It’s very weird to have a former boss (Steve Sloan at San Jose State University, who runs an excellent podcasting class) covering my current boss (John Furrier, CEO of PodTech) and my other boss (Maryam Scoble, who has about as much success as the other two at telling me what to do, although I did take out the trash this morning) while they put together a future of journalism and new media evening event for Stanford’s Innovation Journalism Fellows program.

I love this quote: “Furrier really impressed me, this is one sharp guy!”

Now you know how he talked me into joining PodTech. I totally agree.

In reading my 1,331 RSS items (as reported by Google Reader) today I found one by Scott Barnes where he noted that Ryan Stewart, who covers the rich Internet application space better than most anyone, noted that Microsoft was ahead in terms of developer workflow.

Absolutely.

You only need to watch the Sparkle video I did in September 2005 to see why (that was the code name for the product that became Expression Blend).

Yesterday, listening to the Adobe team, I was in a state of deja vu. Yeah, part of it was I was really tired, but the other part is that they were trying to articulate the workflow changes that are coming as clearly as  Manuel Clement and John Gossman did in that video.

Adobe came close, but didn’t match it.

The problem is it doesn’t matter. If you care about cross-platform (and if you are a Web developer, you do) you’ll put up with a workflow that isn’t quite as nice.

And if you’re a developer for a Windows only shop, you’ll be praising Microsoft for making your life easier.

Personally, I’m glad I’m not at Microsoft anymore trying to get Web developers to try out Expression. Why? Just come and visit 10 startups with me, and you’ll see why.

Macintoshes are showing up everywhere. WPF/E and Expression and the fun workflow that Manuel and John show off won’t matter one bit if you develop Web sites on a Mac.

This line, about my blog’s spam that’s been blocked so far, says it all!

“Akismet has caught 403,396 spam for you since you first installed it.”

Last week in Pirillo’s house a bunch of us were downstairs. Every so often one of our Significant Others would come down and check on what we were doing. We were down there for a long time and didn’t even come up for drinks or pizza. So, they must have been wondering. Well, now they can watch our long boring conversation about Web 2.0 and stuff and see just what we were doing. Theresa thought it was fun, but then she was downstairs with us and her boss was down there too. Consider that a biased opinion. :-)

The original came from Gear Live, which is usually a killer gadget video blog.

Seriously, if you are in marketing or PR you’d probably do very well to listen to this.

I posted a cute cat photo to my link blog.

I also posted 96 other things that weren’t cat photos.

I apologize for the cat photo. I’m a sucker for those things.

Everyone who works at Google is hoping Microsoft actually uses the technology described in this patent (it removes items from the left, or organic search, if someone also advertises that item).

Why is that Google’s wet dream? Because it would instantly get noticed and would decrease its relevancy, especially among influentials who would tell the world about it.

If I were working at Google I’d say a little prayer before I go to sleep tonight thinking that some committee at Microsoft was really so stupid.

Jim Turner says about Adobe: “I can tell you what they are not doing, they are not having a conversation with the influential people in their industry.” and “Where is the Adobe blogger?”

I guess Jim missed that Adobe has tons of blogs.

And, I would expect that Adobe will increase the discussion over the next few months. I am telling them not to invite me next time, but to get a bunch of .NET developers in a room like Scott Hanselman. Those are the influentials that Adobe really needs to have a conversation with.

Me, I’m looking for reasons to subscribe to more blogs. But, at Northern Voice last week someone said that they were looking for reasons to unsubscribe from blogs.

Hey, that’s simple: unsubscribe from that Scoble dude. He’s lame.

Heheh. Anyway, if you’re still reading here Darren has 34 reasons why readers unsubscribe. Damn, reading that list I think I’ve done all 34. Hmmm.

You might know Dow Jones. They own the Wall Street Journal. So, it’s not everyday that I get to sit down with an executive vice president from there. And, wow, what an impressive person. I almost said “impressive woman” but you don’t get to the top of Dow Jones without being impressive all the way around and Clare Hart does not disappoint.

She was CEO of Factiva before Dow Jones bought that enterprise search engine. Which gives you some idea of what we mostly talked about. We talk about Dow Jones and search.

Factiva is used by lots of companies for search (I used it at Microsoft and it gave me a lot better results for corporate searches than Google or Live.com did). We talk about why that is, and which companies are best customers for Factiva.

She thought it was fun that I just setup a camera in the middle of our offices and have a chat without a camera crew and without lights or makeup or any of that that usually surround main stream media.

It was an interesting conversation (about 36 minutes) on a number of different topics, from Google, to blogs, to enterprise search.

I have a new way for rating how cool a demo is.

How many keystrokes per second can I count? You know, tap, tap, tap, tap on keyboards.

Virtual Ubiquity is on stage right now showing off a killer Word Processor that works online. Teaches Microsoft quite a few lessons. Will be out in May.

All done in Adobe stuff and it just takes online apps a whole step forward in what I’ll expect to see from now on.

I’m sure there’ll be tons of words written about this shortly.

But. my takeaway is how excited the keyboard tapping is. Sounds like the hail that was hitting our windows last night. Tap, tap, tap.