Hey, Reg Cheramy, over on Web2.0central.com has a nice list of the top 13 reasons to consider Microsoft for Web 2.0 development. Jinath Premaratne sent me this list and said "I like #8."

Me too, me too!

Update, Matt Griffith gives you the other side of the coin with 13 reasons NOT to consider Microsoft.

Those of you who don't know Raymond Chen might not realize he's one of the most talented developers Microsoft has. Today he posted a fun little challenge and a prediction.

Lee Brimelow just started the WPF Blog, which is about Windows Presentation Foundation from a Flash developer's perspective. Mondo cool, just like WPF. Lee is one of the world's leading Flash tutorial developers (does gotoandlearn.com and lynda.com) and just got hired at Frog design (used to do Flash development at Stanford).

Thanks to Bryan Zug for sending me this (he's a developer at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford).

I've known Nancy Folsom for years, dating back to the 1990s when we both hung out in Fawcette's Off.Ramp a lot. I'm glad to see her blogging, and a geeky code blog to boot! She blogs about FoxPro, .NET, and a few other geeky topics.

Oh, and my wife Maryam links to her and Stan Mackey, our real estate agent, who just started a blog too. Oh, and Kim Sacha. She's studying computational genetics and blogging about her journey. Her husband is a developer at Microsoft (works on the ultra-cool Max team).

Good to see some nice new blogs. How does Maryam find them? She has been building a network of friends in Seattle — she has a movie club where she kicks me out of the house and has her friends over. Funny that last time they didn't even watch a movie!

Todd Cochrane, of Geek News Central, says that Windows Media 11's lack of podcasting features will slow down podcasting's growth. I look at it a different way. I think that not having podcasting features will slow down Windows Media 11's growth. Translation, I agree with him that it sucks that WM11 doesn't have podcasting features yet.

Funny enough, I'm sitting in Podtech.net's headquarters, located on Sand Hill Road. I've spent the past few hours getting acquainted with their team and learning about their plans (they were funded for more than $5 million a few months back). The podcasting space is white hot and only going to get hotter and video blogging is coming onto the scene like a train of coal rolling into Livingston Montana. Anyone miss how big a deal Rocketboom has become in just a year?

Lesson for product planners in the tech industry: if you aren't supporting the latest stuff you'll be derided and left behind. If it takes 30 months to add a cool feature into your product you're too slow, not agile enough, and will see slow growth.

Hey, my fellow Microsofties. Want to see the stock go up? Cut the time from 30 months or longer to 12. The market will start to notice and you'll see increased buzz. That still won't be perfect, but it'll be a lot better than we got now.

There are still way too many Microsoft sites without RSS feeds (a shame, really, since Windows Vista's beta 2 is coming within hours, and it has a decent RSS aggregator built in). Fellow Microsofties, let's change that and we'll see good things come to us.

Instead we have folks like Todd saying we suck. I hate being told that.

Here's another challenge for our product planners. Are you planning OPML features yet? Second Life? Video blogging? Xbox Live integration? WPF-based overhauls? Microformats?

The Contra Costa Times (a newspaper in Northern California) looks at why there aren't many women bloggers on the A list.

They totally missed a major reason.

What's that? Attendance at the early Silicon Valley geek/blogger dinners. Mena Trott (co-founder of Six Apart) was there. But there weren't many women who attended those early dinners back in 2002/03 (which were open to the public and free to attend). It was those early dinners that caused a whole bunch of blog networks to be built.

I find I build mental brands of bloggers I meet face-to-face and probably do link to those bloggers more often than people I don't know at all.

I'm very fortunate cause Maryam has started blogging too. She has introduced many female bloggers to me (I think that's how I've met many of the bloggers quoted in this article) and reminds me of when someone in her circle of friends writes something that would be interesting to my readers.

Another problem, though, goes deeper than just face-to-face networks. It's that women aren't going into computer science and don't hang out wherever geeks congregate. The next time you go to a user group or a geek dinner or a computer conference or visit a computer science department at a major university, look around. You'll probably see mostly men. (The first industry conference I helped plan, back in the early 90s, had 425 male attendees and two female and the numbers haven't gotten much better since then).

Does this matter for our industry? Yes, it does.

How? Well, our industry is moving from a feature-oriented one to one where culture and aesthetics and ease of use wins. Why is Apple so successful? Cause it's products don't just have great features, they are fashionable and tie in well with cultural trends.

When I was in Paris I talked with Anina, the fashion model who blogs. She looked at our new cell phones and gave me about 20 suggestions on how to make them more appealing to people who care about fashion and culture. I videotaped her ideas and they stuck with me. Will those ideas get heard at Microsoft? It's difficult because our internal culture is so male dominated.

We're blowing a huge opportunity here by not listening to women and not hiring more of them to develop more of our products and services.

Ted Pattison was one of the highest rated speakers at the VSLive's that I used to help plan back in the 1990s. Nice to see that he's moved his work to the Web with a new Office 2007 show on Channel 9 — new screencasts will be released soon, most of which are centered on Office 2007.

When I was in Montana I kept hearing about RightNow. Everyone there is proud of the company and its success, particularly at the TechRanch where I had lunch on Thursday. Now I see Tom Foremski writing about Greg Gianforte, RightNow's CEO, and his new book. Added to my reading list.

I'd love to meet Greg too. Sounds like a real interesting guy. It's hard enough to make a successful startup happen in Silicon Valley where there's lots of entrepreneurial support around (and a deep geek culture) but it's gotta be 10x harder to make happen in Montana (fewer people live in the entire state than live in San Jose, for instance).

You'll be hearing a lot more about RightNow Technologies, I predict.

I saw a good example of why I knew I was in Silicon Valley this weekend. This car, in front of me, had a bumper sticker that said, simply:

There's no place like 127.0.0.1

What's worse, is I knew just what it meant.

I'm still trying to figure out, though, why a Gnome was in Montana. Maybe they'll come to Gnomedex? (This was shot on a car outside the hospital in Billings, MT, where my mom was staying).

I love Lifehacker.

What do I love about it? It gives you all kinds of cool tips about how to live life better. Sometimes deep stuff, mostly not, but always cool and useful. Like this, Gina, who does Lifehacker, links to the Photojojo blog, which shows you how to do photo blocks.

Here's another entry that shows you how to upload video from your cell phone.

Wow, I missed the first Virtual BARcamp, hosted by Eric Rice. Luckily Scott Beale was there with his virtual camera. Inside joke, Scott can always be seen at Silicon Valley geek events with his very cool Canon camera.

Trivia? What does "BAR" stand for? Bay Area Rejects. The whole BARcamp movement started after a few geeks in the Bay Area didn't get invites to Tim O'Reilly's FOOcamp (FOO stands for "Friends Of O'Reilly").

Me? I'm having an AFD-BBQ on July 2 after Gnomedex. What does that stand for? Alimony Freedom Day. I can't get everyone in, but if you wanna come, drop me an email.

Update: there's even a Flickr feed for the virtual BARcamp.

One thing I notice? Way too clean. The real BARcamps have sleeping bags, pizza boxes, T-Shirt boxes, and lots of other geek detritous lying around.

I'm seeing all this news about a French video sharing startup, named vpod.tv, and thought it sounded familiar. Then I see that Rodrigo Schulz is behind it. Oh, yeah, he hosted me for dinner when I was in Paris! Congrats dude, can't wait to see what your new startup brings.

I told my dad he should get a new HDTV so he can watch the World Cup in style (yes, America does have a few soccer fans). Anyway, Silicon Valley VC Jeff Clavier links to a schedule for the World Cup. Hey, Jeff, wanna come over and watch on my new super dooper 60 inch screen?

I'm seeing a ton of trackback spam here lately. What's going on? Someone is stealing my content, then tracking back to my blog here, all in an attempt to get traffic and spiders to come and visit. I've been marking all these things as spam. I think that Akismet (the blog spam killing service I've been using) has been using that feedback because other bloggers, like the BestBlog blog, notice that the spam problem gets better over time. I won't link to the sites that are doing this spamming, but if you go to centplus.com you'll see one such spam site.

I hate sites like this!

I'm seeing more and more advertising like on jk's blog here (see the double-underlined words? They pop up as ads).

I don't mind this as much as I minded SmartTags when Microsoft was attempting to do them (before I was an employee I argued voiciferously against them, along with many other people in the community because we didn't want anyone to be able to use our own words for doing this style of advertising). Choosing to do it on your own blog only gets rid of most of my objection. I still don't like these kinds of ads, though, cause for someone who doesn't know the Web very well you can't tell these are ads at first.

I do wonder, though, whether these kinds of ads pay off for bloggers more than the AdSense style ads?

Yesterday Duncan uploaded a video I did with Jessica Arnold. She shows off Outlook 2007. Very cool. But what's interesting is the comments noted that the camera work seemed better. What changed? Certainly not my unsteady hand. But I finally broke down and got a $3,500 camcorder. Glad to see that the results are coming through the other side.

I'm over visiting Shel for a podcast on Waxxi. There are almost 1,000 people signed up, which is just freaky. It's like giving a speech at a conference only from Shel's kitchen table. (UPDATE: Jeremiah Owang blogged the podcast, which was interesting because it ran like talk radio — people could come in and ask their questions over phone and there was a chat room too, I really liked the format; Mish in Toronto also blogged it; so did Peter Dawson, damn these posts all went up fast).

He was just telling me about the world tour he's doing with Rick Segal. Says he and Rick Segal have already gotten invitations from all over the world.

Regarding emails from around the world, I'm way behind. Two weeks behind. Sorry if I haven't gotten back to you yet. Life interrupted.

I'm sitting in the Portland Airport. Got a few minutes before I can board. Ahh, bandwidth here is so much nicer than in Montana for the most part. Oh, and my cell phone works again. I called Cingular this morning and they told me they don't own any towers in Montana, so they have no control over whether my phone works or not. It's Verizon country out there (my Verizon card kept my Tablet PC online, albeit slowly all the time, even at my mom's house).

Anyway, Steve Sloan, my former boss from the early 1990s when I was a student at San Jose State writes about the personal side of blogging (he talks about the kinds of personal conversations we used to have back then, I remember having deep conversations about his family after his wife died tragically in a car accident). I still don't know where the right line is. I figure I'm just gonna write what's happening in my life and if everyone goes away that's fine with me. I do this for love and not the review score.

I keep coming back to that this isn't a committee done form of marketing. A committee could never write about dying mothers or tragedy.

But, it's so nice to get back to tech! I see Shel Israel is going on a world tour to meet entrepreneurs and see if they can help. Hey, Shel, if you wanna visit the TechRanch in Montana, I have a place for you to stay!

One thing I've learned by traveling is just how connected we all are. How did I know Mini was a big deal? Because employees in Ireland told me that they all read him.

Remember the Mena Trott blowup at a blogger conference in Paris? I remember having conversations about that in four different countries.

Yesterday at TechRanch we talked about the TechCrunch bubble.

We're all connected and when something interesting happens in our community it goes worldwide very quickly.

Global conversations indeed! Welp, they are boarding, see ya this weekend!

Wow. I missed a HUGE HR townhall, er, employee meeting today (they announced new compensation and review changes). I just got the email from Lisa Brummel and, wow, wow, wow.

Is Lisa reading Mini? Damn straight she is.

This is the "Mini-smackdown" I wanted to see. Hopefully these changes will get us on a more customer-centric path.

One big thing that's gone? Stack ranking. No longer am I judged against Charles and Adam and Tina and Jeff. Now, either I'm doing a good job for Microsoft or I'm not and my review will now reflect that.

I LOVE these changes!

Also, I love the transparency that the Office team is experimenting with (you can see the Office team's ranking, and guess pretty closely what salary each employee there is making).

One thing I love about Microsoft is that we are willing to play with the business and make improvements. For a big business these kinds of changes aren't made easily, nor often, and I appreciate when they happen and the amount of work that goes into making them happen (I know someone in IT for HR, for instance, and he told me about all the work that's going on behind the scenes to change the review system).

Oh, and thanks Mini! These changes are due in no small part to you. Even if you don't get official props in the press releases.

Can one person change a huge company? Mini did. And we don't even know his name.

But, don't miss the work that Steve Ballmer, the leadership team, and Lisa Brummel did here either. Wonderful. Cheers. Now, let's get back to work figuring out how to make our customers lives better.

Lisa announced MyMicrosoft, a series of initiatives that'll make Microsoft a much better place to work.

There's a lot more to what she announced than I'm talking about here, but as I read over the list I'm just astounded.

These are not small little tweaks. They are wholesale changes to how Microsoft treats its employees.

Well, I'm off for a three hour drive from Livingston to Billings. I'll link to more on this topic later (I don't see anyone talking about this stuff externally yet).

By the way, my cell phone isn't working. So, stick with email until tomorrow.

Montana has everything to build a great tech economy.

There's plenty of capital. Why? Because rich people love coming to the state and settling down (Bill Gates owns a home not far from Bozeman, I learned today, among other famous technologists).

I just opened a safety deposit box here in Emigrant, MT, and learned that it is a profitable bank and quickly growing because of all the big money that's moving into Montana. Lots of Hollywood types buy homes here and need some place to bank.

Then there's land. Unlike Silicon Valley, which can't build out anymore, there's plenty of open space here that can be built on.

Oh, and Montana is only a 1.5 hour flight from either Silicon Valley or Seattle.

But, what is needed? John O'Donnell, executive director of the TechRanch says entrepreneurs.

Today I met several of the companies that are working with the TechRanch to establish a foothold in Montana. I'll definitely be meeting up again and writing about them when we have some more time to spend together.

But today wasn't about them, it was about getting me among the geeks of Montana and having some pizza and have a fun discussion.

Thanks to everyone who showed up today, I definitely needed that! It's always fun to be around problem solvers (which, really, is what geeks and entrepreneurs are).

One fun entrepreneur that I met was Jen Boulden, co-founder of Ideal Bite. She wants to make the world more green, but like Treehugger blogger Graham Hill, she isn't willing to do it the hippie way. I love her tag line "a sassier shade of green."

I told her "you should go to BlogHer." Her answer disturbed me. She said she couldn't afford to go.

Hey, I have an extra $100. Can anyone else kick in some money? It costs about $700 to go Silicon Valley and stay for a couple of days.

By the way, if you wanna see who Jen is, just pick up this month's Vanity Fair magazine — she is featured there along with Graham and a few other environmentalists.

Anyway, I'm going to come back to the TechRanch. It's an interesting place with its own .NET user group, a small set of companies that are being funded and helped along (interesting discussion too that we had about getting non-tech-friendly customers to try out new Web sites and services aimed at them).

If you're considering a college to attend, by the way, you should consider Montana State University. It's in a stunningly beautiful part of the world with skiing, hiking, and lots of other activities nearby and seeing the kind of support that they are getting from the community (the governor of Montana dropped in on the .NET user group a while back) I'd say that entrepreneurs here have a high chance of success. Ted Turner (the guy who started CNN) has two sizeable buildings within sight of the TechRanch and John tells me that the TechRanch is going to be expanding soon. He says that he's well into getting funding for new buildings that they are planning.

Some other anecdotes. The other night in Livingston I talked with a city planner. He said that he's planning for really rapid growth (housing prices are going nuts in Montana, he says to expect them to triple over the next five years). Livingston was rated one of the top five places in the United States to retire. If you have an average house in California that costs $1 million, up here that'll buy you an entire ranch. Or, you could buy a very nice home like my mom has for $300k and live off of the interest from the rest.

Tonight we're driving to Billings, but my cell phone isn't working. My brother isn't feeling well, so looks like dinner tonight won't work, but I'm game for breakfast in Billings. How about at 8:30 a.m. — meet in the Sheraton lobby and we'll go head out from there?

I'll be over at the TechRanch in Bozeman today at about 11 a.m. and then we'll be going out to lunch with a bunch of geeks from Montana State University. It'll be nice to get a break from taking care of mom.

My brothers and I have decided to go back to our lives tomorrow. My mom is in good hands with her sister and the hospice. She has said goodbye and is resting comfortably. She's getting weaker and is awake less often now.

I think this will be the last time I'll write about my mom. I've said my goodbyes. Now we're just waiting for the inevitable. Yesterday the doctor came over and checked one last time for any improvement in neurologic condition. A speech therapist also visited to see if mom was able to drink on her own. She wasn't. I already knew this. I had tried to give my mom some water and she wouldn't even open her mouth. There wasn't much good news from the doctor who basically said "I'm sorry."

Certainly not enough to consider torturing my mom with feeding tubes and surgeries (she still has a major heart condition which is what dragged her into the hospital in the first place) and other life support that she told us specifically that she did not want if she were in such a situation.

So, another chapter of our lives closes and a fresh page appears before us. Thanks momma for helping us write that chapter of our lives!

If you'd like to come to lunch, call me on my cell phone at 425-205-1921. Thanks!