Steve Gillmor: The Allchin Tax Cut. 
tvRSS just got a major upgrade. BitTorrent, RSS and TV. This is a really big deal. It’s time for all aggregators to learn how to do BT.
Marc Canter says Bill Gates learned to say microformats just in time for his Mix 06 talk. Imagine if he had learned to say BitTorrent. Amazon is leading the way, busting through as the first major Internet company to embrace BitTorrent. It’s time for them all to follow suit, there are lots of non-infringing applications, like podcasting, for example. BitTorrent is rational technology, it’s long past time for the technology industry to stop bending over for the entertainment industry. Bravo Amazon!
Lifehacker: How to get happy.
Odeo says podcasting pays. “People want to listen to good stuff! And they’ll even pay for it!”
The power went out today so I snuck out to the movies and saw Inside Man, which was super-good. I especially liked Jodie Foster as the borderline-evil arranger.
The top stories on Memeorandum this week have been the delay in Windows Vista and the reorg in OS development at Microsoft. Their web conference in Las Vegas didn’t make much of an impression in the blogosphere. My guess is that they just went with safe bloggers, and if you go for safety you might as well not do it at all. Now, if they had come to us and said, what could you do with the resources we’re going to put behind this conference, could we have created some lasting value? Without a doubt. How many millions of dollars did they spend on Mix 06? I’d have gone looking for a college classroom building we could use during spring break, and put participants up in Motel 6, Best Western and Hampton Inn (and pay their airfare and incidentals). One space for podcasting. One for blogging. One for APIs. And so on. Add 1/3 Microsoft people so they can absorb the culture. And do a hack-a-thon, something that’s definitely part of MS culture (they were doing them as far back as the 80s). But today they have strict rules about who controls what is said. And as a result, their bad news dominates. So much for control. What a waste. A conversation? No way.
According to David Richards, an unbelievable 60 percent of the Windows Vista code is going to be rewritten before it ships. It’s unbelievable because if it’s true, there’s no way it’s shipping in 2007. If true it’s not just a setback, it’s a multi-billion-dollar debacle on the scale of Apple’s Copland (which, if you recall, resulted in regime change). Basically until someone from Microsoft confirms this, I’d give it zero credence.
I’ve said before that I believe RSS is going to embrace and extend Microsoft, not vice versa. I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t accept this. But the longer they delay, the more it will cost them in leadership.
Who are the three men and what are they smiling about?
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by Jonno on March 24, 2006 at 4:12 am
WTF is that button all about?
I don’t get it…
Posted by Shannon Clark on March 24, 2006 at 11:36 am
Dave,
I was at MIX06 – some feedback on it (and full disclosure, because Microsoft was hosting SFWIN – http://blogs.sfwin.org – a monthly networking event I run in SF around web 2.0 – they offered us a number of passes to give to our attendees and offered them to us as the organizers, so the pass was free for me, but I paid for my own airfare, hotel and meals).
MIX06 was a multiple purpose, multiple track conference. It was Microsoft’s attempt to reach out to the many constituancies around the web – especially designers (whom they have not traditionally reached out) but also at the same time trying to reach out to developers as well as business partners.
It was and is a tricky business – there were certainly podcasters and bloggers present – however that was not by any means the sole focus (or indeed primary focus as I experienced it) of the conference. Instead, they were focused on presenting what they are doing (as well as what they are planning and researching) around the web very much including IE7 and Windows Vista.
That said, they were most definitely listening and engaging in conversation – I asked Bill Gates a question around pricing and understandability of licenses – and was immediately asked to explore it further with Microsoft (and Bill’s response indicated that at least to some degree they realize that it could be an issue and will hopefully address it).
More interestingly however I had a chance to talk with many people on the teams building IE7, on the groups working on projects such as their ATLAS library (AJAX javascript library) and they were very open about what they are working on and what the plans are.
It was an odd mix at times – there were long time developers in the audience, but there were also many people working on non-microsoft platforms (microformats developers etc) and a lot of macs were in use by attendees. There were graphic designers – though as one of them commented over lunch – there weren’t a lot of other people there who “looked like graphic designers”.
Overall, however, I have to give them credit – is it the conference I would have designed or organized with the budget they spent – no. But I found it a very engaging event, had a lot of great conversations both with speakers and with many fellow attendees, and I found the level of attendees very useful. There were both serious programmers, serious enterprise architects and managers, entrepreneurs, and open source hackers, bloggers as well as major media.
And while there were some events hosted by private groups, for the most part everything was open and easy to access, and while Bill Gates and Tim O’Reilly etc did not stay around for the whole conference, Tim for example did stay late into the evening and was available to talk to at the party on Monday night.
Shannon
Posted by Marcelo Lopez on March 24, 2006 at 2:49 pm
“I’ve said before that I believe RSS is going to embrace and extend Microsoft, not vice versa.”
Just as I’ve said for a LONG time that MS WOULD try to engulf and “Microsoft-ize” RSS. Either by “Super-Atomizing” it, or entrenching itself so pervasively as to try to arm wrestle any “RSS 3.0” effort that didn’t mesh with their interests. I still stand by that MS will TRY. It would be a sad day in mudville if they were to succeed.
Oh, on a different note. While I don’t think MS will re-write 60% of Vista before ship, what I WOULD believe, is that they could rewrite 60% of the code for those features which they “committed” to shipping in this release, like IE7, WPF ( Windows Presentation Foundation ), WF ( Windows Workflow Foundation ), and “Indigo/WCF” (Windows Communication Foundation). These are all likely candidates. From what I could see of the March CTP for WinFX and WPF there have already been significant changes from the drop from January.
Posted by Jeff on March 24, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Hey Dave, you should probably go check out “Thank You For Smoking,” which also opened today, albeit on less screens than the Jodie/Denzel movie. I caught it this afternoon at Embarcadero and thought it was hilarious.
Check out the trailer here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/thankyouforsmoking/
Posted by Ernie Oporto on March 25, 2006 at 11:21 am
Re: BT in RSS, all that’s needed is to post a link to the torrent in the description field and then all readers can launch the BT client. I understand BT client footprints might be slim, but why bog an RSS reader down with that when there are very nice full-featured clients out there that will do the job when you click the link? I believe in best of breed for small targeted tools.