Ahh, Google announces a spreadsheet service and the bloggers go nuts.

This is a good thing in my book.

Huh?

It's a good thing because of my philosophy. I want better software. Competition brings better software. It gets product managers to worry about customers. It causes discussions of features that were long-ago decided on.

You're watching two massively different ideas about how computers should be used battling it out right on the world's economic stage.

On one hand you have the old standard Office that says "load locally and use local resources."

On the other hand you have the new, fresh and clean, Google Office that says "load on the server and use a thin client, er browser."

I know which one I'm betting on. Why? Perspective. Even with my always-on-$80-a-month Verizon card getting to Network resources is still far slower than pulling them off of the hard drive. And, that'll remain true for a long time. Also, the Web browser simply doesn't have the API support to do really rich stuff.

Which predicts where Google and Microsoft will really battle it out: in the middleware.

Ahh, middleware 2.0 wars coming soon to a browser near you. Why? Cause as Google gets more people to try its spreadsheets more people will ask for more features. If they don't get those features the PR will turn back toward Microsoft's approach (since our Office has a lot more features than Google's offerings do). There will be pressure on at Google to add features but DHTML (er, Ajax) will simply run out of gas. So, you'll start seeing middleware coming down. (Runtimes like .NET, Flash, Java, and WPF, are what I'm thinking about — I'd bet that Google is working on a browser-runtime of its own that'll add a lot of local functionality to Web clients).

On the other hand, we're going to feel pressure to add online functionality to our Office suites. You're already seeing us respond to that pressure (Sharepoint added RSS, Blogging, and Wiki's in its next incarnations).

All this is great for customers because they'll have a lot more choices again. I agree with Don Dodge that right now there's a clear winner in this battle, but I'm not cocky enough to believe that Google won't figure this out long term. There are too many smart people over there for us to not take this threat seriously.

That said, I finally have switched to Windows Vista and Office 2007 on my main working machines and, wow, is Office 2007 getting underhyped. If I was a Microsoft product manager over on Office I'd send every blogger a free copy and say "please compare to Google Office." I'd love to see the blog hype if we did that.

Update: Dan Farber sees the two approaches as complimentary, not competitive. That's an interesting way to look at it too. Joe Wilcox is worried that Microsoft will get distracted by Google. Oh, I don't think we have to worry about that too much. I worry a lot more that both of our companies are missing the small things. Believe me, if the CTO of General Motors wants a feature in Excel, he or she will probably get it. Google can't distract us THAT much. But, what things are we missing? What are the opportunities that are bubbling up that we don't see?

Update 2: Vadivel Mohanakrishnan reminded me that there have been online spreadsheets for quite some time. Zohosheet has one, for instance. The thing is, I'm very unlikely to give even a big company my corporate data, but far far far less likely to give a small company that stuff. Why? What happens if they go out of business? That shows the market forces that'll bring most Web 2.0 apps into one of the big three companies.

There's some really interesting audio interviews up from the Metaverse Roadmap Summit (which got a bunch of interesting people together to talk about the future of virtual worlds like Second Life). The Electric Sheep blog linked to this and explained the significance. You have to click on the questions, where you'll see the same question answered by dozens of different people.

There's also the Metaverse Sessions site, where you'll find an interview with me and my son, Patrick.

Along my journey I've met some incredible people. Too many, if I really admit it to myself (557 emails are reminding me of that today). But, this evening I just started up Skype and Howard Greenstein told me about his nephew, named Sawyer, who is in a rehab hospital recovering from an unknown disease which has left him paralyzed. He's 12. Same age as my son.

He hasn't been able to move his legs for the past two weeks.

I can't even imagine going through that as a family. But, Howard is coping the same way I coped: turn to our global village and talk about it and try to start a meme to lift his nephew's spirits.

You might have remembered hearing Howard's name before. He ran the Twin Towers Fund, which raised millions of dollars in support for 9/11 victims.

Life is cruel sometimes. I'll go and take a picture and see if we can bring a smile to Sawyer's face.

It's VloggerCon week (Video blogging conference that'll be held in San Francisco next weekend), which means it's Steve Garfield's week. He's been videoblogging longer than most anyone I know. I love his Vlog Soup where he brings us the best of Videoblogs around the Web.

Is videoblogging hot? Well, Vloggercon is sold out.

Weird, before the registration system is closed, but Steve says there's still tickets left. I'll be there.

I heard yesterday that Steve Gillmor isn't coming to Gnomedex. I know he always gives me crap for not inviting him to anything. So, heck, Steve, skip Gnomedex. You're invited to come and watch the World Cup games that week with me and Jeff Clavier at my house. Not to mention my BBQ on July 2.

Why do I want to share a beer with Steve while watching football (European style)? Cause of his letter to Bill Gates.

I too am concerned about the government's request. My brother, Ben (the guy who sells tools) and I had an argument about just this kind of topic a couple of weeks ago. He believes the government should have infinite powers to go after terrorists and criminals. "Hey, if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about, right?"

That's a hard point of view to argue with, but it scares the heck out of me.

After all, who decides what is right or wrong? The majority. Heck, blonde-haired geeks aren't in the majority anymore. So, we gotta worry about this stuff. There are plenty of places in the world where they let this kind of thinking take hold in the government and my wife isn't living in Tehran anymore just because of this kind of thinking.

You know, this makes me think that it's time to partner with Google, Yahoo, Ebay, and the other companies so we, as an industry, will have a consistent and strong answer to government requests.

Larry and Sergey, this would be a great place for us to sit down and have a friendly discussion. Interested? You're invited to my house too. There might be more important things to come out of this than the World Cup on my HDTV.

The Orcology blog asks "Is Trust Evolving." Talks about following my blog. "He's human and wants to be a better dad, husband, and employee at Microsoft. 95 people joined that conversation and you can read their comments. You can't help but the trust the guy. But wait a second. This is a Microsoft blog. Or is it? I can't tell anymore."

It is a nutty world we're all connected to, isn't it?

To me, I don't trust someone who's solely in it for the money. That's the way lots of companies behave. Heck, I even behave that way sometimes. But my best work is when I'm doing something for fun, or in support of a philosophy, like 'the world needs better software.' Blogging lets me communicate with you about when I'm not just thinking about business. Why? Cause there isn't a business model on my blog. It's why I'm turning down free stuff now, why I don't have ads here, etc. Yeah, my audience does give me career power, but that's not why I started it and it's not what drives me to share my life with you.

Why do it then? Because audiences improve everything they touch. Our book is better because we showed it to you before we published it. My videos on Channel 9 are better because you're able to add your two cents onto the subject (or ask a question I forgot to ask). My friendships are better cause everyone in the world gets to see what I'm thinking and going through and we don't need to cover that stuff when we get together. Even my relationship with my wife is better. If I forget to take out the trash all she has to do is tell you and then I'll get heck about it from everyone. It's funny the personal feedback I get on all these topics. 

I do sometimes find it really weird when people come up to me at work that I don't even know and ask "how's the new car" or "sorry about your mom." Today Andrew Clinick who works on the HD-DVD team at Microsoft stopped me at lunch to talk about my new HD-DVD player and my new HDTV. What a weird world I live in.

Our ideas of trust and community and all that are under radical change because of the Internet.

The other day I got a call from a student in India and we had a nice little chat. It was no different than if I had called my best friend up.

Thanks for the trust! Hey, even if you don't like Microsoft you're OK.

Mark Cuban tells journalism companies how they can get audiences. Hey, Mark, that isn't the problem in journalism. The problem is how do you pay for great journalism?

We're seeing lots of journalists getting laid off. Why? Because the business no longer works. The advertisers are taking their money and moving online. Paying Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and Craigs List and Ebay to do the work that the newspaper ads used to do.

Free journalism only takes us so far. Yeah, using bloggers you'll find out about major news events like earthquakes and fires and when your neighbor gets murdered. Maybe. If there's a blogger nearby who cares.

But you won't get the kind of journalism that local papers used to do. Are there any bloggers out here that sit in city council meetings? That attend shareholder meetings? That build relationships with people at places of power? Yeah, some do, but they are still pretty rare and as Tim O'Reilly learned most of us aren't really here to do journalistic work, but rather to tell the world what we think (the two are different).

I wish I had better answers, though, cause I do agree with Mark Cuban that journalism is important.

Speaking of that, I appreciate it when a publication takes 500 hours and puts our products through its paces like what Tom's Hardware did recently with Windows Vista. Or, ComputerWorld's 20 Things You Won't Like about Windows Vista. Ed Bott pointed me to those. I might not agree with all of the points made there, but I do appreciate that journalists are putting in some serious work taking a look at our products.

I wonder how we can ensure that journalists can continue to get paid for that work?

Carlo goes further and says "Journalism Is Broken." Oh, I agree with his point that opinion matters. I've learned over and over that my audience is smarter than me. Richer than me. More knowledgeable than me. More connected than me. No matter what I say, no matter how well researched it is, it always gets better after an audience hears it and can leave their two cents about it.

Jeff and I were talking about that today. He told me how he learns from the people who show up on Channel 9 and On10.net everyday and how he thinks that any corporate site that doesn't have comments, trackbacks, or ways to interact like a Wiki are just blowing it.

I agree. Where's the newspaper that has open comments on every story like we do on Channel 9 or On10?

I am watching the reports from Reboot, which is taking place now in Copenhagen, and wishing I was there. I was planning on being there before my mom died, but now I have to watch Nicole and Thomas and all the cool European technologists having a good time from afar.

Lee Wilkins says that it's one of the best conferences he's ever attended.

Nicole has a ton of excellent interviews again (she always does).

If I were really smart and a really good writer I'd be Evelyn Rodriguez who writes more about what makes Silicon Valley, well, um, Silicon Valley.

I've been thinking about that Silicon Valley post all week. A few of my readers challenged my assumptions. I'm receptive to that right now cause my mom's death caused me to look at all the assumptions I have about life.

That's what Sanjay Parthasarathy did with me with today too (he's my boss's boss's boss's boss and we had a little lunch date to get back in touch after my taking a few weeks off). Could I use my audience to help improve the standard of living in developing nations?

He said something like "what was the difference between Hitler, Stalin, and Kennedy? How they used their audiences."

That's called a smackdown. Leaders make you think about what you're doing. Make you take on big challenges. Make you dream.

That conversation is going to weigh heavily on me this weekend.

Do you have a dream for what you'd like the world to be like? Is it just to copy Silicon Valley and make everyone rich enough to drive a Mercedes SLR like I saw rolling down University Ave. in Palo Alto last week? Or is it to get a billion people off of the $2 a day living conditions that more than half of the world's people live under?

I've seen how to change a big company. How about change the world?

What about network neutrality? Isn't that an important principle to support as it comes to making an Internet usable by all? I guess if businesses had their way they'd charge us all a bunch of fees, particularly if we start distributing content and/or getting popular. I told Sanjay that the thing that makes this so interesting is that every blogger now has the power that only the New York Times or CNN had 15 years ago.

I love how Rick Segal and Shel Israel will travel around the world in August trying to find a way to change the world of investing and entrepreneurship.

What's your dream for the kind of world you want to leave to the next generation? How can we work together on that?

Thinking back to my great meal in Jackson, Wyoming, what made it great? The small things. The way the apples were sliced. The way the dressing was dripped over the food.

It gets to my philosophy about technology. What makes an Apple store great? It's the wood countertops. I bet most of you have never fondled the countertops there, but I have. Aesthetics matter. Small things matter.

Today Tantek announced Technorati's Microformat Search and Pinging. It's a small thing. Hence the "micro" in the name (hey, I like that! Heheh.)

This is important. Why? Because it'll let search producers add all sorts of stuff to search.

Go to Google or MSN and search on my last name. Why can't I tell the search engine to put a picture of me in the result for this blog? Why can't I tell it to list other info? With Microformats I'd be able to, if the search engine recognized them.

Then I'd also be able to write restaurant and movie reviews, among other things, and have engines recognize those too. Or share calendars. Or do a variety of other things.

It's a small thing. I doubt the New York Times will write about this day. But, it could become something much bigger.

My hat is off to the Microformat folks. Nice small thing.

Heh, our "On10" team used Jeff Jarvis' harsh comments against a product manager here in a video look at the New York Times Reader technology (that question comes toward the end of a 10-minute interview). Those in the PR industry call this "Rude Q&A" for "get out your rudest and harshest questions and make sure you can answer them."

Demonstrates something we've learned to do: we watch blogs for the harshest commentary and see if we can get straight answers for you.

Yes, Chris Pirillo, I'm watching your blog too! (But, really, I watch any blog that mentions the word "Microsoft", among other terms).

On10 has been getting some interesting videos lately. Another one that I liked was the Xbox Dashboard video. There's a sizeable update coming soon and Larry Hryb of the Xbox Live team visited On10 to show off the changes. It got Dugg and, wow, has this been hit a lot.

My wife works for Worktank, which is a company that does a lot of stuff for Microsoft (she is one of the producers of MSDN's Webcasts). Last night she was bragging about a site that they did about Windows Vista: http://www.seewindowsvista.com/

She said that they got 39,000 unique visits in the first 24 hours of the site being live. All based on talking to blogs. It's funny what happens if you don't click on anything (the actor gets impatient).

Wait a second. This is an advertisment. One that got people to send it around to their friends. And 39,000 people showed up? Wild.

Joe Wilcox says "there's more to the story" this morning about Microsoft's breakdown in negotations with Adobe.

I've interviewed the Word team about its PDF support and it seemed pretty straightfoward to me. That team just wanted to add capabilities for our customers. I'm pretty sensitive to this stuff cause I've had Microsoft's gun aimed at my head and I want to make sure we're always behaving properly when it comes to partners.

I wish we could all get along better to make our customers lives better, but there's big dollars at stake here so understand Adobe's concern here. It always pains me to see a breakdown in communication with a partner, particularly one as valuable as Adobe.

Update: Brian Jones of the Office team gives his side of the story on his blog.

Someone save me. Maryam got a set of Lost's first season from a friend and we're totally hooked. Watched it until midnight last night. What a show. Now I understand why people talk about it so much. (I was too busy blogging to watch much TV, but now that I got my big-screen it is just too tempting. Having a big screen is totally changing our evenings).

Oh, I see Sony just announced new HDTV screens. That's just my luck. I spend $4,000 on a screen and they come out with new ones! (I knew they would, but seeing as there's no 1080p content out there yet other than a few BlueRay and HD-DVD's, it just didn't interest me). It'll be interesting to see the difference between 1080i and 1080p.

Seeing the Chinese protests that were on campus a few weeks ago back when the Chinese president visited must have given the Windows Vista marketing team some ideas. As we drove onto campus yesterday there was tons of Windows Vista signage and pods of fake protests.

Now, these things weren't done to get a world-wide audience. There's a full-court press on to get employees to load the latest builds of Windows Vista and Office 12.

This is one of Microsoft's secret weapons. Well, not so secret.

By getting employees to try our betas (we call it "eating the dogfood") the teams find a lot of bugs that even Chris Pirillo can't find.

For instance, I loaded the latest build yesterday and my sound card still doesn't work. So, this morning I'm entering a bug about that. It pisses me off. But better that it pisses me off than gets out into the real world and pisses off a customer.

Anyway, nice to see the Windows Vista marketing machine is starting to spin up. They also had balloons in the campus fountains and I hear that there were some Windows Vista Talking Rain cans in some of the refrigerators on campus. I want one! I bet those will show up on eBay.

Regarding Windows Vista, other than my sound card not working, it's really taking shape fast. The performance is noticeably better than three weeks ago and things are starting to really look great. Jeff was showing me his new dual-screen Vista and told me he can't use XP anymore cause he's less productive on XP than he is on Vista. I can see why. I love the new Sidebar and search and, while there's still a lot of rough spots, it really feels a lot better than XP. At least for me.

We've also been doing quite a few sessions with other companies on campus lately on both Windows Vista and Windows Presentation Foundation and some of the apps that I've been seeing are quite magical. Can't wait to talk about those. Is anyone working on WPF or Vista-specific apps that we don't know about? We'd like to talk with you if you are.

It's so nice to be back at Microsoft working. I think they replaced the Koolaid machines with cool new Starbucks machines yesterday. So, no longer can we say "we're drinking the Koolaid" when talking about defending the company's position. OK, OK, I know we never had Koolaid machines, but seeing the Starbucks machines getting installed yesterday did bring a lot of smiles to the workers in building 18 yesterday.

Me? I'm trying to stay off the stuff, but I succumbed yesterday to bad habits. These machines automatically make coffee from real beans that are loaded in the top. Pretty good stuff. It's amazing how seemingly little things can lift morale. Thank you to whoever got this done!

I'd love a Wifi-enabled music player (Dave Winer talked about that). Jeff Sandquist and I were talking about this yesterday. We both find that the night before a trip we're trying to download stuff to our music players (yeah, I have an iPod). Often we forget cause the night before is usually busy packing and doing other things.

But I told him something else.

Let's say you have a 60GB iPod. Well, I only have a gig of music. I'm not a music freak. I only have 125 CDs and I rarely buy music off of services.

But I love listening to podcasts. So, here's what I want.

I want a little service that sits on my music device that just fills it up with a bunch of random podcasts. Things that, when I'm stuck in a plane for 10 hours (I was supposed to be on one today coming from Reboot in Copenhagen, but cancelled that because of my mom) I'll have tons of things to listen to. Most will be crap. I know that. But my device would let me listen to a minute or two of hundreds of podcasts and move on.

If I kept a program, it'd download more like it next time. So, let's say I kept TWiT (This Week in Tech, one of the more popular technology podcasts) well, it'd know I probably am a geek and would download more technology podcasts.

Or, if I kept a Harry Potter podcast (my son likes those) it'd think I was into movies and would download podcasts about other movies. Maybe that wouldn't be accurate, but who cares?

Oh, and if I manually download stuff, it'd automatically delete its stuff to make room.

Doesn't that sound interesting?

I just saw this excellent rant on what makes Silicon Valley special: its people.

I disagree with several of its other claims. First of all, that it's just a parking lot. That's true if you look at it from one angle. But, it has several Fry's. And TONS of infrastructure that makes it easy for geeks to get going.

Also, getting geeks to move away from concentrations of other geeks is INCREDIBLY hard. I'd love to move to Montana, for instance, but there's no way I would do that. I'd be bored there in a few weeks. The TechRanch there is fun, but sorry, when I'm down in Silicon Valley there are just so many people to talk to and so many interesting companies doing interesting things.

That said, there are several places in the world I keep hearing about: China and India. Look for the next Silicon Valley to appear there. Why? For exactly the reasons Paul gave: people.

I just added Paul to my reading list. Good stuff.

We're about 200 miles away from Seattle traveling on Route 90. Did I tell you I love my Verizon card? It works everywhere in the Western United States. Maryam's driving.

It's fun to read blogs at 80 mph on my Tablet PC. And isn't it crazy that I can send my thoughts (and photos) all over the world through a cell phone tower? I was thinking back to the 1989 earthquake when it took several hours to get a black and white photo sent across the US to a newspaper on the East Coast (back then cell phones were rare and digital cameras didn't exist and the Internet consisted of servers that only geeks really knew how to use).

Anyway, for the past few hours I've been thinking about what I'm learning from road-side advertising. There sure is a lot of it. I'm thinking about whether there's some lessons for online companies that need to make money from advertising. I'm not sure there is, but businesses sure could learn a lot since a lot of my reactions are the same when I look at ads on Google or MSN or Yahoo (and the time spent looking at each is about the same).

In just Coeur d'Alene, which is a relatively small town in Idaho, I counted 113 commercial messages. Not counting the FedEx truck that Maryam passed. That's in about 10 minutes of driving over a few miles (like I said, it's a small town).

There were signs advertising McDonalds and Starbucks. Car dealerships. Hotels. Tourist attractions. And a lot more.

It's amazing how bad most are. First of all, you only have one to five seconds to read any sign. Second, a large percentage of the signs weren't kept up very well. Why would I want to stay at a hotel that couldn't even keep its sign looking nice? Third, very few stood out.

See, for a business what really matters?

Scarcity.

Tren Griffin taught me that. He works at Microsoft as a networking services strategist, but that really doesn't explain why I like Tren. He participates on lots of internal mailing lists and challenges us to think about business in new ways.

I wish I had posted his thoughts on Vonage's IPO. He warned us to stay far away and broke down how bad a deal their stock offering was for investors. It's amazing looking at it that anyone bought stock in Vonage (Memorandum has quite a few comments on the deal). Shows that investors don't always do their homework and think about how likely a business will return anything on their investments.

Anyway, back to the advertisements. How do you create scarcity in a place of large numbers of competitors. Heck, most every major exit has a sign like this:

In fact, usually there are two: one for restaurants and one for lodging. Some exists have a third for gas stations.

The chain restaurants stand out on signs like this. Why? Consistency. You know what Subway will give you. It's the same thing you got 300 miles back. Same goes for McDonalds. Denny's. Etc.

I'd love to have better food on the road, but it's hard to take a chance on "Joe's diner" because you have no idea what you're gonna get.

So, how can you create scarcity? Well, one sign in Montana yelled "Grizzly Bears next exit."

It's the only sign I remember seeing in 700 miles that said THAT.

Another sign touted "Lewis and Clark camped 900' south of this sign." Heh, didn't get my business, but at least I remembered it.

Another business that does street advertising well? Chico Hot Springs. They are located in the middle of nowhere (five miles from my mom's house) but they are always packed and people two states away knew about Chico when we talked about where were headed. Great food there, too.

Their signs are simple, and easy to follow to get there (they are several miles from the main highway).

Oh, one other thing before I sign off from the road. I've been reading a bunch of blogs on my cell phone. It's amazing how bad most of them are. For instance, Martin Schwimmer's blog is totally unreadable on my cell phone (it has dark text over a dark background). You all need to test your blogs out on cell phones!

I think when I get back I'm gonna show you guys on video just how bad you make it for cell phone readers. Maybe there's not a lot of us out there, but why make it hard when you don't need to? Dave Winer's blog rocks on cell phones, by the way. It's light weight. Loads fast. And brings the content right to the top (many blogs make you wade through navigation before you can get to content).

Be home in a couple of hours. If the roadside signs don't snag us into a late-night dessert!

Funny, when we got to the funeral home Alberta (my mom's best friend and minister at today's events) was playing music through a boom box at the front of the room. Later she explained to me why she wasn't using the much more sophisticated sound system built into the funeral home: they couldn't play MP3s.

Turns out she had a bunch of my mom's church music on various CDs that were made on computers. Another reason she didn't use it? It was too complex. Later I went back and looked at it. It indeed was far more complex than the boom box.

That reminded me again of two principles software engineers should ask ourselves. 1) Can it do what we need it to do? 2) Is it simple to use? I understand how those two can sometimes be in conflict. It's why a professional camera has a lot more complexity than point-and-shoot cameras. Lately inside Microsoft we've been arguing out some of our decisions on how complex to make interfaces. These aren't easy things to solve. Make something easy and it might not be useful. The problem is that you have to decide what market to go after. If you aim a camera design at the mass market it better be simple, because that's what nine out of 10 photographers want. But, there's 10% that need more features. Leave those features out (like manual shutter speeds and exposure overrides) and you'll lose the pros. Not every product can be as simple as an iPod. Sometimes we forget that, which is why I ask product designers "what's your philosophy?"

I just saw this article over on TechDirt about how complex our cell phones are becoming. Yeah, I've seen people walk into stores and say "I just want a cell phone, no email or Web or anything like that." But, then, I look at my own phone and how much I've come to love its ability to do other things. I would never give that up. It has changed my world and I think that over the next 18 months will provide more technological change than any other device (the Xbox is cool, but if you gave me a choice between a new Xbox or a new cell phone, I would take the cell phone in a second).

The experience at the funeral home reminded me too of just how much our lives had changed due to technology. Would Alberta know what an MP3 file is just a few years ago? I doubt it.

Regarding the services, the day was beautiful and the services were interesting and moving. I found myself thinking that I love living in America where you can practice any religion you want. And my mom and her community sure practices a form of religion I doubt many of you would recognize. Heck, I don't recognize it.

Another funny moment? A cell phone started playing a song in the middle of the ceremonies. If my mom were there that would have earned a dirty look. Instead Maryam gave me a dirty look for giggling (after biting her own lip for starting to giggle herself).

Later she told me how in Iran giggling at a funeral is a big sin. A no-no. I told her that my mom didn't want us to be sad at her funeral, so I found it helpful when that cell phone went off.

When I got back to my mom's house I found I wanted to get back on my computer to get back in touch with the world. There the harsh reality reminded me of what awaits when I get home. 469 emails. Yikes. I haven't been answering email much for two weeks.

One of the first things I did was check in with Dave Winer's blog. He's writing about the O'Reilly Web 2.0 service mark controversy. That led me to Tim O'Reilly, who groused about bloggers' lack of professionalism. I've been thinking about similar things a lot. What are my responsibilities as a blogger? Did I sign up to do the equivilent of the New York Times here? How do I keep true to myself in a world that values (and uses) those who have audiences.

It's why I was depressed a month ago, though. The idea that my blog had become a media property or something I had to do. Or something I had to do a specific way.

I'm glad I went through this personal time after my mom's stroke. It helped me refocus on what's important and what my blog means to me. This blog is mine. It is what I'm thinking about, and what I'm seeing in my life. It isn't a news article. I am not vetted. It isn't done by a committee. I am not being held to any standards.

On the other hand, I don't like the lynch mob. It's going to take a strong blogger to stand up against hundreds of blogs who are urging action one way. But, we need that kind of diversity of ideas if we are going to make this a truly strong media.

It's important for me to say that when the lynch mob isn't aimed at me, either. I might end up at the focus point of such a mob in the future, so hope that someone would stand up for me in such a time.

One last thing before I sign off for the night and start driving with Maryam back to Washington: thank you for putting up with me for the past two weeks. Sorry for not answering my email. Sorry to my coworkers for increasing your workloads as I focused more on my family.

I'm looking forward to getting back and thinking more about the technology business again. My experiences these two weeks demonstrate that what we do is important. Even in a funeral home.