It’s an interesting idea, coming up with a online media-and-text-publishing solution to let you do video/podcast/blogging all in one convenient package. It’s been tossed around by various people that I know of, but no one’s really tackled it. Unfortunately, I think such a solution would be even more difficult than Trillian is to write (and believe me, we have our headaches).

Zine Ridling’s comment above is fairly insightful: we don’t control the networks we connect to, so we’re constantly aiming for a moving target. Microsoft, through their iron-fisted control of their OS, does at least ensure for them that their stuff usually interoperates with their other stuff. Doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a *good* thing, but there you have it.

The only way to do it would be to establish standards for vblogging, audio-blogging, a ‘posting’ method for podcasts, etc. (XML-RPC sort of vaguely passes as an established standard for straight text-blogging.) Otherwise, whoever tries to make such a tool will be facing the same issues that we do with Trillian, or Sean and the Gaim folks do with their code… namely, trying to hit a moving target you don’t control. Or rather, several moving targets. (Multiple IM networks, or multiple online publication services…)

Which can be an interesting challenge, but is rarely an easy task.

Meanwhile, many have been channeling Howard Beale in the movie “Network”: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Every single thing could be built better, no doubt. But without the traditional control that Microsoft has exerted, viz., over its OS, it cannot be made to happen. Much like Heisenberg, the more you control for one thing, the more another changes — you cannot, however, have it all. Yet I wish you could.

I guess I’d also join you in echoing Scoble’s exhortations. Microsoft has the power, the influence, and the opportunity to lead the world into this new online paradigm. I’ve got a lot of friends at Microsoft, and for their sake I’d like to see the company thrive. I’m just not convinced that it will.

Microsoft seems, for the most part, incapable of innovation. When they do innovate (Longhorn [heart] RSS is a killer idea), they seem too burdened with their own monopolist legacy to truly let their ideas take wing. It’s great to have guys like Scoble out there pushing, but it’s the guys at the very top who ultimately set the tone, and Balmer and company just don’t yet get that now is the time for them to yank the reins and gallop off in a different direction.

BTW, it was great meeting you and Melanie at Eric’s Podcast Roadshow on Sunday. Hopefully we’ll ahve a chance to hook up again at a blogger or podcast meetup.