You know, I gotta take more days off. I realized that during lunch. Sitting on the top floor of the Iron Works in the Austin sunshine. Eating BBQ. Damn, I’m getting fat but I’m fat and happy. Lots of great memories from SXSW. Sitting at the table was the Liz Lawley. Craig Newmark. Lili Cheng. Jenny Lam. (Jenny and Lili do a lot of design work on Windows). Nothing important got said, just a fun lunch relaxing in the sun. I just pinched myself and thought that at some point someone will wake me up from this dream.

Speaking of fun stuff, yeah, Microsoft did the iPod box design parody video. Yes, we can laugh at ourselves. The marketing team did it to challenge the box designers for our products to do better. We need more of this stuff. Microsoft is a consensus culture and consensus (which means everyone has to sign off on things) does avoid trouble, but it also makes for uninspired products and marketing. That is our internal challenge to figure out, that’s for sure!

Speaking of designers, I love Alan Cooper. Some of my favorite memories of the 1990s are sitting around with him having conversations with him. I was lucky enough to record part of a conversation I had with him recently after he spoke at a conference so you can see part of his interesting personality. He says bombastic things. But he always gets me to think and that’s why I love him.

Welp, I’m off to get on a plane heading home.

Oh, one other thing. Some people said “get over yourself” because of my last post. I’m so tired of people telling me I can’t (or shouldn’t) be irritated, egotistical, or just a jerk. It’s my blog. Deal with it. Sometimes I +am+ an arrogant, egotistical, jerk. But, who are you to tell me I can’t be that way? What? You trying to outdo me in the arrogant/ego/jerk department? Heheh!

Have a good one. 134 emails to go.

Dave Winer says he’s gonna give up his blog this year. That’s caused a lot of conversations here at SXSW. I’m still processing what that will mean for Dave. For me. For everyone.

Anyway, I totally understand why Dave would want to walk away. I’m staring at hundreds of emails and just don’t want to deal with my inbox right now. I’m gonna take the rest of the day off and hang out at SXSW. My sessions are over and now I just have to catch up with the email. I totally understand why Dave wants to take off from his blog. The pressure is just incredible to do more, more, more.

Who made me a gatekeeper? I don’t want that job.

Don’t send me more email pitches please. Don’t beg for me to try out your software. Don’t wait for me to blog about your company or your team or your product or you. That’s what comments here are for. You have direct access to anyone who is reading this post. Pitch in the comments! If your stuff is good, someone will try it out and say so. Maybe even me.

Shel Israel is to be thanked for this post since he wrote about how to pitch him. You know this world is getting nuts when even the ex-PR guys are getting pitched!

Blogging is authentic, and has power because of that, but the marketers have definitely arrived and now my inbox is full of people saying “pick me, pick me.”

Heheheh, the Kansas City Star says I should be my boss’s worst nightmare. The truth is, I’m not deserving of this praise anymore. I can’t even answer all my email anymore. I’m a week behind.

It’s time to rethink everything.

One thing I’ve enjoyed recently is just reading feeds and staying away from the Memetrackers (although, I’ll be honest, I’ve peeked at Memeorandum a few times, it’s a very hard addiction to break). But, I’m enjoying catching up on the lives of real bloggers. You know, the ones on the M list. The B list. The V list. The U list. The Z list. I don’t know what list Fred of A VC is on, but I just saw him talk about too much blogging.

I’ve realized that what got me here was listening. Listening to my friends talk about their lives. Listening to software developers complaining how hard it is to deal with Microsoft (or how hard our software is to use). Listening to people living their lives and noticing THEM.

I’ve gotten away from that cause so many people think that the secret to their commercial success is to get me to link to them or talk about their products.

No, the secret is to start a conversation. Here, let’s go. No, Evan Williams, I can’t figure out our branding either.

Why do I read blogs? To learn about my friends so that I have something to talk with them about. Garrett Fitzgerald, for instance, tells about loving to watch the C5s landing at an airstrip near his house. That brought back memories of seeing the same land at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley (my dad used to work at Lockheed so I had a few opportunities to visit the airbase).

You might say “who cares?” And you’d be missing the point. It’s the small things on blogs that matter to me. It’s the small things that make us human. Increasingly our blogs have lost their humaness. We’ve become marketing machines. Things to be objectified (yes, I did objectify Molly yesterday, we had a great laugh together, if you’ve never been around Molly to hear her laugh you’re missing out). If I hadn’t read Molly’s blog, we never would have connected yesterday. I hugged Zeldman yesterday and said “thank you for the full text feeds.” If I didn’t read blogs, I wouldn’t have known about Zeldman’s feeds. I would have missed an opportunity to say thank you. His kid is adorable, by the way.

Last night I heard Jimmy Wales speak. He told his secret. Why he started Wikipedia. He made me cry. You see, last night we were speaking as part of the 20×2 event. 20 speakers. Two minutes each on stage. To answer this question: what is the secret?

His secret? He was gonna be cute, he told us. Say something funny about how Wikipedia knew his secret. But, he thought he’d ask his five-year-old daughter. “I don’t have any secrets, dad,” she answered back. But, alas, she turned out to be Jimmy’s secret in the end. See, when she was born she was in a world of hurt. I forget the disease’s name. You know when you have something you can’t remember that you’re in a world of hurt. She was given 1 in 3 odds of living. Jimmy did some research on the Internet and learned everything he could about that strange disease and found one of the world’s leading doctors. He tried an experimental treatment. Only 50% had lived through that so far. The doctor put some new, experimental, protein-based fluid into her lungs and flushed them out. Turned out she lived, and the story ends happily. Jimmy told us that he wanted everyone in the world to be able to find information on things like his daughter’s diseases and find the world’s experts on them. The day he got his daughter home from the hospital is the day Jimmy started Wikipedia.

Do you have a story like that? Wow. It’s the small things in life that matter. Small diseases. Unknown experts. A rant on objectification.

I got another small story. I had drinks with Joi Ito the other night. It’s been a long time since I saw him last (before I worked at Microsoft). Today he links to another person I met and some cool video she and her boyfriend shot at SXSW. Merci is her name. During the conversation she dropped in that she had been raised in a new-age cult. “Really? My mom is in one of those.” Turns out it was the same one that my mom is in! Small world. A connection has been made.

What’s your small story? How about we do a contest? 100 things that you won’t read about on Digg, Memeorandum, or TailRank? Wouldn’t that be fun?

OK, so, I have 20 minutes in Houston. How many cool things can I post in 20 minutes? Let’s see.

Phillip Torrone has a cool how to on how to build a simple iPod Amp.

Tim Bray notices the feed icons site where you can get those new feed icons for your RSS or Atom feed and says he hates the phrase “User Generated Content.” Oh, I said that months ago when I started hearing that. That sounds like something that you don’t want anywhere near you. Gotta wash my hands after reading some UGC. Heheh.
Molly Holtzschlag has the objectification blues at SXSW and has a fun rant on how to sniff out a rotten standardista (she’s on the Web Standards Project so knows a bit about that topic).

Jim Grisanzio tells marketing expert Jack Trout that it’s time for the old-folks home.

Kiruba Shankar announces BarCamp Chennai. Dang, who knew this concept would go around the world? (Advertise your local BarCamp here in my comments).

Chris Sells brags about bagging a $366 Vista PC at Fry’s.

J Baumgart notices that NPR has a blog.

Holy f**k. Jeffrey Zeldman has full text feeds? Daniel Stout pointed that out to me (and more).

Jonathan Nolen guarantees that Skobee’s marketing guy will be well sought after at any conference from now on. Hmmm, is he coming to SXSW? :-)

After I get home from SXSW I head off to Vegas. Anyone wanna meet up next week at Mix? There’s a new Mix Meeting Place where we can sign up to meet.

Guy Kawasaki has some tips on how to be a great moderator.

Noah Kagan, of Facebook, has four easy steps to avoid making a resume. Can you believe it? A guy from one of our competitors asked me if I’d like to be considered for future positions. Then he asked me for my resume. I told him I didn’t want any job that required a resume.

The Googlers brought us a way to find a book in a library.

Charles Petzold, famous Windows developer, tells us “don’t count out WinForms yet.” That article got praises on several blogs.

Jeremy Zawodny, over at Yahoo, points at a video of what happens when a bird gets sucked into an F-16 RAF Hawk CT155202 engine.

This is just a very small portion of what you will find if you read RSS feeds instead of Memeorandum for a week. More to come later.

I’m on the plane to SXSW. In the meantime, my son built me a really cool apartment in Second Life. Thanks to Eric Rice for teaching him all about it. He has a post today that tells you how to learn Second Life. Me? I just got someone with lots of time to spend on my behalf. My user name? Scoble Seattle. Who knows who that is? Heheh. Just look for the Scobleizer building on Slackstreet and say hi!

The bloggers love to pick on the main stream journalists. But, that changed today for me.

The NPPA put up the best of television photojournalism awards. That’s nice, and worth watching. But check out the Judge’s Choice Award. Be ready. It is graphic. Beyond Words: Photographers of War. It’s not easy to watch. The guy who sent it to me said he watched it three times because it is so moving.

I’m taking the rest of the day off trying to catch up my life (tons of email waits, and tons of things Maryam has me doing). Today belongs to the pros.

My hat is off to the pros. Thanks for bringing us the uncomfortable stuff around the world and for putting your lives on the line.

Congrats to the team who made Writely for getting acquired by Google. They built it in .NET. It used to be uncool to startup a company with Microsoft technologies, but I’ve seen more and more .NET stuff being done in the Valley. Who’s next?

Ahh, I’m being asked to join a union and fight the man, Slashdot reports.

One thing. If “the man” is oppressing you, why can’t you just get another job? I know many other high tech companies that are hiring like crazy (and buying startups too). My friends at other companies say they can’t find enough good tech workers. Both people inside big companies like Yahoo/Google complain about that as well as smaller companies. There just aren’t that many geeks on the street right now.

We’re hiring at a crazy clip here. Seems that lots of people are happy with what we’re offering (we’re spending something like $1.5 billion on building new buildings in the Puget Sound area to house more people too so are planning on further future growth).

I think this competition for workers will keep unions from gaining much strength. Why? Cause there’s no better way to mess with “the man” than to walk off the job and work for the competition.

What do you think?

Yes. The hype got too big too fast.

Who was responsible? Dustin Hubbard, Group Manager over on the Mobile PC team. He explains what happened on the Origami team blog. He tells how he didn’t plan for the hype to get so out of control.

I was on several radio stations this morning pimping my book and a few of the hosts asked me about Origami. One said “I heard about it on Paul Harvey.” (Paul Harvey is probably the most respected radio voice in America).

And, with that, this will be my last Origami post until I get my hands on a production unit.

Update: long-time industry analyst Amy Wohl writes that my Channel 9 interview with Otto is a “kind of anti-hype.” Thanks Amy!

The video I shot of Otto Berkes, architect of the Ultra-Mobile PC team (now general manager) is now up on Channel 9.

Update: John Tokash, director of software development at Homestead Technologies, watched the full video already and says “Great stuff.”

Michael Gartenberg also has his first take analysis up. He’s had a pre-production Intel unit in his hands for a while.

Origami Portal already has a step-by-step analysis of my interview with Otto.

How do you keep Microsoft employees who work at headquarters at work? Close the bridges!

Seriously, the bridge is closed because of high winds (live video too!).

I love the traffic map system in Seattle that shows you real-time traffic.

I don’t live across the bridge, but my way home is affected cause of the backup.

It’s interesting, everyone is emailing each other here internally. Turns out the bridge had a broken beam and there isn’t an ETA for it to be reopened. The commute is gonna be a mess.

By the way, that bridge is the longest floating bridge in the world.