What a wacky podcast: Alex Williams put a microphone in the middle of Eric Rice and me as we riff about the future of media. Among other things. All at a party at Gnomedex.

Eric gets my creativity going. I tell lots of people I’m gonna copy everything he does. And I’m only half kidding.

More Gnomedex audio is on the Chris Pirillo Show site.

I left more than a gig of email at Microsoft. And that was after deleting all the crud out of it. What knowledge was in there? Tons of stuff about Channel 9 that would have been awesome for someone to use to learn about how things get onto Channel 9 and how it evolved. Gone. Deleted.

Jeffrey Treem talks about this on his blog “Inside the Cubicle.”

I hope this is the last job where I have to throw away knowledge when I leave.

I’ll probably open an internal blog and see if I can get all the good stuff outside of email and onto the intranet so that if I get hit by a bus someone can step in and learn everything I was doing in email and continue.

How much stuff did I delete from Microsoft? Well, all sorts of emails from people all over the company. All sorts of resources (I got lots of emails from coworkers saying things like “get the latest build of Vista from XXXXX server.” Those kinds of things don’t seem important, but I’m missing them already.)

Mark Cuban said it first: the Internet is boring. But working at a startup isn’t.

But, working at a little startup after working at two of the world’s biggest companies (I worked at NEC, which had twice as many employees as Microsoft had before moving to NEC) it’s interesting joining one of the worlds’ smallest companies.

Patrick sort of nailed it when we walked in and said “Microsoft is bigger.” That was before he realized that Podtech only occupied about 2,000 square feet in the middle of one of USVP’s plush offices (he kept thinking that Podtech occupied the whole complex we were in, not just one small office). Podtech is in incubation space right now. Basically we have a couple of more months to find offices before they kick us out of the nest to see if we can survive on our own.

Oh, but talking about this stuff is making the natives, er, at least the skeptics, restless. Hey, Skeptic, didn’t ya hear that the Internet is boring?

Oh, anyway, one thing that’s different? This is the first time in years that my corporate email is not on Exchange. Turns out Podtech is hosting all of its email on Gmail and all of its calendars on Google Calendar. It’ll be interesting to see what moving over is like.

What else is different about a startup? Too fast growth. We are already out of places to sit and work. That took me back to my first job after college, at Fawcette Technical Publications, where we had people working on the table that also held our coffee machine.

Anyway, I’m wiped out. The day, the 13-hour drive (we got in at 2 a.m.), and another long drive to drop Patrick off at his mom’s tonight have wiped me out.

One thing that Irina already tapped me into is San Francisco’s strong social scene (there’s a raft of things this weekend to attend). She showed me how Upcoming.org lists all the coolest stuff. Like the ValleySwag Hoedown. This company has made a whole business out of getting people the latest swag.

OK, now I’ve heard everything. So long from the boring Internet!

Update: Maryam wrote about her first day’s impressions too.