Microsoft gets into blog role contest
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Microsoft Corp.&#39;s MSN Internet division late Wednesday debuted a preliminary version of MSN Spaces, designed to bring blogs to the masses.
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Olympic athletes may be allowed to blog for the first time at the 2008 Beijing Games.
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In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet. A few comments.  1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did. 2. The world that I hoped would come about did not. While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind.  3. I wouldn't mind losing the bet. That is, I wouldn't mind if the Times fully embraced the web, and I suspect Martin wouldn't mind if blogs rose to the quality of the Times. 4. If the bet had been held a year later, it seems there would be a pretty good chance that Martin would have won the bet because they recently took down the firewall at the Times, allowing search engines to index the full content. In the past, articles would remain visible for a couple of weeks then you'd have to pay money to access them. I believe they have a special deal with Google and other crawlers that allow them to get past the membership wall. For most of 2007 the Times articles were behind the firewall, and were less likely to be pointed to (which is how they rise in rank at Google). 5. It certainly is fun to speculate, but the decision about who won belongs exclusively to the Long Now Foundation. They have to decide who determines what the top stories of 2007 are, and imho they should consult with search experts to determine how to do the queries. Apparently it makes a difference how you do it.  But ultimately it's their decision. 6. Whether Wikipedia has more or less results seems to be a sidebar to the bet, which only talks about blogs and the Times. 7. Another interesting sidebar is rich media. In 2002, before podcasting had taken hold, before YouTube existed, it would have been hard to forsee the story of the South Carolina beauty queen, or the Don't Tase Me Bro guy. Questions about the future are always framed in the context of the past. Did the question Martin and I asked have any value in 2007, or did it just say something about the world of 2002?   Update: Paul Boutin who arranged the bet, apparently in conjunction with Google (I didn't know this) in 2002, weighs in.
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Microsoft is throwing its hat into the blogosphere, a move seen as another attempt to catch competitor Google in the services-and-search race and an effort to woo more customers to its Internet services. -washingtonpost.com
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Since Microsoft officially announced the availablity of the MSN Desktop Search their blog has received over 100 comments which includes some interesting and useful feedback.
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By Patricia Kitchen, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.  Feb. 18--Just as employers are figuring out the role of blogs, their value and downside, along come wikis.
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BBC Europe editor Mark Mardell on the battle of the blogosphere under way in France three months ahead of the presidential election.
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It is launching a test service to allow people to publish blogs, or online journals, called MSN Spaces. Microsoft is trailing behind competitors like Google and AOL, which already offer services which make it easy for people to set up web journals.
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(InfoWorld) - Blogging pioneer Six Apart has made an aggressive move to defend and expand its presence in the workplace now that major vendorsÂ such asÂ IBMÂ and MicrosoftÂ have begun to build blog components into their enterprise collaboration platforms. On Tuesday, Six Apart released the most significant upgrade in years of its enterprise blogging software Movable Type, boosting what many industry experts already consider to be the most sophisticated product of its kind. Movable Type 4 has been rearchitected to simplify companies' management and deployment of corporate blogs and the creation of online communities, Six Apart officials said. The company also announced its intention to release an open source version of Movable Type in this year's third quarter for companies and developers interested in extending the functionality of the platform. The new version's enhancements keep Movable Type ahead of the rudimentary blogging capabilities vendorsÂ such asÂ IBM and Microsoft have begun putting in their collaboration platforms. "No one has anything as robust as Movable Type. Six Apart has a big head start," said Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst. However, Six Apart must keep enhancing the product and making sure it's easy to integrate with enterprise systems, because what Microsoft and IBM lack in sophistication, they make up for in the convenience of providing broad, one-stop collaboration platforms. "This is where the Movable Type story needs to be stronger," said Mike Gotta, a Burton Group analyst. Increasingly, enterprise customers expect to have an integrated suite of Web 2.0 collaboration software that includes such thingsÂ as blog, wiki, and content syndication applications, Gotta said. A step in the right direction is Movable Type's inclusion in Intel's SuiteTwo bundle of Web 2.0 enterprise collaboration software, although it remains to be seen if SuiteTwo will succeed in the market, Gotta said. SuiteTwo, which also includes wiki software from Socialtext, integration services from SpikeSource, and content syndication tools from NewsGator Technologies and SimpleFeed, became available in April. Integration and bundling efforts aside, Six Apart should also consider building a wiki component for Movable Type, because there is so much synergy between wikis and blogs, Gotta said. Of course, Six Apart must continue with its aggressive innovation and upgrade release cycle so that it can keep Movable Type's functionality safely ahead of offerings from the likes of IBM and Microsoft, Koplowitz said. "It's always dangerous to be in the crosshairs of big organizations like IBM and Microsoft," Koplowitz said. Movable Type customers include Intel, Oracle, Boeing, The Washington Post, and New York University. Highlights in Movable Type 4 include:-- Blog publishing improvementsÂ such asÂ an installation and upgrade wizard, enhanced template management tools, and a redesigned user interface;-- Community-creation capabilities such as the ability for blog owners to let readers become members of their Web sites and able to post text, photos, video, and audio;-- IT administration tools to manage multiple blogs and users from a central interface;-- Scalability featuresÂ such asÂ the ability to run Movable Type in multiple servers;-- Integration capabilities to tie in to enterprise systems and directories. The beta version of Movable Type 4 can be downloaded from the product's main site. Regarding pricing, the product is free for personal use. Customers with commercial, education, and nonprofit licenses for the product's current version can upgrade to version 4 at a discount. More information about pricing is at this page.
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Microsoft quietly launched its new blogging service, MSN Spaces, earlier this week. The âquietâ launch has already attracted more than 250,000 users to the new service, still in beta.
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Blog: Blogs: they're here. They're read. Get used to it.
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The company that helped push word-processing and graphical computing into the mainstream wants to do the same thing with weblogs. Microsoft Corp.
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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!
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This is really cool!  I finally get my own comment spam!  For some reason I felt left out of the party.  I just wasn't cool enough for the spammers to consider me worthy of their spam.  Anyway.  I implemented my own little turing test.  Now the comments say:  {{{  Turing Test: Are you a human? (required. Just type yes... this is for automated spam prevention)  }}}  While this wouldn't work for all blogs in the wild I'm sure it will work just fine here in my little corner of the blogosphere.  If spammers really want my blog enough then I'll deploy a captcha.  If they solve the captcha I'll deploy a sentient robot  which will traceroute packets back to the host and then terminate with prejudic ...
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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.
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Microsoft plans to announce a contest to develop the next great digital diversion for the companyâs Xbox 360.
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Microsoft is working on the Smart Blogroll, a way for bloggers and blog readers to learn more about the information and topics discussed on blogs. Bill Slawski points to a paper by Eric Baumer which defines the Smarter Blogroll: Our approach was to scrape the RSS feeds for all the blogs on a user&#8217;s blogroll, run a [...]