I almost answered giving my opinion. But there’s a FAR BETTER way for him to figure that out than ask me what I think. It’s called “Upcoming.org.”

I’ve added hundreds of friends that I know into it. These are folks who are hard core into the same tech geeky events (like Gnomedex) that I’m into. Thanks to Upcoming.org they bring me the best events and I can look and see which ones of them are going.

Look at my page of events on Upcoming.org. I’ve picked the best events from my friends and added them to my own profile there. If I can’t make an event, but think it’s a good one for you to consider I say “I’m watching.” You can see which events I’m attending as well.

What you can’t see is that when you have a ton of friends that you’ve hand picked, like I have, whenever you sign into Upcoming.org it’ll show you new events that your friends have added that you should consider. Then you can see what those events are, and who is attending them. If you see an event like Gnomedex, which has 93 people who’ve registered on Upcoming for it then you know it’s a hot event. Especially if you know the attendees. Raines Cohen, for instance, is the guy who started the Berkeley Mac User Group. He’s going. Jeremy Wright, CEO of B5 Media is going. Scott Beale, founder of Laughing Squid is going. And so on and so forth.

Oh, and if you watch my profile over on Facebook it’ll tell you automatically when I’ve added a new event to my list on Upcoming.

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Oh, Ballmer isn’t the only one that doesn’t see the new media power that’s being built. Apple told its open source geeks to pound sand.

Someone at VLoggerCon said “individuals are now in charge” of what’s important in the world.

I wouldn’t tell ANYONE to pound sand in this world.

A kid in Australia with five readers can become an international media story now just by writing something on his blog.

Who knew what beet.tv was before Saturday? I didn’t.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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The most recent of these items comes from the Church of the Customer blog. Ben McConnell notes that NPR, with its 300-plus podcats, is looking at developing a Web 2.0-like community for listeners of its online audio content. McConnell was speaking with NPR’s Eric Nuzum, who told him “the new vision is to create listener communities who would congregate on the site because of the 304 podcasts the broadcaster offers.”

I read this on the heels of hearing from Neville on today’s installment of For Immediate Release about a new podcast offering called Waxxi. Waxxi kicks off its business on Saturday with a live podcast featuring Naked Conversations authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. By “live,” I suspect the Waxxi folks will record the call-in show and make it available as a podcast.

If that’s the case, it’s an interesting model for a podcast, but it’s also one that Chris Pirillo, the force behind Lockergnome and Gnomedex has been doing for some time on his podcast. The very first thing you see at the top of Pirillo’s podcast blog are these three bullets:

I was also wondering if you couldn’t just record a Skypecast conference and offer it up as an interactive podcast.

Michael Butler of the Rock n Roll Geek Show has also done the live chat thing while fans listen to the live stream of the recording.

But whether Waxxi’s model is new or just an extension of ideas already employed to lesser degrees elsewhere is academic. The point is clear: Podcasts-a social media phenomenon in their own right-are melding more and more with other elements of social computing to become community-driven, interactive vehicles, even if they ultimately do remain nothing more than MP3 files.

In any case, I’m signing up to participate on Saturday just to get more information on Waxxi and how it works.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

The iPod player I got before I set my policy of not accepting free stuff. The U3 drive I got because I didn’t have time to sit through Nathan’s demo and wanted to try it out. When I received them I made no promises to them about the coverage I would give them, or even IF there would be coverage coming. If I ever have a conflict of interest, I will disclose that to my readers.

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So, last night, Nathan Gold, developer evangelist for U3, shows me a new kind of USB Thumb Drive. He had one loaded up, gave it to me, and said “try this out.”

I’m playing with it now. It’s a 1GB flash memory drive that plugs into my USB port. But it isn’t a normal memory key. When you plug it in it automatically adds a new menu in the system tray. That pulls up a ton of software that Nathan put on my key for me.

Turns out it fools my PC into thinking it’s a CD-ROM drive that auto starts.

This is a radical way to distribute test software. Why? Cause I unplug my key and any software I run disappears along with it (and any traces, including any temp files I’ve downloaded – I got the Maxthon browser on the key, for instance. As soon as I unplug it everything goes away, even registry entries).

Whoa. More details on the U3 site.

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Maryam has an iPod Nano, so back when I was at CES, when I saw the Xitel HiFi-Link for iPod, I wanted to try it to see if it was really good. Lots of my friends have iPods, so thought this was unique.

It’s a box that you hook up to your AV system at home that lets you dock a Nano and play the music off of it onto your AV system.

It does exactly what it says it’ll do, is well designed (looks just as stylish as Maryam’s iPod) and sounds awesome on our AV system. If you’re looking for a way to connect your iPod to your AV system, this is worth considering.

On both of these products I’ll buy one after giving these away at Gnomedex.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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I told him that he should take Gnomedex to a higher resolution. I guess his HDTV and Xbox 360 had an effect on me. Or maybe it was the pile of plasma porn at the CES show (by the way, HDTV manufacturers are already reporting hot hot hot TV sales lately, raising their profits and stock price).

Anyway, he just announced Gnomedex: A higher resolution.

So, what does “a higher resolution” mean? Well, it means your family room changes once it gets an HD screen. For the Web we’ll see WPF and Flash fight it out for “rich” experiences. For phones it means higher resolution screens which let you bring new experiences. For iPods it means video. For Windows users it means Windows Vista with its new experiences.

Hey, Chris, you should have the guy who developed Geometry Wars there. That guy is an awesome technologist (it’s one of the first games that takes advantage of all three cores on the Xbox 360).

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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One is the Word of Mouth Basic Training Event in Walt Disney World in Orlando in January. Another is the RSS Summit in Boston in February. The third one is the Council of Foundations Conference in Pittsburgh in May.

What other cool conferences should I go to? Candidates that are high on my list include Les Blogs, Web 2.0, Gnomedex, South by Southwest and Northern Voice. I’d love to go to D4 or Davos, but I doubt I could snag a free invite. Ideally, I am interested in events that: 1) get my intellectual wheels turning, 2) take me to new cities, and 3) enable me to meet cool thinkers/bloggers.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

They’re simply searching for the content they’re interested in and adding it to their personalized page. They could care less about RSS and they don’t know it from Atom, er I mean Adam. So if that’s the case why do we need the word RSS? Doesn’t “subscribe” nail it?

There are different views here. ZDNet’s David Coursey says he hopes the RSS name will go away and become something even simpler, like a “subscribe” feature. David Pogue from the Times agrees. Meanwhile, Rebecca Leib at ClickZ can’t get enough of RSS. She mentions it 25 times in a single story.

Of course, the tech vendors are all talking up RSS. They love acronyms. Apple has a blue RSS icon right in the Safari browser. Meanwhile, Microsoft was decked out in so much orange and white for Gnomedex that they reminded me of the “Orange Crush” Denver Broncos of the 1970s and 80s.

I am in Coursey’s camp. The aggregators should be pushing the subscribe message rather than saying “hey you can get RSS feeds.” This is where I think Mozilla is getting it right. They deliberately pulled the RSS icon out of beta builds of Firefox in favor of talking about “live bookmarks.”

Both Yahoo and Mozilla have it nailed – make RSS seamless and easy and promote its benefits, not its features. Microsoft appears to be moving in this direction as well, however, it’s early. Their messaging at Gnomedex was really for us geeks. Let’s see what they do when Longhorn actually rolls out.

You don’t hear a lot of folks talking about HTML any more. We do, however, still talk about browsing. That’s where RSS is heading. It will be all about subscribe and less about RSS.

Scott Gatz from Yahoo

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

Here’s all most people really need to know about it, from a BBC News report last night:

Microsoft’s next version of its browser, Internet Explorer 7, will make it easier for people to keep automatically aware of website updates.

IE7 will have an orange button on the toolbar which will light up when it detects a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed on a site. Users can click on a “plus” button to subscribe to the site’s feed, as they would with a bookmark.

The new browser is due to be released this summer. It had its public debut at the Gnomedex technology conference in the US city of Seattle on Friday.

Who wouldn’t understand that!

Links:
Microsoft’s support for RSS
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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

I told Chris “imagine each person at Gnomedex has 1,000 readers, that’s 400,000 people you’re talking to.” I think I way underestimated. Even among the bloggers in the crowd many regularly get more than 50,000 each and some in the crowd, like the two reporters from the BBC, regularly get millions of viewers alone. John Furrier, the Silicon Valley podcasting guy, was getting more than that for each of his shows after just publishing for three weeks and that was BEFORE I linked to him.

Now I know why Adam Curry seemed a little nervous during his keynote.

Dare Obasanjo follows up the weekend’s news with a practical perspective of what Microsoft’s RSS extension means to end users and aggregator developers.

And, yes, that really was my red couch on stage. It’s back home safe now.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Business Week Online has a good summary of today’s news which was released at Gnomedex. Some key points:

[...] The fact that Microsoft is putting so much effort behind RSS suggests that the technology’s time has come. Michael Gartenberg, vice-president and research director at Jupiter Research, estimates that about 10% of U.S. Web surfers use RSS readers, software designed to view feeds from Web sites. “This is the type of thing that will bring it into the mainstream,” Gartenberg says. “It’s going to change behavior, and it’s going to do it very quickly.”

But Microsoft plans to dive much deeper when Longhorn ships. Including the RSS technology in the new operating system will allow thousands of software developers to create programs that take advantage of RSS feeds.

Not everyone see Microsoft’s news as good – Nick Fink writing in Digital Web Magazine, thinks Microsoft is taking RSS five steps backwards.

If you want to get opinions directly from members of the RSS Team at Microsoft, stop by Channel 9 and take a look at Robert Scoble’s video interviews. Also see the tech details about RSS in Longhorn in the Longhorn developers blog.

Undoubtedly more information – and more discussion – will emerge in the coming days.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.