Dare Obasanjo asks “what are those A-list technology bloggers good for?”

He’s absolutely right! (I’ve been saying that a lot today — I’m in a very agreeable mood).

The thing is I’ve been keeping my own “A list.” I judge 772 feeds (which represents thousands of blogs since some of my feeds, like Microsoft’s feed, has more than 3,000 bloggers on one feed).

I judged 35,609 items in the past 30 days, according to Google Reader. Out of all those items I shared 1,094 items with you.

To get onto my feed reader you’ve gotta do something better than the average blog. You’ve gotta bring the best of tech through my feed reader. If you don’t I unsubscribe and I go somewhere else.

Out of all those feeds Google Reader keeps track of the top 35 feeds. This is the new A list and DARE IS ON IT.

See, he better watch attacking the A list tech bloggers because he now is one.

I think that’s called a “looping flame.” Where you intended damage to happen somewhere else but it came back to focus on you. Ouch. :-)

1. Mashable
2. Read/Write Web
3. TechCrunch
4. Media 2.0 Workgroup
5. digg
6. Sun bloggers
7. Gizmodo
8. ZDNet blogs
9. Planet Intertwingly (a bunch of bloggers show up here, including Dare).
10. All Facebook
11. MSDN Blogs
12. digg/Technology
13. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
14. RSS Feed for Lifehacker
15. GigaOM Network
16. VentureBeat
17. Chuqui 3.0
18. VentureBeat Wire
19. Y Combinator Startup News
20. Engadget
21. TechNet Blogs
22. Digital Backcountry - Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog
23. JD on EP
24. Google Operating System
25. A Welsh View
26. dzone.com: latest front page
27. All Things Digital
28. Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life
29. Valleywag
30. Googlified
31. Ryan’s shared items in Google Reader
32. rexblog: Rex Hammock’s Weblog
33. Metaversed - Business and Technology News from the Metaverse
34. Business 2.0 Beta Blogs
35. CrunchGear

Anyway, I threw an answer to Dare up on my Kyte.tv channel as well.

I’m noticing a lot more of how companies are using Web 2.0 stuff on their Web pages lately. I’m sitting with Mrinal Desai, VP of Sales and Business Development and co-founder of CrossLoop. CrossLoop does simple screen sharing for free. Built on a P2P architecture. Lets you do customer or family tech support for free. Really great service.

He found me on Facebook and started a conversation with me there.

But if you look at CrossLoop’s blog they have a bar where they keep track of all the bloggers who are talking about CrossLoop. He uses Google’s Blog Search to find people who are talking about their product, then he puts them into Del.icio.us, tags them, and that gets thrown automatically into a widget on CrossLoop’s Web page. He can leave comments underneath each URL too by leaving a note in Del.icio.us. He’s using Del.icio.us’ links widget. You could do the same thing on your blog.

Oh, and if you click on “WW User Stories Mappd” on the right side of CrossLoop’s blog you’ll find another cool Web 2.0 device: a map that shows user testimonials. Whenever he sees a testimonial written on a blog, he contacts that blogger or customer, and asks them for where they are located. Then he uses Google’s My Maps to enter their location. So he created his own “MyMap” to promote how he’s getting global coverage. Really cool.

UPDATE: Not yet on TechCrunch (as of 10:13 p.m.)! Damn, it’s not often that I scoop Mike Arrington by more than an hour on an important Web product launch! Hi Mike! :-) Heck, as of 10:48 p.m. it’s not up on Om Malik’s site, either.

I really want to love the new Plaxo. The 18-minute demo I got last week is awesome — see it embedded above. They’ve completely rebuilt the system from scratch and removed the reliance on Outlook and the negative “send spam to your friends” kind of stuff.

UPDATE: Here’s an interview I did with the chief platform architect and VP of marketing of Plaxo and here’s the demo video which shows us what’s cool and new about the new Plaxo.

It’s now a Web service. In fact you can use Plaxo without loading any software. All to manage your contacts. For someone like me that still has most of my contacts in Outlook the new Plaxo is a godsend. It lets me move my contacts, my calendar data, and other things out of Outlook and onto other platforms.

You can move things over to Google, AIM, Yahoo, the Mac’s iCal, and a variety of other applications and cell phones.

It is really awesome.

Now comes the “but.”

In my tests today it was way too slow. It’s not synching reliably with my Outlook 2007 running on Parallels on the Mac. Had to drop back to XP and Office 2003 to get it to work right. Even then it took hours to sync up my stuff and I only have 378 contacts in Outlook and a moderately complex calendar.

Also, I just checked my Gmail account and it didn’t synch those yet. Gotta go and figure that out.

On the other hand it now is encroaching on social networking apps like LinkedIn and Facebook. If they can get it all to work (and get filters for my cell phones and LinkedIn and Facebook itself) then it’d be great. UPDATE: the new Plaxo 3.0 already hooks up to LinkedIn, can someone try that and report on how it works?

Speaking of filters. When you log into the new Plaxo it doesn’t yet hook up with anything. You have to tell it how to hook up with things like Outlook and Gmail.

This will be MUCH clearer after you see the demo video. It really is pretty brilliant design for adding on new functionality. It’s just that there’s a lot missing that we need to really give the new Plaxo a five star review.

You’ll want to use this, though. When it works it’s the best way to manage your contacts.

If you try it out, what do you think?

UPDATE: Plaxo competitor LinkedIn today let leak that they are thinking of opening its platform up to developers. That’s a smart way to keep people on LinkedIn.

UPDATE2: there are several other articles about Plaxo 3.0 already up on TechMeme and I’ll put the best ones, as usual, on my link blog as well.

UPDATE3: If you try out the new Plaxo, make sure to add me as a contact and see if it brings down all my info. My email is robertscoble@hotmail.com

Jeremy Zawodny, Esther Dyson, Mike Arrington, and me are on a panel this week talking about Web 2.0. I guess Charles River Venture partners didn’t get the memo that I’m irrelevant to Web 2.0. Whatever that means.

Which leads me to Jeremy’s post. He’s trying to define what Web 2.0 means.

To me?

Web 1.0 was about pages. URLs.
Web 2.0 was about users. Adding them onto corporate pages. Wikis. Blogs. Myspaces.
Web 3.0 is about getting rid of pages altogether. Being able to make the Web YOU want or need. Is Twitter a page? Or a post? Or an SMS? A graph? Or a map display?

But, maybe this is just undefinable. Which means panel discussions about it are always interesting. Or should be, especially when you have an irrelevant asshat on the panel like me. :-)

Alfred Thompson, who works for Microsoft, basically says I’m not welcome at Mix: Why Scoble is irrelevant in the world of Web 2.0.

Ahh, yes, ye olde “you must be a developer to understand anything on stage at Mix” argument.

Oh, but wait a second.

I just looked at the speaker list. Andrew Rashbass is on stage. He’s Publisher of the Economist magazine. Is he a developer? Why is Microsoft putting him on stage?

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is on stage too. I wonder if Alfred thinks Mike is irrelevant to Web 2.0? Last time I checked Mike is a former lawyer.

Last year Tim O’Reilly was on stage. I wonder if Alfred thinks Tim is irrelevant to Web 2.0? Last time I checked Tim is a book publisher and, now, a venture capitalist.

Oh, also on the Mix stage is Tom Bodkin, assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

But, Alfred Thompson is right. What I +write+ about Microsoft stuff might be irrelevant, particularly to the developer audience that Microsoft is trying to reach but he must have forgotten my day job: to search out new technologies with my video camera to report on them.

I guess I’m to blame cause I haven’t put my demographics up of my audiences but there’s lots of developers who are watching my videos.

Adobe’s Apollo team recognizes that, which is why I got a personal invite to come over and talk with the Apollo team.

In the video, embedded here, you learn what the new APIs are in Apollo (at about minute 22:00). Oh, but wait, a non-developer couldn’t have asked THAT question, could he? I followed up with at least half a dozen questions about APIs and what Apollo enables for developers. Yet Alfred thinks he wouldn’t learn ANYTHING technical from my work. Interesting.

Not to mention I’ve interviewed more than 200 people since I’ve left Microsoft — a very large percentage of whom are CEOs or CTOs working in the Web 2.0 industry. Nah, not relevant to Microsoft or its developers, right?

It’s interesting that Microsoft doesn’t see people who make media for technologists as important. I guess Alfred assumes everyone who cares will watch Channel 9 or 10. And I say “Microsoft” because this seems to be a common theme tonight of dissing journalists in public who report on Microsoft’s doings.

Oh well, either way, I’ll be out in the lobby with my video camera interviewing DEVELOPERS and bringing them to you and their opinions of Microsoft’s latest technologies.

It’s funny. Microsoft certainly seemed to like it when I did that when I worked there. But now that I’m not a blue badge anymore I’m irrelevant to the Web 2.0 world. Hmmmm.

Irony: Alfred says he hasn’t written code for 13 years. Welcome to the irrelevant Alfred! I do read his blog for the entertainment value too, I must admit! :-) Ahhh, maybe this is why Google is beating Microsoft in search and other things on the Internet.

Shhhhhh. I’ve learned from several companies that they are getting paid to build apps for Microsoft and I know of several people at Mix who are getting paid to come attend. I wonder if anyone will disclose what they are getting paid?

UPDATE: If I worked on Channel 10, a Microsoft-owned channel (done by the evangelism team that puts on Mix, by the way — their offices are literally right next to each other, which makes it extra funny) I’d be pissed at Alfred. After all, the two video hosts there aren’t developers and they just tried to teach us what a mashup was by interviewing a Microsoft developer. I guess they are irrelevant too. I wonder if they’ll get a free ticket to Mix?

UPDATE2: Robbie van der Blom cracked me up with his Twitter remark: “@scobleizer, wasn’t Microsoft irrelevant to web2.0???”

Ahh, just in time to start talking about Web 3.0. I’m glad I’m not going to get tagged with Web 2.0 ownership. Alfred can have THAT! :-)

At SXSW I hung out in the hallways. That’s where you always see the coolest stuff. This year was no different. A couple of guys were introduced to me and showed me their new app that uses a variety of Web services. It’s from Thirteen23 and is a design prototype that uses Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation along with Web services from Flickr and Netflix.

You’ll see a ton of apps like this one this year from both Adobe and Microsoft as they try to convince developers to use their new platforms to build Rich Internet Applications. You can try these apps yourself on Thirteen23’s “labs” page. Windows Vista recommended (it works on other OS’s that have .NET 3.0 loaded, but was really designed for the Vista aesthetic and usage model). It’s the first set of apps I’ve seen that made me want to load up .NET 3.0, which is why I call it a “killer Vista app.”

I’m interviewing over at Mozilla in the morning (the fine folks who bring you the Firefox browser). I just asked my 852 new friends over on Twitter what they wanted to know and the questions started coming in fast and furious. Post yours here, or over on Twitter.

Here’s some that came in in the first two minutes after I posted. Twitter is a total firehose when you add so many people as your friends. Will be useful for someone like me to get instant feedback from an interesting audience.

robitaille @Scoberizer: ask them about their opinion of Iceweasel http://en.wikipedia.org/wik… 1 minute ago from im

urbanduck @Scobleizer, Wii version of Firefox 3? :) 2 minutes ago from im in reply to Scobleizer

StevenHodson @robert: are they going to finally fix the memory leak 3 minutes ago from web

iboughtamac @Scoble Did they fix the keyboard hijack bug? 4 minutes ago from twitterrific

irinaslutsky @scoble: ask them why it keeps crashing 4 minutes ago from im

netchick @Scobleizer: I’d love to know what the Firefox 3.0 teams are doing for convergence on any level! 4 minutes ago from im in reply to Scobleizer

thepatrick @scobleizer: FF3: will it actually fit on a mac? 4 minutes ago from im in reply to Scobleizer

feedia 1.Ask about Vector Graphics support 2.Off line web applications — specifically how cache is handled 4 minutes ago from web

jlward4th @Scobleizer - if memory leaks and stability will be better. why they aren’t doing ECMAScript r4 in Firefox 3 with Tamarin. 4 minutes ago from im in reply to Scobleizer

Brett_Nordquist Scoble: Ask them why they can’t make Windows Media files play within FF. 5 minutes ago from web

tuz @Robert: As a web designer, what can I look forward to about Firefox 3.0? Ask them that. 5 minutes ago from twitterrific

urbanduck @Scobleizer, ask them about their relationship with Google, and other internet giants :) 6 minutes ago from im in reply to Scobleizer

technosailor @Scoble: Will they ever get the memory footprint down. It takes 3x as long to load on OS X than Safari 6 minutes ago from im

The Adobe Engage event is already proving interesting. Ryan Stewart wins the first report to come through Google Blog Search.

Takeaway? Adobe is indeed coming after developers. It’s interesting to hear their positioning vs. Microsoft. My post last week pretty much nailed it. Adobe’s Kevin Lynch says they try to extend the Web where Microsoft looks, he says, to extend Windows.

Adobe’s weaknesses? Corporate developers are safely in Microsoft’s camp because Adobe’s Apollo system (which lets developers build Windows, Mac, or Linux applications) can’t get to the Windows API (or the Mac API, or Linux’ API).

The other real loser here? Java. Apollo delivers real cross-platform apps that look a lot like what Microsoft always demonstrated with .NET 3.0 (great looking UIs and rich interaction).

But, clearly, Lynch wanted to position Apollo against Microsoft’s WPF/E, not Java.

Anyway, more later, we’re sitting through a ton of third-party demos now.

Kevin Tofel asks “Why would I want different reader apps for different publications?”

He’s talking about New York Times’ Reader.

I’ve tried the reader, and I remember seeing prototypes back when I worked at Microsoft. This was an app designed to show off Windows Presentation Foundation, er, .NET 3.0. Some things that that technology does that the Web doesn’t do are much better text control, better typography, and better resizing of the app on different resolution screens.

But, it doesn’t matter. Google Reader is eating the lunch of this approach. Why? Cause we’ll put up with a little less readability in order to share items with other people, in order to see the information on multiple computers and platforms, and the ability to mash up the content with content from other services ala BlogLines, NewsGator, or Google Reader or other RSS aggregators.

The other trend I am seeing is the stunning growth of Adobe love among developers. Everywhere I go I hear “Flash, Flash, Flash.”

Next week Adobe is showing a bunch of us a bunch of stuff that’s going for developer’s love in an even bigger way. Microsoft is under full scale attack in the developer world. I’ve had developer after developer ask me the past few days “what is Microsoft doing?” Even companies that are seemingly in Microsoft’s camp (like TeamDirection, which is a .NET shop using Sharepoint) are talking about going with Flash, er, Flex and Apollo, which lets developers build standalone applications with Flash technology.

Why is this happening? Because Microsoft is leaving influentials to the Macintosh. Developers who choose Macs (and I see more and more every day) are forcing a move away from Java and .NET toward Adobe Flash stuff.

Microsoft will fight back with WPF/E, which is a .NET 3.0 runtime that runs everywhere, but will it be enough to keep developers from moving away?

Adobe’s John Dowdell has the best question (and best set of links) about Microsoft’s new “Blend:” why do it and not support Flash?

Because of what Blend lets Microsoft do: get Macromedia stuff out of the Windows development process.

Huh?

Remember all those “Longhorn rules” posts I made about four years ago? Do you know where they came from?

I do. And I’ll never forget the software development lesson that was harshly handed to me.

Microsofties (before I was an employee) showed me some prototypes of Vista. I didn’t know they were prototypes, though. Later, after becoming a Microsoft employee, I found out that all we really saw were Macromedia Director-based movies.

They looked so cool. Tom Koch, today, and I talked about that MVP meeting where we saw those prototypes and how good they made us feel (almost everything that we saw back then was totally changed in the final release).

This actually was NOT a good thing for Microsoft. Why? Because when you build up expectations and you aren’t able to meet them you look pretty silly.

But behind the scenes things were even worse.

Why? Because executives bought into the Flash and Mirrors song and dance too. They thought what they were seeing was possible.

The problem was, developers weren’t involved. Only people who studied interaction, design, and Macromedia Director.

Problem is, anything you create in Director has to be thrown out and rewritten in C++ (if you work on the Windows team).

That meant a whole bunch of time is wasted, plus it’s very possible that what you are dreaming of is simply not possible. It’s also possible that development teams, that don’t understand interaction design, will change your “experiences” and totally munge things up.

So, could Flash ever be “force fit” to be the UI of Windows? Not according to the engineers who’ve studied the problem.

They needed a system that could be used to design real pieces of Windows, if not the entire UI, and handed off to a developer, or team of developers, without having to have the developers touch the UI at all.

You can see this in my early Channel 9 videos with the Sparkle team (which became “Blend” today).

Blend is based on .NET 3.0, and goes beyond anything possible today in Flash or Adobe products — at least as it comes to the combined design and development team.

I saw how a designer built the original Longhorn clock and a developer coded the interactions behind it using Sparkle in a fraction of the time it would take using other approaches.

Does Microsoft care about cross-platform and all that other stuff? Yeah. But it’s only secondary to Microsoft’s need to make the Windows development process much smoother. The executives never want to go through another schedule slip like they did with Longhorn.

Blend will let the Windows team designers get rid of Macromedia stuff. At least that’s the hype.

How will we know the hype is real? Show me those Vienna prototypes and let me play with them! (Vienna is the code name for the next version of Windows).

UPDATE: TechMeme is all over Expression Blend.