Thanks for the fun "measurement."

Don't know who Jeremiah is? He works at Hitachi Data Systems and is a fun guy to hang out with. A human.

Want a bunch of storage for your data center? See him.

Chris Sells is a developer here and is working on one of the .NET teams and he's looking for developers to tell him what sucks about .NET. "In this case, I’d like to know what “pain points” you experience when configuring, deploying and maintaining distributed .NET applications."

Another human you can talk to here.

Speaking of humans who are accessible, Larry Hryb, Xbox Live team's top blogger, is On10.net today showing off some cool games.

Off to do take care of the humans who write me in email (hundreds waiting, whew).

It's interesting being in the middle of a blogstorm. It causes interesting conversations, that's for sure! (Even here in the halls at Microsoft).

Tim Bray, of Sun Microsystems chimes in: "There's a word for companies that base all decisions on ruthless quantitative ROI metrics: Bankrupt."

My co-author, Shel Israel, in a followup to our failure to answer Werner's question, takes a second stab at "why Amazon should blog?"

Me? I go back to when I was a retail dude in a small store in Silicon Valley in the 1980s.

I learned that if you didn't open the door you didn't get any customers.

You had to open the door, even if you thought today might be a slow day and you'd be better off going to the beach (there were days when we did less than $500 in business, which didn't even cover our rent and electricity, much less our salaries, but we opened the door anyway).

This is a people business. Even when it scales all the way up to a billion dollar business.

I was reminded by that yet again yesterday. My cell phone rang. Rajeev Gopalakrishnan said hello. He runs a .NET User Group in Harrisburg, PA, USA and wanted me to help him find some more speakers for his user group. He invited me to speak.

Now, will that conversation add anything to Microsoft's bottom line? No. Will it show up on a spreadsheet somewhere? No. Will it satisfy Werner's question? No.

But it's exactly why I blog. I want to be found in the search engines. I want people to know there's a guy at Microsoft (actually, now more than 2,000) that cares about what his company does and is accessible.

I didn't start a blog to get 20,000 readers. I started a blog to talk with Dave Winer and Dori Smith and share with them what was going on in my life and tell them what I thought about what was going on in theirs.

Speaking of which, I disagree with Dave's take on this argument this morning. People shouldn't start blogging because their competitors are. They should start blogging because they want to talk with their families. Their friends. Their customers. And other people. About what they care about.

You know, we'll come up with demographics. Psychographics. Business intelligence. ROI graphs. And all that too.

But I really could care less about the numbers. Maybe that makes me a bad blogging evangelist. That's OK.

Our book tells you about 188 other companies and what they thought about blogging's effect on their business. Their relationships. Their accessibility.

David, in my comments, reasks the question again: "Why would people prefer to hear from Amazon over the authors who sell on Amazon and the other customers at Amazon?"

I go back to Rajeev. Why did he call me? I was accessible. He wanted to have me help him out. A simple phone call. A simple blog.

This is not a numbers business. It's a people business. Are you available to share your business with people or are you hiding behind customer support walls, spreadsheets, or IT solutions to interacting with your customers?

I am not going to remain a blogging evangelist. I have to get to work on Rajeev's request. That's the downside of being accessible. Your customers tell you to do more work. Off I go, have a good weekend!

Oh, and I remember my first interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. He told me how he offered his Apple I to HP and Atari and was rebuffed. Why? Because his bosses at those two companies didn't think there would be enough people who would buy a personal computer.

In other words, Wozniak didn't have the numbers either. Did that matter in the end? :-)

Update: James Robertson, who runs his own business is a Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, says the same thing in his post "Trying to find the ROI in blogging."

I heard in the office this week that I am gonna get traded to Google for three engineers, to be named later. Heheh.

Yes, it's April Fools time again. Look at the graph for an "April Fools" search on Technorati.

Ahh, it's always a fun day. I wonder who'll have the best jokes?

Those of you who've been reading me for a while know that I use an RSS News Aggregator to read many times more blogs than I could read just by visiting them in a browser. (I use NewsGator Online, which brings blogs into Outlook). That tool isn't rated in this article, instead Frank Gruber looked at all the online aggregators which are very popular. Good review! If you haven't yet tried an RSS Aggregator, an online reader is a good way to start.

Albert Lai, yesterday, released a bunch of new features for his Bubbleshare photo service. Some, like the new BubbleBar let you put a bar on your relatives computers and your photos automatically appear. This is very cool, turns any PC into a photo display device. No longer do you have to email your photos to mom. Your photos will appear as soon as you drop them into BubbleShare.

But what is really funny is this annotated photo album he posted from his week last week at Mix06. Oh, man, that was hillarious! You gotta check out what he made people like Mike Arrington, Bill Gates, Marc Canter, and Jeremy Zawodny say (there's nine funny photos, click next to see the whole thing).

Alec Saunders has more about the BubbleBar on his blog.

Ahh, now Slashdot jumps into the "Werner kicks blogging book authors behinds" tub. On the other hand, I must buy Werner dinner some evening and thank him. The whole shindig has landed us on top of Memeorandum for a few hours.

Om Malik makes it sound like Amazon vs. Microsoft. That's an unfortunate headline, but heck, it'll sell a lot of seats whenever Werner and Shel and I are in the same room again! :-)

What's ironic is that 120 people were involved in our presentation yesterday. Now, more than 20,000 are (and the numbers are quickly spreading — Slashdot regularly has 100,000 readers a day. Does blogging matter? That's for you to decide, but things can get out of control very quickly!)

I say that headline is unfortunate because I didn't go there representing Microsoft, I went there representing the 188 companies we interviewed in the book. And, Amazon is being painted in a bad light cause we're focusing on one guy, when about a dozen people asked questions and we were treated very well (and, there were many who came up to us afterward who demonstrated they get blogging very well, as you'll learn if you read the comments on the various blogs).

Indeed, Werner has now apologized. That's nice. Now we can all get in a big bear hug and make up. Oh, but then there's Maryam. She told me tonight "you guys should do a debate on the topic." She thinks it would be the conference draw of the decade. I'm game. She recommends doing "book reading 2.0" at Gnomedex. We'll see what Pirillo thinks about that.

But, let's revisit this. The truth is I screwed up. I didn't represent blogging very well and didn't back up the thesis of our book very well (that blogging will improve the way businesses talk with customers).

Now, if this were the old world, you would never have known that. And, I wouldn't have a second chance. But, this is the new world where ideas discussed with 120 people can reach much larger audiences within hours.

On my comments last night several people claiming to be Amazon employees (we really don't know because they gave their comments anonymously, but I'll take them on face value) made some very good points, which basically came down to "you didn't answer the question!" Om Malik made the same point on his post.

The common theme I'm hearing is Werner (and the other Amazon employees who commented here, and elsewhere that I'm seeing) want numbers. They want statistics. Proof. Science.

Where I gave them stuff like "blogging doubled sales at Stormhoek winery, according to its CEO." Or "Munjal Shah, CEO of Riya, says blogging is very important to his new company." Or "Axosoft raised more than $14,000 in just a few days with nothing more than a few links on some blogs." Or "Foldera got more than one million signups for its service in 17 days by doing nothing more than talking to six bloggers." Or, a tailor in the UK saw his sales go up by 10x by doing a blog. That probably wasn't well enough communicated, or it wasn't the kind of answer that would convince Werner. That means I need to go back and do some more homework or at least learn to communicate better while being interrupted by an executive with strongly formed opinions.

I totally forgot to mention that big companies like Boeing (Randy's journal is a blog done by an executive there) , General Motors (Bob Lutz, an exec at GM has a blog), and Wells Fargo (which recently started blogging on its history) are seeing enough of a reason to start a blog (and continue doing them, even after the first year). The teams at Boeing and GM say they are pleased with the response and effect of their blogging and plan to continue doing them.

But, if you don't like this approach, just visit Tom Moertel's blog where he talks about his favorite coffee shop in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. When I visited that shop myself the owner raved about what blogging had done for his business. It turned his little coffee shop into one with an international presence. Thanks to search engines like A9, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Oh, and he said he never got written up in the press before blogging, but now that's a regular happening.

See, maybe that's why I wasn't able to defend blogging from a numbers point of view. To me this is a people business. One where raw numbers don't matter. One where getting eight guys together in a Swiss Chalet can turn into tens of thousands of users literally overnight with doing nothing more than one post.

I also totally forgot that Howard Dean raised more money in the last presidental race than other candidates because of his blog. Hey, when I'm up in front of 120 people with an executive giving me a hard time and not letting me finish my anwers and stop to breathe and think, my brain goes into vapor lock and I get stupid. Yes, Christopher Coulter, I know I'm +always+ stupid, it's just that yesterday I was even stupider than normal. ;-)

But, I learned my lesson. Next time when Werner and Shel and I get together in a room I'll have lots of numbers to back up my thesis. I'm sorry I didn't yesterday.

It was a good lesson to learn. And it was a great experience for whenever I have to do an executive review. If it doesn't kill you, it'll make you stronger. So, thank you Werner for another good learning experience! Seriously!

Oh, and if you have some numbers and stats for Werner to ponder, now would be a good time to link to them here in the comments, or, if you feel corporate blogging is a bunch of hooey then feel free to tell me I'm stupid too! (Although that sort of proves my point that this is a new way for people to communicate their ideas, thoughts, opinions, product desires, and business opportunities with companies in a new way). 

Update: SEO Buzzbox put up an interview with me that was lots of fun to do. Yesterday I was on four radio stations. Whew. Some even asked hard questions like Werner did. But Dr. Alvin Jones put up our conversation on his Website (it's in Windows Media audio non-DRM'ed format here). He broadcasts a business show on WCBQ and WHNC in Raleigh, NC. It's interesting to hear from a guy who is still trying to figure out the Web. There are a lot more like Alvin than there are like Werner.

Update 2: Rick Segal is offering a conference in Toronto for the smackdown. I'd rather do it at Gnomedex in Seattle, I'm already traveling enough in the next few months and Maryam is getting tired of me never being home. Another choice is the Syndicate conference in New York. Eric Norlin offered that up (and I'm already attending that, so either that venue or Gnomedex would work best for me).

Update 3: I guess the Web services team at Amazon (along with the A9 Developer team) had their numbers together (since they are blogging). I would love to hear how they convinced Werner. This is another reason I was caught off guard. Since Amazon already understood blogs (their associate program helps bloggers make some money) they actually should be showing US the numbers. I'm sure they have them from the Associates program.

I love Make Magazine. I wish I had time to do some of these projects. Here they are doing a treehouse workshop on May 5-7 in San Francisco.

…is not some evil spirit. No, it's Michael Lehman who has been podcasting for a while now (I like his Manic Minute recordings cause they are short and sweet), even before he joined Microsoft. Channel 9 visits him in Microsoft's Podcasting World Headquarters and learns how he does it.