I’m sitting here with PodTech star Loren Feldman. The dude is funny. I wish I was funny. Even 1/100th as funny.  We’re also hanging out in New York with Rachel Clarke (she does marketing for a bunch of big consumer companies that she’d rather me not name) and machinima expert Paul Martino.

Anyway, earlier today I visited the Fast Company offices. Here’s their blog. Damn, they are awesome offices. They just moved into the rebuilt World Trade Center #7 building (it was destroyed on 9/11). They have 360-degree views of New York. One window looked down on Ground Zero, lots of work being done to build a new tower and a memorial.

It’s a place that emotionally took my breath away when I first got there. After Fast Company we went to Katz’ deli where about 10 people showed up. We’re sitting in Cafe La Fortuna in Upper West Side. Great pastries!

See ya at Katz Deli in New York today at about noon. My cell? 425-205-1921. Remember to save Saturday for Maker’s Faire too in San Mateo, California. We’re doing a Photowalking there.

Speaking of events, there’s a ton of videos from when I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco up on ScobleShow.com. My favorite of those videos? Zude. One problem, though. They didn’t think their service was going to be that popular. They went into beta one day and promptly got overloaded. If you watch the video you’ll see I was very excited about it and knew it’d be a hit (it was the coolest thing I saw at the Web 2.0 Expo).

I don’t get this. The word of mouth network is now so efficient that I knew they’d probably have about a million people hit it on the first day. They didn’t believe that. Companies that don’t plan for extreme scale issues are gonna really look lame from now on. Even Twitter continues having troubles. I couldn’t get into Twitter many times this week.

Ahh, now you all understand what I meant when I said YouTube is a moat, not a revenue generator. By putting YouTube results into Google’s main engine Google ensures it will have better searches than Yahoo and Microsoft (who were, truth be told, getting damn close to matching Google’s quality). And it does it in a way that Yahoo and Microsoft will not be willing to match. Seriously, can you see an executive at Microsoft advocating putting YouTube videos into Microsoft’s search results? I can’t. That’d be the equivilent of sending traffic to a competitor. It’d be what I advocate at this point, but that explains why I am a stupid blogger and not some multi-millionaire executive.

Anyway, Google just distanced themselves from Yahoo and Microsoft. And they just provided a way to monetize YouTube videos.

I love Google’s strategy. It continues to mess with Microsoft’s strategy. Microsoft still treats each team as something that must make money. Google doesn’t do that. They didn’t care one bit that YouTube didn’t have any revenues. They knew that there’s other ways to make money off of YouTube than to force YouTube to monetize on its own.

Truth be told even I didn’t quite understand just what an impact that the YouTube purchase would have. It’s all very clear now. It also is even more worth putting up with billions of dollars of lawsuits.

If I were at Microsoft now I don’t know what I’d be advocating. Ray Ozzie really has his work cut out for him.

Google just put Microsoft’s Internet strategy in a box. It also explains why Microsoft has put so much effort into Silverlight lately (they need that to build a platform to get out of the box) and, might even explain why the lawyers are sabre rattling about open source. The execs at Microsoft don’t like being put into boxes. That isn’t a place they’ve ever been before.

If Google were playing chess I think they just said “check.”

And you wonder why the rest of the industry is talking about FOG (Fear of Google)?  Exactly.