If you see a Scoble or two at the Tower of London this afternoon, don’t be shocked. Heh.

We had a great photowalk last night — man was it packed at the party Hugh put together. Really great people. Here’s photos that Tim Watt put up from the party and walk. Dave Winer has a nice photo of me, with Milan, and Maryam’s brother in the subway last night.

I just interviewed the development team of Resolver, a new spreadsheet that’s far easier to program than Microsoft Excel. If you build spreadsheets that have lots of code strewn throughout them you should check this out. It is the first application built in IronPyton I’ve seen too.

Hope you’re having a great weekend. We’re going to check out the crown jewels. Talk later.

Ismael Ghalimi has a wonderful list of Office 2.0 apps that he’s using in his daily work (Office 2.0 are apps that you use to improve your work and which go beyond the standard Microsoft Excel/Word/Powerpoint apps that don’t let you easily collaborate with others). Does anyone else have a list that is better? How many apps/categories on this list do YOU use?

By the way, on Monday morning Microsoft will announce something pretty cool in this area, which is why I’m interested all of a sudden.

One thing I’m seeing missing on Ismael’s list is wiki tools/services. Wetpaint is a good example there and they are announcing something soon for Enterprise users as well. Lots of movement in this space, which makes a list like this even more valuable! Thanks Ismael!

Jeremy Toeman asks for common sense in copyright laws and warns his congresscritter against the PRO IP act: “Common sense tells me that the maximum penalty for transmitting an MP3 file should not be over 1000-fold the maximum penalty of shoplifting a CD from a store.”

We aren’t going to have common sense in this, sorry. The political system is jiggered by those who have money and can pay for lobbyists, etc.

It’s sad that our industries and our politicians don’t listen to common sense like that espoused in Jeremy Toeman’s letter to Nancy Pelosi.

I totally support Jeremy’s position on this. PRO IP is a bad idea and is NOT pro user. We won’t get more innovations out of the industry with bills like this.

It’s too bad the music and movie industries aren’t looking for ways to help us enjoy their products better. It’s totally ridiculous that the industry hasn’t found a way for me to pay for content ONCE and enjoy that on every single device I want to.

I guess if the industry were willing to be pro-user far more often than it does then it might have my support when it asks for more copyright protections.

But, I’m a realist. I know that laws like these will continue to get enacted because of the sheer force of so much money being thrown around. Who stands up for the users? Thank you Jeremy Toeman for doing so.

Some cool videos about design. First Gizmodo linked to TED Videos (those things rock, you should watch them all) recording of Philippe Starck, famous designer.

Me? I got some interesting stuff with a company named “EffectiveUI.” Don’t know who they are? They designed some of the coolest Web apps out there, including ones for eBay and a host of other famous names. I did three separate videos with EffectiveUI.

1. Demo of the eBay app they built and a discussion of rich Internet applications.
2. An interview with senior developer, RJ Owen, about the design process.
3. An interview with the president of EffectiveUI, where I learn more about what EffectiveUI does and its approach to design. We also talk about Microsoft Silverlight vs. Adobe Flash/Flex/AIR.

TechCrunch has the skinny behind the new SmugMug. I’ll have a video up soon (hopefully today, although since I’m in London might be next week sometime) that shows off this new UI. It’s stunning and puts SmugMug squarely at the front of the photo sharing sites.

Actually, I got it wrong. SmugMug calls it “SmugMungous.” Wait until you see the demo going across two 30-inch monitors. The UI here BLOWS AWAY all the other photo sharing sites. Hopefully more Web 2.0 companies will follow their lead and build scalable UI’s.

Oh, and they have a new iPhone version out too.

UPDATE: Here’s the video, which is a tour of SmugMug where we see a bunch of stuff. The demo of the new SmugMug starts at about 11:42.

Meet up here at 9:30 p.m. — the earlier geek dinner is sold out, sorry. I got everyone in who left an earlier blog comment, but can’t take more but we’d love to have you join us tonight for a Photowalking. Be there at 9:30 p.m. sharp, because we don’t know where we’ll go after that.

I was just reading the blogs this morning (I have a Fast Company column due and am avoiding working on it) but the news about a new blog council caught my eye. In particular, I see Dave Taylor’s response and tend to agree with him. I’m pretty skeptical. Why? Cause I’ve done enough speaking to enough corporations now that if they don’t get why they should be talking with their customers already I don’t get how hanging out at yet another boring industry conference is going to help them to get it.

And, actually, if your company needs help “getting it” then you shouldn’t be hanging out with other companies, but should be hanging out with the teams who are helping the political campaigns. Oh, sorry, I just plugged my column I wrote a while back for this month’s Fast Company.

But, seriously, here’s where corporations go wrong: they don’t get the value of seemingly unimportant conversations.

Here’s a test. Visit a Best Buy store. Now imagine that store without ANY human beings inside. What do you have? A bankrupt store.

So why when I visit BestBuy.com don’t I see any people? Hear any conversations? Is there any wonder why Amazon has a P/E ratio much higher than Best Buy? (Amazon puts real people on its Web site — it’s ironic that an Internet focused company “gets” the value of people and their conversations better than a “brick and mortar” store does since without people a brick and mortar store would simply not exist).

Demonstrates that the industry has a LONG way to go before it understands the real value that seemingly unimportant conversations have.

Every company I’ve spoken to, from Loreal to Target to Boeing gets that you need to pay attention to the New York Times. I don’t know of a single corporation who won’t return a journalist’s phone calls from the New York Times.

But, how many companies respond to a kid in Australia who only has three readers? How many companies respond to comments made on people’s Facebook walls? How many companies meet regularly with bloggers (the BBC and Microsoft are tonight at our blogger dinner in London — no “blog council” was needed to demonstrate to them why having conversations with bloggers are important).

If this council changes THAT in any noticeable way, I’ll cheer them on. But, like Dave Taylor (who also has been around the block dealing with companies) I’m pretty skeptical.

This is a cool “little” feature in the latest version of Google Reader. if you subscribe to multiple people’s Shared Items’ blogs (I call that a link blog) it won’t send you duplicate items anymore, but will show you how many people actually linked to it. That’s a KILLER feature. But, what’s next?

I think Google is working on a Digg/TechMeme competitor and this is the first in a series of features that’ll bring Google Reader there. All of a sudden my decision to do a link blog using Google’s Reader is looking better and better.

I learned about this over on David Carrington’s blog who demonstrates how it works.

Oh, and we’re in London and having a great time. Milan is as good a traveler as his older brother is. Hardly a peep the entire way. Wifi here in the hotel rocks. It’s always fun to travel thousands of miles just to learn that the Internet works here too! Heheh. Seriously, today we’re probably going to get a tour of the BBC. That should be fun. Last week we got a tour of a Wall Street Journal printing plant (all of the Wall Street Journals that you buy in Northern California are printed about 50 yards from Podtech’s offices. They can print 60,000 copies an hour at that plant alone. It’s amazing the amount of paper and ink they go through there. Makes me appreciate how cool it is that we can distribute ideas via the Internet now and not convince someone to spend so many resources getting our words out there.

See ya from London. Photowalking on Friday evening is something I’m looking forward to. Posting will be light until the 14th when we get back. Although “light” for me doesn’t mean much. I’ll have London’s wifi zones scoped out within a few minutes of arrival. :-)

Seriously this should be an interesting trip. Milan (our 10 week old son) is going with us. Anyway, have fun and see you on the other side of the pond.

This is a bummer, Blognation quickly rose to be one of my favorite blogs BECAUSE of who was writing for them (people like Marc Orchant and Oliver Starr). Now that system is imploding because funding never came through and a mess was created. I just visited the Blognation home page and it’s uncharacteristically empty (UPDATE: it now has content again).

Fascinating reading, but in my own experience I’ve learned that there’s only one thing that really matters in media development: revenues. If someone is promising you a free lunch (er funding) and you don’t have revenues to back it up that free lunch will either never happen (like in this case) or will end at some point in the future as investors tire of pouring money into something that will never make it. It’s not as easy to get revenues in the media business as it might look. Nearly every startup is going after advertising revenues and, so, will be your competitor. This is not a business for the faint of heart.

The news is being covered all over the place due to a letter from Oliver Starr to Sam Sethi, here’s the reports I’ve seen come through my news reader this morning:

TechCrunch
O’Flaherty Blog
Stowe Bowd
Nicole Simon
Debi Jones

My heart goes out to all the Blognation bloggers who probably will never get a dime that was promised to them.

I’m leaving to go to London tonight. I’m sure that this will be the talk of the town at the geek dinner on Friday evening.

UPDATE: a friend of mine just told me that there’s a rumor going around that I’m joining Blognation as an employee. I can categorically deny that. I never considered working for Blognation and am not considering a job there. Just to clear that up.