So, I was standing in the middle of the lobby — I have a badge, but didn’t use it cause the hallway was so awesome. I met Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the Mouse, among many other cool things. I asked him if he’d seen anything cool. Said “no.” Then I turned on the camera and he wouldn’t answer me. Heh.

Anyway, a group of MySpace executives met me in the hallway and said they don’t limit people to 5,000 friends.

I didn’t get their names, but anyway, we talked about the new MySpace platform that’s coming soon.

They told me that their platform will show you a lot more information about each application before you install it. Unlike Facebook.

Anyway, great place to network. How often do you see Dave Winer and Doug Engelbart together?

Here’s a video I shot of SmugMug CEO, Don MacAskill, who has a shirt that shows whether there are wifi signals in the area or not. It rocks.

Here’s the lobby shot when I first got there. We also interviewed the NewsGator guys (really great feed service for enterprises — the longer video will be up in a couple of weeks).

Dave Winer wanted us to open a studio he could use in San Francisco. That makes a lot of sense because so many conferences come through there. But we noticed a different trend: most of the world’s entrepreneurs actually come south: to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.

Why?

Cause that’s where the money is.

So many entrepreneurs come through Palo Alto for that reason and also to visit the mainstream press here (Wall Street Journal has a building right next door to PodTech) that we built a studio here instead.

Today I was showing Doug Kaufmann, CEO of ClearTXT around so you can get a look too.

While we’re talking about ClearTXT, they have a really interesting system to let college staff and students message each other. Very useful during disasters or other things like the Virginia Tech Shootings. That video will be up in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and that’s NOT what we wanted to keep off of TechMeme!

I’ve noticed that PR types are getting very astute with dealing with bloggers lately and getting their wares discussed on TechMeme.

First they’ll call Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. Make sure he’s briefed first (Mike doesn’t like to talk about news that someone else broke first, so they’ll make sure he is always in the first group to get to share something with you all). Then they’ll brief “second-tier” bloggers like me, Om, Dan Farber, Read/Write Web, and a variety of others. Embargo us all so we can’t publish before Mike does. Then they’ll have a party the night of the launch where they’ll get everyone else to come — if they get even a few bloggers to talk about the new thing then it’ll hit TechMeme by midnight.

I usually ignore the PR at this stage of the game. My business doesn’t rely on being first like TechCrunch requires. My most popular video lately was one with Six Apart which didn’t have ANY news. People just like to hear smart people at smart companies discuss where they are going.

But lately I’ve seen a new PR trend. One where companies don’t show their cool stuff to the A-list bloggers in expectation for coverage. Kyte.tv was a good example of this. They just turned on new features last week and let the bloggers discover it organically (when I saw the new features I knew I had to go over and get the scoop).

This didn’t get Kyte onto TechCrunch or TechMeme. But I think it is an interesting stratagy — one of “don’t talk, do.”

On the other hand, I agree with Dave Winer that what Loic Le Meur is doing with Seesmic is brilliant. Loic joins us every evening on Twitter. Hands out invite codes to whoever asks nicely. Then watches our first videos, and puts the best stuff into an edited video.

Loic is playing a PR game at a level that I’ve not seen in these parts.

Here’s a fun game: what is PodTech trying to keep off of TechMeme? Hmmm!

Oh, don’t believe that PR is getting astute about getting lots of bloggers to talk? Yesterday I was emailed dozens of press releases. Almost all of which have been discussed by bloggers on my link blog today.

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.

If you read my comments on the last post you’ll see the “Scoble-you-don’t-need-more-friends” lobby.

Someone asked why I keep pointing out the 5,000 friends limit. Why? Because I still haven’t gotten through and I’m still getting pushback from the lobby. So, let’s try one more time.

First, a “friend” in Facebook is NOT a “real friend.” (Let’s define “real friend” for now as someone who you’d invite over to your house for dinner). In social networking software a “friend” is someone you want in your social network. Period. Nothing more. The fact that people assume that you should only have “real friends” in your social network is just plain wrong. Do you only hand out business cards to “real friends?” In your contact list in Outlook or Gmail do you only have “real friends?” In your phone book do you only have “real friends?” I don’t. I have some people that I talk with all the time on my phone who I’ve never even met. Heck, I remember meeting Donncha O’Caoimh in Cork, Ireland and he kept asking me about what Matt Mullenweg was like. I thought that was funny because Donncha worked for Matt yet had never met him up to that point (Matt is the founder of Automattic, which is the company that makes the blog service Im using here).

Second, Facebook is NOT just a social networking tool. So, any limitation it has limits all the other functions. We’ll go into those in a second.

Third, Facebook’s engineers tell me that the 5,000 friend limit is there because their engines have scaling problems. In fact, I’ve noticed parts of Facebook slowed down for me at about 3,000 friends. Also lots of stuff broke and didn’t work for me (videos, for instance, didn’t work until just recently for me).

Fourth, it +is+ possible to get thousands of names in your contact list. My friend, Buzz Bruggeman, isn’t “famous” yet has 12,000 names in his Outlook contact list. He used to be a lawyer, now is CEO of ActiveWords, and is one of the world’s best networkers. Imagine you tell him he can’t put more than 5,000 names into his contact list.

Fifth, just because YOU don’t use a system in a hard-core way doesn’t mean that it should be designed for YOU. Imagine a pro camera being designed for someone who only takes pictures three times a year (which is pretty average behavior, actually). Facebook claims they are a “social utility.” Yet there are walls that it has that limit that utility for many users. Facebook employees tell me there are thousands of people who have gotten to 5,000 contacts so I’m not alone.

So, why does this matter?

Well, because inside Facebook is a competitor for these three sites:

1. Flickr. Facebook has its own photo sharing system.
2. Upcoming. Facebook has its own event sharing system.
3. YouTube. Facebook has its own video sharing system.

So, imagine that Flickr only let 5,000 people see your photos? Or that YouTube only let 5,000 watch your videos? Wouldn’t you be pissed? Wouldn’t there be massive protests?

Absolutely. Yet we accept this crappy software engineering because of the “you-don’t-need-more-friends” lobby.

The hell with the lobby.

Phil Crissman asks about my Twitter behavior: “does he really know them all? What does that feed look like? Is there more or less meaningful information in a twitter list that large?”

I should do a video of my Twitter behavior, but I have more than 6,000 people I’m following. Which is slightly more than the number of people who are following me.

So, first of all, I don’t use Twitter on SMS. I don’t even use it on the Web most of the time anymore. Instead I use Twitterrific on my MacBookPro. It sits off to the side while I’m working and presents new Twitter messages (we call them “Tweets”). It looks like an instant messaging client and changes every few seconds.

About once a minute, sometimes more, it gothers a set of new messages and brings them to me. 24 hours a day, too. Lots of new messages. 12 new messages every minute or two. I scan these things really fast looking for trends. News. And friends. I’ve started building a personal relationship with many of the people on my screen. Jim Long is there right now, for instance. He’s a camera guy at NBC. I’ve never met him, but I feel like I know him. Hes hardly alone.

You can see what posts I am seeing here. Phil says he was subscribing to all the people I was following just to see what it looked like. You don’t need to do that. In any Twitter account you can view “with_friends” to see what they are seeing on their screens or phones or apps like Twitterrific.

Some things I’ve learned so far:

1. News breaks first in Twitter, then moves other places. Yesterday Jim Long was reading us the wire reports of that shooting. That warned us that news was happening elsewhere.
2. Lots of people post links to their blog posts. It’s become the best place I know of to find new ideas from new people (you can add yourself to my list just by following me on Twitter).
3. It’s really easy to pick out “my real friends.” I just saw Scott Beale leave a message. It’s easy for me to get more value out of his messages than someone I’ve never met. The human eye’s ability to view patterns is really awesome.
4a. I don’t need to read every message. I can see every message sent to me specifically if you include “@scobleizer” in your message (I look at replies directly to me every morning).
4b. I am starting to use the new “track” feature to see everyone’s messages that mention a specific topic.
5. It’s interesting ot get up at a weird time of night and see who is on. Usually while I’m sleeping Europe and Asia are going full tilt. Overnight the news definitely changes. It often is MORE interesting because it’s different than the stuff you know.
6. Lots of blog geeks don’t sleep until late. I’ve noticed that I often see messages from some of the best bloggers at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. — this morning I was online at 3:30 a.m. cause Milan woke us up. Jeff Pulver and Dave Winer, both on the East Coast, woke up and started saying hi to everyone.

Anyway, Twitter, to me, is a chat room. Definitely interesting to follow but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. When it’s on I definitely get less work done. As Linda Stone says it defuses attention. Pulls your attention away from what you’re supposed to work on.

Oh, to answer the question directly: no, I don’t read all Twitters. I only read them when I’m sitting on my computer and online, which is probably only about 10% of the Twitters that the people I’m following write. That is, unless they directly mention me in them, then that percentage goes up to 100%.

Loic Le Meur’s new company, Seesmic, was given raves by Mike Arrington this morning.

That drew out Luca Filigheddu who asked whether Arrington was talking about his service, Hictu. Now Hictu had remained off of my radar screen until he made that comment so off I went to check it out.

First of all, notice the difference in launch strategies used by these two guys. Loic has been visiting a whole series of bloggers and showing off his software. Asking for advice. Doing videos where he doesn’t feature himself, but features the blogger he’s visiting. This is HUGELY smart. It’s PR that takes advantage of our egos — in a good way. I have good feelings about Loic because of how he launched his company. It’s the smartest launch I’ve seen in a while and not very expensive.

Also note that he moved to San Francisco to start his company. Why did he do that? Well, because most of the top journalists and tech bloggers are within an hour of San Francisco. So are tons of the world’s top developers and marketers and business people (not all, but enough of a concentration that Loic noticed it all the way from Paris). Smart #2.

But back to the point of this post: bootstrapping.

Why did I call Seesmic “video Twitter?” Because it actually uses Twitter and builds on top of it. Hictu doesn’t do that. I don’t see any of my friends on Hictu, while I see anyone who posts a video in Twitter in Seesmic.

That’s brilliant and is why, I think, Arrington was so addicted all weekend long.

Also, why am I more addicted to Twitter than the prettier (and more capable Pownce)? Look no further than Seesmic (and Dave Winer’s TwitterGram and FlickrGram). Among others. The API is bringing us really cool new services that aren’t possible on Pownce.

Seesmic IS addicting. I saw that immediately when Loic showed it to me. Sorry Hictu.

I sure wish companies would stop building new social networks and start bootstrapping on top of existing ones.

Cause Dave Winer only links to my idiocy. He’s never linked to any of my videos, which is where the smart people and smart ideas in my life are.

Smart person on there right now is Sally Strebel, aka “bizgirl” on Twitter. But she’ll never get on TechMeme, even on a slow day like today. Smart people talking about their businesses and their lives are never interesting enough to link to, no?

So, if TechMeme is a cesspool we have only ourselves to blame.

I notice that Dave doesn’t link to my link blog. I keep my stupid idiocy off of there (and I haven’t linked to Jason Calacanis’ latest idiocy either).

My link blog has never been on TechMeme either.

What’s funny is Dave’s post made it onto TechMeme before I even linked to it.

I just uploaded the best of my photos from the past couple of days.

You might have missed it, but when he was first born I recorded a Twittergram that announced his birth to the world. This photo tells the story and has a link to Milan’s first Twittergram. I used a cell phone to call the Twittergram service and when I hung up the phone the Twittergram and recording was sent instantly to my Twitter account. I’ve demoed this on stage several times and each time someone comes up to me afterward and says “that’s amazing.”

Twittergram is a service hosted by BlogTalk Radio and invented by Dave Winer. I have a video with BlogTalk’s CEO coming later tonight because they are shipping a bunch of new features tomorrow at TechCrunch 40. Come back shortly after 9 p.m. tonight.

I’ve had so many people tell me how touched they were by hearing Milan cry. Even family members who never would have gotten to hear his first cry have said how neat that is. I’ve listened to it a dozen times and I find it one of my favorite pieces of media that I’ve created. Something about the first cry that just gets your attention. It’s different than any cry that’s come since.

All you do is set up your account with your cell phone number. Then you call the TwitterGram number and it records up to 30 seconds of audio and puts the audio on Twitter — literally instantly. It’s great for sending audio to your friends on Twitter, or getting a short recording up on the Internet as an MP3 file.

Another service that does something similar is Jott.com. Except Jott doesn’t send the audio to Twitter. It sends the audio to India, where it’s transcribed to text, and then sent back to Twitter (or your blog, or your email, among other places). I wonder how they would have transcribed this? Waaaaaa. Waaaaaaa. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Waaaaaaa.

Dave Winer wants a T-shirt.

Me, I’d like to let you keep the $100 per iPhone you so generously are going to give me and other early adopters who bought the iPhone.

Here’s what I’d like for my $300.

I’d like an iPhone where software developers can go to town and play.

I’d like an SDK. A real one. One where we can build apps that talk to the accelerometer in the iPhone. One where we can install apps like the very cool Google Maps or Yahoo Finance apps that are on the iPhone’s home screen.

I’d like Flash. SVG. Java. So software developers can build apps like my very cool Kyte.tv mobile app that lets me answer chat from my Nokia phone, or upload video.

I’d like you to turn on the camera so that I can record some video.

I’d like to buy some video games. Like those over on Kongregate.

I think that’s all worth $100 per iPhone. I’d rather have all these things than have a gift certificate.

Thank you. But since I don’t have any of this stuff I’ll take the $100.