While driving home from Seagate along the coast and listening to various satellite radio programs I realized just how much I loved my satellite radio. I couldn’t even get a cell phone signal, not to mention a signal from very powerful KGO radio towers, but satellite radio was pumping out good stuff nontheless.

By the way, where did Adam Curry and PodShow go? They used to be on 102, but I didn’t hear them there tonight.

Anyway, I was prompted to write this by Gizmodo cause they wrote tonight “mostly everyone I know hates satellite radio.”

Weird, I just got back from Seagate where I talked with folks about what they are announcing at CES and how far the hard drive business has come and the first thing I see in my news aggregator is that Al Shugart, co-founder of Seagate, has died (thanks Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury News). Like Mike notes, Al Shugart is a name that’s been in the press all during my lifetime.

Today Seagate showed me what they are bringing out at CES: a 1.8-inch 60GB drive. Al saw the business go from the original 5MB (megabyte, not gigabyte) drives which venture capitalists and pundits thought no one would ever need cause they are “too big” all the way up to 750GB drives (Seagate is working on terabyte sizes and more). What a lifetime!

Imagine what my son Patrick will see in his lifetime (he was born the same year Netscape was).

Disclaimer: Seagate pays my salary through its sponsorship of my show, which I greatly appreciate.

It’s important to present a balanced view of things. I guess that’s the journalist training. If you are hearing strong emotions going one way, try to find out the other side of the story. I don’t always do that and when I don’t, and I really am honest with myself, and go back and look at it later, my audience is always underserved. So, I’ve been looking for a positive view of Le Web. Hugh Macleod gave one. Thanks Hugh. That brings back memories of last year’s Le Blog conference.

Personally I agree with Hugh. The time for blogging conferences to end is here. I’m getting tired of them. Why? I rarely learn something new.

But there is something in the air. Spending a few hours at Google got me excited again. I’m playing with a Blogger blog just to play around away from public view.

I am playing with JavaScript and all the latest gadgets and gidgets and widgets and code (Mark Lucovsky hates calling them anything but code, by the way, cause he says looking at it any other way starts to limit your thinking. He pointed out that most gadgets on blogs are rectangular. He asked me “why do they need to do that?” Then he showed me lots of examples where code sprayed results into the page in a totally non-rectangular way. And the stuff he demoed on maps is cool. I’ll get that video up for Christmas so we can all spend Christmas break copying JavaScripts from each other and playing around.

I want to go to a conference that Mark Lucovsky plans. One where he just shows me tip after tip of things I could do on my blog with code.

Why is JavaScript interesting to me? Because I can go to a site like Google’s Code site, check out the samples, have it generate code for me, and copy and paste that code into my blog’s template.

If I start to get more advanced, I can even built a little gadget for Windows Vista’s sidebar. Or, build a gadget for inclusion in Goowy, Pageflakes, Live.com, MyYahoo, or a raft of other gadget hosts.

I’m seeing a TON of innovation hitting in this space. Even Microsoft, who is seen as behind in the Internet space, has something like 470 gadgets, most of which were created by folks in the community.

The recent Gadget conference planned by Niall Kennedy sold out, without much PR or marketing.

So, maybe it’s time for “Blogging 2007 Style.” Hint: it ain’t your standard old blog anymore.