Steve Rubel and others spent an hour with Bill Gates. No matter how you feel about Bill Gates, having his ear for an hour posses some interesting ideas. What would you ask? Steve has paraphrases of some of the questions and answers.

Also check out the list of people that Steve mentions were there. These are people who are not really known for being pro-Microsoft (to say the least). I’m curious who was the driving force for putting together this meeting.

I’ve got an account on Ta-da List that I use for tracking some basic tasks. I stopped using it a month or two ago. Today I went back to my Ta-da account to look up some information that I remember tracking as to-do list. I was surprised to see that there were Google Adsense Ads on my list:

So is Google going to start supporting Adsense Ads on password protected sites? I’d imagine that ads on password protected pages is pretty commonly requested feature.

I haven’t found any sort of announcement or discussion on this, so perhaps this a recent change. Or did I miss something on the Signal vs. Noise blog?

There was a great discussion last night on moving to managed email services. This was prompted (at least in part) by the problem of spam. Running a proper mail server today is a lot harder than it used to be (insert flash backs here of when I worked for a small ISP in the 90s). So if you don’t specialize in email, why would you want the headache?

Given the rise of spam I’ve been seeing in my personal email account, I’m giving this idea more serious consideration. The service that was specifically mentioned was Webmail.us. At $1.00/month for 1 GB per email the pricing seems reasonable. Most importantly, if they do a good job of stopping spam then it is worth the money.

The next service that makes sense to push off on someone else is DNS. I’d consider running BIND easier than dealing with email, but it is one more thing that someone else should be able to do at a reasonable cost. Does anyone have recommendations for a managed DNS service provider?

This trend is growing with more companies looking at Amazon S3 for storage and backup needs.

At this point all I really want to manage is the specific service(s) that I’m offering. Today that almost always translates to just a website with a database back end.

UPDATE 2 Dec 2006 @ 4:45pm: I should note that I wrote this with the small business or individual in mind. If you are a large company then the question of doing things in house or not has different parameters.

Drew McLellan‘s has brought back 24ways.org for 2006. Day 1, Tasty Text Trimmer is already up. I’m looking forward seeing what else shows up as the days go on.

24ways.org is special to me because it was Drew’s Edit-in-Place with Ajax that was the basis and inspiration for my Edit In Place code.