Perhaps I don’t pay enough attention to Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis. Something, somewhen, somehow bugged me about his blog posts—maybe it was frequency or attitude, I don’t recall—and so I nuked his RSS feed sometime ago.

But post “The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying your Hand” has me howling delight, even though Jason rambles on even more incoherently than I do. Thanks to Dare Obasanjo for tweeting the link.

Keeping with the privacy philosophy espoused by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, I pulled this picture from his profile.

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I’m not the most popular journalist among the so-called Mac faithful. I’ve written some tough stuff about Apple over the years, and most of my analyses proved right long after my public lynchings. One of my posts from summer 2009 set off John Gruber, aka “Daring Fireball.” The  blog post was a personal challenge to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs to return to work and do well.

But something about the tone offended MacGruber, who ripped into it. From that point, there was only one point of view from Macheads—that I somehow showed insensitivity to a cancer survivor and liver transplant recipient. Hey, Steve Jobs is a big boy and CEO of a hugely successful company. There also were nasty comments about who was I to challenge the great Mac cult leader. I write for a living. Get a life.

On April 1st, for the Steve Jobs challenge post and some others, I made the Macalope’s “Fools of the Year”, coming in No. 3 on the top-10 list. The anonymous Macalope referred to the “A Personal Challenge to Steve Jobs” post but couldn’t link to it and so concluded: “Wilcox himself apparently decided the post was too jacktastic and has since summarily deleted it.”

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There’s something dirty feeling about watching Michael Arrington’s interview of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. I don’t mean that as criticism of Michael; plenty of other folks have done that all too well. It’s this new media thing, where you sleep with the people you write about. You do business with them and for them.

Who am I to criticize? The new media thing is working out rather well for TechCrunch, which makes oodles of money, commands huge traffic and pageview numbers and mingles with Silicon Valley’s dealers and stealers.

The pull is enough for Steve to sit down with Michael for a  video interview. The CEO isn’t talking to the New York Times or Wall Street Journalhere, but to TechCrunch.

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Microsoft has abandoned the fundamental principles that made it the most successful software company of the last decade and ensured its software would be the most widely used everywhere. But in just three years, since 2006, startups and Apple have set a new course for technology and how societies use it.

For Microsoft, this change is scarier than movie “Quarantine.” Without a course correction, Microsoft in the 2010s will be very much like IBM was in the 1990s. That’s no place Microsoft should want to be.

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Microsoft has reached a surprising, and quite unexpected, fork in the road to its future. Choices the company makes today and over the next 12 months will determine whether computing relevance shifts away from its products.

The company has abandoned the fundamental principles that made it the most successful software company of the last decade and ensured its software would be the most widely used everywhere. Understanding those principles, and how they shaped Microsoft’s past, are important for understanding what the future might be.

I originally wrote a single post, but felt compelled to break it in two, because of the more than 2,500-word length. This first post focuses on the past, while the second is about the present and the future. If you want to link to either, rather than both, I recommend it be to “Microsoft Has Lost Its Way, Part 2.”

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My immediate reaction is “yes,” after reading Dare Obasanjo’s post “Why Twitter’s Engineers Hate the @replies feature.” OK, so maybe CNN and Oprah, also members of the “million-followers club,” share the blame.

Like many other Twitter users, I’m unhappy with the Twitter @replies change announced earlier this week, later half-backed off by the social broadcasting service.  You know what I’m talking about.

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Graduates are hitting the job market and New York Times has a warning: Nothing public you post online is private, and potential employers are scouring your Facebook, MySpace or Xanga to see who you really are.

Story “For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé,” in today’s Times, quotes Washington University in St. Louis Vice Chancellor Mark Smith, “‘I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn’t know about it. But the adult world is starting to come in.’”

Back in December, I blogged about the kind of things that kids reveal online that they shouldn’t. After all, it’s information predators might be hungary to get. But employers are a concern, too, and their reaction can profoundly affect young adults’ lives.

Regardless of the audience, predators or employers, people that reveal too much on blog or social sites can find themselves in a heap of trouble (I’m dropping the “networking” from “social.” It’s oh-so last week, already).

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As the parent of an 11 year-old that is active online, I’m concerned about the risks she might encounter there. I also realize that my daughter is fairly insulated from many dangers, because of simple rules she willingly agrees to follow. Risks remain, as they would anywhere, walking along Capitol Hill at night, driving fast on the highway, or climbing a ladder to change a light bulb. Living is about taking risks. But taking unnecessary online risks, particularly when there are predators online hunting teenagers, is another matter.

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Yesterday, a friend asked me to check out her eldest daughter’s Xanga site, to look for privacy or security problems. The teenager hadn’t posted anything compromising her identity. But her friends were another matter. Many of the teenagers revealed quite a bit of personal information, such as IM handles, that could be misused by predators.

I spent a goodly chunk of the last two days navigating Xanga blogrings, seeing what kind of stuff kids post and investigating how much personal information that they reveal. What I discovered deeply disturbed me, and I really wonder how many parents are totally clueless about what kids do on these social networking sites.

My response is to write two related posts, this first one offering background on kids’ online behavior and some of what I saw on Xanga. The second will explain what precautions parents should take with respect to their kids’ online behavior.

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