Microsoft gets the blogging bug
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Software giant Microsoft is joining the ranks of companies offer blogs or online journals.
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Microsoft&#39;s MSN (Quote, Chart) launched a blogging tool that ties in with its home media technology plays. Called MSN Spaces, the beta is part of an update to MSN&#39;s suite of communication services.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Google's Blogger service has been generating a steady stream of complaints from users this year, including hours-long outages, feature malfunctions, and data loss. The problems are particularly frustrating to users who migrated to the service's new version and expected to benefit from its more solid platform. Users contacted in recent days via e-mail report a variety of problems, including the disappearance of blog entries, an inability to post comments, failed migrations to the new service, kinks with the RSS feature, and unresponsiveness by Google to support requests. For its part, Google says that most bugs are isolated incidents affecting relatively few people at a time and that Blogger's stability will improve as the migration to the new platform progresses. "We know how important a service Blogger is to our users, so the highest priority for the Blogger team right now is monitoring the migration to the new platform, listening to feedback from people who've migrated, and tackling as fast as we can the little bugs that inevitably pop up here and there in a new product," saidÂ  Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman. This isn't good enough for Chuck Croll, an independent network and security consultant in northern California who hosts several blogs on Blogger, including a work-related one called PChuck's Network and another one that tracks Blogger issues. "We were promised a more stable environment with New Blogger. That hasn't been one of the features provided," Croll wrote. GoogleÂ began testing this significantly revamped version of the service in August of last year and removed the beta, or test, label from it in December. The "new" Blogger offers new and enhanced features, and Google says it is built on a more powerful IT platform. The "old" version suffered fromÂ serious performance and availability problems the last three months of last year. In September, Blogger, which is free, ranked as the leading blog hosting and authoring service in the U.S. with 21 million unique visitors, according to comScore Networks. Google is taking a phased approach to offering users the option to migrate to the new Blogger precisely to nip bugs at the bud and limit their impact, Hohne says. Yet the impact to some users has been significant. Kim Meyer, from Greensboro, North Carolina, is on the new version and is disappointed with a smattering of bugs that have affected her blog, like photos not loading and an inability by visitors to post comments. "Lately, I've been having more problems with the service that I don't think I should be having,"Â said Meyer, a blogger user for almost two years. Laurie Jackson, who is on the old version, suddenly had archived posts disappear from her blog. She has been trying to get help from Blogger via multiple postings on the Blogger help forum and e-mail messages to the support team. She has received two generic e-mails that repeat information available in the help section of the Blogger site. "The biggest problem with Blogger is their lack of technical support/user service. Bloggers are largely left to their own devices when it comes to solving some of the problems that crop up from time to time," said Jackson, a New Jersey resident, echoing a common complaint. "So right now, I am rather annoyed with Blogger for not caring about us." Michael Brooks, a historian and writer in Toledo, Ohio, publishes several blogs in Blogger and has had mixed success migrating them to the new service. Two attempts to migrate his main site, for example, have failed, resulting each time in an eight-hour outage. "I am leery of my next attempt," he said. "While Blogger is a free platform, it is prone to outages and frequent errors. Most frustrating is when the site goes down in the middle of publishing a lengthy post with the result that I have lost work on occasion that cannot be recovered. It is also difficult to get in touch with Blogger techs, and e-mails generally are met with silence," Brooks said. Mary Shelton, from Riverside, California, switched her blog to the new platform and is frustrated about the hours-long outages and availability problems she has experienced. "The timing of the outages has been unfortunate because they were times when that was my free time to add to my blog," she said. Problems reported on the new Blogger have some users feeling reluctant to migrate. "I am on the old version and am afraid to change due to the problems I have seen on the [Blogger] forum," said Jens Rosenkrantz Jr., who uses Blogger for his business's blog. Still, the switch to the new platform has been positive for others who last year were about to give up on Blogger. That is the case of Robert Brinkmann, chair of the Geography Department at the University of South Florida in Tampa, who hosts several personal and work-related blogs on Blogger, including this one. "Generally, it has been doing well.Â Iâve noticed that it goes through periods where it is a bit 'off,' but overall, it is fine," he said. Others are more tolerant of the bugs. Laurie Kelley of Forsyth, Montana, has encountered problems with photos and comments on her blog but characterizes them as "more frustrating than disruptive" and says Blogger has been working "fairly well" since she started using it in March of last year. Google is confident that as the migration advances and eventually ends, the incidence of bugs will diminish significantly, Hohne said. At this point, however, Google doesn't have a specific timetable for wrapping up the migration. It plans to continue doing it slowly and in relatively small groups, because that way, if an unforeseen bug emerges, it will only affect a limited number of users. Hohne declined to say what percentage of users are on the new platform now. Bugs related to the migration are probably one-time events that, once addressed and solved, will not recur, she said. Overall, the feedback Google has gathered on the new Blogger is overwhelmingly positive, she said. Â
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What Yahoo! can do for Microsoft--and what it can't.
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Microsoft made a belated entrance into the "blogosphere" Thursday, unveiling a free Web-log publishing service one day after Merriam-Webster proclaimed "blog" the word of the year.-Leslie Walker
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roundup Free-roaming source code breeds new Netsky pest. Also: From IE to Opera, browsers are a likely prey.
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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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Microsoft issues a third version of a troubled Internet Explorer patch to fix a bug in an earlier update.
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Here's a zip archive containing the source of the last 10 years of Scripting News. Since Scripting News existed before blogs were invented, I went ahead and included the stuff that I blogged before there were blogs. I hope this isn't too confusing!  "cheesecake" PS: Scott Karp asks if blogs can do journalism. Try this question. Can journalists do journalism? At best they seem to be able to copy each other, so mistakes propogate.  We've made so many accomplishments, both before and after the coining of the term, Karp for example starts with VIgnette. In 1997 if you told someone the functions of Vignette could be provided to millions of people virtually for free they wouldn't have believed you. (This is factual btw, I did, and wasn't believed.)  They also thought syndication would be done by the big publishing companies, something unweildy called ICE. We thought it should be simpler so that anyone could support it on both ends, and we won. The journalists have no record of this probably because they believed the big companies behind ICE and ignored the low-tech stuff. Jorn Barger used my software to do his "web log" -- why isn't that part of the story? Well it isn't if all you think is important is the choosing of the name.
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Blogs and wikis are wonderful tools, but they can devolve into the online equivalent of grunting apes.
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Sample code that exploits a yet-to-be-fixed Windows flaw is circulating. Microsoft plans to deal with it on the next Patch Tuesday.
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Microsoft's MSN division will launch a test version of a free Web logging (blogging) service aimed at consumers on Thursday, Microsoft's first foray as a provider of this increasingly popular Internet activity for the mass consumer market.
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Tycho:  Months after it was necessary, Sony has thrown their blogging hat into the ring...  of blogging.  I've heard people compare it to Larry Hryb/Major Nelson's blog, but with a rotating "crew" of bloggers - like a public relations version of the Wu Tang Clan - it's more like Microsoft's Gamerscore blog.  Which, coincidentally, I never read because it is run by a rotating "crew" of bloggers, like a public relations version of the etcetera etcetera.  The mental image is that of a corporate hydra, the brand seared and scabbed upon its breast.
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WikyBlog is a scalable CMS/Groupware application with an AJAX enhanced tabbed interface enabling users to view/edit multiple files within the same page.   Version 1.4 adds the Wanted Pages, What Links Here, Orphaned Files and Dead-End Files special pages. Automated tasks have also been introduced to maintain database integrity and maintain Trash. A number of other improvements and bug fixes have also been made.  WikyBlog Home:   http://www.wikyblog.com     Get WikyBlog:   https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=148518&package_id=163821     WikyBlog Features:   http://www.wikyblog.com/Help/en/WikyBlog/Features
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Technorati is making an attempt to organize the growing blogosphere with their new "Topics" feature.
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Microsoft&#39;s MSN has introduced a beta version of its new blogging tool, MSN Spaces, which it expects will eventually be supported by advertising.