I knew that traffic in Silicon Valley seemed a bit light this week. Everyone is at Burning Man. There’s a fun video site from there. I wish I was there. It just didn’t work out this year, but it’s one of the things I really want to do.

One thing about Burning Man. I’m told it’s something you need to experience. Watching a little two inch video about it won’t really do it justice.

I was talking with a geek who’ll remain unnamed and he was telling me how easy it is for someone to sit at a Starbucks, slurp off the local WiFi, and recreate almost everything you do, often gaining passwords and private conversations. I saw this once at a conference where someone up on stage was showing the audience everything that was going over the WiFi networks. For instance, did you know that if you’re using many common Instant Messengers that those send your information over WiFi in plain text? I could be sitting next to you watching EVERYTHING you are typing across the Internet.

So, what do you do to keep your stuff confidential? Any tips beyond this excellent article in Security Focus on this topic? By the way, both this article and my geek friend recommended Off-the-Record Messenging if you want to hold private IM conversations over public WiFi networks.

UPDATE: I had a post here about Browzar, but there are some concerns about it so I pulled that part of the post to protect people.

I occassionally have been checking in on Channel 9. I’m still a Niner. Anyway, I’m listing to this video with Brian Beckman. That guy is a smart mofo. One of the first guys to join Microsoft Research.

I have dreams of getting videos like this inside eBay. Google. Yahoo. Sun. Cisco. Apple. Intel. AMD. Nvidia. etc.

Anand M., in India, asks “has Scoble lost his blog power?” (I linked to him and he didn’t get many visits). My read? If I ever did have blog power, it’s gone now. Digg and TechMeme have all the power now.

I think Rageboy has the clue to what’s going on here (the yawning baby cracked Maryam up). I’m boring. Haven’t been linking to enough cool people and cool tech. Too much inbred inside-the-blogosphere, linking. Or, maybe, I’ve been doing too much linking and not enough first-hand-experience. Translation: not enough lists. Sorry. It’s hard to do good blogging when you’re busy all day long. Sigh.

But, Steve Gillmor has it right: this isn’t a game of traffic. It’s about sharing what you love. I love using tech and studying the product of geeks. Whether or not anyone is listening isn’t the reason I’m doing this (sometimes I forget that, yeah, but getting a link from Digg isn’t worth as much as everyone makes it seem). My passion? Trying out new stuff, finding new problems to solve. I haven’t been doing enough of that lately cause I’m just inside an email tidal storm that I can’t get off of me. Seriously, you have no idea how hard it is to keep up with email. I’m failing, and failing horribly. Sorry if I haven’t gotten back to you. Leave a comment instead of emailing.

The flow that’s happening in my life is simply incredible, especially when I compare it to what was going on in my life in 2002 when I worked at UserLand. Back then there were so few companies, very few interesting things going on. Today there’s SO much. I’m not surprised that it’s harder to get people to click on a link.

I was talking with Chris Messina and Tara Hunt on email tonight and said that just the number of events that’s happening in just the San Francisco area is stunning. I can’t keep up. It makes me just want to grab a bottle of wine and go sit on the beach out by the Ritz. Which is why I missed Barcamp this year. I just wanted a small, manageable conversation with a handful of geeks. It was SO enjoyable.

I’m thinking back on the last year and what I really remember and find special. That Swiss Chalet with a handful of geeks. That was it. Out of all the conferences (many expensive, like Mix06 where I had my own Las Vegas suite). All the PR. All the noise. All the events. Getting, what, five guys together in a Swiss Chalet for a weekend was the highlight of the year.

I wonder if we can have more of those types of experiences? I find I learn a lot more from conversations like that, and it helps me out cause then I have something interesting to say to you all.

The power of four people talking is something that’s just fascinated me all week.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. Everyone is getting bored, even me.

Developers: Facebook (social networking site popular with college students) now has APIs and a blog to boot! Thanks to Martin Lucas-Smith for sending me that

I love the new geotagging feature on Flickr. Check out my neighborhood. Can you find the little duckie sign?

Congrats to the great success Flickr has had with this new feature. Now, when will I be able to add blog posts onto a map? Oh, and is Thomas Hawk’s photography getting better and better? I love his rave about Flickr too, made even better because Thomas works for a competitor of Flickr’s.

Interesting, turns out that blue diodes are gonna be tough to get this year. That’s what’s inside the Toshiba HD-DVD player I bought and what is scheduled to be inside Sony’s Playstation 3’s later this year. My brother says this is making the Xbox team look like geniuses.

Ahh, I see someone is asking “why is the Windows Live Writer blog banned from Google?” They are talking about that over on Channel 9 too.

I doubt it’s banned. There are lots of reasons things don’t get into Google very highly. For one the search term isn’t in the title tag (which, for many searches, is more important than how many inbound links you have). For two someone notes that the HTML on Windows Live Spaces is giving lots of errors on the validators.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m gonna visit Matt Cutts at Google. He loves these kinds of questions. I’ll make sure he gets a good answer. I’ll be the guy wearing my “I’m not Matt Cutts” t-shirt. Just incase anyone gets us confused. Also on the calendar is the Calendar team. Meeting me there will be Scott Mace who runs the Calendarswamp blog. Should be an interesting day!

Why don’t I want you to buy this book? Because it contains the secrets to beating me at Technorati (and how to get Shelley Powers and Steve Gillmor to link to you on the same day! Although with Gillmor you really don’t want him to link to you, trust me on this).

It is the best aggregation of tips for how to get noticed that I’ve found anywhere. I hope all my competitors don’t buy this book and I am buying it for everyone at PodTech. Disclaimer, I liked this book so much I wrote the forward for it for free. I am not getting paid for this endorsement (or, anti endorsement, if you will). Well, unless you buy it by following my link to Amazon. Please do. I’m having a house warming party next month and need money to buy wine and beer for everyone. :-)

This post by Rob La Gesse isn’t the first time I’ve heard that build 5536 rocks, but it’s the most convincing that I might be wrong about Vista not being ready by November (which is when it needs to be finished by).

I wish I had time to play more with new stuff. I’ve been using IE7 exclusively ever since RC1 shipped last week, though, and it has only crashed once in more than 40 hours of use so far and it’s dramatically nicer than IE6. It feels good and it’s a good baseline browser, I’ve only found a couple of sites that didn’t look right in it too. One thing I’ve been doing is visiting dozens of “at risk” sites (er, let’s just call them porn and gambling sites) to test its security — these sites usually load TONS of malware, toolbars, and other nasty stuff onto your computer (due to IE6’s extensibility model, er, lack of security). In IE 7? So far no nasties!

Has anyone been testing out IE 7 looking to see how much better its security is? Can you link me to your experiences? So far it’s dramatically better.