MSN Spaces Blog Service Review
560049
MSN Spaces Blog Service Review  This review started nearly 10 hours ago when MSN Spaces first went live, and its taken this long to complete due to the continual downtime of the site. It was originally going to be longer and in more depth, but I&rsquo;d didn&rsquo;t have all day and ...
203087
I&#8217;m playing the devil&#8217;s advocate here, so keep that in mind in case I end up trampling all over anything you hold dear :) Google has taken a lot of flak on a lot of issues in the past few years - it&#8217;s a price an industry leader invariably has to pay.  Apart from Blogger spam [...]
225889
Megite, a real time news &#038; blog aggregation service, has  tweaked their blog news ranking technology with the following &#8216;2.1&#8242; updates: 1. A more aggressive clustering algorithm is introduced and users should see more related information for a big news item. 2. Broad the coverage and users can see rich information in the context of a [...]
438549
Last week Search Engine Journal announced the launch of SEO Clinic, a free service where businesses, individuals and organizations can submit their web sites for a review by our search marketing columnists, or our Resident Pimps. The reaction to the announcement was phenomenal with well over 100 different sites ranging from personal blogs to established  [...]
215878
Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that's got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto. @lovelyperson   Substitute the name of your lover in place of "lovelyperson" and you've just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.  While we're on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items. 1. A must-read piece in today's NY Times, gives a clue why kids don't go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren't there? No one knows.  2. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that's why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn't scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.  3. Or you could use XMPP.
182336
Blog: Travel search site SideStep acquieres travel social network TripUp
258314
Dare Obasanjo works at Microsoft.  In his blog post about the Yahoo layoffs, in a postscript, he indicates that Microsoft is interested in creating a Twitter clone.  I've said openly, on Twitter (and now here) that I would like to be part of a venture that aims to create a scalable Twitter. I've had several conversations with people who are attempting to do this. I haven't done a deal yet. My bet: There will be a lot of growth in Twitter in the coming years, and it seems likely that the Twitter company will not be able to scale their systems to meet the demand. There are features that should have been in the product and in the API months ago that are on the back-burner, likely due to Twitter's constant battle to meet meet demand (scaling). As a user, I'd like to view the product and the company as a black box, but that's impossible with the system glitches and outages. What users are doing now with Twitter is far more important, imho, than the servers, or the company. The company, understandably, thinks their issues are most important, but that's a matter of perspective. We don't own any stock in the company, so our perspective reflects that. To us, they're a utility. All this is a verbose way of saying that Microsoft applying their resources and scaling knowhow to this problem woud be an interesting development.
42262
An enthusiast site notes that nearly everything in Microsoft's $10 a month MSN Premium offering is available for free via Windows or Windows Live.
148984
Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble. A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it. First, here's how it works. 1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763. 2. Talk. 3. Hangup. There will be a new recording here.  http://drop.io/tradesecrets  Looks good!  But there are two problems. 1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file. 2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss. A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild. Interesting stuff!!  Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.
527300
Michael Kimsal (and his bother Mark) were talking about the state of ecommerce applications, specifically about the latest "hot topic" software - Magento.   My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has told me many points, both good and bad, about it.    According to Michael and Mark, speed of the application is a big hindrance. They also mention two points that could help make an ecommerce system so much easier to integrate into the "blogosphere" - publishing a blog feed of some of the user feedback about orders/products/etc and accept trackbacks from an external blog post reviewing the products.
181381
By RANDY MYERS  In the no-holds-barred blogosphere, every voice can be raised. But not everyone cares to listen.  Some visit blogs for updates on political chicanery, others to hear about a hot restaurant, movie, celebrity or technogadget.
489552
By Anonymous  BLOGOSPHERE  Plus: Google's fading luster, Bud TV and typo trouble  Microsoft beats Apple at reviewer relations? Blogger James Gaskin recently discussed small-business servers, but left out Apple.
417449
This is interesting .  43Things has tags as well!  A lot of people are using the Flickr dynamic and bold font treemap view which I'm not sure is good or bad. I've never been fully happy with this view but a lot of people seem to like it (so what do I know!)
641653
Social networking site adds Skype service
320730
I'm starting to realize that my blog is a bit of a time machine.  For example I can create a blog entry to warn myself about something that WILL happen in the future.    My current NTP  blog entry is a good example.  I wrote this for myself as much as for the people who read my blog (or find me via Google).  I know for sure that NTP on Debian is going to bite me sometime in the future and I'm going to forget WHY.  Then I'm going to (of course) go to Google or my aggregator and search for NTP and then find my blog post.    I've done this about a dozen times now and its saved me a TON of time!
699044
MSN is now offering blogging space through its new MSN Spaces service, making it the third major portal to jump into this area. The first?
251767
The ProDevTips website has posted part seven of their series covering the construction of a community site (or CMS) with the combination of Smarty and the Zend Framework.   Since XOOPS didn't do it for me when it comes to this project I have started with the blog component. As it turns out, a blog is more complicated than you would think. Therefore this part will not cover the whole component, only as far as I've gotten at the moment. Covering the whole process in one piece would make it a very long piece indeed.   He provides the code examples and complete SQL structure to get the blog up and rolling as well as some handy tips and explanations along the way.