipped another few months IF it’s a good product when it comes out (remember Windows 2000? It slipped by years). But everyone will remember if this is a disaster (the community is still talking about Windows ME, which was a particularly horrible release).

If this ships in October, I will recommend not installing it and waiting for the first service pack. There’s no way the quality will be high enough to trust it if it ships early. I hope Microsoft takes the time to do this right.

If they don’t Apple will have far more market share at the end of 2007 than it will if Microsoft ships a great release.

Speaking of Apple, they are readying a dizzying amount of new products. I wish I could camp out at an Apple store during the World Wide Developer Conference on August 7th. I wish I could say more, but that’d get me sued by Steve Jobs and I don’t need that kind of heck right now.

David Hayden, CEO of Jeteye, kept Tom Raftery, podcaster/blogger/IT tech expert from Ireland, on hold for 17 minutes so Tom decided to record the hold music he was hearing and interview himself. The result is pretty funny and will get David bugged for at least a few weeks.

Ever had a piece of your code fail miserably on stage in front of the world? Larry Osterman at Microsoft recently did (he works on the audio team) and wrote about it.

I was interviewed by Andy Plesser at last week’s AlwaysOn conference where I talked a bit about what I’m seeing in the video blogging industry and where I hope to fit in.

One other thing I learned at BlogHer is that YouTube is gonna face a HUGE backlash over its licensing. EVERY video session I was in had discussions about YouTube and how people were pulling their content down. Is YouTube listening? Not yet.

Oh, Yvonne Divita, thank you so much for your overly-generous compliment. I’m ordering your book, Dick*Less Marketing. The companies I’ve mentioned should read it.

I think it’s interesting that I met two of my favorite bloggers for the first time at BlogHer (both of whom are men, Guy Kawasaki and John Battelle).

But, that beside, what else did I learn?

Heather Champ, community manager of Flickr, did a great session on digitial photography, but she demonstrated how important it is to listen after the session is over. A group surrounded her and wanted to know more. She introduced us to filtrs, which is a very interesting concept I hadn’t considered before.

Let’s say you have a cell phone camera. And you want a black and white photo, but your cell phone camera doesn’t do that. Well, you email your photo to a different email address that takes your color photo, strips out the color, and then uploads that photo to Flickr.

The problem is only one guy (Aaron Straup Cope) I know of has some Filtrs of his own (he wrote them and runs them on his own servers for his own use). That makes Heather (and me) very jealous. You can see an example of one of his Filtrs in this photo he made of Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield.

Other things I learned from BlogHer?

That the stereotypes about women are true (they talk about things like mothering, cooking, sewing, and soft stuff like feelings, sex, relationships, along with broader things like books and movies far more often than I usually hear among the male dominated groups I usually find myself in after conferences). But, the fact that they are true gives women HUGE economic power and content power that the tech bloggers simply won’t touch.

Saturn did about as good a job of marketing to this group as I’ve seen a company do.

Seth Godin wrote that all marketers are liars. But Saturn taught me that you don’t need to lie, or even write a story. What a good marketer should do in today’s world is let people write THEIR OWN story about the product.

How did Saturn do that? They brought several prototypes, along with some cool ass convertibles. Then they said “here’s the keys” and stood back.

I watched as group after group came back with smiles on their faces and, more importantly, as tons of photos were snapped:

Not every company did it right, though. MSN Windows Live Spaces didn’t improve its position with this audience. I took careful note of what people are using here. My wife’s blog is the only one I saw that was done on MSN Spaces.

This brings me to another point. Companies that listen to audiences like this are hyper rare. They still look at audiences like this as a one-way conversation. Let’s just push our crap out to them, and get our messaging in front of them, but let’s not send any of our engineers or program managers to LISTEN.

If they were listening they would have heard just why almost no one here uses Spaces. And why Six Apart’s Vox product is doomed to fail (Mena, why did you give a product pitch when asked on stage “what do you think the future is going to look like?” That got you scorned by women at dinner afterward that I, and my wife, talked to). More on Vox soon.

My wife, even made one of Spaces’ most negative things (that you need to sign up for Passport to comment) into a positive (it keeps away most of the trolls).

But Spaces’ feature set demonstrates that they aren’t listening to this audience. Buying a sponsorship makes everyone feel good, but the story that the conference goers I talked to are writing is “that was nice, but use WordPress or TypePad cause they are better tools.”

Oh, and BlogHer attendees, they don’t listen to me either so welcome to the crowd. (I gave them a list of things that they should do, starting with “improve your HTML quality” and “get tagging” and they didn’t do any of those yet, which demonstrates a lack of listening on their behalf).

Other things I noticed: the men were quiet. For the most part. Some women complained about Marc Canter’s interruptions during one session. Christine Heron took that to mean that men weren’t heard from. Well, I came to listen, not to speak. The other men I talked to felt the same way. It was refreshing to work on listening skills again and learn something from a group of people I wouldn’t usually be with.

Why don’t I take notes anymore at conferences? Cause of people like Christine Heron. Wonderful reports. Technorati is brimming over with great reports from Blogher. Interesting how our conference attendance behavior has changed. Now the first question I hear isn’t “how do you get on wifi?” but is rather “what’s the conference tag?”

Or people like Lynne Johnson who wrote up the panel Maryam was on in exquisite detail. Amy Gahran is another great reporter that was there.

The BlogHer blog has a LOT more.

As to Vox, the idea is great (expand blogging to more “regular people”) but I’ve gotta wonder how successful it’ll be. Microsoft’s Bob taught the world that no one wants to be a beginner, or seen as one. I think it’s condescending, don’t you? If you’re going to get dragged to learn to ski, don’t you want to get off the beginning slopes and hang out with your friends on the intermediate and advanced slopes?

The world doesn’t want a ski resort that caters to beginners. Doesn’t work.

Same for blogging tools.

Mena shouldn’t have used her time on stage to appear visionary to pitch a product, especially to position it for those people who don’t have the technical chops to join Blogher.

Instead she should have laid out a real vision for blogging for 2010. How do we get half a billion people blogging? What will that look like? What will it look like when I can put my blog on top of a map? When you’ll read my blog on a portable device? How will video blogging change and/or improve? What will advertising systems look like in 2010?

Mena had an awesome opportunity to lay out that kind of future. Instead she did the thing Microsofties usually do: she pitched her product. What a disappointment.

What did you learn from BlogHer?

Well, I have to go. The women are Ponzi is calling and I’m still Maryam’s driver — we’re heading to Berkeley today with her.

Michael Martine (not a Microsoft employee) says Photosynth, a new app from Microsoft, is really cool. On10 and Channel 9 have good videos too about this app that lets you build a 3D world from your photos.

Everyone was coming up to Amanda Congdon at BlogHer last night trying to figure out what she’s gonna do. Her recent video says she’s looking for work (her parents are pretty good too). I know that just ain’t true. If she wanted work she would have taken Jason Calacanis’ offer. In other news Ze Frank still doesn’t blink and still makes me laugh.

I’ll be Maryam’s spouse today at BlogHer. I’m the luckiest man in the world. And not for THAT reason.

I’ve met more amazing people, and gotten more business ideas at BlogHer than at any other conference I’ve attended. Heck, I met Steve Garfield’s mom. Why? Cause it’s outside the echo chamber of the tech industry. You knew it was different when a group of 30 just sat down in the middle of the floor to have a session. I’ve never seen that happen at a male-dominated tech conference.

Oh, I met one woman who makes $25,000 a year just off of Amazon affiliate links. Who said a link isn’t worth money?

Thanks Noah Kagan for pointing me to the 17 pithy insights for startup founders.

With that, I’m off to BlogHer and to try to catch up on some of my email. Whew, another 33 came in since I posted last night. I thought leaving Microsoft would decrease my email load, but it increased it.

I was reading Joe Wilcox’ analysis of Ray Ozzie’s speech and later Ryan Stewart chimed in and the whole time I was reading that I was wondering:

Does Joe or Ryan know that Ray is an investor in Second Life?

If he did, that would have explained why Ray believes that the Web won’t deliver the most interesting experiences online. You go try to build Second Life in AJAX. I’ve seen it done and it’s not pretty.

It’s not lost on me either that the first thing I tried to do with Gmail is hook Outlook up to it. I can’t stand using the Web browser for email. And I have both the beta of the new Hotmail as well as Google’s new corporate Gmail and Maryam uses Yahoo’s email (formerly Oddpost). These are the three leading web-based email systems. I know many of you are OK with reading your email on the Web, but I’m too used to having my email offline. It gives me peace of mind to know I’m in control of my access to my email.

Patrick Scoble, as quoted on Maryam’s blog:

“What’s up with those Mommy Bloggers? They keep hugging each other.”

It is weird being one of only three men in a sea of people at a party. Now I know what it feels like at a usual tech conference, albeit in reverse. And the hugging? Well, this crowd definitely has a different social contract than most of the tech geek things I attend.

Leaving BlogHer for a minute, today I attended (and moderated a couple of demo-style sessions) the AlwaysOn Conference. Lots of suits. VCs. And other various riff raff, like me. Tony Perkins, founder of AlwaysOn (the conference I attended today), showed me Dave.TV, which looks interesting but is way too slow to keep my attention.

The reason he showed it to me is a bunch of the sessions from AlwaysOn are up on Dave.TV.

Then Stewart Butterfield (co-founder of Flickr, now at Yahoo) dropped by the table that Steve Gillmor and I were hanging out at (sorry, I’m so BORED by speeches that come with PowerPoints and hearing Steve explain why links and Office are dead is infinitely more interesting) and told me some tantalizing new things that his team is working on. Of course I immediately asked if I could come over with my new soooopppppeeeerrrrr dooooopppppeeerrrr video cameras (sorry, Christopher Coulter, I got a Sony, not the Panasonic you recommended, cause I couldn’t justify the extra $2,000 and cause I like the Sony) and someone at the table said “oh, so you’re gonna do Channel 9 for the rest of the world now, huh?”

Damn, caught me.

Oh, and if you’re waiting for me to answer your email. Keep waiting. I didn’t do any email today and the pile just gets deeper and deeper. I’m already two weeks behind on email. Not good. But, then, I’m on vacation, and too busy trying to keep up with Maryam (who dragged Patrick and I to two furniture places after the BlogHer speaker shindig tonight).

What else is on my attention radar today? Wiki’s! But, not ready to talk about them. Damn, though, lots of you are really interested in them. That post generated a lot of email and phone calls. All of which are greatly appreciated.

Anyway, all around me tonight I heard great business opportunities. Especially for video bloggers. I’m gonna stay quiet on this one, though, cause I see some opportunities no one else has bothered doing yet.

More to come from BlogHer over the next few days, I’m sure, the tag to watch is BlogHer06.

I’m gonna disappear again. Damn, my email is going nuts. Calling David Allen! Calling David Allen!

If you’re at BlogHer, say hi! I won’t be hard to find. I’m the blonde. Heheh.

I was poking through the satellite radio stations on my Sirius radio when, whoa, Jason Calacanis’ voice was speaking at Maryam and I over Gillmor Gang. OK, that’s weird.

But then I switch over to NPR and, whoa, Chris Anderson is on talking about the Long Tail.

Hey, Chris, can you get the Wall Street Journal to say our book sucks too?

All your media are belong to us. Or, there’s snakes in the ************* plane. Or something like that.

Anyway, there is a serious (er, Sirius) point to all this.

The online (er “new”) media is starting to leak into the mainstream “old” media.

What I think everyone is missing in the “Digg” version of the world is that we’ve built a farm system for media now that anyone can make media.

I’ve been listening to a LOT of “anyone media” and I can tell you that the Long Tail will NOT roar here. Most video blogs and podcasts just aren’t high enough quality to get a large audience. But, don’t write them off cause of that. The Long Tail does have a huge positive aspect:

The Long Tail is a stair system to the head!

Someone who does have talent can use it to walk up the curve from where only family and friends will watch all the way up to main stream media where millions are listening.

If you think Ze Frank is gonna remain in the Long Tail for very long your latte is a lot stronger than mine is today — by the way, don’t miss the announcement that he made in today’s show, he’s building social software to let you do things with people near you. We all know that people who don’t blink are gonna take over the media world.

Now, if you’re content to have your video blog stay at #1309 out of the 1,400 on vlogmap, then that’s cool. But some really have dreams of being at the head of the tail. Why? Cause that’s where the money is.

I learned that in the book business. The books who are in the top 5 on Amazon make many times more than books that hang out around #1,000 to #5,000 as we’ve been doing lately. And, being at #5,000 is a great honor cause there’s more than one million books on Amazon.

I’m looking for people who are walking up the Long Tail. Are you? Give me a call.

Oh, and unlike other community sites I believe deeply that you should get paid for the value you’re creating for the company that you’re adding to (Leo Laporte makes a good case for the other point of view). There are ways to hand out goodies equally to all members, but to say “I ain’t paying anyone” seems to me to be the kind of capitalist who just wants free materials and huge profits. It’s why I hated the time I heard all the CEOs say “user generated content” at the Google Zeitgeist conference last year since they were all seeing huge profit possibilities by having users do the work and they just collect the profits.

Anyway, we’re here in Silicon Valley and I’m overwhelmed with email. So, I’m gonna take a few days off of blogging and catch up with that.

We’re almost out of the house (had to come home and do some last minute cleanup) but what stuck with me about the BBC was that they came over and watched me blog. They thought it was mind blowing that I could send my words out to the world (they checked out my stats and said that theirs weren’t much better on most of their Web pages) and they thought it was cool when I got three comments almost immediately after the show.

There’s a little microphone on a little table here in the Seattle Library.

It will take my voice to millions of people. All over the world.

That is just mind blowing. What’s even more mind blowing is they are transmitting from the most beautiful building on the West Coast: the Seattle Public Library. When I arrived people were walking all around the table, not realizing that they were talking to an audience of tens of millions of people around the world.

You can listen in at BBC World Service’s Web site. I’ll be on at about 8:50 p.m.

It is my goodbye to Seattle. After my five minutes on the BBC, Patrick and Maryam and me will drive down to Silicon Valley. It’s our last hour in Seattle.

Update: well, that was fun. 3.5 minutes. Didn’t say too much, talked about the future of media a bit, but it’s hard to get into much depth into any topic in 3.5 minutes. The guy on the right of the picture is the journalist who interviewed me, George Arney.

Well, onto Silicon Valley. From the biggest of big media to the smallest of small. Call us along the way. 425-205-1921. We’ll drive for three hours to Portland tonight, then the rest of the way tomorrow. Of course we’ll have the Verizon wireless card.

Oh, and I wasn’t the only one on the radio tonight. When I was coming over here I was listening to my satellite radio and heard Chris Pirillo on David Lawrence’s radio show.

I voted for “love it.”

I remember back on June 27th that someone named Slashchick wrote that we’d never sell our house for more than Zillow listed it for. And, if we did, it would have taken weeks or months.

Long story short: she was wrong. It sold in four days. For way more than Zillow was listing it for. (We didn’t want to jinx the sale by blogging about it, but everything is pretty much finished up now, so I can blog about it finally).

This gets to something that I’ve noticed. Many bloggers and commenters are pessimistic. I’m an optimist! Well, that, and we have a real estate agent who looks out for us.

Remember how we bought this place? We were going to Stan’s office to sign papers to buy another house. Maryam had looked at 50 houses back three years ago. When we got there he said “another place just came on the market and I think you should see it.”

He didn’t go for the quick and easy sale. He didn’t need to do that, he already could feel his 3% lining his pockets. But, he decided to do some extra work. Something Maryam and I have always appreciated about Stan.

Anyway, that turned out to be a HUGE windfall for us. This house went up in price much faster than the other place we were thinking of buying.

It sold for almost what we were asking for the house (in the $440,000 range — Zillow listed its value as $414,000 — we bought this house for $295,000 three years ago). One thing Zillow can’t show is how much was invested in the house after buying. We put thousands of dollars in the house in repairs and upgrades.

Other houses in our neighborhood have not sold as fast. The market is switching from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market but some markets remain hot. If you have a great house that the market wants it’ll pay the price. Stan knew that because he knew our market. If I tried to sell myself I probably would have just asked for Zillow’s price, which would have been a mistake. One thing I learned in the camera store I used to work at: it’s very easy to lower your price, it’s nearly impossible to raise it.

Down in Silicon Valley I know a guy who just got into a bidding war over a house (he won, but paid FAR above the original asking price). So, even in “over priced” California the housing market is still strong.

Why did our house sell? Well, it had all the attributes that home buyers look for. Quiet street. Roomy. Great yard. Curb appeal. Nice neighbors.

So, why did we get a house in Half Moon Bay and pay WAY UNDER Zillow’s estimated price? We bought that for $900,000, where the owners were asking $930,000 and Zillow said it should sell for $1.127 million.

We win on both sides of this deal.

Why didn’t the owners of that home get what they wanted? Well, because the Half Moon Bay house was put on the market in the summertime. There’s a few things you should know about that. First, the heat in the valley pulls in ocean air. That means fog. Cold. Wet. We ignored that.

Second, there’s a major road into the Half Moon Bay area that’s out right now (Hwy 1, which is out at Devil’s Slide until late September). So, that means traffic. Traffic. Horrible commutes. We ignored that too.

But other buyers didn’t.

Oh, how did we find that house in Half Moon Bay? One of Maryam’s best high-school-friends, Katherinne Garzon, is now a real estate agent. She was looking for the best housing investments for us in the San Francisco area. She also encouraged us to low-ball our offer and see what happens. We held back our enthusiasm for the house (it was the first and only house I looked at because I fell immediately in love with it) and knew we were playing a game of chicken. If another buyer had showed up we would have lost that game. I’ve learned to listen to the professionals, though, and it all worked out.

Aside: I see George Ou talking about the heat and power problems that they are having in Silicon Valley right now. I can see nuclear power in our future. The pressure on the system to keep supplying us with cheap power is going to be extreme. We’ve gotten addicted to our computers and our air conditioners and our HDTVs.

Anyway, I’ve come to appreciate the Zillow blog. It’s informative, well written, and I love the heat maps. Not the temperature, but how “hot” a market is.

But, the lesson here is that Zillow’s prices are a guideline and you shouldn’t take them as gospel. Real prices will vary by neighborhood and, even, by house as we’ve found.

Personal note to Slashchick: stick to your day job.

We’ll miss Bothell. I definitely have mixed emotions today.

This is good news for those of us trying to build new content businesses on the Web: ABC tested out streaming shows online and found good success for advertisers, Ad Age will report tomorrow, Jeff Jarvis says.

In other video news? Chris Pirillo and Leo Laporte wants to rebuild TechTV. Um, Chris and Leo, the community is already doing that — albeit better. (And, Michael says in the comments below, Leo Laporte has already done an awesome job of replicating the best content in the This Week in Tech podcast).

Why? TV was limited by the massive audience it needed. Everytime I was on TechTV I had an image in my mind that they were burning $100 bills in the middle of the floor. Actually, if I had imagined $1,000 bills the image would have been more accurate.

How do you get a mass audience? By pandering to lowest-common-denominator stuff. Translation: you have to dumb down your content. I remember talking with Leo Laporte and this would drive him nuts. He actually wanted to make the content even geekier. Sometimes he succeeded in talking about how to setup your own Web server on a Linux machine, but that was about how geeky it would get.

But on the Internet I don’t need to dumb down my content. The costs of doing content are so low that if I want to do a cooking show for geeks I can. Just get a $300 camcorder and start putting videos up on Google Video or You Tube.

Translation: TechTV is already here and it’s WAY better than what was on the real TV network. Did TechTV ever put videos up to teach you how to do something really geeky like use ASP.NET 2.0? No. They couldn’t have. They would have pissed off 90% of their audience.

But we don’t need to worry about that and that’s a good thing!

NicheTV is here. It’s even better than TechTV. And the advertisers like it too!

Eileen Brown, who works at Microsoft, in the UK, just added her cell phone to her blog. Alright, now we can all call her up.

Ahh, today is a busy day. The movers are here. I have a TON of email and I need to go into Microsoft to finish up some expense reports. Then we sign our house away. I’ll be on BBC radio tonight (they found me because I had my cell phone on my blog). And then we start the drive down to California.

And it’s freaking hot here again today. Hope your Monday is going as well.