The investors speak.

Ahh, so as long as the stench stays contained to the boardroom the investors were willing to ignore it, but as the stench seeps out from under the boardroom door and into the CEO’s office the shareholders decided to get out. Interesting.

HP’s CEO is holding a press conference in about an hour. I wonder if he can clear the air and make that smell move somewhere else?

At the Ragan PR conference the HP problem is a topic of conversation here. I just sat through a session of “PR winners and sinners.” Sinners being folks like Vice President Dick Cheney who shot his friend in the face while hunting. Winners being people like Kyra Phillips, CNN anchor who accidentally took a microphone into the bathroom and then went on David Letterman to redeem herself.

Anyway, I’m getting bored by talking about HP. I’d rather link to Beet.TV who has discovered that Google Video now has a capability for captioning. That’s cool.

I’m off to Chicago’s airport to catch a flight back to California. Stay out of trouble and, remember, no matter how flawed your life is or how sucky a job you have it still is far better than being an HP PR member right now.

One thing I really like about an offline feed reader is that you don’t need to read feeds all the time. Just store them up like a squirrel stores nuts. Then go on a feed reading binge. I use NewsGator for Outlook (it brings all my feeds into Outlook so I can read my feed items offline — most of this post was written using Windows Live Writer at 33,000 feet on the United Flight yesterday to Chicago).

I have an admission to make: I haven’t read any feeds since about 8/18. That’s why my blog has sucked lately. I haven’t been discovering the new little things that people tell me they liked most about my blog. Anyone can talk about HP and how messed up its board is, right? But who will read more than 100 feeds for you and find some cool nugget?

Anyway, one thing I noticed when I looked at my feeds for the first time yesterday is that most of my favorite bloggers publish more than my less favorite bloggers. A lot more. Let’s look at the top posters in my RSS reading list:

Boing Boing. 701 posts since I last read my feeds.
Engadget. 1093.
GigaOM. 466.
Lost Remote. 408.
Make Magazine. 395.
MSDN Blogs. 2886. (not really fair, cause there’s a few thousand people on there, these are Microsoft’s employee blogs).
Life Hacker. 552.
TechCrunch. 212
TechDirt. 278.
TechNet Blogs. 1454. (same problem as MSDN blogs, this one is another group of Microsoft bloggers).
I published 273 items in the same time.

Disclaimer, these numbers aren’t quite for the same time period. Some I hadn’t been reading for a longer period of time. But they are representative of the “fattest” feeds.

Whew, that’s a lot of blogs to read through.

A good comparison is my favorite Microsoft technical blogger, Raymond Chen, only posted about 50 things in the same time. And that’s a lot more frequent than many other feeds.

Interesting, on another, but sorta associated, topic: Maryam, my wife has written her first stab at “10 ways to create a killer blog.”

Me? I think I’d just focus on what a blogger is passionate about. That’s where it all starts. Yeah, there are things you can do to get into Google, or TechMeme, or iTunes, but if that’s how you look at life you won’t be interesting anyway.

Hell, what makes for a good blog? How about some hotel bed jumping? I’m lying in a hotel bed right now. I’m tempted. Heheh. Thanks to Tim Bray for that one.

Anyway, I gotta get some sleep. I’m on stage in a few hours.