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If It's on Super Wall, It May As Well Be Public Record

In December of 2007, a judge, U.S. Magistrate Judge Patty Shwartz, ordered the plaintiffs in two cases (Beye v. Horizon, 06-Civ.-5337 & Foley v. Horizon, 06-Civ.-6219 were consolidated for discovery) to turn over their children's online emails, diaries, and other writings to the court. They had until January 15th to comply. The plaintiffs fought the order, saying the online writings were therapy tools and not meant to be shown to others. However, Shwartz was not swayed.

Horizon believed that the children's writings on their social networking sites and emails could show that their eating disorders are wrapped up in emotional causes, and therefore not the insurer's responsibility (since N.J. law says only biological mental illness must be covered).

On Jan. 24th, Horizon claimed that the Jan. 15th set by Shwartz come and gone with no disclosure on the plaintiffs' parts, even though Beye's parents had turned over the child's Yahoo emails. But the Foleys had yet to disclose their daughter's emails. Horizon insisted the plaintiffs turn over not only the children's emails, but also the corresponding emails and the email accounts of the girls' families. They also requested a mirror-image copy of the hard drive for each computer in the plaintiffs' family.

When it came to disclosing the writings on both Facebook and MySpace, David Mazie, the Beye's lawyer, stated that they have produced what documents they can and they have no Facebook or MySpace pages to turn over. The Foley's lawyer, Bruce Nagel, says "he believes his clients have no Facebook or MySpace pages."

However, anyone who knows a 15-year-old girl, knows that that these statements were likely false, and the lawyers were just trying to buy some time.

As it turned out, Horizon moved to dismiss Beye and Foley cases on the ground that the court should abstain from ruling due to pending state legislation would resolve the issue for good. While the new legislation may provide respite in these particular cases, those who are interested in internet privacy laws and protection are now feeling a knot in their stomach over what may have been.

What You Say Online is Not Private

The internet is not like a diary, although many people use online journals, blogs, and social networking sites to share their innermost thoughts, feelings, and secrets with the world. With a hardbound diary, you only had to be afraid of your little brother finding it under your mattress; but with the web, the words you write are etched in stone for the entire world to read. And even when you remove your accounts and disable your profiles, you may not really be gone. With Google's caching, the Way Back Machine, and even the websites themselves, your data is retained for a lot longer than you may have realized.

Take for example, the U.K. user who realized that he was unable to fully delete his Facebook profile. It seems users wishing to remove their Facebook profiles are only given the option to deactivate their accounts. These accounts become inaccessible, but still remain in Facebook's database. To really wipe out all information, Facebook advises users log in and manually remove all data from their profile before deactivating their account. This greatly concerned Dave Evans, the senior data protection practice manager at the U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office: "One of the things that we're concerned about is that if the onus is entirely on the individual to delete their own data," he told BBC Radio 4."An individual who has deactivated their account might not find themselves motivated enough to delete information that's about them, maybe on their wall or other people's site."

Only months earlier, the ICO had been warning social networker of possibly jeopardizing future careers by posting explicit photos or pictures of them "partying."

So What's a Social Networker To Do?

Reputation management companies have stepped in to fill the void in defending users' online reputations. A site like ReputationDefender, for example, will search all information about you (or your child) on the internet, provide you with a report, and then destroy whatever information you deem inappropriate or slanderous. Through non-legal means, the company works with the site owners where your data resides to get it removed. Claiming a thorough process that can remove data from almost anywhere online, ReputationDefender, and those like it, are poised to be the next major companies of the Internet Age. As the GenY and the YouTube Generation enters the workforce, a place still dominated by many Baby Boomers and others who grew up sans internet, the potential damage those MySpace photos could cause will then become much greater.

In the end, the best you can do is think carefully before you post photos, before you blog, and even before you send an email because the internet is more of a permanent record than anything your teachers ever threatened you with back in school.

In the digital age we must all be aware that the illusion of privacy is just that: an illusion. And you may never know went it could come back to haunt you.

(Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/01/21/dlface121.xml and http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1201779829458)

The Industry Standard Returns - Will It Stick?

In 2000, the Industry Standard was one of the hottest magazines on the planet. It was flush with VC dollars and sold more ad pages than any magazine in history. But when the dot-com wave it was riding finally crashed, the magazine receded with the tide and filed for bankruptcy in 2001.That's why when news that it was coming back leaked this fall, it prompted some to declared that the "bubble is back."

The Industry Standard will relaunch today in public beta as a strictly online publication coupled with a futures market. We got a chance to check it out early and speak with Derek Butcher, the magazine's General Manager.

According to Butcher, the magazine's brand still had so much equity left in it, that publisher IDG (who was an investor in the original magazine and bought out the publication's assets) couldn't resist trying it again. Now that Silicon Valley is hot once more, and ad dollars are flowing on the web, it seemed like a good time to try relaunching the business mag. There's just one problem: blogs have this space covered to death.

So rather than focus on breaking news, the Standard is opting to focus instead of analysis of the business and technology news. Content will be short editorials (300-400 words) that break down business news written by outside contributors (that is, bloggers, analysts, and industry pundits will submit content to the Standard for publication). It's an editorial approach that Butcher seemed to describe as one part ReadWriteWeb and one part Huffington Post -- though unlike HuffPo, the Standard will pay its contributors, and unlike RWW, the focus will be on business over tech analysis.

"No single voice will dominate the discussion, which is why we decided to forgo the somewhat print-centric idea of an editor in chief, despite talking to some great people for the position," said managing editor Ian Lamont in a press release. "We want readers to get viewpoints from the widest range of contributors possible, with the common theme being that these contributors are all people who believe that the Web is a major paradigm shift in business."

However, the editorial isn't the most intriguing part of the relaunch. What really sticks out about the new Industry Standard is the prediction market. A prediction market is something like a stock exchange where the cash value of assets is tied to predictions. People invest in predictions they think will come true with the idea being that the more people who predict something, the more likely it should be to actually happen in real life. Most prediction markets in the US use play money because of gambling restrictions, and the Industry Standard's is no different.

Users start out with $100,000 in play funds and invest in time sensitive predictions like, "Apple will ship 10 million iPhones in 2008," or "Yahoo! will accept Microsoft's takeover bid by February 8." Users can also suggest predictions, which are in turn voted up or down by other users.

Prediction markets have shown a remarkable tendency to accurately predict the future, and the Industry Standard's market can theoretically be used to keep writers honest. Any writer who is constantly throwing out wild predictions can have his ideas tested on the open market. Butcher hopes that the prediction market will have a reciprocative effect on the editorial, with writers playing off the things people are betting on in the market, and the market reacting to the things people are writing about.

The market is very well designed and rather easy to use, but will it, coupled with the out sourced editorial content, be enough to recapture the late-90s magic that made the Industry Standard a household name? The other quintessential Silicon Valley magazine of the dot-com boom was RedHerring, which relaunched in August as a web-based publication (including a video site and social network) to little fanfare. RedHerring's traffic has actually declined since then, according to Compete, and even articles on big stories like the Microsoft bid for Yahoo! only attract a handful of comments -- compared to, say over 800 on Digg -- and thousands if you count how many times the story made the main page.

It's possible that the media market has shifted so much since the late-90s that magazines will never be able to reinvent themselves on the web in the face of competition from a now established and well-connected blogosphere and user-powered aggregation of sources (like Digg and Reddit). But the Standard is probably smart to eschew the traditional editorial structure and follow the example set by successful blogs communities like the Huffington Post and Seeking Alpha, by bringing together a group of outside contributors who may already have a readership elsewhere.

Try out the Standard web site and prediction market and tell us what you think. Can the Industry Standard return to glory or will they flame out again? Let us know in the comments below.

Plaxo Pulse First to Use Google's Social Graph

Although only announced hours ago, Plaxo's Pulse is already using the new Google Social Graph API. They got a head start due to a collaborative effort between their Chief Platform Architect, Joseph Smarr, and Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick. Now, the Plaxo public profile pages will serve as the flagship example of what this new API has to offer.

An Open Social Web

Plaxo's Pulse platform, mistakenly thought of by some as just another social network, is actually an attempt at an open version of the social web where sites inter-operate with each other. Currently Pulse supports integration with flickr, YouTube, digg, LiveJournal, Windows Live, del.icio.us, yelp, MySpace, webshots, last.fm, Pownce, xanga, tumblr, jaiku, twitter, smugmug, Yahoo 360, Picasa, and Amazon.

A great example of the type of interaction Pulse aims to achieve on their platform is the new two-way synchronization feature between Pulse and Twitter. A little over a week ago, Pulse quietly launched a "status" feature. Then a few days ago, they announced that this feature could now be used to synchronize with Twitter, two-way. If you set up your Pulse status to sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it instantly updates in Twitter. You can also update in Twitter, and this will be synced back to Pulse. And if you have the Twitter Facebook app installed, it will update there, too.

Dynamic Public Profiles

With the launch of Google's Social Graph API, Pulse is now giving users the ability to create a unified public profile enriched by some or all of the aggregated content streams from the social web. Pulse uses the API to gather together your various URLs on the web to create a public identity that you can control. With this, you can manage your own data and content and determine how you want to present it to the world.

This is a new sort of public profile page. Instead of a being a static page, like the one you would have on MySpace, the page is constantly being updated by your stream of content that you create all over the web.

The public profiles are a completely opt-in feature. You decide for yourself what content and information is included. The resulting pages are tagged with microformats, so your profile page is readable by Google and other web sites.

Over the next few weeks, Plaxo promises to introduce even more in this area, as this is just the first release.

To get started setting up your Public Profile, Plaxo members can go to Pulse, then click on "My Profile" at the top. On the left-hand side, click on the "Public Profile" link to begin.

Google Releases Social Graph API

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.

It was only a few weeks ago that Google announced that it had joined the DataPortability.org work group. It didn't take them very long to make good on the promise of contributing to the cause of data portability, though I suspect that Social Graph API has been under development at Google since before they joined DataPortability.org.

The Social Graph API uses the same algorithms at play in Google's search engine to discover how people are connected across the Internet. In fact, it only uses publicly available data -- if it's not on Google, the API won't be able to find it -- which Google says puts users in control of their own data since anything they don't like showing up, they can change at the source level.

The API works by searching for connections between people based on how people are linked on social networks and via publicly available profiles and pages -- i.e., if Marshall Kirkpatrick and I linked to each other on our personal blogs, or if we followed each other on Twitter, the Social Graph API might consider us friends because we have a strong connection. So, if I then sign up for a new social service, I can feed it links to my social presence elsewhere (like my blog or Twitter profile) and it will analyze those public connections and suggest to me that maybe I should be friends with Marshall on this new service because it looks like I'm friends with him elsewhere.

I spoke this morning to Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks (whom we interviewed in December), and he showed me a demo using his blog as an example that shows how strong each of his various online presence points are connected. I.e., how his blog is connected to his Twitter account is connected to his Flickr page, etc.

As more and more users are beginning to suffer the effects of "social networking fatigue," anything that helps automate and make easier the process of adding your existing connections to a new network is a useful tool. The Social Graph API could be an important part of the data portability movement in that it allows users to find and evaluate their public social connections and take control of that information.

Google has set up a Social Graph API group as well as provided developer documentation.

Kylie takes Olivier Martinez back - on the promise of marriage and a baby (Daily Mail)

Daily Mail:
Kylie takes Olivier Martinez back - on the promise of marriage and a baby — Kylie Minogue is back with her French boyfriend Olivier Martinez after a year apart. — But there are strict conditions to their reignited romance. — The couple, who met up in Paris last week …

Scarlett Johansson Lesbian Sex With Penelope Cruz

Scarlett Johansson has a steamy lesbian sex scene with Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona that’s slated for release towards the end of the year. Page Six reports that the scenes are extremely erotic and will have people blown away and even shocked. Apparently Penelope and Scarlett go at it in a red-tinted photography [...]

Scarlett Johansson lesbian with penelope cruz

Scarlett Johansson has a steamy lesbian sex scene with Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona that’s slated for release towards the end of the year.

Page Six reports that the scenes are extremely erotic and will have people blown away and even shocked. Apparently Penelope and Scarlett go at it in a red-tinted photography dark room, and it will leave the audience gasping. The women later have a threesome with Javier Bardem (below), who plays Cruz’s husband.

Enough reasons to watch the film and make the wait - Vicky… has December 2008 release date - quite miserable.

Lindsey Strutt In Loaded Magazine

This 20-year-old student from England has been a Page 3 girl and a top model for a variety of magazines. Lindsey Strutt’s making a big splash this month with the latest edition of Loaded!

case holloway solved

Dutch crime reporter "peter r de vries" claims to have solved the holloway case, The whole story will be telt in his weekly crime show on dutch television this coming sunday. The dutch bloggers of Vkmag.com also found an open backdoor in the site of mr de vries and pulled out this page that shows something like joran v/d sloot confessing the murder on the girl.
Abcnews also has a story about this.

Holy crap!! dont get me wrong but why does it take a crime reporter to solve a case instead the local justice department that oviously cant handle this kind of cases.

Andrey Golub :: Tips for Pursuing a New Career Outside IT

Life in IT can be thankless, but you don't have to suffer. A 25-year IT veteran turned professional coach offers advice on how she and many other technical professionals found fulfillment and fortune outside IT.

Seven Tips for Pursuing a New Career Outside IT

February 13, 2008 — CIO — Let's face it: Life in IT can be thankless. Your work often goes unnoticed, unless you do something wrong. You put in long hours, working evenings and weekends. Expectations are high. Users are seldom happy with results.

Believe me, I understand. I spent more than 25 years in IT, having started as a systems developer and ending as director of career development in a high-tech consulting company. As my career in IT evolved, I realized I enjoyed management and staff development more than technical work. After the IT downturn of 2001, I decided to begin a new career as a professional coach.

It's easy to tire of a career in IT. I've talked with dozens of technical professionals who say they are burned out or who no longer feel challenged by their jobs. Many more senior professionals are forced to consider a job outside the field after being laid off and finding it difficult to land a new job, either because their skills aren't in demand or employers don't want to pay for their experience.

You don't have to suffer in IT. If you've ever considered a career outside the profession, the following seven steps will help you make your move. They worked for me and many others, as you'll see.

1. Identify your interests: What do you like to do?

Tom Prince knew he wanted to do something besides sell CRM software when he was Siebel's vice president of sales, but he had no idea what. After he left Siebel in 2002, he and his wife Mary decided to investigate the possibility of opening a restaurant. They loved good food, dined out often and understood their local, Boston-area market well. They partnered with Lorenzo Savona, a former general manager of two chic restaurants in Boston, who had been planning to build a restaurant similar to the one Tom and Mary Prince envisioned. In 2004, they opened Tomasso Trattoria in Southborough, Mass. Today, they also run Panzano Provviste e Vino, a market and wine shop next door to the restaurant.

"There's so much disillusionment in high-tech. You rarely get the feeling that you're selling people something they really want," says Tom Prince. "Here, we're providing something that people actually know and care about—something that people really want. Food affects their sight, their smell, their taste, their touch, all of their senses."

If you don't have a clear idea of what you want to do, start by evaluating your existing position. Make a list of everything you love and hate about your current job. Use those likes and dislikes to form criteria for a new career. Look for opportunities that feature the things you love but not the things you hate. For instance, if you love your job because of your relationship with your clients, look for jobs that focus on customer service. Or, if you love being the expert and sharing your knowledge, teaching is a possibility.

Also think about what you do in your spare time. What do you enjoy doing most? What is it about these activities that makes them enjoyable? If you love dogs, consider starting a boarding, grooming or training business. If you practice yoga, find out what it would take to become an instructor. Brainstorm ways you can make a career out of your passions the way that the Princes did with food.

2. Leverage your strengths: What do you do well?

For 24 years, Norman Daoust worked in corporate IT roles, except during a sabbatical when he focused on his music. Daoust plays fretted instruments—the guitar, electric bass, banjo and mandolin. After three years of trying to make a living as a musician he decided to return to corporate IT, only to remember exactly why he left before: the inability of large, bureaucratic organizations to embrace and manage change. He had to get out, but instead of going back to music, he opted for consulting in his area of expertise, information modeling and systems integration. He prepared for that transition by participating in several consulting workshops. When he was laid off from his corporate job in 2001, he took the leap. Seven years later he has built a successful consulting practice with many clients and the freedom to make his own schedule, including time for his music.

A great tool you can use to identify your strengths is the book StrengthsFinder 2.0. When you buy it, you get a code to take the StrengthsFinder assessment online at no additional cost.

3. Assess your options: What could you do that reflects your interests and leverages your strengths?

Tom McGoldrick performed many roles during his 30 years in IT: systems programmer, project manager, department manager and senior vice president. He left IT in 2002 during a downsizing. When he stepped back to look at his life, he realized how much his career had taken him away from his family. He and his wife Sue Ann decided to look into running their own business.

They considered more than 1,200 different businesses and eventually narrowed the list down to six. One option was inspired by their beloved pet Labrador retriever, Apollo, who had a champion bloodline. They considered breeding dogs, but further research showed they couldn't make a living at it. When Apollo unexpectedly died, they looked for a burial/cremation facility that would provide Apollo with the honor and respect the McGoldricks felt he deserved. They discovered Paws in Heaven and were very pleased with the care and attention Apollo received there.

In 2003, the owners of Paws in Heaven decided to retire, and the McGoldricks bought the business. Tom McGoldrick recognized that the business savvy, technical knowledge and relationship-building skills he had honed over the course of his career in IT would lend themselves well to running and growing their new business. Paws in Heaven perfectly combines McGoldrick's love for animals with his business and technical acumen.

Focusing on your interests and strengths the way McGoldrick did will help you more easily recognize opportunities as they come along and determine whether they're a good fit for you.

4. Try your possibilities on for size: What would this new career really be like?

Technical graphic designer Marissa Rosenfield Smajlaj was shopping at a bookstore in downtown Boston when she came upon a copy of the book Colette's Birthday Cakes by world-renowned specialty cake artist Collette Peters. As she flipped through the pages and admired each cake, she had an epiphany: "I could do this!" she thought. Smajlaj got a part-time job in a bakery to see if she'd enjoy the work. She loved it, decided to go to culinary school and was accepted at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu in London. She completed the Le Cordon Bleu Diplome de Patisserie. The following year, she became a pastry chef at a New York City restaurant. She hasn't looked back since.

5. Be open to opportunities: What's out there?

Bill Sobbing didn't start out as an IT professional. In college, he majored in English. When he graduated, he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. He looked at many different possibilities, but none of them excited him. Eventually, a relative got him a job where the relative was working. When the IT department at Sobbing's company posted an entry-level position, he applied for it and was accepted. Sobbing found a career that interested him and spent the next 20 years working in various IT roles. He enjoyed the work but, like many IT managers, he tired of corporate politics. He decided to become an independent consultant and began working primarily from his home. One morning, he picked up a newspaper and read about a local school, The San Diego Golf Academy, which offers a program in golf course management. He had played golf casually since high school but never considered making it his career. Yet something in the story about the Golf Academy compelled him to check it out. Three years later, Sobbing is general manager of a nine-hole golf course in Phoenix, Ariz. He could never have done it if he hadn't indulged his curiosity.

6. Select the right opportunities: Which are viable?

In 2002, Alan Klug was a senior consultant with KPMG. He enjoyed working with clients, but the consulting industry was suffering from the post-9/11 economic recession at that time. Klug knew future consulting opportunities would be limited and decided to pursue something entrepreneurial. He considered opening a custom closets business, a car wash, and franchising a quick-service restaurant. He developed business plans for each idea, but none of them really grabbed him. Then he came across a small ad in Fortune for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Intrigued by a company that got paid for taking people's junk off their hands, he says he "researched the heck out of it." He learned that it was a lucrative and fast-growing business with a solid strategy and good management team heading it up.In 2003, he became a 1-800-GOT-JUNK? franchisee with four territories. He has since expanded to eight territories. He is on track to become a $2 million business in 2008 and is already thinking about what he might do next. "If an opportunity comes along, don't count it out immediately because it seems too good to be true. Just research it and find all the downsides," he says. "There are plenty of opportunities out there to be exploited."

If you have a couple of options and can't decide between them, take out a sheet of paper and divide it into columns—one for each possibility in question. Write the title of each option at the top of each column. List the pros and cons of each possibility side by side. If neither choice stands out, answer the following questions: What will happen if I pursue this career? What won't happen if I pursue this career? What will happen if I don't pursue this career? What won't happen if I don't pursue this career? Those four questions sound similar, but they're all slightly different and designed to help you explore the nuances of each possibility. Use your answers to those questions to decide which option is the best for you.

7. Create a career action plan.

Once you have decided on a career, you can put together a career action plan. This is a simple project plan with tasks, deliverables and target dates. It includes a long-term career objective (from six months to three years) with short-term tasks and deliverables for the next three months.

If your career objective is, for example, to launch your own consulting business next year, one short-term task to perform might be to talk with several consultants to learn more about what it's like. Other tasks might include investigating what areas of specialization are in greatest demand and what it would take for you to build your expertise in those areas. A deliverable might be to draft a preliminary business plan with a list of potential clients and the financial resources you have available to launch your business. At the end of three months, add new tasks and deliverables for the following three months. This simple approach works well for planning and tracking your progress.

As you begin building your career action plan, answer the following questions:

What do I need to accomplish my goal?
Do I need education, equipment, office or other space?
Do I need hands-on experience?
Do I need financial aid?
Do I need a mentor or a coach?
Who among my friends and acquaintances can provide assistance with my career change? What assistance can they provide: resources, expertise, moral support?

Remember, no one succeeds alone. There's nothing wrong with asking for help. There is something wrong with not asking for help when you need it. In most cases, people are more than willing to lend a hand.

These seven tips come from my own experience as well as the experiences of others. I leveraged my own interests and strengths in training and professional development to move from IT into my coaching business. In my corporate role as director of career development, I coached many IT professionals, from systems developers to executives. In that role, I had the opportunity to try out what would become my new career as a professional coach. Since I wasn't ready to leave my corporate job at the time, I worked with a mentor/coach to develop and implement a business plan that enabled me to remain with my company while I earned my credentials and began to build my coaching and consulting practice. I have been on my own since 2006. I have found great joy and success in my new career, and I wish you the same in your "Life Beyond IT," wherever it may take you.

Joanne Dustin is a certified professional coach and the author of Life Beyond IT: Open the Door...Your Future is Waiting.

Customizable Websites - The Definitive Guide

Several popular websites have let their homepages be customized by users. New web technologies have made it possible to add slicker customization interfaces so more sites are allowing users to customize their pages. But, should you do the same?

Making a Seamless Parchment Paper Background

Making a seamless tiling background is not as hard as it may seem � especially when you make use of Photoshop�s offset filter. In this example, I�ll use a stock image of some old-looking textured paper to make a seamless background appropriate for the content area of a web page.

Kosovo Serbs burn border points - BBC News

Javno.hr

Kosovo Serbs burn border points
BBC News - 2 hours ago
Kosovo Serbs have set fire to two border crossings to protest against Kosovo's declaration of independence. The attacks took place at the northern Jarinje and Banja crossings, manned by United Nations and Kosovo police.
Violence as Kosovo Serbs protest Aljazeera.net
NATO closes Kosovo border points to Serbia amid violence (Roundup) Monsters and Critics.com
Times of India - Makfax - Reuters - ABS CBN News
all 201 news articles

Report: NBA to hold outdoor game in preseason

Taking a page out of the NHL's playbook, the NBA is heading to the great outdoors when the Phoenix Suns and Denver Nuggets square off in an October exhibition game, according to a published report.

LG KF700 Touch Screen Phone Competes with iPhone

LG Electronics today announced the launch of the KF700, a new multimedia phone that combines three input methods. As the world's first phone with three separate input methods, the KF700 integrates a 3-inch touch screen, alpha-numeric keypad and Shortcut Dial. With its user-optimized navigation, all of the phone's functions and features are instantly accessible. The KF700's 3-inch full touch screen provides access to features and its wide aspect ratio makes it ideal for watching movies or browsin...

Photo: LG KF700 Touch Screen Phone Competes with iPhone Photo 1

The KF700's 3-inch full touch screen provides access to features and its wide aspect ratio makes it ideal for watching movies or browsing the internet. From the main screen users can flip through several handy widgets, including a calendar, scheduler, and memo pad, with the swipe of a finger. The large touch screen also means that the phone can provide an adaptable on-screen interface, rather than tying users to a fixed, preset button layout.

The Shortcut Dial on the back of the phone scrolls through six user-selected features by controlling a virtual dial on screen, rather than digging through menus. The Shortcut Dial can also be used to scroll through web pages or emails, adjust volume and perform other functions for which a wheel is naturally better.

"Our consumers told us that they wanted a phone that had plenty of multimedia features, but doesn't take a long time fiddling with menus to figure out. We created the LG KF700 based their insight," said Dr. Skott Ahn, CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. "Internal research showed that a phone's multimedia features often lay dormant if they are hard to access. On many phones these features are hidden deep in menus, requiring too much time and effort to find them. The LG KF700 eliminates these endless menus with its intuitive interface and multiple input methods."

Most of the new touch screen phones currently available eliminate some formerly universal features like the alpha-numeric keypad. LG incorporated a slide-down alpha-numeric keypad to simplify the process of making calls and typing text messages.

When browsing the internet on the wide touch screen, the shortcut dial zooms in and out on websites. When sending text messages, the alpha-numeric keypad provides the letters, while frequently used symbols are readily available on the touch screen. These symbols change based on users text messaging habits.

One of the KF700's multimedia features is a web browser that provides access to Google Search, Blogs, Gmail, Maps and Youtube. Support for HSDPA 3G networks makes web browsing fast and other features like video telephony possible. Other features include an MP3 player, MPEG4 video player, 3.0-megapixel camera, Bluetooth connectivity and more.

The LG KF700 will be available in Europe in mid March and will become available in other markets in the months following.

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Sony Ericsson Z770i Designed for the Internet

Sony Ericsson today announced the launch of the Z770i, an elegant clamshell optimized for the web using HSDPA data speeds. The Z770i is designed to surf the web or receive the latest news, and the 'email set-up wizard' makes it simple to access the inbox. With Exchange ActiveSync, users can configure the Z770i to have work emails pushed straight to the phone. Surf the web or retrieve email directly on the phone or connect the Z770i to a laptop (via USB Cable) and use it as a modem. Once online, ...

Sony Ericsson Z770i

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- View Specs

Sony Ericsson today announced the launch of the Z770i, an elegant clamshell optimized for the web using HSDPA data speeds.

The Z770i is designed to surf the web or receive the latest news, and the 'email set-up wizard' makes it simple to access the inbox. With Exchange ActiveSync, users can configure the Z770i to have work emails pushed straight to the phone.

Surf the web or retrieve email directly on the phone or connect the Z770i to a laptop (via USB Cable) and use it as a modem. Once online, web browsing is easy through the Magnetic Mouse Pointer that is controlled by the navigation key. The key changes the icon depending on its position on the Web page (i.e. from text input to pointer or to link). Pan and zoom into an area for easy reading on the good-sized (2.2-inch) screen.

Receive RSS feeds from news or entertainment as the action happens or click on the RSS tile, or 'widget,' for instant access to favorite web pages from the phone's desktop (or standby screen). In addition, the Z770i has a built-in weather forecast application, allowing users to receive regular weather updates. Consumers can also snap a photo on the Z770i and upload it instantly to their own blog site.

The Z770i will be available in Vogue Red, Graphite Black and Exquisite Gold in selected markets from Q2 2008.

- Sony Ericsson Z770i Specs

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FlyClear Discount Code Benefits Everyone!

While I'm not happy with how well the FlyClear airport security program works, I can't fault its affiliate program. Since I wrote about it and posted my discount code of SCA49148, the referrals have been rolling in at an amazing pace.

I posted about the program at the end of September. Since then, I've had 13 "refer-a-friend" referrals come in. That's given me an extra 13 months of CLEAR service for free.

I was pretty surprised so wondered what was going on. Why were people bothering using my code? Some top terms used to reach my CLEAR pages explained why:

Click to continue reading...

Up Next for Beta: Search, Flickr View, Add Page

We’ve been a little quiet of late, mostly because we’re busy working on our next release. We still have a bit of QA to do, but we’d like to share some details.

Search

As you can see, we’re actively integrating blog search into beta.bloglines.com. We’ve incorporated some Ask 3D's popular features into Bloglines blog search. For example, related searches in the right-hand column in the screenshot below. In case you’re wondering, we’ve retained the filtering allowing you to search based on feed subscriber popularity. You also might notice an advertisement on that mockup. Keep an eye-out for CPC oriented ads in future releases.

Search Results

Flickr View

We continue to expand our views for photo-feeds with a new preview mode for Flickr photo-feeds.

Flickr View

Add Feeds

Many of you noticed that Beta's add page was pretty basic. Essentially, it was a stub for future development. We’ve finished off the next iteration on the page, so you can easily track packages, monitor weather, or see recommended packs.

Add Page

Blogliners, we're here working for you. Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Keeping in Touch with Friends via Bloglines

At Bloglines, we experiment with feeds all the time. We wanted to point out 3 easy ways you can keep in touch with your friends on Facebook, Flickr and Upcoming.org via Bloglines.

Facebook
Need to have your Facebook Friends' Status Updates at all times? You can import your Status Update feed into your Bloglines account. Here's how you can get your Status Updates in Bloglines. Go to your home page. Look for your "Status Updates" section on the right side of the page near your photo. Click on "See All" and go to your Status Updates Page. On the right side of the page, you'll see a blue RSS Icon under the header "Subscribe."

Flickr
Get a photo feed from a friend, family member or other Flickr-ino. Enter the user name in the Flickr Search. Look at the bottom of the user's profile page. Look way to the bottom and you'll find an RSS icon. Subscribe to it like any other feed.

Upcoming.org
See what events your friends aretracking. Be sure to sign-in to Upcoming.org. Look for the area on your home page with the title, "My Friends' Events." (Be sure to have added friends before-hand.) Click on the link "My Friends' Events." Look for the RSS subscribe button in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

Keep us posted on other ways you use Bloglines. If you do post on your blog, be sure to send us an email, so we can highlight your post for other Blogliners.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Bloglines Beta Debuts Photo Widget

We have another treat for you Blogliners who have been patiently awaiting our redesign. Today's special surprise is the Photo Widget View available within Bloglines Beta.We've been experimenting with different views in the Bloglines Start Page. In this case, we display photos from Flickr inside a Photo Widget. Sure beats a text description. We currently only do this for Flickr, but in future releases you will be able to apply the photo view for other photo-oriented feeds.

Here's a little before and after.

Before

After

As a reminder, you can go to Flickr or other photos sites and create a feed tracking a specific topic or tag. In the example above our topic we tracked was "Europe." Or you can track a specific user on the site. So in other words, anytime a friend posts a picture on Flickr, you would see that picture on your Bloglines.

Have Fun!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Bloglines for the iPhone and Mobile Phones - Reminder

Last week, I met a big name blogger who is also a dedicated user of Bloglines. I couldn't help but notice his iPhone typing skills. He was clearly pounding out at 40 words per minute which is super-fast on the iPhone. I was really excited to hear his impressions on iBloglines, our iPhone optimized version of Bloglines. Unfortunately, he hadn't heard of iBloglines. I was crestfallen. I realized I needed to do a better job telling Blogliners about our great products.

No better time than the present to remind everyone of the great Bloglines mobile products. We have 2 major product sets: iBloglines for iPhones and Bloglines for mobile phones.

iBloglines for iPhones - located at i.bloglines.com

	Pin - Save the story for when you get back to your Mac or PC.
	Email Articles - Sharing is fun.
	Search - Find the latest buzz with our blog and feed search.
	Auto Refresh of "My Library" - No need to hit refresh to get the latest updates.
	Hide Images - We know EDGE is slow, and your time is valuable.
	Preferences - Personalizing is essential. Our Blogliners love to personalize their experience so they can optimize their feed reading flow.

Bloglines for Mobile - located at m.bloglines.com and m.beta.bloglines.com

Why two different versions of Bloglines for mobile phones? One is Bloglines Classic (m.bloglines.com) which has been around for years. The other is our new beta product (m.beta.bloglines.com) which has the latest set of enhancements.

Bloglines has had a leading mobile feed reader for the last couple of years. It's always been one of our key product strengths. So we were really excited to make our mobile product even better. We were busy over the summer re-writing the mobile code from the ground up. A new version of mobile is available as part of the Bloglines Beta Releases. Go to m.beta.bloglines.com on your cell phone. When we feel it's ready, we'll make it available on Bloglines Classic. Key Features

Start Page - Your Bloglines Start Page is displayed at the top of the screen. This way you can pull your favorite feeds to the top.
Pin (formerly known as Keep New) - Sometimes you want to save that special post to read later when you're not on the go.
Pagination - Instead of loading all of your posts, we parse out the posts into smaller bundles to fit into the memory constraints of cell phone browser. This has numerous benefits including improved speed, better reliability and safer "mark read" behavior.

Enjoy

Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Bloglines Beta - Even Faster!

Earlier this week, we released another round of improvements for Bloglines Beta:

It's Faster

Most people have commented on how fast the Bloglines Beta is, much faster than the classic site. However, a web site can never be too fast! Will, Bjorn and Ben have been reviewing the front-end code looking for ways to shave time off common actions. Hold onto your seats, you'll definitely feel the speed improvements especially in QuickView and 3-Pane View. We hope you relish the time saved not waiting to download. We are.

Back-button Support

Because sometimes in life, you do need to go backwards to go forwards. Now you can use the browser's back button like on standard web sites. Hitting the back button will take you to the previously loaded screen.

Expandable Start Page Modules

Some feeds just demand more space on your start page. Now you can change the size of the start page modules with a simple drag-and-expand of the lower right-hand corner of the module.

Better Support for Smaller Screens

We've noticed a number of Blogliners complaining that they were not able to see the "Mark All Read" and "Edit" buttons in the feed header. We've modified the header to better support smaller screen sizes and those who use a narrower browser window.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman & The Bloglines Team

Talking about Gadget devs, come out and play!

I know it has been awhile since I posted. Tonight we have big news! MSN Spaces is now Windows Live Spaces. The Windows Live vision is taking shape! In addition to tons of cool improvements (themes, social networking, and more), now Gadgets can be built for Spaces as well as Live.com. Stay on top of developing for Spaces at the Spaces Platform blog.

One of the best aspects of Gadgets on Spaces is their viral nature. See a cool gadget on someones space - just click on the + sign and you can quickly add it to your Space. Let the fun begin!

Quote

Gadget devs, come out and play!

Admit it.

You've always thought MSN Spaces was pretty cool -- that we did some things right and would work hard to smooth out any rough edges over time. But, you weren't sure if the Spaces team would ever let developers outside the company party in someone else's space. Well, a big part of joining the Windows Live family today is support for web gadgets written by anyone including YOU! Thanks to the great work done on Gadgets to date, you can now write a gadget that works both in Live.com (personalized portal) and Spaces (online expression/identity). And, it only takes one person adding it to their space for your gadget to become popular -- visitors to that space can choose "Add to your space" or "Add to Live.com" right from the header of the gadget, then visitors to that space can add to their spaces, and it's off to the races!

What kind of gadget makes sense in a space?

Remember that the Live.com portal is about YOU catching up on the world.   Spaces is about the world (however big or small you define it with the permissions you set) catching up on YOU. Users will decide which gadgets are worthy of adding to their space or not, and given our experience with Spaces features to date, the ones that will be the most successfull will be:

Customizable -- let the space author personalize the gadget so their instance of it is different than another Spaces user's instance. This could be as simple as letting the space author select the city they want to show weather for OR as complicated as pulling the user's account data in from another service (ie, his/her Netflix queue).

Reflective of the author's personality -- a gadget that helps the author to be creative with little or no work is more relevant than one that lets a visitor come to a space and check their mail account or convert their currency. All of those gadgets are killer apps; it's just the ones that are more like sharing your photos or music tastes will probably be more popular.

Adaptive to our rich themes/layouts -- after adding your gadget to your own space for testing, try selecting a bunch of dark and light themes AND moving the gadget between our narrowest and widest columns to make sure it works well in all scenarios. You want that puppy to shine!

How do I get started?

1. Build a Windows Live web gadget according to the SDK available at the Windows Live Dev site.

2. If your gadget has any settings/edit UI that visitors shouldn't see, then use the following code to detect whether Spaces is running the gadget in author mode and show/hide the UI accordingly. There is a p_args argument outlined in the gadgets SDK and we've added a new method off of that called getMode(). You can do a simple comparison of the value returned from that method call to determine author vs. visitor mode.

Something like the following:



         foo = function(p_elSource, p_args, p_namespace)

         p_args.module.getMode() == Web.Gadget.Mode.author

3. Add the gadget to your own space using the following Spaces API:

http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=URLEncodedPathToYourH ostedGadgetManifestURL

Switch between "Edit your space" and "View your space" to see how it behaves in both author and visitor modes. If your manifest file, Javascript, and CSS are hosted anywhere but Windows Live Gallery (gallery.live.com), the gadget can only be added for editing/viewing by the space owner. It will be hidden to visitors.

4. Zip up your manifest file and supporting Javascript/CSS files and submit that gadget package to the Windows Live Gallery so other visitors can add it to their space by going to Customize --> Modules --> "Add gadgets from Windows Live Gallery". Once it has been verified to work in each service, it will appear in the Gallery for users to add to Live.com or Spaces. Make sure you use relative URLs (mygadget.css instead of http://foogadgetdeveloper.com/mygadget.css) in your manifest XML to point to the scripts/CSS or the gadget will be rejected during verification.

5. If you upload a cool gadget to Gallery that you think will be a hit with Spaces users, comment on this post or send mail to spgadget@microsoft.com.   Same thing applies if you have feedback or feature requests for making gadget development for Spaces better.

We'll be updating the Gadgets SDK and sample code on dev.live.com very soon to reflect the additional Spaces items. In the meantime, you have everything you need above.

Good luck stormin' the castle!

-- Jay Fluegel

Watch my Engineering Great AJAX Experiences Talk...

My presentation from the Mix06 Conference, Lessons from the Trenches: Engineering Great AJAX Experiences is now online:

NGW020 - Lessons from the Trenches: Engineering Great AJAX Experiences

Description:
Explore the challenges and lessons learned developing the Windows Live and Gadgets Web client frameworks powering Windows Live, Hotmail (Kahuna beta), Spaces, and more. This technical talk presents design and architectural considerations for building interactive AJAX-like sites. See how componentization, network management, accessibility, page composition, and more impact the design and engineering of your Web application.

(To find other talks, go to the main Mix06 Sessions Page).

Gadgets and Cross-Browser Development

We are working hard to improve the Gadget framework documentation. In the meantime (and as we improve documentation), I am working on a series of short tutorials, tips, and highlights introducing how to use the Gadget framework and the underlying APIs.

I am going to start with our compatibility layer. After exploring various third-party gadgets being developed for Live.com, I discovered that many developers are still struggling with the API differences between Firefox and Internet Explorer. Most common, I see various tricks to handle the event model differences where IE uses a global event object and Firefox passes the event object as an argument to your handler.

This is not necessary when you build Gadgets. Instead, you should be leveraging the underlying compatibility layer that is part of the overall Gadget framework.

As I posted last September, as we develop our properties, almost none of our application logic contains browser specific code. Instead, we develop once to the Internet Explorer API and our code runs without modification in Firefox. This occurs because we download a special script that emulates the most useful IE’isms inside of Firefox and in a few cases, Firefox/W3C’isms in Internet Explorer. In this article I highlight the most useful methods and properties of this layer (I promise we will develop a full reference in the near future).

Event Model

This is easy – always attach events using attachEvent and detachEvent. Do not assign event handlers using function references (e.g., myElement.onclick = doThis) nor use the addEventListener approach.

In your event handlers, don’t worry – you will always get the global event object. For example:

function doClick()
{
  alert("You clicked on a " + event.srcElement.tagName + 
     " element");
}
document.body.attachEvent(“onclick”,doClick);

Also, as a general practice (I will cover this more in later articles but this is extremely important), when writing Gadgets, be sure to detach any event handlers in your dispose handler. Otherwise, your Gadget will leak memory due to known browser issues.

What can you do with this event object? You can check out the MSDN reference as most properties are exposed. In addition to the standard properties, below are the list of properties we added to Firefox:

srcElement
cancelBubble
offsetX
offsetY
x
y
returnValue
button (few issues as Firefox does not properly distinguish between the left button and no button)
fromElement
toElement

We have also gone further and extended Firefox with the very useful mouseenter and mouseleave events. As long as you attach these events using the attachEvent and detachEvent methods, these events fire just as they do in Internet Explorer. These events are very useful for quickly and easily detecting when a mouse enters or leaves a specific element. Again, check out the MSDN reference for more details.

We even have a reasonable emulation of mouse capturing. However, this is most useful in the context of an entire web-page not within a simple gadget. This is because mouse capturing in Firefox only fires within the context of the browser client area. Regardless, when using mouse capturing (setCapture and releaseCapture methods), the mouse events fire properly on the correct elements.

We also fixed the Firefox onclick event to only fire for the left mouse button (Firefox fired for all mouse buttons). This little difference could cause you grief in your application. (For those of you who noticed that we also accidentally prevented the ability to open pages in new tabs via the middle button, that will be fixed real soon).

Useful Element Methods

Internet Explorer also supports a number of very helpful methods and properties on every element. These APIs simplify day-to-day programming and are very useful for building your application. Below are the list of element functions we added to Firefox. Again, check out MSDN for the details (linked for each item below) on how they work.

The currentStyle property returns the value actually being applied to the element. We currently support a subset of CSS attributes that we have found useful: border, margin, padding for Top, Left, Right, and Bottom; position; height; width; zIndex; color; and direction. We will most likely extend this list over time.

Useful style properties

We also extended the properties available on the style object with the extremely useful pixel* properties. These allow you to easily manipulate the dimensions of the element (assuming you are working with pixels). We also added the cssText property which gives you a serialized representation inline style.

XPath Expressions

When dealing with XML documents the ability to query for specific nodes is especially useful. Trying to decipher the difference between IE and Firefox for querying XML can be extremely painful. So, we provided support for two very straighforward IE methods, selectSingleNode and selectNodes.

Creating xmlHttp Objects

When you need to create a new XML Http Object, you can now simply use the standard approach, var y = new xmlHttpRequest(). However, as I will cover in future articles, I highly recommend you leverage our built-in network stack for all your network requests.

Parsing XML

Last, but not least, you have a string that you want to load into an XML DOM - just use the standard DOM Parser object:

var dp = new DOMParser(); 
var xmlDom = dp.parseFromString(yourXMLString);

This concludes my very brief and fast introduction to our compatibility layer. We are continually expanding the functionality. For example, we have basic IE filter support (alpha filters assigned via script will also apply in Firefox). I will cover these in later posts. For now, resist the urge in your Gadgets to author code differently for each browser. Instead, take the easy road and let our compatibility layer do all your heavy lifting.

Last, since it will inevitably come up, see the following post on why we support or don't support other browsers (while the post talks about start.com it is relevant to all properties on our framework).

What we learned building Live.com (or why are we slow)?

Over the last 18 months, we have explored how to build a highly-interactive, customizable, and extensible portal. The first iteration was a simple portal on Start.com. We created various iterations (start.com/1, start.com/2, start.com/3) which have evolved into the first fully extensible portal on Live.com. Today, from Live.com to the Kahuna (Hotmail) beta to MSN Spaces, and so-on, we are investing heavily in building very rich, interactive experiences. With these investments, we are learning a great deal on the right and wrong ways to engineer rich, interactive web-sites.

Underneath all our Windows Live properties, we share a common framework for how we engineer our client experiences. The framework is very client-centric where we composite most of the page client-side. For example, if you were to view Live.com’s HTML, you will notice that it serves a web-page “shell” and meta-data that describes the content. This meta-data is interpreted by the Live.com application and then rendered. This approach is extraordinarily flexible as we can quickly enhance and extend the application without any heavy server lifting. However, as we have learned and is being evidenced by our customers, without care, performance degradation can quickly outweigh all other benefits.

As you examine Live.com, and for the technically savvy, explore the underlying browser technology, it is easy to question whether we as Microsoft and the industry as a whole are pushing the browser too far. The current crop of rich applications while cool and interactive are starting to fare poorly performance-wise against their traditional brethren. So much so that an often posed question is, where do we go from here? And is it time to reexamine building rich applications?

First, let’s step back and very briefly look at the web versus traditional software. With traditional software, you would go through various design phases starting from specifications, to architecture documentation, to development, to usability testing, to testing, and eventually to ship. The entire approach had a fairly long lead time (up to years). Once released, updating the software was difficult and many times very cost prohibitive. This created a very high-bar. The web has removed almost all those barriers. On the web, we can now experiment and develop software with near real-time feedback and very fast release cycles.

I view the Web 2.0 phenomena as being very early in the development lifecycle. I am not prepared to dismiss any approach, pattern, or methodology as we are still in the learning phases. In the case of Windows Live, as we push the browser, we are also learning a great deal. Examining performance specifically - when I look at Live.com today, I see incredible innovation. We are pushing the limits of extensibility (gadgets), reuse (shared frameworks across all our properties), and are taking chances to drive new user-experience standards (look at how we present search results). On the contrary, I also see an application whose performance is starting to become painful to use. The page currently takes a long time to load, especially on the first visit. Beyond our user’s feedback (we do read all messages), broader industry pundits are quick to throw in the towel on the entire technology.

We are taking a different approach to this problem. We are challenging ourselves to prove that we can architect a performance driven, rich extensible experience. We are leveraging our gained knowledge shipping the many iterations of Start.com and all the beta products we are developing to improve our shared architecture and drive best patterns. Using the current Live.com as a simple case study, below I illustrate a few of the performance-oriented technical issues that we are working on quickly addressing:

Manage your Connections Carefully

If you were to examine Live.com at the network level, a reasonable person would quickly conclude that we are making too many connections. We decomposed this issue as follows: First, we are hitting an IE 6 issue that causes un-cached images applied dynamically via script to download on each reference. This issue typically manifests itself on slower connections – the time when bandwidth is most at a premium. We are baking a solution to this problem directly into our frameworks so that we pre-cache dynamically applied images before reuse. Next, every RSS feed and Gadget manifest is a unique request. This creates a web-page that is very “chatty” – an AJAX characteristic that you should work to avoid. We will solve this by intelligently batching multiple requests into a single request (and are exploring even more efficient means for the longer-term)

Parsing XML is Slow

We have also learned that merely parsing the RSS XML can be expensive in the browser. When we parse RSS, we are merely translating it into Javascript structures to be further manipulated. Since our server’s are already normalizing feeds to a standard format, instead of serving the RSS feed directly, we are going to translate the feed directly to JSON (Javascript structures). As a simple benchmark, on my fast developer machine we went from 400ms to parse 150K of RSS to 15ms to “execute” the JSON response.

Caching and Connection Management is Essential

Network bandwidth and connections are a scarce resource. Managing them is essential to providing fast experiences (especially for subsequent loads). We are evaluating the optimal approaches for splitting resources across multiple servers to leverage as many simultaneous connections at once (the browser is limited to 2 active connections per domain). We are also reviewing all resources to make sure they are set with appropriate expirations. In general, almost all content should have expiration, even a very short one (e.g., if the user leaves the page and hits the back button, the page should be re-rendered entirely from the cache).

Staging the Application

One of the biggest challenges with a very rich web-application is deploying the code. The richer the site, the more code that is needed. In the case of Live.com today, the entire application deploys before anything renders. However, our underlying framework supports dynamic and prioritized deployment – we just were not properly leveraging it. We are now focusing leveraging this pattern so that we can “stage” the application. We will be able to deploy the minimal code necessary to retrieve content and render the page and subsequently download features in priority order (e.g., render, then get drag-drop code, then get the RSS image rotator code, etc). For features not yet in use or visible, we can deploy those last or even on demand. Staging an application is fundamental to maintaining high-degrees of perceived performance.

Server versus Client Rendering

Traditional web-pages are generated via the server. Live.com and many of our properties are very client-centric where the client constructs the web-page from the user’s meta-data. In general, the first time a web-page loads, a server-generated page will almost always be faster. However, with a properly architected web application, we are discovering that our subsequent loads on a client-side generated page (especially when we stage the application) can be much faster than a server-oriented page. This occurs because our client-oriented approach is highly cacheable and loads asynchronously, even off the cache. The only content we need to download is the user’s meta-data. The rest of the page, scripts, and behaviors are cached indefinitely.

This summarizes a few of the performance-driven challenges we are addressing. Internally, we have developed a complete prototype that validates we can build a high-performance, scalable version of Live.com that load and run near-instantly to within seconds (on broadband). We are working on integrating these improvements into the shipping site as quickly as possible. Over the coming weeks and months, expect to see continuous noticeable improvements.

Update: Beyond performance, the Live.com team just posted the goals for the Live.com page.

This deserves a link...

I've been called lots of things, but this is the first time I believe I was called a treasure... Thanks Scoble :-)

Talking about "Hack Day" is creative play at work

In Saturday's Seattle Times, there was a short article about Microsoft's Hack Day. I was part of the virtual team that helped kick off and organize the first two hack day events. They serve as a great venue to experiment and meet others. The first two focused on hacking Spaces modules and building unique gadgets. We typically give a few short presentations, and then let everyone loose on the code base to experiment and innovate. Check this article out to get a little glimpse into the Windows Live culture...

Quote

"Hack Day" is creative play at work
...
And that's how a group of 75 Microsoft developers set out Thursday to brainstorm at an internal event called "Hack Day."
...

Talking about: Ric Merrifield on the Motion Initiative

Prior to rejoining MSN/ Windows Live, I spent a few years trying something completely different. I was an architect on an incubation project (Virtual Enterprise Team) exploring and bringing together SOA with how businesses work. Ric continues driving this work. I guarantee you will learn something new and different in this Channel 9 video.

Ric Merrifield - Microsoft gets down to business with Motion initiative

"Ric, director of strategy on the top secret Motion Incubation team, runs the Motion initiative. What's that? It's a group at Microsoft that studies how businesses work and looks for opportunities to help them do their business better. They made an entire map of how business works.

Motion's research led to the acquisition of Great Plains, too (which led to the Dynamics suite of services/applications).

Enjoy this look into a team you've never heard of before today and see how Microsoft approaches new markets and new acquisitions, and how it learns from other businesses."

Presentation: Lessons from the Trenches

I just gave my Lessons From the Trenches talk at the Mix06 conference. As requested, I uploaded my slide deck and you can find it at http://www.weblogging.com/decks/lessons.ppt. I believe the talk was also videotaped as a webcast and will hopefully be able to make that available.

UPDATE: If you attended the talk, be sure to provide feedback at http://content.mix06.com. Also, I expect a webcast of the talk to be available within 3-4 weeks.

The Live.com team has outdone themselves...

Go check out http://www.live.com.

I expect to see more posts from the team after they get back from some much needed rest.

The experience and features have been heavily updated. A few highlights to check out:

Heavily updated look and feel.
Multiple pages to help organize your content. Quickly rename and rearrange your pages (drag and drop them)
Adding content is much easier (and again, just drag an item from the list onto your page)
The coolest updated feature: Search (including extensible macros). Try the infinite scroller to move through the lists, click on the drop-down to find macros to extend your search experience.
Built in gadgets have an enhanced look and feel.

Explore. I am sure you will find more great stuff.

Talking about "The Real AJAX Upside"

Naming was never my specialty. Very little known tidbit. When I wrote the first DHTML draft specification, I named it "Active HTML" (I will leave it up to you to figure out why this is a bad name back in 1997). How did it change to "Dynamic" - from looking up Active in a thesaurus.

However, Dynamic HTML as a name served its purpose well in the late 90's. I do believe remarketing the existing technology as Ajax was a necessity for the community/ industry. Can you imagine all the new startups going for VC capital having to explain their cool new web innovations is based on 8 year old technology :-)?

Quote from Tim Bray's blog...

ongoing The Real AJAX Upside
"You know, I (Tim) could be excused for being a little bitter here. Everybody’s all gaga these days about AJAX as meme-ified by Jesse James Garrett. Check out Taxi to the Future, a piece I (Tim) wrote for XML.com in 2001, talking about how to improve user experience and system performance with a Transform-Aggregate-send XML-Interact architecture. Remind you of anything?
But you know, I’m actually not crying in my beer because first, Garrett was in the right place at the right time with the right acronym, and secondly, Scott Isaacs has been talking about this stuff since 1998 and helped invent most of the underlying technology, but dammit Scott, how could you ever expect to hit the memescape big-time with a dorky name like “Dynamic HTML”?"

What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense

Expanded 2nd Edition, by Joel Comm, 97$

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Learn how to optimize your web pages so the search engines will LOVE your site
Understand how to format your ads so your visitors will want to click them
Discover which colors, sizes, text color and borders will generate the most clicks
Find out how to position your ads for maximum response
-- Explore which elements can draw instant attention to your ads, no matter where you place them
Learn how to prune out low-paying ads that steal clicks from your high paying ads
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Discover how to add FREE articles to your site - Web sites with over 12,000 articles you can use revealed!
Learn about other pay-per-click programs. Know which ones you should keep your eyes open for.
Discover where to find server-side scripts and software to track down the most "click-friendly" pages and search terms
Learn how to read your server logs to find the hidden gold-mine
Discover when and how to use the Google Search Box to maximize revenue from customers searching for something specific
Learn how to read your visitors like a book, including:
-- what drives them to your web site (search terms they used to find your web site)
-- which ads they clicked and WHY
-- which pages they're visiting most often and WHY
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Find out how to generate revenue on visitors when they leave your site
Discover how to pinpoint which ads are making you the most money and which ads are producing the most clicks (and NO, those are not one and the same thing!)
Find out how to zero in on top-paying ads and pages with AdSense Channels
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Discover how to make AdSense work for forums and Internet communities, an incredible source of keyword-rich content that you can have created for free!
See my own secret list of successful websitesÂ�See how I do it with real-life examples! (And a whole lot more, including hands-on examples and actual screenshots of web pages that are raking in the cash with Google AdSense!)
Examine case studies demonstrating real-life examples of how others are succeeding with AdSense.

The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense

Written by William Charlwood, 101 pages, 67$.

The complete Step by Step EASY road map for making and maximising your income from Google's AdSense program

http://www.factsaboutadsense.com- How to get approved fast if you aren't already using AdSense to make automatic money
- Secret but legitimate techniques that will drive up your income
- The FactsAboutAdSense.com Case Study - shows you how to Fast Track qualification
- 101 pages of fact-packed, clear instructions
- Detailed analysis of the AdSense Income Equation
- Why a brilliant idea from a Nobel prize-winning economist is crucial to ALL AdSense income (Don't worry - I explain it in simple English)
- A foundation course in AdWords - the source of ALL AdSense income
- Google's AdSense Preview Tool reverse-engineered: learn tricks that can tell you how to re-design your website for maximum income
- How to use internet marketing techniques that can drive your traffic levels through the roof (and take your AdSense earnings with them)
- A complete Start to Finish Guide from your first website (if you haven't already got one) to cashing your first AdSense check - AND THEN GROWING YOUR INCOME SOME MORE
- My foolproof formula that generates money for me whenever I hit "Send" - it's so easy you'll kick yourself when you learn how it works
- How to keep competitors' ads off your site - even if they operate in Australia
- The $100 dollar click - explained (You don't want to restrict your site to just getting clicks worth a few cents do you?)
- Tracking those clicks - how to use Channels to monitor and improve your AdSense performance, and the best tracking systems currently available

Replacing AdSense Defaults With Paid Ads

If you use Google's AdSense program to earn money from your website, you could be missing out on additional income by not replacing unpaid PSA ads.
Many online ad programs, including AdSense, will sometimes show default ads, or public service announcement (PSA) ads, when they have no paying ads to show. This can happen for many reasons, especially when their spiders crawl your pages for content.

What many webmasters do not realize, however, is that you can easily replace those unpaid ads and earn bonus revenue from your website. All you need to do is make a simple change to your ad codes.In the case of Google's AdSense program, this is done by adding an alternate URL to your code. It is a very simple process that will typically take you less than five minutes. Using the AdSense online wizard, you simply add an alternate ad URL to your code, then copy and paste the new code into your pages.

Judging from online forum posts on the subject, as well as considering the incredible number of sites that do not use Alternate ads, it appears that many webmasters believe Google or other ad networks will punish you for replacing their defaults ads. This is of course ridiculous. Why would they give you the tools and instructions on how to do this if they were going to penalize you? Now that you know how to earn extra revenue from your site, the challenge for many webmasters is how to make a "URL" actually appear as an ad. It's really not that difficult, and there are a couple of ways to go about it.

One new program that was recently created to address this issue is AlternateURL.com, where you can create an alternate URL ad in just a few easy steps in any of the standard AdSense supported sizes to your ad code.

Competition filter

Within your Adsense manager, you have the option of using the "Competition Filter" which allows us to remove certain websites from the ads being displayed regularly. This is going to be an on-going optimization task in the future. Without filtering the ads being displayed within your website, you might find yourself with ads unrelated to your industry and possibly some ads that have a negative effect within your site.

If you don't remove all the unwanted ads being displayed on your website, you might end up hurting your Adsense performance online. The more targeted you can get your Google Adsense ads to display on each page, the better your chances at being able to make more money. Try to take a moment every week to study the ads being displayed on your website.

Open up a note pad, or word document and record all the websites you don't want to be displayed anymore. Add these sites to your "filter list" within your Adsense account.
Remember to add the website (within your filter list) like so: smartads.info - without the www. Adding anything after or before the url will only prevent the company from displaying one of their many ads like so (www.site.com/ads/1.html). This way you stop anything from the entire website from showing up within your Adsense campaign online. The more you optimize your Adsense filter, the better your performance will pick up and the less non-related ads will be displayed on your website.

ShowClicks.com Tracking script

ShowClicks is a system for monitoring and analyzing the performance of Google AdSense in publisher websites. ShowClicks uses a combination of JavaScript and PHP to track both AdSense ad clicks and searches by your website's visitors.

Besides this core information, ShowClicks also provides value added functionality to track extra information - for example, the IP Addresses of visitors and where the visitors are redirected to. All this data is stored in a MySQL database to allow subsequent analysis and reporting.

ShowClicks allows you to monitor and analyze (in real-time) the performance of Regular Ad Units, Link Ads and Searches based on the following attributes:

Visitor IP Address
Hit Date/Time
Ad Dimensions
Source & Destination Page
Link Ad Topic
Search Keyword(s)

http://www.showclicks.com

Terrafirmascripts.com Adsense Tracker with Statistics

Adsense tracker makes it easy to collect detailed adsense statistics on a unlimited number of domains. The stats are easy to read and will quickly identify which ads are clicked, which pages and ad formats are performing the best and will not violate your terms of service with Google.

http://www.terrafirmascripts.com

What's wrong with Wikipedia

First, I point to Wikipedia pages often here on Scripting News and on Twitter. I also find it a useful personal resource. For example, I'm working my way through Battlestar Galactica and I find it helpful to read the summary of each episode after I've watched it. It's great that they have a common format. And they fill in blanks you might not have noticed but don't spoil the plot of upcoming episodes. I've been investing in ETFs lately, and Wikipedia has helped me learn how they work. So I don't question its value. It has value.

Wikipedia is therefore a puzzle to me. Because while it's helpful, it also hurts me, because my biography there is more of a vendetta, by anonymous people, who seem self-centered and immature, but it's impossible to tell what axes they have to grind, because they're largely anonymous.

Same is true for various activities I've participated in. You may argue that I didn't invent this or that, but surely I had something to do with RSS, blogging and podcasting? Yet depending on when you look, I'm often not mentioned on these pages. This makes it hard for me to claim my work in professional dealings because people consider Wikipedia authoritative. What it says is considered by many to be the truth. So this has hurt my career, and my ability to do creative work that builds on past work.

This is where Andrew Keen could have and should have, imho, written his book. This is where the Cult of the Amateur really does do damage, by usurping authority, and replacing it with anonymity and giving power to those who who tear down creativity, to remove the incentive to share, unless you're completely selfless and don't mind if others take credit for your accomplishments. That's not the nature of creativity, btw, creative people fiercely insist on credit, fight for it, imho, rightly.

Eventually, if it hasn't already happened, there will be consultants you can pay to make sure your point of view dominates a Wikipedia page. It has already come out that a gift to the Wikipedia Foundation will assure that your point of view dominates your profile page. How much of this can Wikipedia stand before it is reformed? It seems time to have this discussion, and not in the confines of Wikipedia where it can be controlled and gamed by insiders, but outside where everyone's opinion can be heard without being edited out and when it's clear who's saying what.

That said, here's how I think Wikipedia should evolve to fix this problem.

Based on the principle that one has the right to confront his accusers, Wikipedia pages on living people, or covering active creative areas, should be limited to pages of pointers of attributed accounts. Editors work to validate that the people are who they say they are. If they can't be validated, they either don't get linked, or get linked to from an area specially marked as not being validated. (I prefer the former.)

Further, in areas important enough to be controversial, meaning that people disagree on what happened, we should try to get as many people who were involved in the event or activity to write first-person narratives. In areas where they all agree, that should eventually be considered fact and presented as such, but the first-person narratives must stay linked. This would prevent the kinds of disasters that happen when people (for example) edit their own profile pages, meanwhile giving people the formal right to tell their own story, which clearly, many people covered by Wikipedia want.

I hope an interesting discussion ensues. Of course I expect to hear from the people who edit my profile pages to keep my name in the dirt, and I don't expect them to use their actual names. Can't speak for everyone else, but I'm much more interested, always, in hearing opinions from people who have the conviction and courage to put their personal authority behind their words, as I do.

HTC Shift US version with Sprint EVDO modem

Well, Amazon.com let the cat out of the bag early. The US version of the HTC Shift was supposed to be announced on March 24, but Amazon did it again and put up a pre-order page early. So HTC ...

Weary Midwesterners Battle Rising Rivers - The Associated Press

Ledger Independent

Weary Midwesterners Battle Rising Rivers
The Associated Press - 1 hour ago
FENTON, Mo. (AP) - With more than a dozen people killed by floodwaters and rivers still rising, weary Midwesterners on Thursday weighed not just the prospect of a sodden cleanup but the likelihood that their communities could be inundated again.
Flooding swamps Midwest Winston-Salem Journal
La Niña heightens flood risk this spring in Northeast US Pocono Record
Tampa Tribune - WKRC TV Cincinnati - Anderson Herald Bulletin - WKBT
all 2,067 news articles

Officials shut down Minnesota bridge, citing safety concerns - CNN

KARE

Officials shut down Minnesota bridge, citing safety concerns
CNN - 38 minutes ago
(CNN) -- Officials in Minnesota have closed a major bridge across the Mississippi River, citing safety concerns, the state's transportation department announced Thursday.
Minn. Bridge Similar to I-35W Closed The Associated Press
Major St. Cloud bridge closed Pioneer Press
FOX 9 News - FOXNews - MSNBC - Land Line Magazine
all 196 news articles

Former SLA member leaves prison - Los Angeles Times

Former SLA member leaves prison
Los Angeles Times - 1 hour ago
Kathleen Soliah, a former Palmdale resident, served about half of her 12-year term for her role in a plot to blow up LAPD cars. She had been arrested in 1999 while living under an assumed name in Minn By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer ...
Former SLA member Sara Jane Olson released from Calif prison San Francisco Chronicle
Ex-SLA Member Freed From Calif. Prison The Associated Press
News10.net - WKBT - Minneapolis Star Tribune (subscription) - Bemidji Pioneer
all 96 news articles

House defeats governor's casino bill - Boston Globe

House defeats governor's casino bill
Boston Globe - 1 hour ago
By Matt Viser and Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff The House voted 108-46 this evening to defeat a proposal to license resort casinos in Massachusetts, rejecting one of Governor Deval Patrick’s cornerstone economic initiatives.
Pols vote to discard casino bill Boston Herald
Tribes can operate Class II without state approval, lawmakers told Indian Country Today
BostonNOW - SouthCoastToday.com - MetroWest Daily News - Worcester Telegram
all 286 news articles

Only From the Sky

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.pcworld.com

Only From the Sky

Dubbed The Badlands Guardian by locals, this geological marvel (Google Earth coordinates 50.010083,-110.113006) in Alberta, Canada, bears an uncanny resemblance to a human head wearing a full Native American headdress--and earphones, to boot. Of course, The Guardian was produced naturally.

Tags: image

Tags: image,

Please Vote for Me and My Artwork

clipped by: enSue
clipper's remarks: I would really appreciate you voting for my submissions to HP's Design to Inspire theme/banner contest for the Vox, Typepad and LiveJournal blogging platforms. Thank you!

Clip Source: ensue.vox.com

Design To Inspire Contest: My Submissions

Vote for Aqua Rays Theme!

Vote for Rainbow Day Theme!

Vote for Sweet Dreams Theme!

Tags: vox, typepad, livejournal, hp, themes, blog, contest, designtoinspire, graphics, design

Tags: vox, typepad, livejournal, hp, themes, blog, contest, designtoinspire, graphics, design,

PicLens plugin. Another way to browse photos

The PicLens plugin for Firefox, IE and Safari will enable a cool, scrollable "3D wall" for viewing photos.

PicLens is currently enabled at Google image search, flickr, Picasa, DeviantArt.com and several other sites.

You can easily enable your existing gallery, by inserting 3 lines of code in your html file, and adding an RSS file.

You can also use the PicLens publisher, which will create a simple gallery page, create thumbnails and generate the RSS file.
It's cool, simple and of course free!
The picture is from a google image search for attuworld

Now I GOTTA blog - dammit - there are too many stupid things going on!

Look - I’m trying to get work done. Could all the idiotic, stupid deals - just stop for a while so I can stay head down? Why don’t these people get on the Clueship! Well - in addition to AOL creating one of its greatest blunders ever (I can see Ted Leonsis rolling his eyes [...]

Look - I’m trying to get work done. Could all the idiotic, stupid deals - just stop for a while so I can stay head down? Why don’t these people get on the Clueship!

Well - in addition to AOL creating one of its greatest blunders ever (I can see Ted Leonsis rolling his eyes now) lets see what else is going on in the blundersphere today.

WAIT! You mean consulting companies are worth money? But they just have people - no business-model-less IP!

Young whippersnappers are being given more money - after not making any money before. This time its the MyBlogLog guy. What was/is MyBlogLog’s business model? Ads?

Then there’s FriendFeed - the current darling du jour. Now what’s it’s business model? Duncan Riley gets it right - the functionality is sexy, but REAL aggregation is yet to come. Susan Mernit has a great name for FriendFeed pill poppers - Stalkerati.

I don’t agree with Loic that International startups have to MOVE to Silicon Valley or take money from worldclass VCs (or insiders like Loic did.) But many of his other advice is correct. What everyone needs to do is NOT spend money on overpriced execs who are lazy and don’t work hard (which there seems to be plenty of in Silicon Valley) or listen to these stupid Angel Investors (who Loic seems to have collected a bunch of.) Common sense rules. But oh yah - having a business model - helps.

danah boyd has to study and come up with a name for this. It seems that once Spitzer’s ‘girl’ dumped her MySpace page - there’s been all this fighting over who can pick it up! Doesn’t she know how to monetize page hits? Its the new form of prostitution!

iPhone apps only run “one app at a time”. Its as if the Finder went back to 1985! I can just see Steve Jobs saying “fuck them - who cares about running more than one app at a time! They should be HAPPY we even let them run anything!”

When in doubt - go rdf and semantic web - NOT

There’s a battle brewing around open source ad servers. Coolio!

Congrats to MySpace on going live with their Apps gallery. Now lets see how well their ‘open social graph’ stuff works out. We haven’t had the time to kick those tires - but we’ll get there - soon.

One day I will bring my sons to SXSW - as well. Then I’ll bring my daughters - 10 years later. SXSW is where Mimi learned the term SWAG.

Is Mozilla the platform? Is Flock the web?

I was wondering when someone would mention Zimbra

Speaking of platforms - need another one? Try Xcerion and their iCloud.

Oh yah - and the Adobe exec who engineered the Macromedia ‘merging of the dying dinosaurs‘ is leaving Adobe. Wow - that’s a surprise.

Once you’ve kicked out Ed Anuff - where else do you go - but to the VCs.

ShareThis,

Final note - if Jim Bankoff’s AIMpages had been done right - maybe AOL wouldn’t have needed to buy Bebo? Just think about - that.

Separating Web Spam from Quality Content - What are the Metrics?

Posted by randfish

Let's try a little excercise...

Common features of spam domains include:

Long domain names
.info, .cc, .us and other cheap, easy to grab TLDs
Short registration period (1 year, maybe 2)
High ratio of ad blocks to content
Javascript redirects from initial landing pages
Use of common, high-commercial value spam keywords like "mortgage," "poker," "texas hold 'em," "porn," "student credit cards," and related terms
Many links to other low quality, spam sites
Few links to high quality, trusted sites
High keyword frequencies and keyword densities
Small amounts of unique content
Very few direct visits
Very few links sent out in (non-spam) email to the site
Registered to people/entities not associated with trusted sites
Not frequently registered with services like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Central or Live Webmaster Tools
Rarely have short, high value domain names
Often contain many keyword-stuffed subdomains
More likely to have longer domain names
More likely to contain multiple hyphens in the domain name
Less likely to have links from trusted sources
Less likely to have SSL Security certificates
Less likely to be in directories like DMOZ, Yahoo!, Librarian's Internet Index, etc.
Unlikely to have any significant quantity of branded searches
Unlikely to be bookmarked in services like My Yahoo!, Del.icio.us, Faves.com, etc.
Unilkely to get featured in social voting sites like Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, StumbleUpon, etc.
Unlikely to have channels on YouTube, communities on Facebook or links from Wikipedia
Unlikely to be mentioned on major news sites (either with or without link attribution)
Unlikely to register with Google/Yahoo!/MSN Local Services
Unlikely to have a legitimate physical address/phone number on the website
Likely to have the domain associated with emails on blacklists
Often contain a large number of snippets of "duplicate" content found elsewhere on the web
Unlikely to contain unique content in the form of PDFs, PPTs, XLSs, DOCs, etc.
Frequently feature commercially focused content
Many levels of links away from highly trusted websites
Rarely contain privacy policy and copyright notice pages
Rarely listed in Better Business Bureau's Online Directory
Rarely contains high grade level text content (as measured by metrics like Fleisch-Kincaid Reading Level)
Rarely have small snippets of text quoted on other websites and pages
Cloaking based on user-agent or IP address is common
Rarely contain paid analytics tracking software
Rarely have online or offline marketing campaigns
Rarely have affilliate link programs pointing to them
Less likely to have .com or .org extensions
Almost never have .mil, .edu or .gov extensions
Rarely have links from domains with .edu or .gov extensions
Almost never have links from domains with .mil extensions
Rarely receive high quantities of monthly visits
Rarely have visits lasting longer than 30 seconds
Rarely have visitors bookmarking their domains in the browser
Unlikely to buy significant quantities of PPC ad traffic
Rarely have banner ad media buys
Likely to have links to a significant portion of the sites and pages that link to them
Extremely unlikely to be mentioned or linked-to in scientific research papers
Unlikely to use expensive web technologies (Microsoft Server & Coding Products that Require a Licensing Fee)
Likely to be registered by parties who own a very large number of domains
Unlikely to attract significant return traffic
More likely to contain malware, viruses or spyware (or any automated downloads)

For high quality content domains, the opposite is true (at least, for a good percentage of these). Now think about the sites you're building - which features apply to them? What could you do differently to be more like the "high quality" category and less like the "spam"?

BTW - Love to hear your take on features you think are common to spam, or to high quality sites.

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