We’re sitting around in the Swiss Chalet and the geeks are wondering just what we did last night. Got a bit of a hangover (we drank a 109-year-old Cognac last night, among other things). Pierre made some awesome raclette cheese — they have a machine where they through half-a-roll of cheese on it and it melts it off. It’s amazing stuff. They are checking in on their email and what happened overnight. Hundreds of requests for access to CoComment. #2 on Memeorandum. And requests from press coming in. Brian Benzinger even wrote a Greasemonkey script overnight. More than 800 people have looked at my Flickr photo from last night. Laurent continues the conversation over on his blog. All for a non-planned release. (They are wondering if they are going to get yelled at by SwissCom team that developed this along with Laurent). This wasn’t a planned release, it just happened cause we bugged Laurent to talk about it.

I think this is going to start a new trend. Wanna release a product? Well, you can either go to Demo (that’s this week and I’m sure it’ll start lots of these kinds of conversations too) and show your stuff off to Chris Shipley and crowd (and that’s after you pay tons of money) or you can throw a killer party in a Swiss Chalet, invite your friends over to hang out in a hot tub and go skiing, and show them all what you’ve been working on.

It was a great demonstration of what we discuss in our book and what I talked about on Friday in my speech to LIFT06. You don’t need to do much more to kick off a movement than to start a simple conversation. Yeah, David Anderson (the agility expert) you get it. Who’s next?

Bubbleshare is holding a bubble wrap photo contest where they are giving away copies of our book, among other cool prizes. Of course this got Chris Pirillo to wrap himself in bubblewrap. Damn, Chris, that’s embarrassing!

Why do I read so many feeds? To catch stuff like this (Ed Bott is hearing conflicting information and isn’t sure what to do). There’s some confusion going around about the Office 12 NDA. So, I checked with the folks who know over on Office 12. Here’s the deal:

Press (which include bloggers) are allowed to write about client apps – specifically Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Visio, Project, OneNote and InfoPath. Products still under NDA include Groove and all our server products.

MVPs might be getting other rules, but here’s the person in charge: Sandhya Thodla. sthodla@microsoft.com. Anyone else trying to make NDA rules up should be sent to Sandhya. If you aren’t clear on any of this, please ask Sandhya before writing about Office 12.
Is that clear enough?

By the way, Frank Shaw is president of Waggener Edstrom in charge of the Microsoft account. Translation: if he says something is OK, it’s OK.

UPDATE: February 7, 2006: It turns out that this isn’t quite the case. There are different NDAs given to different groups. Sorry for the confusion, but I need to be a little bit clearer about the Office 12 beta program. If you’re an MVP, in the Technical Beta or on the TAP program you’ll need to comply with the EULA of Beta1, which maintains confidentiality except in cases where the information is already public. If you’re a blogger and want to talk about Office 12 and you’re already on the beta, we recommend you learn what’s public and what’s not BEFORE you disclose anything new.