Saturday, 10 July 2004

Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com This is a cool initiative! I'm listed in here We just launched the Microsoft Community Blogs Portal, a searchable listing of blogs by Microsoft employees, categorized by product or technology topic. The project also makes it easier for pages across Microsoft.com to publish lists of relevant blogs and posts from those blogs. This project was intended to answer one of the key pieces of feedback we get from customers about our blogging efforts to date. As people posted in response to Scoble's question about Microsoft blogs, it’s sometimes hard to find blogs about a particular technology or product that we make, even on a site like blogs.msdn.com which only has full time Microsoft employees blogging. Our answer to that is to ask our bloggers to categorize their RSS feeds (and to indicate whether they’re writing for a technical audience or a more general readership). The blog portal then makes those blogs available for consumption. The project also provides ways for blog content to be automatically incorporated into pages on Microsoft.com. We’ve already been doing this, in a proof of concept way, on MSDN in the developer centers, but the process has been very manual. This should make it much easier for all our site managers to incorporate blogs. A nice side effect of the project is the ability to search across all of the registered RSS feeds. So if you aren’t able to find something using regular Microsoft.com search but you think one of our bloggers might have written about it, you can search across all the registered posts from the portal. Oh yeah, about RSS. A second project which launched yesterday, called Smart Components 2.0, also allows these contextually relevant lists of posts and blogs to be re-published via RSS. What’s that mean? In a nutshell, every one of the blog recent posts components contains a white on orange RSS badge linking to an RSS feed that is scoped to the same content set as the component. The one on the blog portal has an RSS feed of the fifty most recent posts from all registered Microsoft blogs. If I’m on the Exchange community site, there will now be an RSS feed that aggregates posts from registered bloggers who write about Exchange. And we aren’t just RSS-enabling blog content. With the new code that we deployed yesterday, all sorts of smart components on our sites, including lists of newsgroup content, upcoming chats and webcasts, knowledge base articles, and security bulletins now emit RSS. Finally, what we shipped yesterday was a portal and a toolbox for our site managers to incorporate these features into their sites. We’ll point to uses of the new components as they go live and spread Microsoft blogs and RSS across Microsoft.com. We’ll also write specifics about some of the other new features in the Smart Components 2.0 release. (Bonus: there are some interesting hidden features in the blog portal.) Related... [Weblogs @ ASP.NET] [listening to: Nowhere Man - Paul Westerberg ] 11:02:25 PM    comment []  trackback []  G!   • My Organization

Amazing Melatonin Bricey has not slept well for most of his short life. Recently we have been giving him melatonin before he goes to bed. It is available by prescription and made up by a local pharmacy. It has been amazing. He yawns (he never yawned before) and falls asleep in less than 10 minutes - while I read to him. It is a miracle. We have seen a noticable change in his behaviour. He can focus on activities such as drawing or coloring in. He has been able to write his name -- a few weeks ago all he could do was a 'B'. He still wakes during the night, but he is now having a much deeper sleep. Thanks to the magical melatonin! [listening to: Spanish Eyes - Al Martino ] 7:50:48 PM    comment []  trackback []  G!   • Family

Got myself something useful - SD WIFI card I got myself a handy component today for my XDA II The WiFi SD (SecureDigital) card is the smallest WiFi card in the market.  Isn't that fantastic! Small is good Amazon has lots of info about this little fellow I just can't wait to pop it into my XDA II and use it on my travels overseas, as I wont be able to use GPRS. [listening to: American Pie - Madonna ] 5:56:57 PM    comment []  trackback []  G!   • Random

Innovation Conference in Melbourne My good buddy, and former Microsoftee, Cameron Reily has become a voracious blogger. This morning he posted a piece about an innovation conference he wants to run in Melbourne. I think this would be a well attended event. Australia needs this kind of stuff happening. There is a lot of negative feelings around technology innovation at the moment, or it is perceived as too hard, too expensive or just fleeting. Good luck Cam -- let me know if you need a speaker.... [listening to: Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps (Quizas, Quizas, Quizas) - Doris Day ] 5:17:31 PM    comment []  trackback []  G!   • My Friends • My Organization

Spider-Man 2 I took all the boys to see Spider-Man 2 this afternoon. It's a terrific movie, and we all agree it's better than the first movie (which is also pretty good).  Lots of action, lots of terrific special effects, a good story, and a great bad guy. Plus it is all setup for Spider-Man 3. The most amazing aspect of the movie was that Brice sat through it all. An amazing effort for a 4 year old. [listening to: Rubberneckin' - Elvis Presley ] 5:07:54 PM    comment []  trackback []  G!   • My Interests

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