So, I was reading feeds and just ran across Fred Wilson’s A VC blog (he’s a famous VC who lives in New York City and invests in a bunch of stuff that we use everyday). He posts that his favorite post was a picture done by the founder of Vimeo. Asks what does that say? About blogging?

It says to me that we’re all weird creatures and that we like weird stuff. Including a founder lying in bed pondering the future.

I put it on my link blog. Why? Cause I liked it too.

Translation: there’s something deeper going on on blogs.

1. Blogs have lost their humanity. Their weirdness. Instead we’ve become vehicles to announce new products and initiatives on.
2. We’ve gotten too caught up in the TechMeme games.
3. We’re bored. The interesting stuff is happening off blogs. This afternoon, for instance, I’m meeting Hugh Macleod and we’re just going to hang out in Palo Alto and have fun. Meet at the Apple store at 3 p.m. on University Ave.
4. Creative stuff and ideas and questions are getting spread out all over the place.

Anyway, hope you’re having a good weekend.

I’ve just put a bunch of stuff up on my link blog, including a report of what we were doing at Nokia on Thursday. Hey, there’s that Social Media Starfish again! Look for “NRC Palo Alto” or “Active Words” in the link blog and you’ll see the starfish.

Speaking of which, if you want to see just the headlines of my link blog, they are reposted over on Fast Company Magazine’s site and also on my Twitter feed for @scobleslinkblog.

There’s a lot of great stuff on my link blog. Joi Ito recommends PhotoPhlow. Fake Steve Jobs gives some interviews there. Microsoft’s Listas is discussed. B5 Media has a post about me being on its advisory board. Louis Gray talks about his love of FriendFeed. And on and on.

Why don’t you subscribe to the feed of my link blog?

The last couple of days have been interesting.

Thursday ended with an interesting dinner with Google’s PR team and my old boss, Vic Gundotra, who now is an executive at Google.

At the dinner he announced that Google was “gearing up” for releasing a raft of open technologies which would be gifted to Web developers. Much like Google Gears is. Dan Farber was at the dinner too and wrote up a lengthy post on the details and what this all means.

But, this post isn’t named “Micromedia” for nothing.

Here’s a bunch of short videos (since so many of you claim you like short videos) for you to watch.

Earlier this week we went to the CTIA show and met several cool companies (many more to come next week, these are just the first three).

1. Utterz. I tried to hate it at first. Do we really need something else to come along that looks like a blog but that lets you call your blog with your cell phone and leave some audio there? Do we need another Twitter competitor? Turns out we do, and I underestimated this service. Eric Rice slapped me over on Twitter several times for that. I redeemed myself by interviewing one of Utterz’ founders. I’ll call Utterz a “micromedia community service” for now until I have a chance to drink some great wine and come up with a better name. Five minutes long.
2. I get too focused on Silicon Valley’s tech hipness, but Edioma has a fun service that helps Spanish-speaking people learn English. Larry Upton, an executive there, tells me why that matters and gives me a demo. Five minutes.
3. I’m preparing to go to Paris in December with Milan and Maryam for the LeWeb3 Conference. So, anyone who shows me cool travel services will catch my attention. WorldMate is such a service and Eyran Blumberg, VP there, showed me how the service might help me out on my travels. Seven minutes long.

But those are my official “ScobleShow” things. How about over on my Kyte.tv channel?

1. Milan Scoble smiling at his older half brother Patrick. Hey, that brightens my day, hope it does you too.
2. Facebook, on November 6, will announce Social Ads — the AllFacebook Blog has the details. Here’s my thoughts on what those will be.
3. Last night, after I picked Patrick up in Santa Rosa (Patrick lives with his mom up in Petaluma, which is across the Golden Gate Bridge) we talked about what we were going to do on the way home: pick up our copy of Leopard.
4. Patrick celebrates getting to level 70 in World of Warcraft. I have no idea what he is saying anymore. I need a parent’s guide to WoW.
5. Here’s what it looks like inside the San Francisco Apple Store last night buying Leopard. Of course getting INTO the Apple store should have counted for hazard pay — we had to cross through thousands of bicycle riders who were doing the usual “Critical Mass” protest against cars by riding their bikes through traffic and generally causing mayhem.
6. At the Apple store last night Loic Le Meur was there too (founder of Seesmic). So I get him on video inside the Apple store.

All those videos were done using my Nokia N95 cell phone. I love that thing and Kyte.tv’s service, because I can get video to you within minutes of me filming it.

Anyway, after we got home we switched to Seesmic and installed Leopard.

1. Loading OSX Leopard. “Goodbye Tiger,” Patrick says. We also talked about how we met Lynn Fox, director of PR at Apple.
2. Leopard almost finished installing (it took Patrick about 45 minutes).
3. Patrick’s first boot into Leopard.
4. “A reflection on the freaking dock,” Patrick says in his first impression of Leopard.
5. A really cool feature is Webclips. You can highlight a piece of a Web page and then make a widget out of it. Patrick demonstrates. Milan cries. Heh.
6. @geraldb28 Twittered us last night and said “wannt do some screen sharing?” This video is what resulted.

What’s really fun is that on Seesmic, Utterz, and Kyte there’s TONS of micromedia being produced.

Will anyone watch? Wrong question: for most of this it’s about the conversation that happens and the communication we can do with each other.

I got a TV station in my pocket. What are you going to do with yours?

How news spreads…

Dave Winer just called me and said Apple is coming out with an iPhone SDK next year.

How did he know? It’s on Twitter. Not on TechMeme.

MacNN has the story. I just got up, so more to come after I clear my head.

What will this enable? Tons more apps like what Mike Cannon-Brookes (CEO of Atlassian) is showing me here.

My reaction: wonderful news.

UPDATE: as of about 10 a.m. it’s now on TechMeme. Interesting, I’ve seen this behavior several times before that news will break over on Twitter about an hour before it’ll get on TechMeme.

UPDATE 2: at about 10:45 a.m. it moved to the top of TechMeme. I just read my feeds and the story broke somewhere around 8 a.m. this morning.

UPDATE: This list is no longer accurate. Google updated the numbers last night and they all changed pretty dramatically. I’ll update the list later this week when I have time.

Darren Rowse on ProBlogger showed me how to look up how many subscribers I have on Google Reader.

So, I went looking for some numbers.

Keep in mind that these are ONLY for Google Reader, which is only a small percentage of subscribers (although a growing number).

First, though, let’s look at the TechMeme Leaderboard. The numbers of Google Reader subscribers are in parenthesis.

1. TechCrunch (Google Reader says: 117,690 subscribers on one URL, 11,470 on another — this is for US site)
2. New York Times (33,159 for front page, 5,298 for top 10 most emailed items)
3. Engadget (146,449, it lists a number of others too — compare to only 28,289 for Gizmodo)
4. Ars Technica (about 19,000 in quick add up of all their feeds)
5. CNET News.com (14,395)
6. Read/WriteWeb (8,479)
7. The Register (5,826 for main feed, 1,208 for headlines)
8. GigaOM (5,393 subscribers, plus 1,840 for ommalik feed)
9. Silicon Alley Insider (unknown)
10. Computerworld (1,341 for breaking news, 1,959 for top news)
11. InfoWorld (889 for TechWatch blog, 4,384 for top news)
12. eWEEK.COM (5,021 for tech news, about 1,000 for other feeds)
13. Wall Street Journal (2,033 subscribers)
14. Associated Press (532 subscribers)
15. paidContent.org (401 subscribers)
16. AppleInsider (16,326. Compare to 16,646 for MacRumors)
17. BBC (202,463 for front page, 6,971 for Tech)
18. Crave: The gadget blog (3,136)
19. Search Engine Land (3,910, none for new Sphinn)
20. Reuters (4,006 for top news)
21. BusinessWeek (7,209, 3,617 for tech)
22. Bits, New York Times tech Blog (212)
23. Techdirt (12,628)
24. Webware.com (4,071)
25. TorrentFreak (981)
26. Between the Lines (1,588)
27. CrunchGear (4,190)
28. CenterNetworks (254)
29. All About Microsoft (542)
30. VentureBeat (1,138)
31. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (15,457)
32. Gizmodo (28,289)
33. Scripting News (7,594 for Dave Winer’s main blog and 339 for his annex)
34. Rough Type, Nick Carr (1,801)
35. Microsoft (MSDN Blogs where employees blog, 1,357; MSDN magazine, 1,413, Microsoft Research, 2,276, MSDN just published, 5,452, Microsoft’s press releases, 463. Compare to Mini-Microsoft, 3,246. There are a variety of others, but none higher than these)
36. BoomTown + Kara Swisher + AllThingsD (1,325 on Huffington Post, 377 on AllThingsD, 124 on BoomTown)
37. Wired News (104,159 for top stories, 4,291 for science, 2,729 for gadgets. Compare to Google News, which has 192,100).
38. mathewingram.com/work (18)
39. Business Wire (I couldn’t find data here)
40. Scobleizer (600 for ScobleShow, 4894 for Scobleizer, 29 to my Twitter feed,
41. NewTeeVee (1,439)
42. Tech Trader Daily (360)
43 A VC (Fred Wilson) (4,053)
44. PR Newswire (254)
45. Publishing 2.0 (1,270)
46. Forbes (1,058 on Tech News)
47. DailyTech (about 5,500 on main news feed)
48. Epicenter, Wired blog (351)
49. O’Reilly Radar (13,345)
50. Los Angeles Times (415 for top news, 947 for local, 935 for print edition)
51. Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog (597)
52. Times of London (988 for UK News from Times Online)
53. All Facebook (196)
54. Valleywag (5897)
55. Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim (1,656)
56. Inquirer (4,908)
57. WebProNews (about 500)
58. The Jason Calacanis Weblog (2,809)
59. Google LatLong (2,210)
60. ZDNet (930)
61. Download Squad (9,095)
62. Google Operating System (12,284)
63. Official Google Blog (71,283 — the Google Reader blog has 49,242)
64. The Boy Genius Report (1,629)
65. Guardian (7,448, 1,750 on World Latest)
66. PC World (2,279 on latest technology news)
67 Google Blogoscoped (41,387)
68. Infinite Loop (1,987)
69. Macworld (10,545, 843 in top stories)
70. Digital Daily (see Kara Swisher above)
71. Istartedsomething (380)
72. Mashable! (8,763)
73. Engadget Mobile (5,673 for mobile feed)
74. 9 to 5 Mac (76)
75. Guardian Unlimited (7448, 1,750 for World Latest)
76. Financial Times (638. Compare to 176,814 for MarketWatch.com)
77. Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo’s blog (1,050)
78. MediaShift (784)
79. Yahoo! Search Blog (3,509)
80. Washington Post (5,197, 3,502 for politics)
81. Inside AdSense (4,325)
82. Broadcasting & Cable (63)
83. Akihabaranews.com (226)
84. Google Public Policy Blog (1,397)
85. comScore (526)
86: the::unwired (458)
87: ProBlogger Blog Tips (4,586)
88. Think Secret (10,610)
89. BuzzMachine (Jeff Jarvis) (3,166)
90. Agence France Presse (514)
91. ILounge (4,651)
92. Sprint (I couldn’t find)
93. DigiTimes (474)
94. ipodminusitunes (unknown)
95. Doc Searls Weblog (1,397)
96. Reflections of a Newsosaur (22)
97. Googling Google (1,268)
98. Salon (53,909)
99. Insider Chatter (51)
100. Telegraph (1,260)

TechMeme itself has 10,179.

I also picked some of my favorites to see how they rank
Tantek Celik (402)
Shelley Powers (105)
Tara Hunt (1,083)
Jeremiah Owyang (463)
Scott Beale (1,412)
Rodney Rumford (184)
Blognation (5)
Betsy Devine (73)
danah boyd (2,172)
Shel Israel (552)
Chris Pirillo (2,795)
Stephanie Booth (142)
Daily Kos (7,285)
Daring Fireball (10,878)
Darren Barefoot (359)
Derek Powazek (99)
A List Apart (10,542)
Ryan Stewart (478)
Don Dodge (1,324)
Dare Obasanjo (2,261)
Renee Blodget (178)
Ed Bott (1,113)
Michael Gartenberg (475)
Howard Lindzon (257)
Robert Cringley (5,948)
Jeff Clavier (768)
Jeffrey Zeldman (7,459)
John Battelle (35,976)
Joel Spolsky (26,911)
Tim O’Reilly (10,422)
Joi Ito (1,444)
Jon Udell (3,343)
Loic Le Meur (1,538)
Marc Canter (582)
Dave McClure (122)
Steve Rubel (7,676)
Matt Mullenweg (1,990)
Nick Bradbury (1,287)
Noah Kagan (123)
Paul Boutin (143)
Scott Guthrie (5,511)
Tom Raftery (227)
Thomas Hawk (720)
Uncov (754)
Quotationspage.com: (128,748)
Channel 9 (Microsoft’s video community) (2,268)
Leo Laporte (TwiT.TV, 2,854)
Kevin Rose (389)
Digg (14,247 to Digg/Tech; 109,286 for all News and Videos)
Jonathan Schwartz (3796)
Sun’s blogs (161)
Mark Cuban (8,436)
Guy Kawasaki (7,534)
Seth Godin (36,822)
Tom Peters (2,153)

MediaBlitz has its own analysis of the TechMeme leaderboard numbers. Basically it looks like only 5% of the average blog is read in an RSS reader so multiply these numbers by 20 and you’ll probably get close to real traffic levels.

Tim Bray reminds us that these numbers are ONLY for people who subscribed to the feeds in Google Reader. On his server he has 1,455 subscribers for his RSS, 4,403 for his atom feed, while Google Reader reported 3,690 for his feeds.

I’d love to know how many subscribers you have. Can you look your numbers up and put them in a comment? Remember to add up all the various feeds you have (that’s how I got these numbers above).

Enjoy!

The next step? What are you learning here? For one the BBC is one of the only sites that puts “about News Feeds” next to all of its feed icons (they link to a well done page about how to use News Feeds). Any wonder why they get so many subscribers?

UPDATE: Fred Oliveira says that Feed Burner is reporting to him that he has 2,445 subscribers from Google Reader but Google Reader says that Fred only has 524 subscribers from Google Reader. So, these numbers may be WAY off. But they are the data I had to work with. Would love to hear your stories. Tim Bray says he’s seeing a discrepancy too.

UPDATE #2: I might have missed some of your numbers. I tried to find them all, but please correct what you find if you find some that I missed.

UPDATE: #3: One thing you can’t look up? How many subscribers you have to my Google Reader Shared Items Blog.

UPDATE: #4: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was doing something similar. I need to go to dinner, otherwise I’d put my list in a spreadsheet like that.

The folks over at NewTeeVee just announced its new conference schedule for a conference about NewTeeVee.

I find it severely lacking.

First, why feature Joost? They haven’t proven that they’ll survive in this new TV marketplace. I’m willing to bet that Justin.tv or Kyte.tv will have 10x the traffic in a year than Joost. Even TechCrunch is growing bearish on Joost’s future. Why is Joost going to have trouble? Because they wanted to replace TV and the TV networks will NEVER give Joost their best stuff.

But let’s face it, it’s still a YouTube world online. What will change that?

So, what else is missing at a discussion of new TV stuff?

1. Best practices of old on new. The best example of oldTV coming to newTV is what ABC.com is doing. Ever watch Lost over there? I have and it’s the best stuff out there. They are using technology from Move Networks. That stuff blows away Joost. To me THAT is “new TV.”
2. The best advertising technology I’ve seen is CastFire. I don’t see them on the program. I do see Brightroll. That’s good, I have a 24-minute interview with the founder on my show. Nexidia showed me a bleeding edge technology that’s already bringing new kinds of contextual ads to several TV stations’ local news shows.
3. The biggest innovator in streaming media is Chris Pirillo. The way he uses chat. His sponsorships. And the way he uses YouTube is very innovative yet he isn’t on the program.
4. Codec comparisons: DivX has some of the best codecs out there. It also has a set top box that I’m playing with and its Stage6 community is pretty neat. DivX’s CEO was on my show at CES earlier this year. Adobe is doing a bunch of work. So are other folks. Can we see a shootout? Or techniques to get the sharpest picture online?
5. Apple? No, they have nothing to do with “new TV” right? Well, I haven’t been able to get them on my show either, but Rocky uses Apple’s FinalCutPro to edit my show.
6. Adobe? I see one guy on there as part of a panel discussion. Are we going to learn anything in a panel?: No, we won’t. But the folks who bring us Flash deserve a lot more than a panel slot. Not to mention they have a video editor, Premiere. Oh, and my video with the engineering team behind Flex/Flash talking about its architecture got hundreds of thousands of views.
7. Microsoft? They want to get market share away from Adobe. I see Dan’l Lewin there, but you do realize he isn’t a technical guy and he hasn’t built any video or done any video on the Net, right? He was a co-founder of NeXT, though. Maybe that’s the closest to Steve Jobs you could get.
8. Rocketboom? They just shipped an iPhone app. They have the best distribution system I’ve seen for an independent video blog. Andrew is still doing innovative stuff. Where’s he?
9. Blognation? (Or ANY blog network other than GigaOm?) They are about to put video bloggers in dozens of countries. But not gonna be at NewTeeVee I guess. And because they are a competitive thing to GigaOm they get locked out the same way that PodTech gets locked out. If I ran a conference I’d invite my competitors to speak. Why? Cause my first responsibility as a conference planner is to the people who come. See Eric Norlin’s video for more on planning a great conference.
10. USVP? They invested in several video ventures (including PodTech, Zannel, and National Banana). Not gonna be there and they should be. Heck, let’s get out of stuff that’d help me out. Last night I had dinner with Stewart Alsop. He’s an investor in Justin.tv. Why isn’t he on the VC panel? Justin is doing the most innovative stuff in the streaming video space.
11. Tracking and uploading? TubeMogul, for instance, showed me how they can let video bloggers upload to multiple sites and track their results. Compete.com’s CTO was on my show too. I wish someone would do a session on new ways to demonstrate audience engagement and size and all that.
12. New ways to tell video stories? YourTrumanShow showed me how, for instance.
13. Mixing 3D world’s with video? I don’t see that either. But Scenecaster has a way to do that. So does Second Life. More on the way. I’d love to hear the latest and see what Eric Rice and friends are up to.
14. Why not a session on video vs. audio? There’s a lot of interest there and it sure would be interesting to see if BlogTalkRadio could make a case for audio. You noticed my son’s first sounds on the Internet were audio only, not a video, even though I had lots of video gear there. Heck, I sure could learn something about getting better audio quality.
15. Facebook? MySpace? LinkedIn? Plaxo? Facebook is one of the hottest video sites on the Internet yet I see nothing about it. That’s really lame and missing where a TON of “new TV” action is happening.
16. Building a social network around your video site? Magnify, Ning, and Broadband Mechanics might have something to say about that. In fact, Magnify shows off a great “new TV” site to me. Ning showed me their stuff too. So does BlogTronix, which has a system that lets companies build sites very similar to the Channel 9 one at Microsoft. Ning will be at the conference but, again, only on a panel. That’s not the help that people need — they need demos of what’s possible, not more talk.
17. Legal issues with new TV. How do you get rights to music, other people’s videos? What’s the rules around fair use?
18. Mobile video? On my show Buzzwire showed off its solution. Also, Radar.net showed me a way to share videos with your friends from your mobile phones. Kyte.tv’s CEO is on a panel discussion but I doubt they’ll do a demonstration of how that works. It really is mind-blowing what you can do on a cell phone now.
19. Streaming video? Ustream came on my show to demonstrate what it’s doing. Veodia is aimed at big companies with a better quality streaming video.
20. Mashups? YouTube is now showing videos on top of Google Earth. Plazes is giving us location-based presence. What could we do with that?
21. Film sites. Jaman is very impressive, for instance.
22. Webcasting? IVT showed me its solution. So did Adobe with its Connect service.
23. New kinds of Web experiences that’ll have an impact on how video is used. Zude got my “demo of the year” mark and demonstrates new ways to use video online. Mixercast is a cool way to mashup video, pictures, and other stuff too.
24. New hardware gadgets for video producers? Drobo showed me a new hard drive system, for instance, that we’re using at PodTech and love. I’ve been testing out tons of the latest gear including a Nokia N95 with Kyte.tv and a new Nikon pocket camera that has wifi built in. Heck, get Ryan Block of Engadget to come out and show off the latest gear. That dude has a ton of gadgets in his house and he always knows what’s good and what’s not.
25. Real Networks? Do they have a shot at sticking around? They came on my show to demonstrate its new player which lets you save from YouTube.
26. Search and Discovery. MeeVee demoed its search engine. Blinkx CEO came on my show to talk about it (then later took his company to an IPO). Dabble’s founder/CEO showed me its cool search portal and community for video. Stumbleupon came on my show to demonstrate its cool video discovery service.
27. Why don’t I see anything on Windows Media Center? TV Tonic showed me a killer system that’s getting lots of traffic for video bloggers.
28. Video greeting cards? Smilebox showed me theirs.
29. Video email? EyeJot showed me how to do it.
30. Bleeding edge ways to use video cameras? Get Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research to come down. He showed me a system that was wild.
31. Ways to make money with your “new TV?” Edgeio showed me a classified ad system that a few video bloggers are using to bring in some extra cash.
32. Splashcast has been seeing massive growth through its Facebook application. They came on my show a few months ago to demonstrate its widget and media distribution network.
33. What’s the future of home entertainment systems? Seagate showed me its version at CES. I just interviewed MediaMaster too (mostly music right now, but video someday soon) and they have a very awesome service. Videos of that coming soon.
34. Screencasting for fun and profit. Don McAllister, who publishes screencastsonline.com, came on my show to talk about how he does it.
35. Google? They do this thing called YouTube. You might have heard of it. Marc Lucovsky showed me how to “bling my blog” with a video bar, too.
36. Video education? Winnov showed me an innovative system for universities to use.
37. Loic Le Meur’s Seesmic (here’s me talking about it). If you really want to be known as “NewTeeVee” you gotta have them on the schedule.
38. Zannel. I interviewed them this week and they are competing with Seesmic and Kyte.tv.
39. UPDATE: I totally forgot Bittorrent. A guy I know downloads all of his TV shows via Bittorrent (and movies and music too). I’m sure he’s not alone so a conference like this should discuss that and what the industry should do for or against it.
40. Serving an international audience. Look at the new Pop!Tech videos. They have subtitles with eight languages in them. That really rocks. But what do you need to do if you want to serve China and keep your videos from getting censored? How about transcriptions so that search engines can work better? Etc.

$500 for this? Damn, maybe I should start charging for my show! I give you a TON more content for free!

Heck, we can even meet over on my newfangled Kyte.tv channel and have a live chat. With audio, video, AND good old text, even!

Oh, and keep in mind I +HATE+ panel discussions. They look great on the Web site, or in a brochure (that’s why I added them to my conferences when I planned them). But you rarely learn anything you can take away and apply to your keyboard. I was just on a panel discussion too at the recent Facebook conference and, while it was entertaining (a good fight on a panel is one way they can be redeeming) I watched the video and didn’t see anything anyone would have learned from it.

UPDATE: Om and I had a nice talk this morning and he’s severely constrained by time (this is a one-day conference). More on that conversation hopefully later in next week.

If you were doing a conference on “new TV” what would you put on it?

When I interviewed Steve Ballmer a few years back he said Microsoft is in the game to win.

But when you’re inside Microsoft the employees use different language. Many projects there are simply defensive ones. To keep a competitor from getting more inroads into one of its businesses. iPod, for instance, isn’t threatening to Microsoft directly, but they started the Zune project up when they noticed that a decent percentage of people, after buying an iPod, would switch their computers from Windows to Macs. THAT threatens Microsoft’s core business.

The problem is that whenever you do something just to defend another business you don’t do it from a position of love. Or a position of strength.

Now, look at the new Zunes and the reaction they are getting from journalists and bloggers.

I’m totally uninspired. Yawn.

Where’s the 16:9 wide screen? Where’s the super-dooper-podcasting features (and why weren’t these announced last week at the Podcasting Expo? Talk about a blown opportunity)?

Michael Gartenberg says that the features are actually pretty good but the marketing/messaging sucks. Again, this is a defensive product. It’s not a visionary one like the Tablet PC that Gates came up with on his own. The execs probably told the Zune team “stop the bleeding” or something metaphorically equivilent and the fact that they did a good job is surprising to Gates.

On the other hand, Apple HAS pissed off many of its most rabid evangelists lately. This Gizmodo post is one artifact of that. Apple’s treatment of developers and early adopters has opened up a marketing hole that Microsoft COULD take advantage of.

But only if Microsoft is in this game to win. It’s not. So we get uninspired product. Uninspired messaging. Uninspired launch dates.

Yawn. Wake me up when Macworld is here in January.

Ever start a story like this?

Yesterday I was attacked by an autonomous robotic helicopter…

Me neither until I was attacked by one of these criters on our photowalking at Stanford University. Turns out that if it gets a bad bit of directional data sent to it they’ll go out of control and one did just that: flipped over and came straight at me and hit me in the leg (no one was injured and the robot was rebooted and flew just fine from then on). One of the developers said that it might just be an evil robot. Heh. Can’t wait to show you the video (Rocky says he got the attack on video). It was an incredible day with a mixture of art, science, and technology and Ian Hsu, of Stanford, gave us a great tour that’ll be quite hard to match.

UPDATE: We’ve just uploaded the video of the mishap.

The photographers, brought to Stanford by the National Geographic, who presented in the evening as part of the All Roads Project were incredible — they are visiting several cities in the US and I highly recommend getting to their talks and meeting them. Made me realize how much of the world we don’t see because many of the world’s photographers don’t know how to use blogs and/or Flickr and/or don’t have access to the Internet. One photographer, from Africa, if I remember right, told the audience that there are villages where people are getting killed during protests over electricity. He made the point that photographers there aren’t very likely to be on the Internet.

Some interesting brainstorming is underway of how to bring more images from these places to the Internet, which is where the audiences that might be able to help with money and/or PR attention (which is what many of these photographers are hoping for).

I’ll have my photos up in a few hours, still processing them. Oh, and damn Apple’s iPhoto. It crashed several times and ate my photos to boot. So, I’m switching my workflow over to Adobe stuff which I should have done in the first place anyway.

Over the next week or so we’ll get the videos up we shot, including of the robotics team.

The official tag is “photowalkingstanford.” But there’s photos on Flickr for photowalkingstanford and on stanfordphotowalk. I’m sure Thomas Hawk will get some up soon too and I’ll update this post when that happens.

UPDATE: over on Zooomr there are a lot more images. Here’s the ones on Zooomr tagged with photowalkingstanford and photowalking100107.

By the way, thanks to the approx. 40 people who showed up. Looking forward to seeing your photos. Please link to any of your blogs/photos here in the comment section so we can see them all.

Our next photowalking will be in the Marin Headlands with Trevor Carpenter on October 9th.

UPDATE: Here’s my photos from the day:

At Dave Winer’s house he has a Mac Mini. On it he has a service running that displays Flickr photos from his friends.

Now that I’ve gone overboard taking photos (more than 40 gigs worth in about 16 days) I’ve started thinking about Dave’s system. Result? I’m editing a LOT more now and only putting up my very best shots.

Oh, I want a Flickr box. I have Apple TV but can’t see a way to subscribe to my friends’ Flickr/Zoomr/Smugmug/Facebook photos. Damn, if it could do JUST that I’d be evangelizing it to everyone.

Oh #2, I just tried to find a link to Dave’s description of what his service does and I couldn’t find it. Dave, can you leave it here in my comments and I’ll add it to the post tomorrow.

Oh #3: thanks to Bubba Murarka for taking me to the best Thai and best ice cream in San Francisco (on the photos you’ll see where that is).

Oh #4: Photowalking tomorrow!

Brilliant videos. Demonstrates just how bad Apple is behaving toward developers.

What a fun week. Milan has proven I can love something more than I love blogging. Well, heck, Twitter and Flickr proved that too (that’s where I’ve been spending a lot of my online time this week, check out my new photos — we had a fun day yesterday with Dave Winer. In two weeks with my new camera I’ve already made 36 GBs worth of images, whew! Then compare to Patrick’s photos. He’s pretty good with the 5D).

Twitter has really turned into something special. It’s how I keep in touch with my friends and the world. I find I like spending a lot more time there than on my blog because of the immediacy.

So, let’s get back into it. Tonight there’s a couple companies announcing news. Come back at shortly after 9 p.m.

One of the companies speaks to the future of development. Four years ago I predicted that within 10 years very few people would be doing standard old Win32 style development. At the time I thought that Vista would be a lot more popular than it turned out to be and that the world would shift toward .NET development. I was wrong. The truth is that Web work is becoming far more popular than i thought it would be. Every startup lately is showing me Web work and, while some use .NET, most use LAMP on their servers.

Anyway, see ya tonight and don’t miss the Photowalking at Stanford University tomorrow. It looks like a huge crowd will be there.