Hey you. If you’re reading this via my RSS feed, check the latest revelation of my inner geek on my site. I’m trying out one of TypePad’s new widgets, a swiki cloud. It’s very now, baby. Are these things really useful? I’d be interested to get your take. On the upside, it has given me a search bar on the blog for the first time. And it has this really cool feature where you can compare the results of the swiki search versus Yahoo!, Google, MSN etc.

I’ve also shuffled a few categories around on the site - a prelude to a site redesign that I’ve been pondering for some time. Any recommendations on a web designer in Australia?

I’ve resisted writing about the David Richards vs Scoble argument that was nicely moderated by Phil Sim over the weekend.

But now I’m really starting to get interested. You see, the plot keeps getting thicker.
A few quick observations. First, Charles Wright is funny (it helps if you imagine the smirk of glee on his face when he writes stuff like this). Secondly, David "Riches" (as C.W. calls him), will never back down. I’ve competed against him while I was Editor-in-Chief at Australian Reseller News, so I too talk from experience. Thirdly, is it just me or is Scoble slighting Australian journalists? Ok, maybe not. But ya better be careful, we all carry big knives, keep crocodiles as pets and live with kangaroos. In fact, I *really have* seen a kangaroo on a street in suburban Sydney (Frenchs Forest to be precise, for the local punters at home), but I digress…

Up next, Steve Gillmor is also funny, and right as usual (btw Steve, I’d comment on your blog if that sign-in thingy wasn’t so onerous). Office is on the fast train to dead-ville thanks to the hosted apps evolution.

Now for my value add. I did my own bit of digging today. I spoke to an industry source who I have a very strong sense was quite possibly David Richard’s source, although the person dodged that direct question (adding to my suspicion). This person, who I will not name, said to me that the 60 per cent figure was based on "strong speculation."

Was that strong enough to include in the Windows Vista story I’m running in the Australian Financial Review on Tuesday? Nope. But it’s great blog fodder. And truth be told, I don’t actually care if the figure is 60 per cent or otherwise. As the subtext of DWR’s rebuttal points out, either he or Microsoft will be right on the code rewrite/completion front.

So now that Ray Ozzie is in charge, as per Steve’s post, and the new ship dates are announced, we sit and wait. We’ve got calendars with reminders, and thanks to this great bit of theatre, a well documented online trail to set the stage.

Meanwhile, how funny is this NYT yarn that says Microsoft delayed Vista to keep HP happy.

…Yet unlike Dell, Hewlett-Packard sells extensively through retailers,
whose orders must be taken and shelves stocked. That takes time.

Hewlett-Packard, according to a person close to the company who
asked not to be identified because he was told the information
confidentially, informed Microsoft that unless Vista was locked down
and ready by August, Hewlett-Packard would be at a disadvantage in the
year-end sales season.

I’ve just started playing with Google’s news aggregator/RSS reader called (surprise!) Google Reader, announced on the Google blog this weekend.

My first reaction was "ah crap, now I’ve got to import all my Bloglines feeds." Of course, that’s a hassle that I’ll look to avoid until I get a better sense of what this is all about. Some early thoughts:

* It’s one of the first times I’ve seen an RSS aggregator that doesn’t require you to copy/paste an RSS URL string, or at least have to deal with it in any automated fashion.

* To a complete rss/newsreader newbie, I’m not sure that it will be as intuitive as Google will hope. You are at first presented with a blank screen which can be a bit intimidating. On the upside, a quick search in the "search for new content" bar and you are away.

* I like the chronological list of stories that get populated into the left hand side. The ability to "star" stories of interest is good, except that when I tried this feature I got an "oops" error message. No doubt it will get fixed easily/quickly.

* The keyboard shortcuts are a nice touch, but not sure that I’d convert from using arrow keys.

What do you think? Worth migrating from Bloglines?

There are moments in life when you just want to swallow a huge chunk of air, hold it in, smile, and hope that you’ll remember the scene forever.

Yesterday I joined a dozen mates on board a two deck cruiser we’d rented to travel around Pittwater, the large harbour on the western side of Sydney’s Northern Beaches peninsula. We had it all. A beautiful day, beer, meat for the BBQ, good humour, the celebration of one guy’s impending marriage, and the chance to cast aside responsibilities and thoughts about work.

As we sat around at the beginning of our trip, feeling very pleased with ourselves, one guy remarked to me that there was nowhere else in the world he would rather be right now. This picture, taken on my camera phone, captured the moment for me as we dived off our anchored boat into the water.

Jonathan Schwartz: Now, since John Gage first uttered the phrase, Sun has been saying "The Network is the Computer." It’s one of those rare vision statements that only becomes more true over time. And next week, we’re going to prove the point by unveiling the world’s first on demand supercomputer. And by on demand, I mean accessible through your browser, with a credit card.

This grid story has been kicking around for years. What’s interesting about Sun’s move is that it will give savvy IT managers an easy way of testing it out by flexing the corporate AMEX.

Oh, and yes, he’s broken the news on his blog. That says something about the future of corporate communications too.

Churning away in the back of my mind this week have been thoughts about the future of online publishing. Tuesday’s packed search engine room conference was another reminder that a vast marketing community is out there looking for new solutions to old problems. Specifically, how do I get the best ROI for my company/client’s advertising buck, and what marketing avenues offer the highest levels of accountability and solid leads?

Skip forward a couple of days, and I notice in the RSS feed that my old InfoWorld mate Matt McAlister is working through similar ideas over at Yahoo! in sunny Sunnyvale. In fact, Matt’s found the sharp end where the old/traditional publishing methods and the new media business collide.

…there’s no metric that will convince me the page view model is going to continue to dominate.

So we have a situation where online publishers must maintain growth from existing online ad models, while constantly search for new products.

To that point, Frost & Sullivan presented research at the search engine conference that contained this tantalising metric: 38 per cent of respondents to its survey said they had "no set limit" on what they would pay for a desirable keyword. That speaks volumes about the lengths people will go to in a hotly competitive market that’s widely perceived to be functioning well. Create more opportunities on the web where restricted supply drives up demand, and it sounds like you’re on a winner.

I’m down at Sydney’s Darling Harbour today attending the Search Engine Room conference, an annual show buzzing with search engine strategists and marketers happily disintermediating the traditional marketing and media world.

The story behind the story that 99% of Google’s revenues come from online marketing is that it’s spawned a whole new community of businesses that effectively play the middleman role in the marketing equation. Not sure how to get the best result in PageRank? Nervous about whether you should spend $1 or $2 on buying a certain keyword? According to Frost & Sullivan analyst Foad Faghadi, who spoke this morning, there are now around 40 search engine marketing companies in Australia. He also said there are 150 people working full time in the search industry (I think that figure’s a bit low), and pay per click advertising represents $124 million, or 20 per cent, of the $650 million spent in online marketing in Australia.

There are plenty of other factoids floating around here, which I’ll keep under my hat for the moment. But with 250 people in the room and a small but buzzing collection of stands, it’s obvious that there is real traction in this sector.

Oh, and yes, they have free wi-fi for delegates. Hurrah. But oddly enough, I can only see about two or three others using notebooks. Quite a contrast from the US where events like this are a live advertisement for Apple PowerBooks.

Opened up the SMH this morning to see Darren Rowse staring at me from a prominent pic on page 3. The paper has mixed together recent news of big media dot-com deals and thrown in a bit of Web 2.0 for flavour. Darren and b5 media have not been acquired (yet?) but the concept of "blogpreneurs", as Jeremy Wright puts it, is still a subject of fascination. And in true blogger fashion, Darren’s not missed a beat, posting a welcome note early this morning. Congrats mate.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to run Foxtel? Until recently, the 10 year old Australian cable network hadn’t even turned a profit. It’s competitively hobbled by its joint ownership by Telstra, News Ltd and PBL, and now it’s woken up to the reality of the Internet.

Foxtel chief executive Kim Williams has rolled out this sob story as it becomes apparent that broadband usage has surged past cable TV:

In Australia, the number of subscribers for pay TV grew by 6.3 per cent to 1.69 million last year, while broadband customer numbers surged more than 80 per cent to 1.67 million.

What amuses me is Foxtel’s belief that government regulation of content on the internet - Australian sporting events in particular - will help appease its ills. Then you’ve got this bizzare notion implicit in the story that Foxtel must somehow compete with "broadband," which is clearly not a company or entity one does battle with in the traditional notion of competition. Mr Williams at least has one thing right: Foxtel’s content will continue to struggle (some might say in vein) against content freely distributed over the internet, which by definition will never succumb to regional interests.

Reading this yarn in The Aus today, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the thousands of mass of niche, independent podcasts don’t exist. Cameron, for one, can’t be a happy chappie as TPN didn’t even get a mention.

But it gets even better. How about this back-hander from Austereo:

[Austereo's head of multimedia Martin] Jones said he expected the novelty value would lose pace and many of the small, home-based amateur podcast services would fall away. "That’s an opportunity for serious, commercially based operators to try to build a viable business model around podcasting," he said. "I think you’ll see that happening in the next 12 months."

Other interesting quote re ABC’s success:

As with early internet take-up, podcast usage had been skewed towards "younger male, more geeky people", but that was quickly changing, he said. If take-up continues at the present pace, the ABC expects that in a year it could be close to 500,000 downloads a week.