Had problems with Feedburner, and frankly, have never really understood the point of it anyway. I've reenabled the basic Community Server RSS feed going forward. Some of you might prefer that anyway as it's a full-text feed - let me know what you prefer!
The good: Community Server 2007 is a great platform, and should help in the long-term with posts, management, and spam.
The bad: Community Server 2007 has changed their theme format, and I simply don't have the time to go and rebuild the whole theme.
They are having a contest for new themes, so my hope is some nice ones will come up and I'll just end up using one of them. That said, if any of you guys are bored and web-savvy, and want to take a spin at recreating an "Ozymandias" theme, I'm happy to pass along the original art assets. 
Just wanted to let you know the site has been updated to Community Server 2007 (with thanks to the Community Server guys, as always!) The site may look a bit funny for a day or two until I have time to work on updating the theme, but will work as normal otherwise. In theory, we'll have much better spam blocking as well.
Just wanted to point you to a couple of interesting posts today.
The first was Jerry/"Tycho" of Penny Arcade fame talking about ThreeSpeech (the "unofficial" Sony blog), as well as commenting on Microsoft bloggers in general. As usual, his writing speaks for itself, so I'll just quote the piece referring to Microsoft blogs:
Microsoft's marketing isn't slimy, it's just bad. Inert. The entire platform strategy was designed to secure a leadership position in the next generation, and once they achieved it, they were paralyzed by it. I thought it was rudderless behavior until I realized that they had simply reached their destination and sort of unpacked their things. As for their blogger phalanx which encircles the web, their position as explicit partisans dilutes their message automatically. Unless you are searching for quantifiable facts like release dates or raw platform orthodoxy, their editorial content is understood to emanate from that circle of cursed megaliths in Redmond.
For what it's worth, I'm actually good friends with Jerry (and the rest of the PA crew), and don't take any offense here. I completely agree about the "challenged" attributation of ThreeSpeech opinions. I'm certainly not thrilled with all of our marketing (and frankly, Apple manages to spank us so badly at times that it really, really smarts!) Can't argue that one. But I was somewhat struck by his opinion on corporate bloggers.
I can't argue the fact that simply being employed by a company in an industry you're commenting on is going to have the effect of causing people to suspect bias. And in fact, there's truth to the statement. The simple fact that I can't write about some of the confidential things we're doing removes a huge chunk of topics right off the top. And I'm sure the very nature of working on something you believe in passionately can also tinge a viewpoint. But I can also say that a lot of folks at Microsoft (especially those in the games division) are super-passionate about what we've built and continue to build.
There have been plenty of times that people have sent us feedback (some of it solicited here, in fact). And it's good stuff. You'd be amazed at how often we're already working on identified problems - we're gamers here, it's not like we don't know. Unfortunately, sometimes we just can can't enable certain things. To use one of Jerry's favorite quotes of mine, it's often a "time and space" issue. Sometimes we're able to get to it later, sometimes we never get to it. But I can say that there's a lot of deep, internal soulsearching when we make the tradeoffs on what we build. There's some magical stuff coming down the pipe in the next few years... give us the benefit of the doubt. We tend to deliver on our promises, even if it takes us three versions to get it right. 
One of my coworkers was also struck by Jerry's comments, and he wrote up a heartfelt response. Take a read, and whatever you do, keep up the communication and the comments. (Yes, even you Mr. "Ring of Death and DVD attack" man. ) We're slow sometimes, but each and every one of your comments are heard.
Been meaning to highlight a couple of other blogs I think you'd enjoy reading, especially if you're interested in the game industry. What I particularly like about both these blogs is that they're written by professional journalists, and bring a significantly higher quality of writing and opinion. In a world where Time Magazine's Person of the Year is "You", it's worth highlighting some of the better writing and thinking on the web.
You may also find these interesting because I can't say I'm always in agreement with their opinions. I've known both N'Gai and Dean for years, going all the way back to my Intel days, and we've always had spirited discussions. There are points of agreement, but I wanted to highlight that you'll definitely find a different viewpoint here than many of my opinions. Hopefully you'll take some of those and incorporate it into the overall conversation.
First off is Dean Takahashi's blog. Dean writes for the San Jose Mercury News, and his blog seems to be a combination of extended versions of his newspaper articles as well as his own opinion. You may also know him as the author of "Opening the Xbox". Dean definitely isn't one to pull his punches when writing about the Xbox, but he does have some great sources in the industry and you'll definitely find some fun stuff here. Worth watching.
Second is N'Gai Croal's "Level Up" blog. N'Gai (other than winning the award for coolest name) writes for Newsweek. I've know N'Gai for a long time, and I've always appreciated his very strong opinions as well as the reasoned backing he has for them. I'll be upfront and say that I often disagree with him, especially when it comes to Sony, but I also have to be fair and say that when we discuss different issues I can't discount many of the points he brings up. It usually comes down to a mutual "guess we'll have to see" sort of agreement... as well as a good excuse for dinner at the next trade show.
Take a read of both these blogs. Both N'Gai and Dean approach their blogs from a bit more of a journalist's perspective, and I think you'll find their perspective refreshing - even when they're horribly wrong. (Yes, that was tongue in cheek!)
Funny, but some people (including friends) don't believe I picked up a PS3. A couple of emails suggest I'm just saying I picked one up, and that it can't be that easy (it was). And some wonder why I picked one up at all?
Short answer - I've always said I'd get a PS3, and that I believe there will eventually be a couple of games (probably platform exclusives) that will eventually make it worth having (especially at a lower price). I don't think that time is now for most people - $600 is a lot of money to basically do nothing but play Resistance. But you have to remember that this is also part of my job, and keeping hands-on as the system evolves has value as well.
Should you read this as a recommendation? No, no, and no. The system is just not done. I can easily recommend the Wii, however. (But good luck finding one!)
And just for grins, here's my PS3 (you'll actually see two PS3s as the Japanese unit was still installed, but I'm down to just the US one now). You may have to click the image to see any details - black on black doesn't seem to pop as well as one might hope. Oh, and mind the security, aka "Mocha" (this is Seattle, after all.)
Had the following comment made:
"Now also this site is a PR move on MS part so expect it to cast a positive light on their products. I am also less than happy that only every 3rd post of mine doesn't make it here but, this is a MS blog written by somone involved on the 360 project."
I'm still amused to see some people think this is PR driven. Simply put, it's not - nothing I have ever posted has been seen, filtered, or approved by PR or Marketing at Microsoft. I can safely state this as it's a simple fact. Microsoft just happens to be very progressive in its thinking around blogs. I know that my stating this won't change some people's minds, and frankly, there's nothing that will. But I did want to state that for the record.
More important in my mind, the comment above implies a belief that I filter or censor comments. This isn't the case, and there may be a technical issue happening that I want to explore with your help.
For the record, I do not filter or approve comments. I just don't have the time, and frankly, don't care to. So when you type a comment and hit "Submit" it should just appear (after a few minutes - the site is slow to process). Period.
I also do not delete comments unless it's A) requested (ie, "I posted this in the wrong thread"), B) offensive (swearing, racial slurs, etc), or C) spam (link farming, porn keywords, etc.) If it's just a comment calling me, my opinions, or Microsoft flaming idiots they stay; I'm not that thin-skinned.
So please test this - submit comments, say what you want. Have an opinion, and if something doesn't appear after a few minutes (the site takes a bit of time to process), please let me know. There's no censoring going on here.
Title pretty much says it all, but I'm heading off to Peru with some friends to hike the Inca Trail and see the Machu Picchu ruins.
We will be gone for a few weeks (first multi-week vacation in years!), and that means I likely won't be posting often. However, we should have plenty of transit time and I may get a chance to write up some offline posts here and there. In addition, Loraan may chose to grace these pages with his wry yet witty pontifications. Be gentle, as he hasn't had the fun of being seared by comments of competitive console fans (nor does he even work in the industry).
Oh, and a last prediction since the announcement will be while I'm gone: Wii will price at $249 in the US. $149 is too low (puts into weird competition with DS), $199 is still too close to $149/originally-released DS price, and even at $249 they'll sell every unit they can make this holiday. Yes, I know this would price a "Wii60" ($400 Xbox 360/$249 Wii) at above the $599 Sony SKU, but that's not Nintendo's problem. 
Have a great month! If you need me, I will be here:
Some of you might have noticed a short downtime this morning - with thanks to Letskilldave, we upgraded Ozymandias.com to the latest version of Community Server 2.1 this morning. You should notice some speed improvements as well as other nice little features. In addition, Spam filtering for comments should also be a lot better. Let me know what you think!
Obviously I did, and so here we are.
My intent was (and is) to have a conversation with the games industry (including gamers themselves) and try to share my thoughts on where we're going, along with the positive and negative bumps we'll experience along the way. Some may care, some may not, but I wanted to highlight that if you think you have an opinion and voice people might enjoy reading you might think about doing your own blog.
When I started I was lucky in that we have a lot of internal folks who blog regularly, and I was able to lean on them with questions and to get feedback. What I didn't have was a nice compiled "so you want to write a blog" article to kick me off. Handily enough, gamedaily.com released just that yesterday. It's worth a read if you're thinking you might want to join the blogging community - it highlights some of the questions you should ask yourself before starting, and may give some context into why those of us who do blog regularly do what we do. (Great sentence, that. )
