I read hundreds of blogs. Follow thousands of people on Twitter and FriendFeed. I’m seen as THE poster boy for the Silicon Valley echo chamber. But I don’t see much about Meebo, certainly not even close to the amount of talk that, say, Twitter gets (and Twitter has 1/10th the traffic that Meebo does). Why is Twitter on TechMeme nearly every week, but Meebo isn’t?

Well, recently I started seeing some mentions of them on sites like Read/Write Web so I wanted to find out what was up.

First of all, I was blown away. Second of all, I found I was so interested in the fact that this company has more than 20 million 35 million people using its services and most for hours every day (I heard the number wrong, and they corrected me this morning). Yet you probably don’t know Meebo’s CEO’s name. Unless you’re on the service you probably don’t even know about it.

Which is why I spent 40 minutes videoing a conversation with Meebo’s CEO, Seth Sternberg, learning about what’s happening in its business. This is like an MBA-level course on the latest advertising and community trends.  I also got a separate tour of their offices, if you want to see what those are like.

This is why I do video. It’s one thing to read a blog post, it’s a whole nother thing to get a demo, have a conversation, and learn some new stuff. As good as the Read/Write Web post is, I never got an understanding of how and why advertising on Meebo is working so well. Any entrepreneur who is trying to make an advertising business model work should watch this interview for some tips.

So, why is Meebo underhyped? We talked about that after the cameras were off and I theorized one theory:

That A-list bloggers don’t use IM or chat much, so don’t get passionate about it the way they do about, say, Twitter (although Twitter has about 1/10th as much traffic).

Seth countered and said that’s probably true, but that he’s noticed that most of his users are on Internet Explorer, not Firefox or Safari. So, the audience that’s using IM is much more mainstream than the audience that most tech bloggers hang out with.

Which points to another thing I’m learning here. If you are an entrepreneur and you want to reach a mainstream audience, you should hang out on Meebo more to do your research, not on Twitter or FriendFeed.

Apple’s Mobile Me just deleted every single item from my Outlook calendar on Windows Vista. Gone. Deleted.

Luckily I have them backed up on Google, but what a scare.

Apple’s secrecy keeps them from properly testing out their apps with tons of users, the way other companies do who aren’t so worried about secrecy.

Other people are reporting the same thing. Do not buy Mobile Me. Do not install it. Be warned.

Update: Walt Mossberg, tech journalist for the Wall Street Journal, said to avoid Mobile Me too, weeks ago. I should have listened to him.

Update 2: this post got a separate conversation going over on FriendFeed.

The third startup just wrote me to ask us to hold our videos that we’ve done with them until the TechCrunch 50 and Demo conferences slide by in early September.

Rafe Needleman, of CNET, demonstrates that I’m not the only one seeing this happen to.

One entrepreneur noted that TechCrunch’s crew looked very tired and told him that they had gotten 1,000 submissions to dig through for TechCrunch 50.

What does this do?

Well, it holds the best companies in PR hell. They can’t talk to the press if they want a shot at being on stage at either of these companies (which does bring PR and venture capital attention).

Funny that we’re back in this situation.

Anyway, that just gives other companies an opportunity. I was over at Google and Adobe yesterday making plans and was met with open arms. In fact, they welcome any blogger to contact them to build a relationship and check facts. Just write press@google.com and they will try to help you out. They told me that they mostly are a reactive PR team because Google has hundreds of products/services that are iterating all the time (far different than, say, Apple, who only iterates once in a while).

So, if you could troll around Google with a video camera, what team would you go see?

My first choices? Android. Knol.

It also makes me realize that we need a new, how-to show that’ll be more practical. Sort of like a Make Magazine, but for people who are trying to use this new world. For instance, did you know that on Google Maps you can put in an address and then the word “restaurant” after it? It’ll show you that address and all the restaurants around it. I did that yesterday to find restaurants around Adobe’s headquarters.

That’s something that many people won’t figure out about their iPhone’s maps, though. There are thousands of little things like that that, if you knew them, make your life a lot neater.

Anyway, Rafe, why don’t we get together and do a joint project or something this next month. It’ll probably be our last chance to do some R&D for a while.

Oh, and today on WorkFastTV we’ll have David Kralik, Newt Gingrich’s Internet Strategist on. He’s going to show off a ton of eGovernment stuff. For those who don’t know, Newt is known for doing the most innovative stuff in government and I can’t wait.

That will be live at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, come join us, and then come join us in the interactive session right afterward.