This is an interesting idea – AOL has just opened up Blogging Stocks which is a collection of blogs, each about a single stock. There is one blogger for each ticker symbol, and that blogger is responsible for following what is going on with the company and writing about it. Right now they just have a list of eight companies, but they plan to expand it.

Heather Green makes some interesting points about conflict of interest and possible price manipulation, but I’m willing to give them a shot, and I think it’s a great idea. I think it will be an awesome way to follow the companies we all care about and for a hybrid stock-geek like me, it’s going to be a lot of fun commenting and interacting with someone who is a) passionate and b) knowledgeable about the stock in question. My only concern now is who is going to cover Adobe and when is the company going to be added to the list.

Mike has an excellent podcast this week, and he has become an absolute must listen for anyone who is interested in Flash as a Platform, Rich Internet Applications, or just developing Flash applications. This week, he talks about some fun things. A snippet from his list of topics: “Discussion Panel: Flash as a Platform” and “Is the Operating System becoming irrelevant to application development”.

I guess there was a discussion panel at Flash In the Can on Flash as a Platform. Aside from making me cry a little bit because I wasn’t there, it sounds like some very cool ideas came up. What put a smile on my face (after I was finished crying) was that people seem so open minded about RIAs and really using Flash to develop full-fledged applications.

One of the things that came up was that applications are moving to a layer above the operating system. The question that followed was “is the OS relevant as an Application platform” and I think it still is (more on that later). But the main benefit in my mind of working on the layer above the OS is that it opens up more and more devices/platforms to run your application on. When you can build an application and have it run on PocketPCs, mobile phones, XBoxes AND PCs, why on earth would you want to develop for a specific OS?

Now, as someone mentioned, there are some things (the example was AutoCAD) that would be a pain to do via an RIA, but I’m with Mike – as hardware gets chaeaper, broadband gets faster and the applications that “run” RIAs become more powerful, the performance implications become smaller and smaller. That’s what’s so exciting, that down the road (albeit not tomorrow) we can potentially run AutoCAD “above the OS” without any performance hit. Think about a web based AutoCAD that you can access via a tabletPC and take to a site to make changes on the fly. All stored on the web for acess anywhere.

Tim Sneath sat down with Michael Wallent, the General Manager of the WinFX team to talk about the history of WinFX. It’s a long video (50 minutes) but if you have time, it’s well worth peeking in on. It gives Microsoft’s view of the Rich Internet Application world and what they see as the next step with Avalon. As Michael notes, Adobe has had this market cornered for a long time.

It would be very interesting to see someone from Adobe talk like this because you do get an insight into how Microsoft wants to grow Avalon and what their goals have been during its development. As I said, it’s long, but if you’re interested in RIAs it makes for good listening.

You’ll have to excuse me until I finish kicking myself for not going to FITC over in Toronto because it seems like they’re doing a bunch of good stuff. Keith Peters is doing some live blogging during the keynote and it sounds like Mike Chambers talked a lot about Apollo and what’s to come. In fact Keith describes it as “the most detailed public description of Apollo to date” which is awesome. The best part? Keith said that Mike Chambers showed a Flex 2 application built by Sho Kuwamoto running as an Apollo application. I’ve sifted through the screenshots and I think this is the shot of Apollo running. I’ll be updating the unofficial FAQ as I get more info from the guys at FTIC.

Word is out that what was going to be Flash 8.5 is now Flash 9. which is as it should be. With all of the changes, from a marketing standpoint it just makes sense to release it as a rounded version number. Part of me is surprised they didn’t just roll to Flash 10. Or maybe even something cool like ‘Flash X’. Emmy Huang had the announcement and links to a FAQ about the change.

I went and checked out the Seattle Flash User Group yesterday and I came away realizing a couple of things. One is that the people who use Flash are an incredibly diverse group. The speaker for the meeting was Kev Brockschmidt who is a great artist and showed off some of his Flash examples. The other is that Flash has a long way to go as a development platform. So many of the people at the meeting think of Flash only in terms of animation, which is fine, but I think it’s a misconception that many people have.

Flash has always been about experience. Whether it’s playing a Flash game, interacting with a game website in Flash, or watching a video done in Flash, the idea is always to make the experience engaging and fun. Eventually awesome developers will transfer that fun, engaging experience to the robust applications they develop for the web. I hope that all of the Flash animators out there give Flex 2 a try and just see what it can do.

Rich Internet Applications are going to change usability on the web and there will be a fine line between a good user experience and an annoying one, but I think we’ll see more of the former. The Flash community has so many talented, design-driven people that once the hardcore developers catch on, the meshing of ideas is going to force people to rethink how they build web apps. There are going to be some growing pains, but in the end we’ll have a better, more collaborative web in which engaging the user is easy. Advertisers should be very happy.