Everyone I met today asked me what I thought of YouTube’s rumor. The blogs certainly are lit up, which demonstrates well that if you get blogs to talk about you, it’s probably a pretty good predictor that other people are talking about the same thing too.

$1.6 billion. Whew. And all I got was a cool YouTube sticker for my tripod. Heheh.

Lots of people think Google is nuts for buying YouTube, if this rumor proves to be correct. I don’t. When you have an audience that large and that engaged you’ll be able to find a way to turn that into dollars. And, for someone like Google, it means more than that even. It means a way to keep it out of Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s hands.

Engineers always talk that way, though “I could build that in a week.” Bullshit, I answer. You might be able to clone the technology but you’ll never get the community to move.

Remember all the eBay competitors back in the late 1990s? I do. They almost always had better technology than eBay, but still failed. Why? This is a rock star business.

You can’t copy the Beatles. If you try you’ll be destined to play in high school auditoriums forever.

That’s why YouTube is worth the $1.6 billion. It’s the access to a group of people who won’t move anywhere else.

I’m at the hot company of the day, Blue Dot. They just got written up on TechCrunch (Mike Arrington has been telling friends that he’s using Blue Dot instead of Del.icio.us). I just met the entire company (10 people) and they have a cool way to share Web sites with your friends. This is the next Digg. Instead of sharing stuff with the world, you can share with groups. Sounds lame here in text land, but when you see the video demo it all will make sense.

Anyway, here’s some exclusive news. They just told me about their mobile service. Go to bluedot.us/m and you can get to your Blue Dot groups from your mobile phone. Doesn’t always work on every phone, but if it does it’s very cool.

Today was absolutely incredible. Zune, Microsoft Research were both excellent videos. Research showed me something that just blew my mind. But you gotta see it on video. I’ll let you know when that’s up.

More on Zune later, but I’m just running my ass off. Gotta go get ready for the Woz interview. Hope you’re having a good Friday.

Got a very warm welcome back at Microsoft yesterday. Hung out with some of the top Windows Vista folks, was over at the Tablet PC team hearing about their latest UMPCs, spent a fun hour with Buzz interviewing the Windows Quality team (the folks who get your reports after your computer crashes), then hung out with the MindCamp folks for a fun party and dinner.

Today is just as packed in. Interviewing the Zune team, getting a tour of Research, before heading over to Pioneer Square to see some startups (Pluggd is first on list) before heading to University of Washington (Keene Hall) to interview Woz in front of an audience of hundreds of people tonight.

Anyway, I got an interview with Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot up (he was also a founder of Excite at Home, so he’s seen the ups and downs of Silicon Valley).

I’m sorry about only having one microphone so you can’t hear my questions very well. I have several more interviews I did that way, but now I have a second microphone so in the future this problem goes away.