I love Jamie’s work. He has a new GooglePark Comic up, titled “the Party Plane.”

Heheh, I’ve seen the inside of the real Google Party Plane, but I’ve never been inside of it. Yes, both of those statements are correct. Stick that in your tube and send it along.

I just saw Brian Keller admitting that he’s a YouTube addict and that he found a developer-oriented video that was sponsored by Windward Reports that’s now seeing about 10,800 downloads per hour. Whew!

I’ve been following the career of D.J. Coffman, comic book artist, and I see he’s a finalist in the Comic Book Challenge. Go vote!

Anyway, I hear that ComicCon was a lot of fun. NBC has a bunch of videos from ComicCon. Anyone have some good blog reports?

Oh, boy, Irish blogger Damien Mulley is crossing the politically correct line with his insightful guide called “How to use Google to get a girl.” I bet this gets 1,400 Diggs within three hours.

My favorite line? “Orkut is ancient Brazilian for “place to find people who will have sex with you”. This is why Orkut is full of Brazilians.”

When it gets hot smart people go to the library.

Huh?

Well, you might say “movie theaters or malls or swimming pools” but those are always crowded.

Today is a scorcher in Seattle. Welcome to global warming. Or local warming. Either way it’s freaking hot!

After our breakfast we needed to meet up with the people buying our house and Chandu recommended the Redmond Library cause it just was too hot to have a conversation anywhere else. What a wonderful place! Yes, they even have a great place where you can talk. It was pretty much empty. And VERY cool. Even had a drink machine and an eating area where we talked about house sale stuff while Patrick played on his Portable Sony Playstation. Free wifi too.

One thing we had fun watching there was a new plasma screen that was displaying artwork from museums around the world. I wrote down the service that was feeding the screen: GalleryPlayer. Georgeous images. You hook a computer up to your HDTV screen (mine can display 1280×1024 images, newer screens will be able to display higher res than that) and you buy images you want to play on it. Great eye candy for impressing people who come for parties and such.

Anyway, hope you’re keeping cool. I’m sure not.

We (Maryam, Patrick, and I) had a wonderful breakfast with Chandu Thota. He’s a developer lead on Virtual Earth Microsoft’s Windows Live Local service. You know, Microsoft’s Mapping Service (why can’t they name things simply at Microsoft? If I could figure that one out I’d probably be running marketing). On his “20% time” nights and weekends he also does the very cool FeedMap which lets bloggers find other bloggers near them.

Anyway, at one point while we were munching food at the Brown Bag Cafe in Redmond (our favorite breakfast place) we got in a creative mood and we started throwing around ideas of things we’d like.

That’s not the important thing I took away from this conversation, but listening to how a developer thinks when in a creative conversation is very interesting. One idea he threw out was that he wanted to crawl all the blogs, look for commonalities, then spit them back to a box that I’d put on my blog. Something like Amazon’s “you may be interested in these items” feature, but for blogs.

Note the developer’s impulse, especially from someone who is adept at building Web Services. He wants to put a bunch of data into a database in the cloud, analyze it, add value to that analysis, and spit it back out to bloggers everywhere.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this pattern. At BARcamp, MindCamp, FooCamp, and at Dave Winer’s house, I’ve heard this same pattern over and over again.

Yeah, the details vary. Some developers want to study weather info. Some want to mash up ticket selling services and find you better ticket prices. Some want to take real estate data, mash it up with mapping data, and spit it back at you. Etc. Etc. Etc. Just watch TechCrunch to see daily examples of this.

But, what are the common things these developers all need:

1) They need a freaking fast distribution platform. Er, a set of server farms around the world. Why? Well if that little Internet component that Chandu’s thinking of slows down my blog I’m going to get rid of it. And so will every other user around the world. Delivery speed is job #1 in this new world. It better work in London, Chennai, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Cape Town, the same way it does in San Francisco.

2) They need a shitload of storage space. Yes, that’s a technical term. You try crawling 100 million blogs and see what kind of index it builds for you. Let’s just round up to “a terabyte.” Can you afford to buy a terabyte in storage space to scratch your developer itch? Chandu can’t.

3) They need an API. Something simple to spit data in, and suck data out. REST seems to be the one of choice lately.

4) It needs to be cheap. Um, free if possible. At least if you want Chandu to be able to build it, deploy it, and have it survive its first exposure on DIGG. If Chandu starts making revenue then you can get him to give you a cut, but the startup costs need to be near zero so that the developer “itch” can be scratched. Guys like Chandu (and most of the other geeks I know) don’t have much money to buy access to services.

What was Chandu’s first impulse at breakfast? To use Amazon’s S3 service.

But, that made me wonder why Microsoft isn’t seizing this opportunity now. Microsoft has been stunningly successful by simply catering to developer’s needs.

The fact that one of its own engineers is feeling an impulse that can’t be satisfied on Microsoft’s own server farms is telling. And should be keeping Microsoft’s executives awake at night.

We talked about the fact that only big companies will be able to deliver #1 and #4. #2 is actually pretty easy to do for a small company, but if you want your app to be distributed around the world it takes some resources and to both of us that will mean developers will be attracted to Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Yahoo/eBay.

So, let’s go through the players one-by-one.

Google. Google has some daunting advantages in the coming developer wars. First, nearly EVERY developer I know uses Google. Most use Gmail. Most use Firefox (which really is a Google-friendly browser). A large percentage use Google Maps. The fact that Microsoft has ceded the influential geeks over to Google is going to pay off big time for Google. I’ll bet this is why Vic Gundotra decided to go over to Google (he still hasn’t told me what he’s gonna do at Google or why he left Microsoft, but I can read the tea leaves).

Yahoo. Yahoo has the social software world, which will be its key card that it can use to stay in the game. Whenever I meet a developer I ask him or her about the services they use. Invariably the names Flickr and Del.icio.us come up. If Yahoo can figure out how to use these two developer touch points to get developers to come over and build things on its system, it’ll see wins. That said, I’ve been doing a lot of surveying of user behavior lately. When I hang out with developers they use Google as their search engine. When I hang out in places that have more “normal” users, they are heavier Yahoo and MSN and AOL users. So, Yahoo isn’t seen as “geeky” as Google, which might hurt their position. Yahoo will need to bring something dramatic to the table to get geeks to pay attention. If they just match Google’s offerings, the geeks will just stay with Google.

Microsoft. Microsoft has a huge number of developers but those developers are skilled at building Visual Basic apps for businesses. They don’t think a lot about the Web. The ones who’ve decided to spread their wings generally switch over to a Google mindset instead of switching over to a Microsoft mindset. But, Microsoft can always get back in the game. They are investing big time in both marketing initiatives (Mix, Channel 9, On10.net) and have some really interesting stuff coming. While at breakfast Scott Guthrie, general manager inside Microsoft’s developer division came over (I’m going to miss living in the Redmond area) and said he wanted to show me some cool new Web developer initiatives they will soon launch. Not so secret weapons? Ray Ozzie. Scott Isaacs. Google should have hired Scott when it had the chance. Scott has some stuff cooking that’ll keep Larry and Sergey (and MarkL and VicG) up at night.

Amazon. Amazon is out in the lead right now with S3. Will the rest let them keep that position for long? No. Some other advantages Amazon has? Great community, loyal — and buying — customers who’ll buy other new things offered on Amazon’s site. A great affiliate model and system (bloggers get paid everytime they send customers to Amazon).

eBay. They have Lenn Pryor. Seriously what they have is the largest buying and selling community out there. And they have Skype, which hasn’t made sense yet. But, Skype built a great P2P system. What’s the hardest thing for developers to do? Get huge amounts of data around the world without paying for it. Hmmmm, if the dev team that did Skype could do something innovative here that would absolutely rock. But, let’s assume that the Skype team isn’t gonna do anything. Well, eBay still has learned a TON about keeping its Web system up and running. That wouldn’t be hard to turn into a set of services that developers could use for other purposes.

My money? It’s on Google. Why? Cause I go back to the developers. Right now they are more likely to use Google’s stuff than any other — you should see how developers and geeks talk about all these companies. So, unless Google does something evil to piss developers off, or don’t deliver the long-rumored GDrive soon, it’s their game to lose.

That said, don’t bet out the other players. They are all trying to figure out where the value will come in this chain.

Anything I haven’t thought about? How do you see the coming Internet Developer Wars playing out?

Update: Nik Cubrilovic stands up for smaller companies (like the one he started, Omnidrive) that are doing the same thing, but are shipping now.

The geeks are cooking now. Or will be after they read “Cooking for Engineers.” Done by a software developer, Michael Chu, in Silicon Valley. Mmmm, this makes me hungry!

Noah Kagan sent me this one (he’s a user experience designer, used to work for Facebook). We were talking last weekend about potential videoblogs that might be fun to do. His idea was to do a cooking show, which I thought was a great idea. Why would that work and why is that an opportunity that isn’t filled by mainstream media like Julia Childs? Because, let’s say I have an iPod. Let’s say I had 50 different recipes downloaded onto my iPod, but each one is a video podcast. First 10 seconds of each is a list of ingredients you need from the store. Now, no program on TV does that. Why? Cause that’s a lame format for something where you’ll watch for 30 or 60 minutes. But an iPod is different — you can select from a number of choices and you can carry the thing around with you. The needs of an iPod user are DIFFERENT than the needs of someone sitting on their Barcalounger watching a TV screen. Don’t ya think?

This opens up a whole raft of new content opportunities. Imagine if Robert Hess converted all his cocktails on his Drinkboy site to videos? (He’s a geek who works at Microsoft, by the way).

I wonder what a food critic, like Hillel Cooperman’s TastingMenu (a geek who runs the Microsoft Max team at Microsoft) would be able to do with video? That site rocks, by the way.

Do you have a favorite food or drink site? Especially ones done by geeks with day jobs like these?

Michael had one of these Barcalounger setups in his living room and I fell instantly in love. Anyone have better seats for a home theater setup?

Why do I look at my referer log? Cause the coolest people link to me. Heheh.

Anyway, tonight the AmigoFisher blog linked over here.

AmigoFish? Hmmm, I remember my readers telling me that AmigoFish was cool. So, I read on. And tried it out.

It indeed is cool.

I am into digital photography, so did a search for that. That led me to the Studio Lighting.net blog and podcast, which let me to the Strobist blog.

This is the best of podcasting. People who care about what they do and are willing to share their craft with other people.

I’m gonna definitely do some more “AmigoFishing.”

Aside: Kevin O’Keefe, LexBlogger (a law blog) writes today that the best blogs send audiences away.

Well, the best search engines take you to great stuff.

I get the weirdest phone calls.

This afternoon I got a call that went something like this:

“Hello, this is Robert Scoble.”

“Hi, this is Michael Markman and I live right around the corner from you and wondered if you would like to see Moxi before you leave?”

“Sure.”

Now, Michael had emailed me before to let me know about Moxi and it sounded very interesting, so I wanted to make sure I saw it before I left. He pitched it as sort of a Media Center for cable companies.

Long story short I wasn’t doing much and the heat was keeping me from doing anything productive anyway, so I said “sure, wanna meet up now?”

Anyway, I just got back from spending a delightful hour or so with Michael.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

First, I didn’t know much about Michael. He was creative director on Moxi. Ran the team that designed the interface, which won two Emmy’s! (That was a clue that this would be a step above other UI’s). He also told me he worked at Apple for about 10 years in the creative services department back in the 80s/90s.

Anyway, he showed me through the UI. I wanted one almost instantly. And that’s where the story falls apart.

“Can I order this through Comcast?”

“No.”

“How about any other cable company?”

“Only if you live in a few select cities.”

Seems that you can have the best UI, a well-thought out system, with lots of great options, but if you can’t talk the cable companies into adopting it you’re dead in the water.

You know, I’m tired of putting up with a poor user experience on my cable box.

Everyone complains about the monopoly that Microsoft has, but at least you have a choice there. You can go with Open Office. Or Wordperfect. On the Office side. On the OS side there’s OSX and Linux. Wonderful competitors to Microsoft’s offerings.

But on cable or phone systems? We have absolutely no choice.

I want to buy Moxi. But the cable companies are keeping us from considering it.

And we won’t even talk about the IPTV systems that Microsoft showed me. Four HDTV video channels on screen at one time.

That’s blocked too.

Instead we have to put up with crappy UIs, poor feature sets, and crappy HD content.

Do you blame me for loading BitTorrent?

Anyway, thanks Michael for inviting me over. I sure wish everyone could use the system you helped design.

Jeff Sandquist, my former boss at Microsoft, had a horrible experience on Northwest Airlines today. He’s sitting in the Minneapolis airport. Say hi if you see him. He also just started a wiki to start tracking power and wifi locations at airports. I thought about doing that, but not sure it would really help anyone. Wikipedia, though, does list wifi availability for airports.

Anyway, this reminds me why I am a HUGE fan of Southwest Airlines. Nearly the identical thing happened to me on a recent trip. I was set up to have a connecting flight through Reno. The flight was getting delayed. I was getting nervous. But before anything could happen the flight attendant called out my name and the name of another gentleman.

Turned out she was getting us off the plane and had already booked us on another flight.

It’s weird, but the people who interact with the customers at Southwest are just a lot more interesting than their blog makes them out to be. I’ve been on flights where the attendant tells great jokes. Another time someone sang and got cheers from the passengers.

Fred, over at A VC blog, writes about “scars from the last bubble.”

Oh, that matches my psychological profile very well. It might seem from reading my blog that I have non-ending confidence that the advertising market (and the pressure on VCs to keep pouring on the gas) will continue to grow robustly.

The truth, however, is quite different. I’m very scared of the future. I remember the day in February 2003 where I laid myself off. I remember how hard it was for Maryam to find a new job (she went unemployed for more than a year).

I remember when most of my friends were either totally unemployed, or working for no cash. Remember the guy who started Blogger at Google? He wasn’t getting paid. How about the couple who started Six Apart? Unemployed.

So, what have I learned?

Your revenue ramp better be going up faster than your cash on hand is going down. Seems simple to do, but this is really hard. Why? Well, here’s a good example. Which would you rather have? $100,000 today or a penny doubled every day for a month? Well, the penny doubled will be a lot more money. But, if your cash runs out before the 20th of the month you would have been better off taking the $100,000. Markets build by doubling. That’s why big companies miss important things when they are small (they only see things after the metaphorical 20th day when the numbers start to get really interesting). But keeping your company going until that metaphorical 20th day is a terrifying game of chicken between your cash going down and waiting for that doubling effect to really kick in (and that’s assuming you have a product or service that’ll keep doubling — like blogging turned out to be).

If you are seeing a doubling effect going on, measure its amplitude, and then spend accordingly. The blogging world was doubling every five months. In the first year I was blogging, 2000, that meant going from a couple hundred blogs that I could find to about 400. In 2001, it went to 800, then 1600 by the end of the year. In 2002 it went to thousands. In 2003 it went to hundreds of thousands. In 2004 it went to millions. The problem is that we spent our cash so we couldn’t survive past 2003. That either meant we should have gone back and gotten more money (not possible cause VCs weren’t investing in very many things back in 2002/03) or we should have slowed down our spending. If I was honest with you I should never have gotten hired at UserLand back then, I didn’t add enough value for the eight months of cash that were left. The doubling effect hadn’t yet kicked in.

Sometimes it’s good to take the $100,000 offer if it makes sense and live to see another day instead of holding out for a penny doubling. I don’t remember one of those on the table, but if I ever get a chance like that I’ll look back at this as advice.

At this point PodTech is gassing up. Why? We need some products and services, er, shows, that can get onto the doubling effect that video blogging is now seeing. But this scares the hell out of me. On the other hand, if we don’t spend the money, hire great people, we won’t be able to surf that doubling wave that we’re seeing. It means getting over your fears.

My mom dying was a HUGE part of this. She told me, by dying at too young an age, ”it’s time to surf and take some risks.” It isn’t lost on me that my new house is just a few miles from Mavericks, the place where some of the largest waves in the world hit land. Those waves have killed professional surfers. The surf report has come in and the waves are getting bigger.

I don’t know that we can really avoid the next bust, though, but at least this time around I’m going in with my eyes open. If you were joining a startup today like I am, what would you be trying to do to live through the bad times?

BL Ochman has an interesting post today about Dell’s recent business problems.

I think it’s even deeper than the support issues that Dell has had with bloggers.

But, let’s start there. This week Patrick’s power supply broke for his Apple iBook. So, I dropped him off this afternoon at the Apple store in Bellevue, Washington.

He promptly walked out with a new powersupply. I didn’t have to even be involved. He just got a reservation at the Genius Bar and took care of the problem himself. I wasn’t even in the store.

Dell can’t match that customer support. If he had a product from Dell he’d need to wait until Tuesday to receive his new power supply.

If Dell hasn’t figured it out yet Apple is now just another Windows OEM. But what an OEM it is! And Apple is definitely taking away marketshare from Dell (all the new MacBooks at Microsoft that I saw were evidence of this — passionate computer users appreciate great design and great service). Dell is also being hurt on the innovation side of the house. By not doing a Tablet PC Dell has told the marketplace that the innovation is gonna come from other places. I’m typing to you on a Lenovo Tablet PC right now. Why isn’t this a Dell? Because Dell didn’t innovate.

Apple has marketing that makes everyone pay attention. Does Dell inspire anti-Dell advertising imagery like this?

But it gets worse from there. I need a new laptop for work. PodTech has given me a budget of $2,500 to spend on a new laptop.

I’m a home user. Quick, find me the new Dell that has a high-definition screen on Dell’s home laptop page. Hint: it doesn’t exist there. If I hadn’t seen them at Microsoft I wouldn’t even know about them. This is a competitive advantage that Dell has over Apple (Apple doesn’t have 1080 screens in its laptops yet) but Dell is hiding them.

But, I look at how Apple treated a 12-year-old today. And, I probably will hold out for an Apple product because of that service aspect that Dell just can’t provide because Dell’s business model requires cutting every bit of cost out of its distribution chain.

Hmm, I hadn’t noticed this either, but search-engine authority Barry Schwartz, over on the authoritative Search Engine Watch, points out RSS feed icons on Google Base. They are RSS 2.0 feeds, too. That little RSS thing? It’s going places! Or bases. All your RSS base belong to us. OK, I need some sleep. Enjoy the feeds!

Interesting podcast where Atari co-founder Al Alcorn talks with PodTech’s Rio Pesino about Silicon Valley history, including meetings with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

Fascinating recollections. He is one of those guys who didn’t think personal computers would be a big deal (turned down the chance to produce Woz’s contraptions at Atari).

How do I know it’s back up? Cause Maryam is rolling on the couch practically peeing herself over how funny Nick Douglas’ “Trackback Mountain” post is. I haven’t seen her laugh like that in years! Valleywag is a gossip site. About as accurate as those magazines you find at the grocery store checkout stand (and about as funny, as long as you aren’t the one the magazine is talking about).

I was telling someone just today that I will never sign up for another email newsletter. Ever.

Michael Martine reminded me of that when he wrote a blog post “my love/hate relationship with Microsoft.”

In that post he even gives Microsoft a couple of kudos “maybe they learned something from Scoble afterall.”

No, sorry, Michael, it looks like telling Microsoft’s marketers that they should be fired for not having RSS feeds didn’t take.

Getting people to subscribe to an email newsletter is sssooo 1990s.

If that’s the kind of marketing we should expect for Zune then Apple has nothing to worry about.

But, Michael is right. At least the Zune team has a blogger among its ranks. I’ve subscribed to his blog. It has an RSS feed.

Jimmy Wales (a guy who DOES know how to set up his own wiki server — he’s the founder of Wikipedia) is starting a political wiki, Central Campaign Wikia, that he hopes will change the face of politics the way wikipedia changed the face of encyclopedic information.

Ahh, the Internet is still giving Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) heck over his speech where he said the Internet is a series of tubes.

Over on AlterNet they posted a DJ remix of his speech. It’s funny!

And while we’re laughing over old news, the Jon Stewart video where he makes fun of “it’s a series of tubes” Stevens is pretty funny too. It’s Friday. Stick this in your tube!

I was over at Joi Ito’s blog and saw how Firefox advocates are trying to get more awareness among everyday people. That’s a great sign that geeks are trying to get non-geeks onto the bandwagon.