DISQUS

Hi Kevin! I just haven't had time to work on Bleezer, which was a one-man project. But never fear. I've created a SourceForge project for Bleezer, and I'll be releasing the source as an open source project early in November.

It's actually a Java client, so it works pretty much anywhere.

Kara didn't ask her friends; she essentially asked 100 random people at a wedding in Washington, DC. Washington is focused on politics, and not the coolest new technology.

I expect that you'd get the same response pretty much anywhere if you asked the same question.

That's what analysts do. The repeat what they heard from other people. Only they put it in report form, and charge a lot of money for it.

You would still need a way to get texts from your phone into your feed. Perhaps Twitter could still handle the incoming SMS messages and route them, while your decentralized idea handles everything else.

And why should I pay a tax on blank CDs to compensate artists in case I copy music - which I do not. And I believe that the tax now works out to about 100% since the price of blank CDs has dropped.

Sorry to burst your bubble. :)

Otherwise it surely would have made big news before now.

Actually I believe it is a no-fly zone for commercial aircraft so it isn't likely that many people would have seen it from the air.

Clearly you hit a sore spot Robert. I've been there too. I currently live in Waterloo, Canada, and don't want to relocate right now. The companies in the area claim that there are 2000 open jobs (in a community of 400,000) and they can't find anybody. Truthfully, they just want new graduates or people starting out with little experience and lower salary expectations. And yes, it is the HR checkbox situation.

I know many talented folks who just can't get hired.

This isn't anything special to Microsoft. Voice recognition has been available on PBX systems for years. Google just needs to buy that option. No big deal really.

But it still isn't human. My wireless company has the same kind of system and it is the biggest pain in the butt to get anything done with it.

Rick's post was actually about not having proper shareholder agreements in place, resulting in being unable to get shareholder approval to get funding.

"Everything Apple does is innovative. Even if Microsoft’s stuff is better (and three years earlier). "

Microsoft's stuff is better? By whose definition? Better is in the eye of the beholder, in this case the customer. If the average customer finds the Apple products easier to use, then aren't they "better". The iPod must be pretty good, since the Zune all but copies it.

It isn't about the best technology, or 1080, or some measure that matters to only a few people. It's about making life easier for the average person, which is why Microsoft became successful with Windows originally. The average person is not even watching HD programming regardless of what kind of TV they have.

And skc, 2% of the digital player market is a couple hundred players. 1% of the phone market is millions of phones.

Just watch out for the huge problem with online/away/offline status not showing correctly. But Skype will say they're sorry and tell you that you are welcome to check for updates.

The first thing I did on my Sony Vaio and my Powerbook was turn off the startup sound because both of those companies appear to have more sense than Microsoft in realizing that the user controls the machine - not the other way around.

Michael, the Huffington Post commands a high rate because it trades on the fame of the folks who post, who already are well known or have personal brands.

And Robert, a blog network of 1000 bloggers might command a high ad rate (or higher than normal spot rates for certain focused blogs), but they have not yet yielded (and may never) a multi-media star like Oprah or Stern.

If one indeed compares bloggers to journalists, then can you name a journalist who commands the power of Oprah or Howard Stern? How about Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert?

I vote for PBWiki. Don't use Writeboard. We tried to use it with just 4 users and it had no way of ensuring that our changes didn't stomp all over each other.

Sadly, many ISPs throttle BitTorrent including mine, Rogers Communications (one or the two largest Canadian ISPs).

BitTorrent becomes pretty useless when running at dialup speed.

My primary email is Thunderbird on my Powerbook, but I use Gmail on my PC. Thunderbird syncs via POP to get the Gmail mail so that I can have it everywhere, and I have no problem at all.

And Gmail is very good at automatically figuring out email addresses.

It amazes me that nobody sees the enterprise value of the Google Spreadsheet. I don't meant at Google, but behind the firewall of a corporation. Microsoft has has to add security tools to ensure that you can turn off copy, save, and print on documents. The Google Spreadsheet behind your firewall offers the ability to collaborate, yet completely control the data.

Companies would have the security and control of a pseudo-mainframe environment while employees seemed to have the flexibility of a PC environment.

I think Mark is referring to paying audiences (i.e. subscribers), and paying audiences for journalism are shrinking, which leads to the layoff of journalists.

Ah, will that be on the same day that Microsoft displays other software choices on their home page?

People seem to forget that the choice to go to Google's page is one made by the user. Nobody directs them to go there, or forces them to use Google. There are plenty of choices. The Google toolbar is also something users install by choice.

On the other hand, IE7 is the default browser in the operating system that will ship with every PC running Windows, and it is preset to take users to MSN. Virtually nothing in Windows is done by user choice. Every user will be forced to take an action to move away from the default.

The term for that is "negative option marketing", and is generally illegal.

To be completely fair, the choice of search engine should be blank until the user selects one. That should please everyone.

Windows once solved a problem. It provided a pleasant, easy-to-use interface, and allowed users to run more than one application at a time.

That was then. This is now.

What problem is Microsoft trying to solve now? Does it even know?

Maybe that should be the first thing they figure out.

I see no point in insulting people. They may want to insult me back. And I generally think less of people who resort to that kind of thing.

As I've said before though, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Does it really matter if it's an OS or not? If that abstraction helps then that's great. It's an environment that you immerse yourself in; so much more that just an OS. Would you even seriously compare it to XP or OS X?

Hmmm. Maybe it's time to re-read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

There's nothing wrong with passionately arguing for something you believe in. Sometime though, you just need to know when to let it go.

I've been married for a long time, so I've had a great deal of practice giving in and apologizing. :)

But if you were having any kind of problem with your Google rank, I think you might have fixed it this weekend. And you've certainly kept Microsoft at the top of the news this weekend. After all, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and anybody who wasn't aware of Vista is now.

In the grand scheme of things this is just noise anyway. Tomorrow we'll be worried about something else.

Gee I thought I was being nice. You are entitle to your opinion (about who bloggers link to) as is everyone else. I'm sorry if you felt insulted, but you didn't make a perfectly reasonable call to bloggers not to link to unsupported posts (Curt's words); you threatened that "we should now start deriding people who link to non-credible sources".

But hey, my intent was not to insult. Like you, I'm perfectly capable of being human and making mistakes - and believe me I take every opportunity to make them. :)