Like a lot of folks, Twitter first and then tumblr has stolen a lot of my blogging thunder. And for that my blogging deserves its own fail whale.  Even with that I have a stack a mile high of topics I’ve been meaning to blog about and now I swear I plan to start working through.

Also that does make this a good time to remind anyone interested in more real time, daily commentary to follow me on twitter (@sawickipedia) and for those looking for pithy observations on the array of things I find interesting online go to my tumblr site (http://sawickipedia.tumblr.com).

And perhaps most importantly, I owe an update on Katie and her treatment for breast cancer.  And that’s coming up next.

I used to think all accussed “dopers” were guilty SOB’s, but after reading the literature and background – I am convinced that most anti-doping exercises are witch hunts led by sloppy labs with questionable motives and purposes.  If I were a professional athlete that had their livlihood at the hands and mercy of the French lab that produced the “positive” result in Floyd Landis’s case, then I would shudder with fear every day I gave a sample that today I would be branded a cheat – rightly or wrongly.  With a guilty until proven innocent appeals process with no credence given to outside independent experts there is little hope of overturning “guilty” rulings.  With no checks on procedural errors, omissions, and independence, one’s livlihood is in the hands of a group of people who make McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings look reasonable.

My only hope is that there is a legal path for Landis to pursue this in federal courts where he can contest his lack of justice and expose the anti-doping corrupt jihad for what it is.

So with that, when I saw the news about Judy’s Book yesterday, I reacted with a heavy heart.  I want to pass along my sympathies to the Andy and the Judy’s Book team.  It’s never easy to see a dream die and even harder to let people go like that.  Andy’s honesty and shared learnings about Judy’s Book both public on the blog and in private have been very refreshing.  In a world where all you ever hear is “things are great” no matter how far from the truth, Andy took the path less taken and I hope we all can learn from those lessons.  Andy’s ideas on local search and commerce will likely prove largely right, but the timing is still tough.  And as I’ve discussed, being early is still wrong no matter how right the idea proves in the long run.

Best of luck to Andy on his next adventure and sorry this one didn’t work out.

Living in Seattle, the heart of Microsoft country, I am fortunate to have lots of friends who work for the company. What I hear from those friends is that Microsoft is worried to death that Microsoft’s bread and butter – owning the most valuable development channel – might be going the way of the DoDo.

Now we already can see that the desktop OS is losing importance as traditional client apps are all moving online into the browser. As was often predicted – the Network has become the Computer. But Microsoft isn’t worried about the shift from the desktop to the web per se – they’re worried that their development platform for the web – ASP.NET – is about as cool to the next generation of developers as their Dad’s or Mom’s Oldsmobile. Microsoft has been a ginourmous success largely because they have historically not only owned the platform but more importantly owned the developer community. If there’s a company that understands ISV relations, it’s Microsoft (as discussed previously here).

The number of next generation developers (18-25 year olds) learning .NET is fading fast compared to PHP or Ruby. And since Microsoft’s bread and butter is owning the developer channel. And throw FBML and FQL into the mix and you’ve got Microsoft wondering about why it’s no longer the cool kid in school. When was the last time you saw an article about a really cool .NET app versus articles about really cool FB apps? Exactly. LAMP stack or bust is the usual moto at web companies these days.Since FB is the cool new development platform then Microsoft gets a whole lot of cool with Facebook. Another generation of developers and the economics that come with that. And if FB does become the social graph/network OS – that’s likely a very valuable platform to own. So you can begin to see why Microsoft hearts Facebook.

Quickly – on the topic of valuations – two posts worth passing along are from mr. facebook dave mcclure (organizer of the upcoming don’t miss it FB conference – Graphing Social and Silicon Alley Insider (henry blodgett’s new very good news commentary site). Both essentially argue that it’s not an insane number. And assuming FB is on a MySpace like growth curve then I tend to agree (MySpace is on pace to hit $70 million a month in revenue in ‘08).