I love the new Mahalo Daily done by Veronica Belmont. Well, I like the trailer, at least. Oh, and yes, my show is long, boring, and I’m fat and nerdy compared to Veronica.

But at least I’ll have Newsgator on my show at midnight. Great consolation prize. :-)

Even better, my show got on the SXSW blog. How cool is THAT!?! Why? We give away Austin’s BBQ secrets. Now THAT should have been on Mahalo!

I’ve been getting lots of emails and calls on this, so I know that at least some developers care about the proposal for a new ECMAScript titled the ES4 proposal (PDF). I am still trying to figure out which side to take in this, but from what I’ve been able to learn there are a few sides to this.

1. Mozilla and other browser manufacturers who are trying to push a new version of JavaScript (er, ECMAScript) through the system.
2. Microsoft, who those browser companies see as dragging its feet. Chris Wilson, architect on the Internet Explorer team gives his side of the story. He also wrote a post on the IE team blog. I’ll just link to Chris Wilson’s stuff because he links to plenty of stuff on the other side so you can get up to date on what’s going on.
3. Web developers, who are scared that they are going to have to support yet another version of JavaScript and test their sites on yet another platform.

Where do you find yourself?

Google, last week, told me it was about to announce a ton of things for developers that would be based around JavaScript and CSS. I wonder what it thinks about this conversation?

I’d love to have developers on my show who can explain both sides of this argument to me and also explain what the new JavaScript will do for the Web and for end users, since that’s really who I care about. I don’t have a dog in this fight, so would love to give both sides equal time to explain what’s going on. Anyone game?

UPDATE: Brendan Eich, head of Mozilla, writes back to Chris Wilson about this issue.

PayPerPost is the company that Mike Arrington founder of TechCrunch (and me) love to hate. But today there’s reports that they are rebranding the advertising network to “izea.”

They are focusing less on gaming Google (since Google has rejiggered page rank anyway to penalize pay-per-link streams) and more on being an advertising agency for the social media starfish.

Wonderful. But here’s the rub: I expect Facebook or Google to start sharing revenues with bloggers and social media freaks like me in a new way. Real soon now.

Since Google’s ad salespeople are going to get the brands I like and trust (like BMW, Procter and Gamble, etc) I’m far more likely to go with an ad network from them or Facebook than one that wants me to peddle stuff I’ve never heard of.

Translation: Ted’s company is interesting to watch cause he pisses off lots of A listers but I’m still not sure he’s really going to build something disruptive. A company doesn’t change its name if it’s loved.

When Shel Israel co-authored Naked Conversations with me we interviewed about 180 companies about how they were using blogs and how that usage was changing their business.

Today I’m watching companies and political candidates and seeing a new trend that I’ve written up as the “Social Media Starfish.” I just did two videos, one that defined the social media starfish and all of its “legs” and another that explains how Google is going to disrupt many pieces of that starfish tomorrow with its Open Social announcement tomorrow.

Some things in text. What are the legs of the social media starfish?

1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.

What do you think?

Here’s the two videos:

Part I of Naked Conversations 2.0: defining the social media starfish. 22 minutes.
Part II of Naked Conversations 2.0: how Google will disrupt the social media starfish tomorrow. 18 minutes.

Five minutes. Around the globe. November 1st at 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Participate.

Eric Engleman, general manager of Bloglines shows me the latest in what Bloglines is doing for RSS Feed Readers. Geeks might not care, but this is a good video to pass to people who haven’t yet gotten on the RSS bandwagon. I mention that the BBC does the best job of explaining feeds to its readers.

I use Google Reader, but still have my Bloglines account and if you’re going to read feeds in a folder-by-folder approach Bloglines is better than Google Reader in managing your feeds. Anyway, it’s good to see that Bloglines is still there coming out with new stuff for people who read feeds.

Oh, and over on ScobleShow is a bunch of videos from last week’s CTIA show. Tons of mobile gadgets and services.

Last night I was hanging out with a small group of people when Shel Israel told us “there was just an earthquake.” His wife had called him and he happened to pick up the phone. I instantly looked at my phone and saw Maryam had already called me. Turned out that 80% of the people at the table had the same experience — that a wife or significant other had called them and checked in.

But what was fascinating was what happened next: we all went to Twitter where the earthquake was causing its own “Twitterquake.” Damn, were the posts flowing fast. What a lot of people on Twitter realized was there was MUCH BETTER information flowing through Twitter than on any other media. Quickly we realized no one was hurt, no real damage had been done, so we went back to our dinner.

In San Francisco most of us at the dinner didn’t feel it. I immediately left a TwitterGram, so that everyone would hear our voice and understand that nothing happened where we were.

But the more interesting thing was that I was standing next to Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme/Memeorandum, as this was all going down. He predicted, accurately, that the earthquake wouldn’t make it onto TechMeme. He told us that the only way it’d show up is if it started affecting something in technology. He did keep nervously look at his cell phone to make sure that TechMeme wasn’t displaying anything about it.

We did talk at the table, though, that how we get news has dramatically changed. First of all, the word-of-mouth network was the fastest out there. Loved ones are going to probably tell you news like this before anyone else. Twitter is damn fast, too. Beats the USGS Web site with data. And that’s saying something because the USGS sites report quakes within minutes.

Lots of chatter on Twitter discussed that Google News, CNN, and other mainstream outlets weren’t reporting the news. The local newspaper wrote a story, but this demonstrated how inadequate local journalism is: Twitter had far more information than this story had and had it FAR faster and thanks to things like Twitter, Flickr, Kyte.tv, Seesmic, Twittergram, and Utterz, we can cover the story with micromedia in a way that the San jose Mercury News simply hasn’t gotten a clue about.

Well, that’s the Twitterquake wrap up. Anything from your point of view that we should discuss regarding the changes in how we get our news?

Oh, during the quake we didn’t lose power, didn’t lose cell phones, and didn’t lose access to Twitter. During a really big quake there will be lots of infrastructure down, but SOMEONE will be able to get messages out and that’ll really be interesting to watch how information gets shared if, say, all of San Francisco isn’t able to communicate with the Internet.

UPDATE: Mike Doeff was tracking Twitter for every mention of the Quake. Wow, thanks for doing that!

I’m reading feeds and putting the best stuff on my link blog. So far the best thing I’ve seen on the impact of Google’s Open Social is Marc Andreesen’s post. His company, Ning, is one of those who are involved in the announcement.

See my link blog for other good posts. I’m trying to find stuff that adds value to what’s already on TechMeme, but Marc’s post is so good that it needs your attention anyway.

Anyone remember Friendster? It was an early entrant into the social networking scene. If they had done their work right they SHOULD have been a much bigger player than they are now.

Why aren’t they?

1. They didn’t take care of PR and didn’t take care of bloggers. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing. Several people at the dinner tonight noted that Facebook hasn’t responded to claims that Facebook’s employees are spying on data that the public doesn’t have access to. And that’s just one PR complaint.
2. They kicked people out that they didn’t like. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing.
3. They didn’t respond to new competitors who took away their coolness. Facebook? They are about to meet their biggest competition yet.

Last night I was at a dinner for Hugh Macleod and Oren Michaels. There was talk of an earthquake. No, not the 5.6 one centered near San Jose. The fact that Google is about to jump into the social networking world. TechCrunch caused the shockwave of the year with that one.

One name that’s on the Google announcement, Plaxo, tells me that Google is looking to build a “social graph” that’s open and doesn’t have walls keeping developers from playing. They are looking to “Friendster” Facebook.

Add into this last week’s little “Vic Gundotra” dinner and I’m already seeing a trend: Google is going full bore after influentials, bloggers, and other “new media” developers who need a social network as part of their efforts to remain competitive.

Think about it. Nearly every cool Web property lately has a social network. Upcoming.org, Flickr, Yelp, Channel 9, etc. All have their own proprietary social networks.

Look at MySpace and Facebook. Both don’t solve that problem.

Will Google? And, by helping out Web 2.0 developers and other influentials (Facebook calls them “whales”) will Google cut off Facebook’s PR air supply (which is proving quite lucrative)?

Those are things I’m going to focus on for the next few days.

Some things we still need answers on:

1. Is this new Google social network really fun to use like Facebook is?
2. Does it beat Facebook’s aesthetics?
3. Can the social graph be componetized so that I could add a social network to my blog, for instance?
4. Does the development platform beat Facebook’s? (Can I see which apps my friends have loaded, is the key question).
5. Does it build a really open social graph?
6. If Google does match Facebook’s utility (really easy: just clone the hell out of it but give the “whales” more than 5,000 friends. I’ve talked with many celebrities and businesses and they say 5,000 simply isn’t enough which is why many of them are forced to stay on MySpace) do they allow new kinds of social ads?

It’s going to be an interesting next month getting around to all these companies again and seeing what they plan to do.

Steve Ball runs the audio team at Microsoft. Buzz and I were comparing notes the other day of all the people we’ve met at Microsoft. We both agree that Steve’s our favorite guy and the guy who we’d most like to hang out with.

I think this video explains why without even trying. He’s creative. Nice. Soft spoken. Never says a bad word about people (even when I know they’ve given him cause).

This video is NOT an interview. It’s just him playing guitar to his daughter — he’s quite an accomplished guitarist and he’s studied with some of the greats (Robert Fripp, for instance). I’ve played this dozens of times over the past few months since I recorded it and it just makes me happy. His daughter is an angel baby. Can’t wait to go to Seattle again to meet up.