I hate Chris Pirillo. He has an HDTV screen (Maryam won’t let me buy one, says we have to pay off credit cards first) and he also has an Xbox 360. Damn him!

Anyway, Thursday he’s having a few people over. I think I’ll crash his party and eat his food. Heh. Oh, wait, it’s being podcast? And I gotta kick Pete Grondal and Larry Hryb off of the couch? Even more fun! Hey, give me that controller!

So, the MSN Spaces users now have MetaWeblog API (thanks Dare for letting us know), which means they can use blog editing tools other than the browser. Tom Harpel says BlogJet is cool. I’m wondering which one is better, Zoundry or BlogJet? Or a different editor? Dare has a list.

Ben Metcalfe (the guy who got Mena to swear on stage) writes about some issues that he feels the blogosphere needs to address. A few things. 1) I find I can hold real conversations with a video camera and/or a Web forum and/or Skype and record it and put it up. Maybe someone should give Ben an invite to audioblog.com?

As to persona representation, sorry, I don’t go with you on this one. When I worked at Fawcette I saw someone get fired for getting drunk at a party and hitting, inappropriately, on my coworkers. At NEC I saw someone get fired for posting racist remarks in a Web forum. Neither case was really an example of behavior that was connected to the company’s official business, but the reality is that if you work for a company and you’re identifyable with that company you’re ALWAYS representing that company.

Ben, you’re generally the only interaction I have with the BBC. Think about that for a moment. To ME you ARE the BBC. Well, you and Ian, who I meet at geek dinners in London.

If you do something that gets back to your boss and it sufficiently pisses him or her off there’s not going to be much you can do about it, sorry. Tell the BBC’s biggest advertiser to screw off and die at a party and see how long you’ll last there.

As to marketing, it’s a messy business. The one thing I look out for is transparency. We all know Hugh Macleod is getting paid to hawk Stormhoek. And that’s OK. If we didn’t know I’d be screaming left and right.

Just like you all know I work for Microsoft.