Software giant Microsoft is getting the attention of the geek blogosphere for moving its drag-and-drop Web mashup development tool, Popfly, into public testing. Why? Because it has a cute name? Because it's being pitched to everyday Internet users who aren't developers — women, even? (As if women don't program now.) Because it's being pitched as an easy way to build widgets for popular social networks MySpace and Facebook? For all those reasons, sure. But that's not why you should care about Popfly.

"We're an enabler of Web 2.0." — Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, at the Web 2.0 Summit, describing his software-tool company's supportive role in inflating the bubble. In the morning, Chizen will make phone calls to conference goers to explain that Web 2.0 didn't really mean what it said last night.

According to the BusinessofVideo.com blog, Microsoft is shaking up its audio- and video-software business:

Microsoft's attempt to catch up with Adobe's dominant and newly updated Flash has reached final 1.0 status for Mac and Windows. Novell will bring Silverlight to Linux for Microsoft. A handful of obligatory partners were announced, and of course, several Microsoft Web sites will be using the browser plug-in [Scott Guthrie's blog]

Yippee! No more crappy, blurry YouTube videos! No more pixelated garbage filling every corner of the Web! Adobe's addition of the advanced H.264 high-definition codec — "codec" being a fancy way of saying "video algorithm" — to its popular Flash software. Flash, of course, has become the ubiquitous means of distributing video on the Web. Adding H.264 will finally bring high-quality moving images into the Web mainstream, and put an end to the rein of amateurism in online video. Or will it? Not so fast.

So, that weird spinny semaphore public art thingy above the Adobe building in San Jose? Apparently it was broadcasting the entire text of Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49. Fun fact: The two dudes who broke the code met when they both attended "a workshop on how to flirt with women." [San Jose Mercury News]

As a (perhaps) final coda to the Googleplex map errata, lots of readers phoned in with declarations or speculations regarding the acrobat statues outside Building 45. Were they in fact leftovers from when Adobe lived there, and did they have some nominal relationship to Adobe's Acrobat products? Or did early explorers find these statues in the Spanish colonial days and decide this would be an excellent place for an office park?

Item 10 on our map of the Googleplex is a pair of circus-y statues outside Building 45. A reader reminisces:

My regular day job is graphic design (if you guessed editor, you were wrong), currently I'm freelancing at a company in downtown San Francisco for the time being. The marketing firm is stocked with the newish Intel-powered iMacs, and being a designer those iMacs are mostly running the Adobe CS2 suite; Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign.

• Today's "Reason that San Francisco is cooler than San Jose" is a warning to vegetarians: In Silicon Valley, waiters forcibly stuff meat down your throat. [Metroactive]