So, I’m about to leave for San Francisco to attend the Digg party and I just visited Upcoming.org (this is the best place I’ve found to find geek events around the world to attend). Sure enough the Digg party is on the home page. But what else is there? A new design. Pretty nice!

No, I’m not going to Twitter from the party. But I’m sure someone will. 600 geeks and freaks are expected to attend.

The Pulitzer Prize for feature photography goes to Renée C. Byer of the Sacramento Bee. I dare you to look at her work and not cry. Start with the first photo and read the text with each photo (easy to miss cause you have to scroll to read it).

Thanks to Thomas Hawk for linking to this.

Rafe Needleman, Josh Lowensohn, and Erica Ogg rated their five most favorite things for CNET, from the Web 2.0 Expo.

I’d add to their lists “Zude” which will be out in early May. It’s a Web service, sort of like MySpace, but that goes way beyond. You can drag and drop things around, and a lot more. TechCrunch wrote that up.

I asked lots of people what their favorites were, and Spock (a personal search engine) was the answer I heard most.

What was the best stuff you saw (if you went)?

Ahh, the arguing over whether to do full text or partial text feeds continues. This time with Feedburner saying they aren’t seeing a click-through difference.

Personally I hate partial text feeds. I’ve subscribed to a few of them, particularly ZDNet’s bloggers, but I notice I read a lot fewer of their items than I read items from, say, TechCrunch or Mashable, who offer full text feeds. And I link to them a LOT less.

I keep bugging Dan Farber (who runs the ZDNet blogging group) about this and he says he can’t do anything about it because of the advertising model that ZDNet has chosen. He also says that he hasn’t gotten enough feedback to the contrary to take back to his management.

The thing is he won’t. Here’s why.

Out of, say, 1,000 people who are on the Internet, only a small percentage read a lot of feeds. Let’s say it’s 10%. That means only 100 out of any 1,000 people will read feeds and of those 100 people only a small fraction will bother with ZDNet’s feeds.

The thing that partial texters are forgetting is that the other 900 people will find out about you from an influencer. Someone who will tell them. So, your traffic growth will be far slower if you only offer partial text feeds. Many of my friends who are journalists or bloggers just won’t deal with partial text feeds anymore. You certainly see that I link to mostly full text feeds on my link blog.

John Battelle realized this after he polled his readership about this issue: “From the results of my very unscientific poll, I’d clearly be alienating at least a very vocal minority.”

I wish ZDNet came to the same realization cause the quality of their content is really high.

Google just released its latest results and in aftermarket trading Google is up again. This is the second quarter where Yahoo presented disappointing results and Google came in right behind and brought in results that the market liked (income was slightly below expectations, profits slightly higher — profits up 69% this quarter). For me, this is great news. I’m hearing more and more stories of businesses increasing their online advertising spending. How about you? What should we read into the results this week of the Internet giants?

I was reading up on news from this week and saw that my sponsor, Seagate, had a pretty rough quarter (profit was down 22%). They are in the middle of a hard drive price war.

Thomas Hawk, in a post about the importance of backing your stuff up, notes that you can get a 750GB drive now for about $230 at Amazon. Don’t miss Thomas’ post, or the comments about how people are backing their stuff up now.

After Seagate reported its earnings John Furrier sat down with Seagate’s CEO, Bill Watkins, where he went into detail about the bad quarter they had.

That’s a great way to take bad news on: do it on video and take it head on.

On Wednesday evening I picked up Brad Fallon and Andy Edmonds who were taking me to dinner. I didn’t even notice that Brad left a laptop bag in the back seat, although at that point even if I had I’m not sure I would have said anything (Andy carried his backpack into the restaurant). That turned out to be a very expensive mistake for both of us. As he notes that after dinner we came back to a smashed back window and a missing bag. Luckily they didn’t get into the trunk where I had a laptop and camera. I got the bill for the window: $410. The window itself cost about $185, the rest is labor. I probably could get it a little cheaper by shopping around, but at least Saturn loaned me a car while they are fixing it.

I won’t be leaving my equipment in my car anymore. It was an expensive lesson to learn.

The GetANewBrowser blog says that Stumbleupon’s acquisition by eBay is ridiculous.

I don’t think so. Everytime I’m on Stumbleupon I get more traffic than I’ve gotten from any other Internet site or blog other than Digg (and I’ve been on quite a few of the world’s top Web sites, including home page of BBC). There are a LOT of people using Stumbleupon and that audience is among the most engaged of all Web sites out there.

It’s interesting. On Tuesday I was over at eBay’s new North San Jose campus. There’s thousands of people working there on nothing but PayPal. I think the fact that we interact with this world via a few pixels on our screens makes us think this world doesn’t have much value. I had no idea just how many people it took to keep PayPal working great.

Those thoughts that things on your screen don’t have much value are wrong. Last night I had dinner with Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, among others from the online video industry. I shook Kevin’s hand and said “congrats, cause you’re next and now we know the true market value of Digg actually is somewhere above $40 million.

I’m also noticing another trend. Quite a few of the people I’m interviewing are getting rich. Here’s an interview I did at Stumbleupon a few months ago. One of my friends says I should ask for some equity before doing an interview. I think that’s an interesting idea, but for now everyone who gets on my show hasn’t paid to be on (except for my sponsor, Seagate).

What will eBay do with Stumbleupon? Om Malik, at dinner last night, told me he thinks this purchase is scaring Google more than any other. He notices that Google added a similar service to StumbleUpon to its toolbar.

Seshadri wrote me this morning and notes that I have only blogged a few times in the past few days and that I haven’t really been blogging the same since Kathy Sierra’s incident. He’s right to notice this. I’m just burning out and need to cut back a bit on something. My video show has been getting a lot more attention lately (four separate interviews with four separate companies uploaded just yesterday). I’m trying to keep up on my link blog — and failing this week. I did about 14 hours of live video this week from the Web 2.0 Expo. My email is demanding lots of attention which I haven’t been giving it. So the blog suffers. Tomorrow I’m at Adobe meeting three different teams, on Saturday I’m at the PodCast Hotel. Last night I had dinner with a bunch of great people thanks to CacheFly, (I was at a table with Om Malik, Kevin Rose, Patrick Norton, and Martin Seargant) who does the hosting for Diggnation and Leo Laporte’s shows. Tonight I’m going to the Digg party (600 people are expected, they are celebrating a million registered users) after dinner with Jeremy Toeman and several other geeks. Life is just swirling by.