This morning I met with several members of the Adobe Flex team.

Official News on Adobe’s Site about Flex going Open Source.

I have two videos of our conversation:

1. Video of our conversation this morning.

2. Architecture overview (video) and more depth on just what pieces have been open sourced.

What does this mean?

Adobe is firing its guns in the Microsoft Silverlight vs. Flash war.

Developers win.

Is obviously messed up. WordPress’s great folks are playing with it. I’m off to go to Phoenix, so will be offline for a while.

UPDATE: back to normal. In the meantime, check out what happens when a famous book author, Roger von Oech, who wrote “Creative Whack Pack” (no, not the blogging echo chamber) came over and gave me a new toy to play with.

I think that this chart on Google Finance says it all.

Congrats Apple!

Today, on the plane, sitting next to me was a woman who just got out of detox and is headed toward a five-week program to try to get her off of alcohol addiction.

She inspired me because she was obviously tired of how her life was going and wanted to improve it.

Chris Pirillo and others are participating in an empowering women meme that’s passing through my reader right now.

Francine Hardaway just told me how she finds her inspiration: she helps abused women start businesses through her foundation. She told me how she was crying on Sunday after her latest graduation. How she watched a group of women, some of whom were straight off of major drug addictions, released from jail, or, worse, all that with the added problem of abuse.

She told me how this group inspired her through picking themselves up, starting a business, and getting some confidence that they can do something good in the world.

It’s women like Francine who inspire me and why I’m honored to be sitting across the table from her right now in Phoenix, Arizona.

On the plane I was thinking about why some people just have more fun than other people. Roger von Oech came to mind. That dude has a good attitude, plus you can tell he’s smart. But I learned some other stuff too from him that he wasn’t even trying to teach me.

1) Take risks. He called me up, didn’t know if I’d be interested in him. Took a risk. Invested some time getting to know someone new.
2) Spread fun. Soon after meeting me he pulled out some of his stuff and showed me what his new product did. Was generous, brought several for me to hand around the office.
3) Listen and learn. He wanted to know all sorts of things about me. I noticed he was a great listener. You can tell that from the blog post he wrote about me. He didn’t take notes, but was mentally trying to learn something new.
4) A smile goes a long way. I found Roger to make me feel good. Why? Cause he was just happy. I don’t know how else to explain it. I guess that if you are creating products that try to get you to be more creative and innovative that you better be creative and innovative yourself.

Thanks Roger, love my new “Ball of Whacks.”

Come back tonight at a little after 9 p.m. Pacific Time tonight.

Some big multi-billion-dollar corporation would like to announce something.

Why?

Developers, developers, developers!

:-)

Like I said, Mix07 is gonna be interesting and, no, I don’t need to be inside the conference to have a front-seat position on the battlefield.

UPDATE: the news is now up.

I’m hearing a ton of rumors of what’s coming to Mix07 next week in Las Vegas. I’ll be there Monday. Feel free to throw a piece of fruit as you head into the hall. I’ll be doing hallway cam out with Loren Heiny.

Anyway, here’s what we MIGHT see. How about you, what do you think Microsoft will show off?

1. An Amazon S3 competitor. “Ve have more datacenter knowledge than Amazon.”
2. Ruby on Rails and PHP running on .NET. Will it make Twitter scale?
3. Microsoft will announce an open source initiative. After all, why else would William Hurley be speaking there? Although likening Mix to a BarCamp made me gag. BarCamps are free, and aren’t centrally planned. No journalists need to beg to be let into them.
4. Ray Ozzie will use these terms at least two times during his keynote interview: HD. API. Widget. Decentralized Web. RSS. Silverlight. ASP.NET. Streaming video. DRM. Services. Ecosystem. Xbox. Media Center. Cross platform.
5. Mike Arrington will pitch TechCrunch 20, his new conference for new product demos, at least once. Bonus points if he mentions it three times.
6. Someone will point out that ABC TV isn’t using either Adobe or Microsoft video technology.
7. At least three companies will say they weren’t paid by Microsoft to build their apps and demonstrate them on stage.

So, what about you? Are you expecting anything new?

Jeremy Zawodny, Esther Dyson, Mike Arrington, and me are on a panel this week talking about Web 2.0. I guess Charles River Venture partners didn’t get the memo that I’m irrelevant to Web 2.0. Whatever that means.

Which leads me to Jeremy’s post. He’s trying to define what Web 2.0 means.

To me?

Web 1.0 was about pages. URLs.
Web 2.0 was about users. Adding them onto corporate pages. Wikis. Blogs. Myspaces.
Web 3.0 is about getting rid of pages altogether. Being able to make the Web YOU want or need. Is Twitter a page? Or a post? Or an SMS? A graph? Or a map display?

But, maybe this is just undefinable. Which means panel discussions about it are always interesting. Or should be, especially when you have an irrelevant asshat on the panel like me. :-)

If you missed TechMeme today (it was a slow news day, so don’t feel like you missed much) you probably didn’t see the little dustup between Jason Calacanis and a Wired Magazine journalist, who wanted an interview with Jason. Jason wanted to do that interview via email instead of on the phone. Fred Vogelstein, the journalist, didn’t want to do an email interview cause he knows that email interviews often don’t get interesting cause people who write email answers carefully consider their answers to the point of making their answers pretty boring.

I’ve been interviewed by Fred for hours (when I was in Switzerland I spent at least an hour on the phone with him) and always enjoy talking with him.

Anyway, it ended up with Fred and Jason doing the interview on Jason’s podcast. Which is interesting in of itself. I’m listening now. The interview? It’s about TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington.