Mix in our new son and a conversation about the future of video with Loic Lemeur, who runs one of Europe’s biggest Web conferences, and you get some fun video itself. Thanks, Loic, for a very fun dinner.

On Monday he’ll announce that he got lots of funding for his new company, which is building what I call “Video Twitter,” but really is more than that.

Oh, and coming soon PodTech is going to have some news of its own. I’m more excited about the future of our industry than I’ve ever been.

Written to you from Sun Microsystems where I just got a tour around some of their new community efforts. Really killer stuff.

I think this is the first public video that our new son, Milan, appears.

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.

Hey, if you’re gonna screw up, don’t make a little teeny mistake that you can sweep under the carpet and pretend you didn’t make. No, go out and prove yourself an idiot in a big way!!!

That’s what I did today when I wrote about .NET’s moves to share source with developers.

The reason I made the mistake? I saw all these headlines saying that .NET was being open sourced. It fit into the story I wanted to hear. After all Java is open sourced. Flex is open sourced (although someone just pointed out that Adobe isn’t yet accepting submissions).

But I didn’t really do my homework before posting this morning.

Truth is .NET isn’t being open sourced. Microsoft is not taking source code submissions from the developer community. No sirree.

Also, I didn’t really grok the impact on Microsoft developers. Over and over I’ve been getting hate mail today (and hate comments).

So, to correct my mistakes here’s a few things:

1. .NET is NOT being open sourced. It’s being shared sourced. So developers can see the code but can’t change it like they could on true open source projects.
2. For developers on Microsoft’s toolset this is a huge deal because it’ll help them figure out what’s going on inside .NET much better than before.
3. This isn’t the first time that .NET source was opened up, either. Developers, in my comments, have been making that point all day long.

Anyway, since I’m a .NET idiot you might want to check out what other experts are saying about these moves over on TechMeme.

I’ve also been posting the smarter .net posts over on my link blog.

Here’s the autonomous robot helicopter video that we saw at Stanford University. Rocky is cheering on the robots to attack me and one does.

The full video with interviews with the team members that explain what these things are and how they work will be up next week.

Basically they have laser and other sensors that can see the ground. The team is trying to come up with a helicopter that can fly itself without a pilot being involved. Partly for doing military work so that they could send one of these into a hostile situation to get video and other data. But these might have other uses as well. They can fly for about 20 minutes on one charge, cost about $10,000 to build, and have a few computers on board and lots of sensors.

We’ll also have other videos up next week that we filmed at Stanford. Rocky Barbanica filmed this and tells me he also has the first mid-air collision of these robots captured on tape too.

Reuters reports on a new iPhone killer (Verizon’s claim, not mine) that’s coming soon from Verizon. Sounds great. Can’t wait to try it. I doubt people will wait in line, but who knows?

Ahh, maybe this is why Steve Jobs lowered the price to $399 for the iPhone. Now that seems like an even more brilliant move.

Some things I’d like to see here:

1. What maps are on the system. I use Google Maps all the time on my iPhone and I notice that even Patrick and Maryam are using it a lot too.
2. What stock quotes are on the system. I use Yahoo’s stock prices several times a day on my iPhone.
3. What’s the experience like? It’s one thing to put a touch screen on a device. It’s a whole nother thing to make it a thrilling experience. Even my ex-wife (the one who hates technology so much she moved out of Silicon Valley to get away from the geeks) loves her iPhone. Will the Verizon devices get the same kind of evangelical fervor going? We’ll see.

OK, I’m taking quite a bit of heat from the Zune advocates in my comments — lots of them think I’m an idiot for bagging on Microsoft. So, here’s a challenge.

I’ll give you one hour of airtime on ScobleShow.com to make the case for the Zune. You gotta come to my house in Half Moon Bay, CA to do the filming. I’ll treat it just the same as I do any other demos out there. You just bring your devices and explain to the world why these are so cool and why I need to buy one. I’ll even have Patrick bring all his iPods and iPhones so you can have those to compare with, if you’d like.

Call me if you’re interested and have access to one of the new Zunes. If you’re a Microsoft employee or a PR representative even better. I always leave my cell phone on my blog, by the way. It’s over there on the right side of my blog, but my number is 425-205-1921 (local call from Microsoft headquarters! Heh!)

Another defensive move on part of Microsoft? Protect the tools business!

So, Sun Microsystems open sourced Java.
Adobe open sourced Flex.

Now Microsoft is releasing the source of .NET. UPDATE: Krish points out that this isn’t open sourcing .NET, just releasing the source. That’s even lamer cause the other two have actually open sourced and are accepting submissions from the community.

Cool, but when you’re last to do something does it really matter anymore? This is a good move, though, and will help many of Microsoft’s developer community stay on Microsoft’s tools.

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

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

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

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

I’m totally uninspired. Yawn.

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

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

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

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

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

If you know Mike, founder of TechCrunch, you know that old-school media pisses him off so Henry Blodget today found a great way to piss off Mike. Say that CNET is gonna buy him. Personally I wouldn’t be surprised to see Mike buying CNET in a few years. I don’t think Henry’s really serious, it’s just retribution for a post that Mike made about Henry where he asked for a muzzle for Henry.

Anyway I’m on Mike’s side in this little back and forth. I think this talk is just as crazy as Google at $2,000. That said it’s a crazy world we live in and getting crazier by the minute!

A few weeks back we toured the USS Hornet, a famous aircraft carrier that’s docked over in Alameda near San Francisco. Rocky put together a neat little video of the photowalk. But even if you don’t get much out of our photowalks you should check out the first minute or two. Matt Roe has the best answer to my usual “who are you?” question that I’ve heard so far.

Next Photowalking? With Trevor Carpenter on October 9th at the Marin Headlands (above the Golden Gate Bridge on the North side).

Now that I have basically the same equipment that Thomas Hawk has I’m even more in awe of his abilities to see things. Check out his photos on Zooomr (he just uploaded a bunch from yesterday’s Stanford photowalk — see how much better his images are than mine? Damn!) He just plain comes away with not only better images but MORE of them in a certain period of time.

That said, I’m really happy a lot more people are coming along on our Photowalks lately because you get to see the different approaches that people take to the same subject and you get to see images you missed that would be good to go back for later.

One thing that’s cool about the Photowalks is you get to see something you might not be able to visit and you also get to learn a little bit about history (the Hornet picked up the Apollo crew and was the site of the first steps that they took after visiting the moon). Thomas also shows us a few tricks including how to make a “poor man’s macro” and talks about his new Drobo drive system.

Enjoy!

Oh, and Matt Roe? He cut school to go on one of our Photowalks. After seeing his images on Flickr (his newer ones are on Zooomr) I can understand why. That kid has a lot of talent.

UPDATED: Thomas Hawk posted more about this Photowalk on his blog this morning.

Ever start a story like this?

Yesterday I was attacked by an autonomous robotic helicopter…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: Here’s my photos from the day:

A few months back I wrote a Fast Company column about Yahoo’s moves into the social software space. Sure is in contrast to Ballmer’s approach, no? Today we see that they are making more moves in search too. I noted that back then I noticed that Yahoo’s execs were far more upbeat than I’d ever seen them. It’s time to compare search engines again. Has anyone done a good comparison of the moves made?

A few years ago I wrote to Microsoft’s leadership and asked them why they weren’t involved in the new Web 2.0 space. I got an answer back that was about 2,000 words long and included the words “business value” 13 times. Translation: Microsoft’s leadership thought that Web 2.0 and social software like Flickr didn’t have business value and was too much of a potential fad to invest in.

Glad to see that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, is consistent. Notes that Geocities lost most of its value after being acquired by Yahoo and says “it had most of what Facebook has.” Let’s come back to that point in a second.

The thing is that Ballmer has bought into the advertising hype too. I remember when Microsoft’s President, Kevin Johnson, came to our group when I worked at Microsoft and explained that the advertising industry is 10x the size of the software industry and that he was going to steer Microsoft more into an advertising-driven business rather than just one that made its revenues from selling software. Translation: Microsoft was going to compete more with Google, Yahoo, and other companies going after the advertising pie.

Don’t miss this quote. It’s demonstrates everything that is wrong with Microsoft’s approach:

“There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure,” Ballmer said.

When I worked at Microsoft I heard this over and over and over again from various engineers and program managers who STILL haven’t competed effectively with WordPress, Flickr, Skype, YouTube, or any of the other things over the years I’ve heard this “we can build that in a few weeks” kind of arrogant attitude attached to.

But, remember eBay? Remember how dozens of competitors tried to get into the eBay space? (and still are?)

Why aren’t they succeeding? Because eBay is NOT about the technology. It’s about the community and unless you have something that’ll convince the buyers and sellers all to switch all at one moment you’ll never be able to take eBay’s market away. Translation: it’s too late and eBay has huge defensibility around its business because people won’t move away from it even if you demonstrate 5x better technology.

Same with Facebook. I’m not moving away from it. Why? I have 5,000 reasons why (and another 500 already who want to be included in my Facebook network). Unless you can convince them all to move I’m not moving. This is why LinkedIn isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, even though I like Facebook’s approach a lot better. It’s also why MySpace isn’t going anywhere. My son says his friends are all on MySpace. My brother’s bar is on MySpace. They aren’t moving no matter how hard I evangelize Facebook.

Which gets us back to Ballmer’s quotes.

First, let’s share this one: “I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people,” Mr Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.

I’m 42. Hardly young. And Facebook is appealing a lot to people in my social network and age group lately (and so is Twitter and other social tools like Pownce, LinkedIn, and sites that use social groups like Yelp, Flickr, Upcoming.org). I guess Ballmer missed that. This is what happens when Microsoft executives don’t get outside of their ivory towers very often. Steve, you really need to go to any tech industry conference and hang out in the hallways. Don’t come to San Francisco, you won’t believe anything you hear here anyway. But go to, say, LeWeb3 in Paris and hear what they say about social networks. You’ll probably hear Bebo. Facebook. And a few others. From even the old folks. Last night I was at a National Geographic event and lots of people were talking about Facebook.

Here’s another quote:

Mr Ballmer also noted that sites such as Geocities, an online community that was bought for $3 billion by Yahoo! in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, “had most of what Facebook has.”

Oh, boy. No way, no how.

First of all, I never joined Geocities. It never had utility for me. It was a place to build free Web sites. I found it had all the disadvantages to me that MySpace has and NONE of the advantages of Facebook. It was NOT a social network that exerted the kind of social pressure on me to join the way that Facebook did. I tried to ignore Facebook for years. Same with MySpace. But people I kept meeting kept begging me to join. Kevin Rose, when we had dinner, told me I was blowing it by not being on Facebook. That NEVER happened with Geocities.

Also, Facebook is now a business card collection. A rolodex. That has real utility that’ll keep me using it long after it joins the “old fad bin.”

Oh, and anytime people say “this thing is a fad?” I think of blogging. Lots of people told me that when I started it too. It wasn’t. Neither is Facebook.

But all this makes me think that Ballmer is trying to send signals to Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO) that the price is too high and that this is just a negotiating ploy. Nice one! But it doesn’t give me confidence that Microsoft is going to figure out Web 2.0 or social networking strategies anytime soon.

It also makes me realize that Ballmer has no clue about the future of advertising. If he did he’d be talking about how Facebook’s ability to concentrate people into buckets in a new way should be copied and studied. That’s where Facebook’s real advertising value is and Microsoft hasn’t demonstrated ANY ability to see that yet. Of course, Facebook itself hasn’t shipped its advertising platform that’ll demonstrate its vision there either, but I hear it’s coming.

Will Microsoft get a clue before Facebook gets an entrenched advertising platform going?

Ballmer proved with Google and with these quotes today: no.

BREAKING NEWS: You know how Google Adsense works? On blogs or web pages? It looks for keywords used and then delivers ads.

Or, you know those “related links” things that are showing up on various blogs and news pages? They are generated the same way.

But Proximic just shipped a much better system than the ones I’ve seen from Google and other players.

Here it is. This isn’t a lightweight Web 2.0 company, it was under development for five years.

I was just looking at the TechMeme Top 100 List and noticed that it has very few bloggers on it — I can only see about 12 real blogs on that list. Blogging being defined as “single voice of a person.” Most of the things on the list are now done by teams of journalists — that isn’t blogging anymore in my book. TechCrunch just hired a professional journalist which is sort of funny cause when I started blogging I never expected blogging to become a business, just a way to share what was going on in my life.

But there’s a bigger trend I’m seeing: people who used to enjoy blogging their lives are now moving to Twitter. Andrew Parker punctuates that trend with a post “Twitter is ruining my blogging.” I find that to be the case too and when I talked about this on Twitter a raft of people chimed in and agreed that they are blogging a lot less now that Twitter is here.

Personally the list business is just lame anyway. When I consult with companies I tell them to forget about the “A list” and go for people who are passionate about their products. Word gets around when you’re talking with your customers in a new way anyway. It’s one reason why I am watching 5,900 Twitterers. That’s MY “A list.” Why don’t you join? I automatically follow anyone following me now.

UPDATED: Gabe Rivera just released the TechMeme Top 100 list and explains it.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh #4: Photowalking tomorrow!

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

TechCrunch also just announced a TechMeme related piece of news. New top blogs list coming out. That’ll be very interesting.

Adobe tonight is announcing that they’ve bought Virtual Ubiquity, makers of the very cool BuzzWord (which is now open for public trials). For the details, go and see TechCrunch’s post cause I’m too lazy to write up all the news word-for-word (I was driving when I got the call, so might have missed some important detail and we were both embargoed until 9 p.m. tonight — I’m sure this news will be covered in depth by tons of bloggers) I saw this at an Adobe event a few months ago and wondered why it hadn’t been acquired yet cause it’s a lot nicer than what other companies have shown me so far like Google’s Docs.

Adobe also announced a cool new widget that’ll make sharing files easy, especially PDFs, which will be automatically rendered by this new widget. I’ll play around with that and see how it compares to some of the others from places like Microsoft’s Folder Share and Box.net, among others.

I was briefed on Friday by Adobe and asked them whether this represented a new strategy for Adobe and whether or not we’d see more acquisitions. The non-committal answer on the other end of the phone told me the answer. Look for Adobe to make other moves in the near future to dive further into the deep end of the Web 2.0 Work 2.0 pool.

Don’t pay attention to what Adobe is doing here, though. Alone it doesn’t seem all that significant (even though, to me, it represents a real shift in strategy and an interesting one, to boot). But, rather, look at the bigger “Work 2.0″ trend that’s underway here. I doubt that any one company will end up owning a monopoly share the way that Microsoft really controlled Work 1.0. It’s rare that I see an office worker who isn’t using Microsoft’s Office. Walk through an airport and on almost system you’ll see Outlook/Excel/PowerPoint/Word.

But, I love the new collaboration software that’s coming along. The trend got moving with Skype, but includes things like Zoho’s Office suite, Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets, the recent purchase of Zimbra (now owned by Yahoo), Edit Grid, Etelos, Atlassian, Skitch, 37 Signals (Basecamp, etc), 30 Boxes, ThinkFree, SmartSheet, Spresent, Grand Central or Callwave, Vyew, Stixy, and Concept Share. I’m sure I’m missing stuff, please add in your own favorites to the comments here and I’ll keep updating my post.

Or, as Jake Luer says: anything that keeps 18 versions of the same doc out of my inbox (I asked everyone tonight about what services came to mind when I said “Work 2.0.”).

These new services let you work with people in a whole new way. No more emailing around Word Docs or Spreadsheets or PowerPoints. Instead you pass around a URL, and work there.

Now, is Microsoft in trouble? No. Office is going to sell well for quite a few years still.

But there is blood in the water. If you try all these companies listed in this post you can work together with people in new ways that simply aren’t possible using Microsoft stuff.

Anyway, Adobe tonight just added onto the pile. This is significant. It’s amazing to me that Microsoft is letting all this competition build up strength and power. How long before people other than the “insiders/early adopters” start switching over to these newer services? I know I’m using Microsoft stuff less and less. There IS blood in the water even if only the early sharks can smell it.

UPDATE: More on TechMeme about these announcements.

UPDATE2: Microsoft itself is working on an online collaborative word processor, Mary Jo Foley says. Again, don’t get waylaid by the word processing announcements here. The bigger picture is more important.

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

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

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

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

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

When I visited Carnegie Mellon I met Randy Pausch. He was inspirational then (developed a new programming language, Alice, which was aimed at helping kids learn to program). But now, he’s even more inspirational. You gotta watch this video (WMV format). It’s his last lecture. Has pancreatic cancer.

More about this talk and Randy over on Metafilter.

Tons of people on Twitter are reporting problems with their iPhones. Including my son. Including Jeff Clavier. Anyone else having this problem? These are people who have not unlocked their iPhones. I’m about to update mine and will report what happens. A bunch more reports are over on TechMeme and Dave Winer is tracking them too.

How about you? How did your update of your iPhone go?

Oh, and Patrick’s iPhone lost all of its data. Made worse because his Mac had a bunch more problems (this is the second time it’s been in the shop) and so he’s praying now that Apple didn’t delete everything off of his hard drive.

UPDATE: My iPhone update seems to have gone well. New icon on home screen says “iTunes.” Meanwhile the Twitters from people with updates that didn’t go well continue to come in. Here’s another one.

Here’s my photos from the Halo 3 Launch party last night in Silicon Valley. Guy Kawasaki has a better post, though.

It was a great party, glad I talked Maryam into letting me go. Thanks to Daniel for coming along. Good vibe and lots of smiles.

Wow, I go to lunch with my parents and the entire world shifts due to a Wall Street Journal report that Microsoft may buy part of Facebook which would value Facebook at $10 billion or so.

Too bad that Microsoft’s management didn’t listen to Jeff Sandquist and others two years ago.

Funny, you know Dave Morin? He works at Facebook on the app platform now but used to work at Apple. He told me that he tried to get Apple to pay attention too. But got frustrated with Apple’s inability to get Facebook. So, he left to join Facebook.

What’s funny, he told me, is now a good percentage of Apple employees are on Facebook. At the latest Apple press conference I noticed that Steve Jobs even showed off the iPhone Facebook app on stage.

As talked about earlier, here’s the FeedHub videos.

Interview.

Demo.

Read/WriteWeb has a good preview of companies to watch at DEMOfall 2007, which starts today in San Diego, CA. Here’s the full list of all the presenters coming this week.

I think they missed one that’s worthy of including, though: SceneCaster. Mashable has a writeup of SceneCaster. I’ll have a video of them up soon.

Why? SceneCaster is aimed at Second Life. But it gets rid of some of the real negatives that Second Life has. What are those negatives?

1. You can’t get more than about 80 people into any one space. This makes it very tough to use Second Life for commercial experiences. SceneCaster doesn’t have those limitations.
2. You can’t embed Second Life onto Web pages or Facebook profiles. SceneCaster lets you do just that, which makes it far easier to navigate around for novices.
3. SecondLife isn’t well integrated into other Web stores of 3D objects. SceneCaster integrates Google’s 3D Warehouse.
4. Kids are kept out of the main grid in Second Life where on SceneCaster each scene is controlled by the owner. So my scenes will allow kids in and others might have different rules.
5. Because each scene is embeded into a Web page we can link to scenes a lot easier than we can link to them on Second Life.

What doesn’t it do that Second Life will? It isn’t a complete world the way Second Life is, although that world gets people lost which causes high churn rates of people who try it for a while and get bored and leave before discovering that there’s a world that might keep their attention.

Downside? Windows only right now (they are working on a Mac version).

Any other Demo companies that we should pay attention to?

Let’s do what we did with TechCrunch 40 last week. I’ll pick SceneCaster as my favorite company that I’ve seen so far.

Anyone want to pick the company that’ll get the most hype coming out of Demo?

Oh, and there’s a TON of news coming through the feeds this morning due to Demo. I’ve put the best stuff on my link blog.

Another cool thing that Read/WriteWeb didn’t mention? YourTrumanShow, which now will be called “VideoMap.” Mashable wrote that up too.

First of all, Jim Long is an NBC camera dude who is on Twitter. That alone is weird enough. But his Tweet tonight?

“thanks new dad!!! how’s the sleep?? hey White House press secretary Scott Stanzel had nice things to say bout you!!

Whoa? Who the heck?

I remember Scott Stanzel from Microsoft. It hadn’t registered that this was the same Scott. Wikipedia reports that Scott left Microsoft in October to join the White House.

Wild! I told Jim “Scott’s a great guy for a Republican.”

Maybe it’s time for a tour of the White House? Jim also told me that Scott is a big social media advocate.

Oh, and I’m getting some sleep, just at random times.

I’ve been playing with mSpoke’s FeedHub, releasing today at the Demo Conference. I’ll have a video up later today demonstrating the product.

Dan Farber has a review and info up on his ZDNet blog.

I’ve been interested i this topic for some time. Right now I’m reading 848 feeds for my link blog in Google Reader. I’m way overloaded with feeds. Now, imagine I only had 10 minutes a day to catch up on my feeds, how would I do that?

Well, the answer up to now was TechMeme or one of its sisters.

TechMeme actually works great. Tracks thousands of news feeds and every few minutes it remeasures which ones are most important. Problem is that TechMeme only covers tech news. Its sister sites cover gossip, or regular news/politics, or baseball.

But what about 800 custom feeds that you hand picked?

Well, that’s what FeedHub is aimed at.

You put your feeds into it and FeedHub will pick the best stuff to show you out of those feeds.

One problem: for me it doesn’t work. It doesn’t pick the stuff I’d really like to read from my feeds. Almost none of the items match my link blog, for instance.

Now, keep in mind that you’re not supposed to judge FeedHub by its first results. You’re supposed to train it. By using the feed items and clicking on the ones you like, and voting up certain topics, over time it will start bringing ou a lot more stuff that matches your interests.

That’s cool, but I haven’t gotten to that level of commitment with it yet to find out if it really works that well.

I really want to believe in it, though, because I think something like this holds some major keys to information overload and giving us a “custom TechMeme.”

I’ll keep playing with this and see if I can get it to work well for me.

Some other concerns:

1. How big a market is there for a “custom TechMeme?” Not too many people I know are trying to read hundreds of feeds. Certainly not many busy executives who are looking for alternatives.
2. How will they make money? Advertising in the feed items? That’ll make reusing them far less popular and, even, could add its own new noise that’d offset the time savings.
3. What will they do with the attention information they are collecting? Let’s assume that they’ll get everyone who reads feeds to use it, well, then they’ll know more about us and our behavior than even Google does today.

How about you? Any of you playing with this? Are you looking for ways to subscribe to new feeds and get a custom Techmeme?

Oh, one more caveat. It takes up to a day to start working. So if you just try it for a few minutes you’ll have a totally unsatisfactory experience.

UPDATE: Got the videos up here.

That’s Dawn Douglass, in her booth at TechCrunch 40.

She takes on TechCrunch in a scathing post.

Writes “But I think TechCrunch is vulnerable as a company. Why? Because Arrington is abusing that power.”

Among other things.

She also notes “As a startup, isn’t it shooting yourself in the foot to openly, much less publicly, criticize the one who can create positive or negative buzz about something that you have poured your heart, soul and financial security into? “

I know both Dawn and Mike. Dawn is the softest person you might imagine. I find her a breath of fresh air when it comes to entrepreneurs who are trying to get people to pay attention to their efforts. But now I know she speaks softly and carries a big stick!

As to the DemoPit. There was one thing I really hated about the DemoPit: The signage totally sucked. I walked around and couldn’t tell what any company did. That meant I’d need to go up to them and ask. Which guaranteed a four-minute pitch. Most of the time when I did that it was with companies I really didn’t care about. Please, Mike and Jason, next time you do that include a sign that has a sentence about what the company does. That’ll greatly increase the number of vendors I’ll go up to and engage with.

What do you think?

UPDATE: in defense of Jason and Mike, doing a 1.0 conference on the scale of TechCrunch 40 is really pretty awesome. Most of our industry conferences have had quite a few years to get to the place that TechCrunch got on the first one. Back in the 1990s I used to help plan conferences and they aren’t easy to do and rarely do they go completely how you plan. I remember seeing Mike a few days before TechCrunch 40 and he hadn’t slept, obviously was pouring his entire being into this. That’s something to be defended as well.

If you follow the talk over on Twitter you’ll see that there are some unwritten “rules” and that I am breaking lots of those rules and pissing lots of people off.

I break the rules so you don’t have to.

So, what are they?

1. Never send more than 140 characters. I break this rule all the time because what I have to say simply doesn’t fit into 140 characters. So, why not just say it on my blog? Easy. I’m reacting to something someone said to me on Twitter. What happens on Twitter should stay in Twitter.
2. Never Tweet more than five times a day. First, a “Tweet” is a Twitter message. So, why no more than five times a day? Because if you post more than that you are in danger of pushing other people’s messages off of the home page of your follower’s Twitter. Last night one guy complained that all he saw on his Twitter account was my messages.
3. Never follow more than 300 people. Why is this a rule? Because if you follow 5,700 people, like I do, then you’ll be tempted to answer lots of those Tweets, which will put you in danger of breaking #2. See next rule.
4. Never follow anyone who isn’t your “real” friend. This will help you keep your friends’ list down to less than 300, which will keep you from breaking rule #2.
5. Don’t assume other people are having the same experience you are. My experience with Twitter? I get 20 new Tweets inbound EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY. It’s like a 24/7 chat room for me. But for you? Most of you only follow 30 people, so to you it’s more akin to instant messaging with just your friends. If you subscribe to a noisy jerk, like me, you’ll get overrun. Me? I just tell my friends who complain that they don’t have enough friends.
6. Don’t post thoughts across multiple Tweets (see #1). I do this often and it pisses people off. They think that the 140 character limit was there for a reason. The real reason is that SMS can’t handle more than 140 characters.
7. The Twitter question is “what are we doing?” It’s NOT “what do you think about XXXX?” I break this rule all the time cause, well, I have opinions and Twitter is my way of sharing short opinions with the world. Sue me.
8. Follow one person for every 10 who follows you. Me? I follow EVERY person who follows me, as Dave Winer points out. Why? Cause I believe that anyone who follows me is a friend and is someone I should listen to. Other people think it’s just a publishing mechanism for posting their URLs and other stuff to the world.
9. If other people are telling you you’re spamming, you should listen to them. Me? I tell them to screw off. Why? Because if I’m being too noisy then there’s a little button called “unfollow.” Why should I change my behavior to suit others? Many other people tell me they like my noisy behavior. One thing I like about Twitter is that you don’t need to follow people you think are jerks.
10. Don’t put things into Twitter that aren’t designed for Twitter like photos, audio, etc. Me? I use TwitterGram and am playing with Flickr embeds too. Why not push it around?

Anyway, are there other rules I don’t know about? I’d like to break those, too.

Let’s leave Halo 3 out of this, for now.

Yesterday Hugh Macleod wrote up his thoughts on Microsoft.

He puts out a theory that Microsoft would be more loved if it told a better story.

I’ve been studying my own reactions to Microsoft lately and I think it’s a lot deeper than that.

I have a REASON to love Microsoft. It propelled my career into a whole nother level. But lately even that hasn’t been enough.

I’ve been asking myself why?

To me it comes down to expectations. Microsoft is like the genius child who has rich and smart parents. Society holds huge expections for such people. If they don’t succeed the story is it’s a child who hasn’t lived up to his/her potential.

Microsoft is much the same way.

We see Google having fun with docs and spreadsheets.

We see Facebook and Plaxo and LinkedIn (not to mention Ning and Broadband Mechanics) having fun with social networking.

We see Flickr, Zooomr (one developer!), SmugMug, Photobucket, and a raft of others having fun with photography.

We see Apple having fun with all sorts of stuff.

We see Amazon having fun with datacenters.

And on, and on.

But where is the kid who has rich and smart parents? Yeah, Microsoft brought us the “Demo of the Year” last year: Photosynth. But what you didn’t read on TechCrunch is that it takes up to nine hours to process one set of images so, while it is a killer demo, it won’t be a product you and I can use anytime soon.

This week we learned that Google is struggling to stay relevant to the new conversation: one that was taken over this year by Facebook. But what is Microsoft doing to stay relevant? It’s like Microsoft has decided to go and spend the inheritance and not do any more work to stay on the bleeding edge. This is a much less interesting Microsoft than it was back in the 1990s, where it seemed every week Microsoft would announce something new and interesting. I remember being a subscriber to eWeek and other trade magazines and it was a rare week that Microsoft didn’t have the most important story. (TechMeme has taken over that role, and this summer how often have we seen Microsoft at the top of TechMeme? Not very often.

This week I learned another Microsoft employee is leaving to start his own company. This guy has asked me to keep it quiet until he can let all his managers know, but he’s someone who is liked and trusted both in Silicon Valley and up in Redmond. He’s a connector. An innovator. A guy who wants to SHIP innovative products.

These kinds of people keep leaving Microsoft because they see it isn’t living up to its potential and is frustrating to work inside of. It’s more fun to go join a small startup, or even one that’s fairly well along its path, like Facebook (everytime I go to Facebook I see more of the people I used to work with).

It’s been more than a year now since I left Microsoft. I really expected Ray Ozzie to come out and do lots of cool stuff for the Internet. But what did we get? A new design on live.com? Please.

The interesting thing is that Microsoft’s bench is so deep that even with the people they’ve lost over the years there still are huge numbers of amazing people working there and they still have advantages that no other company has. Deep, deep pockets. Massive numbers of customers. Profits that keep arriving everyday. A salesforce that’s well run and has its fingers in almost every country in the world.

So, back to Hugh’s post. Microsoft needs a new story. If I were on the management team I’d be looking hard at the Bungie team, the folks who brought us Halo 3.

What did they do right?

1. They stayed away from Microsoft’s politics. They work in a small ex-hardware store in Kirkland, Washington, USA. About 10 miles from the main campus.
2. They kept their own identity. They have their own security. No Microsoft signs outside. A very different feel internally (much more akin to Facebook than how the Office team works together). Each team works in open seating, focused around little pods where everyone can see everyone else and work with them.
3. They put their artists and designers front and center and obviously listen to them. The Windows team, however, fights with their artists and designers.
4. They keep the story up front and center. They work across the group to make sure they deliver that story everywhere. Translation: employees know what the story is, how to communicate it (or when not to), and they have great PR teams who work to make sure that story is shared with everyone.
5. The product thrills almost on every level. Hey, sounds like an iPhone!

The problem is that Bungie is a small exception in a sea of Microsoft.

Changing this company’s public story is going to prove very difficult. Maybe that’s why Hugh drew Microsoft a “Blue Monster” instead of something a little more friendly.

I’m sure some of my friends at Microsoft will misread this and think I’m “a hater.” You can think that if you want. It is intellectually lazy, though.

It’s interesting that since leaving Microsoft only Kevin Schofield (he’s one of the great connectors the company has over in Microsoft Research) has really done a good job of reaching out to me and tried to tell me a “new Microsoft” story.

One thing I did at Microsoft was reach out to the haters and see if I could tell them a new story.

So, I’m game. On Monday night I’ll be at the Halo 3 launch party. I’ll be looking to show my video camera a new Microsoft story.

But until I find it so far it just seems like that rich and smart kid who hasn’t lived up to the potential that we all see in her.

Am I missing something?

Thank you to the photographers who taught me to capture the main event.

Thank you to the photographers who taught me to look for the details.

Thank you to the photographers who taught me to look down.

Thank you to the photographers who taught me to look for juxtapositions.

Thank you to the photographers who taught me to look for love.

Thank you to the photographers who taught me to get down on my belly and get into the mud.

Thank you to Flickr for making such a killer community of people who help inspire other photographers. Thank you to Canon for making a tool that is amazing.

Hope you are having a glorious evening, just like this one. All these shots were made tonight with a Canon 5D on my evening walk.

Don’t miss our next photowalking with the National Geographic at Stanford University where you’ll learn some of these lessons yourself. You’re invited! Tom Seligman (Director of the Cantor Art Museum) has confirmed his participation in the photowalk.
Marc Levoy will be there, too. He is a CS/EE professor who has been doing some amazing work in the areas of photography and imaging.

Thomas Hawk lays it out. This is a great guide not just for photowalking but for joining any new community. That reminds me, I need to hand out some “favorites” for other people’s photos.

Oh, and save October 1st at 4 p.m. on your schedule. Stanford University has put together a hell of a great photowalking. Be there, or be square. More details coming soon.

That photo was taken on our first Photowalking together more than a year ago now. How fast time flies!

If you’re watching my Flickr stream you’ll see images from both my Canon 5D getting uploaded as well as images from a Nikon S51C. This is a cool little camera that has wifi built in. So, I don’t need to hook the camera up to my computer to upload images anymore.

I took this image seconds ago looking out Patrick’s bedroom window. Wonderful image quality and I really like the wifi built in.

The camera is on loan from Fotonation (they made the wifi software that Nikon uses). They are loaning me the camera to participate in the America At Home project that Rick Smolan is putting on. Are you taking pictures at home this weekend? If you are, you should submit them to this project.

I wish my Canon 5D had Wifi built into it.

UPDATE: already in my testing I find one thing frustrating: I can’t upload images straight to Flickr. I have to upload them to Nikon’s site first, then visit my computer and post them from there onto Flickr.

I can’t believe it’s almost October. In the past week the pumpkins showed up in Half Moon Bay, so I took some shots. We should do a party at the pumpkin patch again. Anyone want to meet up next Saturday?

Mike Arrington says that Google has been showing around a new social networking tool that’s aimed at competing with Facebook.

Why is Google so concerned by Facebook?

Easy, Google is the world’s best intention concentration engine.

Think about it. If you intend to do something, like buy a car, where are you going to go? Google!

And, aren’t you concentrated into a community of other people who also intend to buy a car? Yes!

Name another system that does a better job of concentrating intention the way that Google does. I can’t.

Well, until Facebook came along.

Now Facebook has several ways to track intention. They have a great set of groups that you can join. If you were intending to do something, like buy a car, wouldn’t you want to talk with other people who’ve bought the car you’re looking at? Absolutely.

Did you know that if you click an interest that someone has put in that you can see all the other members on Facebook who also have that interest?

That’s a concentration effect that Google doesn’t have.

Or, do a search for “Saturn Aura.” I find a bunch of groups by Saturn car owners. That’s another way that people are concentrated.

Anyway, all this concentration of people into groups really pisses off Google. Why? Because THAT is what advertisers BUY on Google!

Google was getting used to having the only advertising story where some company like General Motors could buy audiences that were concentrated into little buckets. Now Facebook is coming on strong and, so, Google needed to jump in with an alternative.

Can’t wait to see it.

Hmmm, I used the words “social graph” in this interview with Randi Zuckerberg, director of business development at Facebook.

Dave Winer, yesterday, said that anyone who uses that term sounds like a monkey.

She gave her definition of Social Graph at about 14:39. Everyone who is talking about this should listen to this part of the interview.

I disagree with Dave Winer. The Social Graph is NOT my social network.

My Social Network is my friends list.

But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that.

For instance, did you know you can see everyone who is into skiing on Facebook?

Did you know you can see everyone who is into Daft Punk?

Those people are NOT in my social network. But they are part of the social graph that you can study on Facebook.

Interesting how we have disagreements about language.

So, what would you call what you can see in Facebook? It isn’t just my social network, though. Try again.

I love Callwave. Here you get to see what it does that makes your phone much more useful.

Shel Israel, blog here, is the guy who coauthored Naked Conversations with me. I’ve never had him on my show before today. But, you might not know that Shel has helped launch countless Silicon Valley companies. He’s been to Demo (the conference coming up next week) more than anyone I know. The companies he’s helped have won “DemoGod” awards seven times. He wrote a newsletter about conferences, too, so knows what he is talking about.

Anyway, we talk about lots of stuff in this half hour conversation. Hope you enjoy it. If you’re a company going to Demo you should listen to his advice.

I love any conference that bans PowerPoint. I recently started out a speech saying “I used to work at Microsoft and sat through my share of boring PowerPoint presentations so I promised myself never to do that to an audience again.” That got me my biggest applause line.

Anyway, this conversation goes south a few times, but that’s just how Shel and I work together. Stick in there and there’s some good stuff.

I gotta go back and find out if you can win a DemoGod award with a crappy product. Shel’s dog interrupted his answer on that. I’ll try to get him to write the answer here.

Ahh, now you have even more of a reason to come to Half Moon Bay to my house to get on the ScobleShow (I’ve done a couple of interviews today already here — tons of interesting stuff is coming out next week at Demo and I’ve been getting some sneak peaks this week). Now you can come and get the “one of the top five sandwiches in America,” according to MSNBC.

In fact, I think we’ll go there today. Want to meet at Sam’s Chowder House at 2:30 p.m.? Yummy!

UPDATE: that’s the photo I shot of my lunch today. It was definitely yummy. I like Salumi’s up in Seattle better, though. But maybe that’s just me.

Here’s the video of Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint. They won the $50,000 at TechCrunch 40 yesterday. He gives us a demo and shows us how his service can save you thousands of dollars. Also explains why it’s better than Quicken.

So, what was Barak so passionate about this morning? Well, his firm creates market conversations. One of the ones that got big PR was the Ray Hopewood campaign.

He’s running for president and is making fun of us technology bloggers at the same time.

I think it’s brilliant.

What is it?

There’s a small company, BigFix, that does enterprise software. All its competitors have billions of dollars. They don’t.

So, how do they get noticed in a sea of clutter? In a world where 700 companies want Mike Arrington to pay attention to them?

Do they do the usual stuff?

No, they create a funny presidential campaign that gets national airplay.

How did they do it? They were brave. Created a campaign that didn’t have a hard sell. Didn’t have a strong tie back to the company funding it.

Did it work? Yes, bigtime Barak says.

The campaign is funny and takes swipes even at me. The videoblogger is named “Robert Scziport” and Barak said he got the idea, at least in part, for the campaign after watching me report from John Edwards’ plane when he announced he was running for president.

Barak Kassar at breakfast this morning. I love people who have passion for life and passion for doing interesting things.

I’m still learning to use my new Canon 5D — these aren’t very sharp if you blow them up — but, damn, I’m having fun shooting people. More on Barak in a second.

The winner of TechCrunch 40 is: Mint.com.

Here’s the CEO, Aaron Patzer. He just won $50,000. His site is being hit so hard it’s down. He gave us a demo yesterday morning. We’ll try to get that up tomorrow.

What’s interesting is that two days ago I asked who would win and within minutes one commenter here said he thought Mint would. More proof that my readers know more than I do?

Here’s the TechCrunch coverage of the contest. Mint is also at the top of TechMeme right now.

On October 1 Stanford University is rolling out the red carpet for a Photowalk which ends up at a talk by National Geographic photographers.

This week Rick Smolan (that’s him in the photo) is doing another one of his famous photo projects that you can participate in. He’s the photographer who did the “Day in the Life” series of books, among others. This time he’s working on a new book that focuses on what home means to Americans.

Anyway, really hope you can come along on the Photowalking at Stanford. You’re invited. Just sign up on Upcoming.org. You don’t need an expensive camera, either. It’s open to everyone.

I never even got into see a presentation. The hallway was too good. Here’s my photos. Damn, I love my Canon 5D camera (thank you Maryam!). Imagine how good my images will be after I learn how to use it. Thomas Hawk or Scott Beale don’t need to worry about losing their status as best Web 2.0 photographers anytime soon. Hah.

I got a demo of Mint and it lives up to the hype someone gave it in my comment section this morning. Nice way to look at and manage your personal finances. Cubic Telecom did live up to the hype, too. I gotta get some of those phones for Maryam’s family in Iran. She pays so much for her mom to call back home.

There’s plenty of chatter over on TechMeme — I’m not going to try to live blog conferences anymore, it’s a thankless task and one that’s best left to people who actually like sitting in the halls. Me? I’m a hallway rat. CenterNetworks’ Allen Stern has a good wrapup and links to a few of the best posts..

Oh, anyone want to be on the ScobleShow? I’ll be hanging out in Half Moon Bay and have a few extra hours this week to do some interviews. Family is here, so it’s good to get out of the house.

Finally, in that picture above is Renee Blodgett, holding the camera. If you can identify all the other people in the picture you’ll be ready for some hallway networking at tech conferences in the future. Hint: a famous journalist/blogger, a wife of one of TechCrunch 40’s co-founders, and a famous lawblogger is there.

I’m in serious social networking fatigue. Or maybe that’s the overnight fatigue kicking in cause Milan woke up three times.

Here’s another Twitter competitor: Utterz.

Except it’s like Twitter with TwitterGram with a decent UI.

Here’s the condundrum: if a service has better features than Twitter but your friends aren’t on it, is it any good?

No.

Translation: I’m not trying out new social networks anymore until at least 100 people ask me to join.

Sorry to be so rude, but the bar has gone up. The window has closed. Yada yada yada.

Oh, I’m sneaking out of the house to go to TechCrunch 40 for a few hours. Don’t tell Maryam!

I’m seeing a LOT of hype about TechCrunch 40 being free for companies to demo at. Eric Norlin repeats that, for instance, on his blog.

That just isn’t true, if you look at it the right way.

Most companies I know are bringing five people to a show like TechCrunch 40 or Demo (which is next week). Shel Israel, in an interview that’ll be up this week on ScobleShow, told me that he recommends startups bring EVERYONE to shows like Demo or TC40 (everyone being someone involved in building the product/service, not support staff like secretaries or janitors). Why? Because the hallways is where the real networking is done and where the real stories get written about companies. If you have five people at a conference like this you’ll have five times more opportunities to get a hallway discussion started that’ll lead to a major blog post or an article in the New York Times (I’m writing a column for Fast Company and am already including at least one company from TechCrunch 40 in it, for instance).

At TechCrunch 40 those people need to buy a ticket. So that’s far from “free.”

Plus, many companies that are coming from outside of San Francisco region need to pay the travel, hotel, and meal costs. That’s not insignificant.

Even people who get in free (and there are always some of those) need to take time away from other things that are important and/or cover travel costs. That’s hardly “free” in my book.

So, what’s the most “free” for both attendees and demoing companies?

How about ScobleShow.com? I’ve had hundreds of companies on my show in less than a year. Far more than you’ll see at Demo or at TC40. Yet none of them, other than Seagate, paid to be there.

Also, no one at home pays to watch those demos and you don’t even need to travel to see them.

So, Eric, you’ve already got your “free for all” demo show! Even better, if someone gets boring you just turn them off!

Oh, and I patterned my demos after Chris Shipley’s Demo. No PowerPoints. Short demos (most of my demos are less than 10 minutes).

Every single company that’s been on my show should say thanks to Seagate. That’s the model for making a “free for everyone” demo show.

Part of the fun of the next two days will be seeing who’ll win the $50,000 at TechCrunch 40, which starts in a few hours here in San Francisco.

I’ve asked a few of my friends and the early hype goes to Cubic Telecom, a company from Ireland headed by Pat Phelan. Several of my friends say that they are the ones to watch — their demo is on Tuesday (makes international calling, and traveling with a cell phone overseas, better than before, my friends say). Formerly known as “Roam4free.”

The problem is no one who has seen all these companies’ new offerings is talking (the companies are under strict embargoes not to show anyone their stuff outside of NDA land), so we’ve gotta do some triangulation to figure out who’ll be the best (which also makes this, at best, an educated guess at what will win).

Why try to pick a winner before you know? Well, that gives you some context. You go check out the company that’s getting the early hype from your friends (they usually are right, by the way) then you compare everyone else to that company. If you find a company that’s better than that one you have a story.

So, how about it — which company is better than Cubic Telecom?

Oh, and I love that the early favorite doesn’t come from Silicon Valley. I bet if Cubic Telecom wins Ireland’s best tech blogger, Tom Raftery, will have a big party.

I’ve given up trying to compete with Mike Arrington. Instead I learned it’s easier just to hang out in his house and interview companies. Seriously. Here’s an interview I did there with BlogTalkRadio’s CEO, Alan Levy.

They just launched a bunch of new features and he tells me the inside scoop.

What’s funny is that Dave Winer called me in the middle of this interview (he had no idea I was doing it). That added some levity because Dave Winer worked with BlogTalkRadio to build TwitterGram.