A friend of mine who’ll go unnamed, but he isn’t involved in the Demo conference, just came up to me in the hall here at Demo and said “it’s pretty sleazy that you supported Mike Arrington given that Sam Sethi affair at Le Web.”

For the record, I didn’t know about this conference until Mike told me at lunch today. Also, it did seem fairly tactless to announce a competitive conference at Demo, given what had gone on between Mike and Sam — if Mike had advised me, I would have asked him to wait until after Demo was over to announce this new conference. Here’s Mike’s own words: “This is driven entirely from Sam’s ethical lapse in trashing a competitor while simultaneously promoting his own events.”

You might have heard the news that Jim Allchin retired today from running the Windows team at Microsoft. But, you might not know that he’s an accomplished guitarist.

Well, now that he’s retired, I’m sure he’ll want to play with Don Box, or Steve Ball, or some other Microsoft musicians (geeks are often great musicians).

Well, on stage at Demo as I type this is “eJamming” which hooks up band members all over the world. Really cool. They have a guitarist on stage that’s playing with other musicians all over the world.

This morning I started comparing the various blog search engines on which one is doing best at bringing you the best news from the Demo conference.

One thing that bugs me about blog search is still every engine is showing spam, but Technorati seems to have less spam. Anyway, I just visited all the engines and Google Blog search is doing a better job.

What engine is winning in your judgment? Do you agree/disagree that Google is winning here?

Wow, Vuvox is on stage. Totally freaking cool way to use your photos. This is another one that I just can’t find the words to explain. It’s something you have to see.

Dave Winer notes that the Telegraph said I was mostly “silent” on the issue of Windows Vista. Hmmm, I don’t know that I’d define putting a two-hour video up about Windows Vista and OSX as being “silent.”

But, unlike Dave, I have a copy of Windows Vista and I like it. I’ve already said so much about Vista over the past four years. I’m not sure what else to say other than “congratulations.”

Regarding my videos, Maryam says at least 10 people watched the videos and emailed her (we gave her email address at the end of the second video). Damn, that’s nine more than I was expecting.

I didn’t want to be the one to say this, because David Geller, CEO of EyeJot, is a personal friend of mine and my judgment is potentially clouded by that friendship. But, I was watching and EyeJot is definitely something I’ll use to send around video comments and things to my friends and family (it’s a video messaging service)

Michael Copeland at the Business 2.0 Beta Blog says: “Actual sounds of  “that’s cool” from the audience elicitied from this one. And it is.”

Blerts.com is on stage right now saying they have the way to read RSS feeds.  Saying it solves information overload problems.

It’s the worst thing I’ve seen on the Demo stage so far.

Wrong way to overcome information overload. Seeing only headlines is FAR FAR FAR less productive than using a real RSS reader that shows full text. This thing only shows you headlines which means you have to click and wait to see each item. That is HORRIBLY inefficient compared to other approaches like NewsGator, Bloglines, NetNewsWire, or Google Reader.

Can you use keyboard commands to plow through your feeds like Google Reader does for me? No.

Does it give you a river of text like Google does? No.

I almost didn’t even bring this up. There’s so much better stuff coming out of Demo that deserves your attention more.

I’m sitting with Mike Arrington right now (the guy who does TechCrunch) and he and Jason Calacanis are starting a new “demo” conference. Here’s Jason’s writeup. Here’s Mike’s.

This is a great idea. A large part of Demo is Web stuff anyway.

UPDATE: Mike asked me to be on the advisory board of this conference since I see a lot of interesting companies for ScobleShow (I don’t charge any company to get onto my show, either, except for my sponsor, Seagate, and truth be told I’d put them on my show whether or not they are paying). I’m honored to help out Mike and Jason.

Over on ScobleShow there are three new videos that just shipped of stuff that we’re seeing here at Demo.

I sat down with Splashcast and VodPod to talk about their approaches to media distribution. Splashcast is one of the companies that was featured in that BusinessWeek article this morning.

Splashcast demo.

Splashcast interview.

Vodpod interview and demo.

OK, I’ve been walking the aisles meeting with tons of companies and this is the first one that motivated me to pull my laptop out and blog it right from the company’s booth. OK, Zoho’s Notebook got close, but that won’t be out until March, so didn’t feel the pressure to tell you about it RIGHT NOW.

Nexo changes all that. Think Yahoo groups. But done right. I’m here in the Nexo booth talking with Craig Jorasch, CEO of Nexo.

I can’t explain it all. I’ll get a video with them, but every part of their service is better than Yahoo’s groups. Their look. The way you can add images. The fact that they have RSS and Atom and OPML support. The way you can layout the group’s pages. The way it sends out email and integrates different events into email. The polls that you can add.

It’s all better than Yahoo.

I’m going to use this. In fact, let me start a group right now and see how long it takes me to get started.  It took about 20 seconds. No weird Yahoo ID needed.

My group is here: http://scobleizer.nexo.com/

One thing I learned that isn’t quite ready yet is a public group for a site like mine. I have to invite you into my group as a member before you can send messages or participate in my group. That’ll change next week.

Either way, this is a great demonstration of what happens when Web 2.0 technologies gets applied to an old problem of how groups of people can interact with each other.