April 15, 2005
@ 07:39 PM

I've been bemused by a number of posts attacking Volvo by Henry Copeland who runs BlogAds.com. In his recent posts, such as Volvo buys safety, gets dreck and Volvo Whiplash, Henry Copeland attacks Volvo for sponsoring MSN Spaces where most blogs have a small readership as opposed to paying him to put ads on the weblogs of "A-List" bloggers such as Dave Winer and Andrew Sullivan which have a larger number of readers than the average MSN Spaces blog.

I could write an entire essay refuting this type of thinking but Chris Anderson has already done so in his article The Long Tail. It is a very insightful look at how to view audiences for  content and the fallacy of chasing after the big hits or popular content to garner success in the market place.


 

Categories: MSN

I've recently ben thinking about the problems facing search and navigation systems that depend on metadata applied to content provided by the creator of the content. This includes systems like Technorati Tags which searches the <category> elements in various RSS feeds and folksonomies like del.icio.us which searches tags applied to links submitted by users.

A few months ago I wrote a post entitled Technorati Tags: Why Do Bad Ideas Keep Resurfacing? which pointed out that Technorati Tags had the same problems that had plagued previous metadata self-annotation schemes on the Web such as HTML META tags. The main problem being that People Lie. Since then I've seen a number of complaints from developers of search engines that depend on RSS metadata.

In a comment to a post entitled Blogspot Spam in Matthew Mullenweg's weblog, Bob Wyman of PubSub.com writes

A very high percentage of the spam blogs that we process at PubSub.com also come from blogspot. We’ve got more serious “problems” in Japan and China, however, for the English language, blogspot is pretty much “spamspot.” It is, as always, disappointing to see people abuse a good and free service like that offered by Google/Blogspot in such a way.

In a post entitled Turning Blogspot Off Scott Johnson of Feedster wrote

All Blogspot blogs right now are included in every Feedster search by default. And now, due to the massive problems with spam on Blogspot, we're actually at the point of saying "Why don't we make searching Blogspot optional for all Feedster users". What's going on is that spammers have learned how to massively exploit Blogspot -- to the point where at times 90% of the blog traffic we get from Blogspot is spam.

Now that's bad. Actually this spam issue just plain sucks. And its starting to ruin the user experience that people have with Feedster.

The main reason these spam blogs haven't started affecting the Technorati Tags feature is that Blogspot doesn't support categories. However it is clear that the same problems search engines faced when they decided to trust HTML metadata are beginning to show up when it comes to searching RSS metadata. This is one place where established search engines would have a leg up on upstarts like Feedster and PubSub if they got into the RSS search market since they've already had to adapt to all sorts of 'search engine optimization' tricks.

On a related note, combining the above information about the high number of spam blogs on Google's Blogspot service with the recent article Bloggers Pitch Fits Over Glitches which among other things states

In fact, enter "Blogger sucks" in Google and you get 720,000 results, with most of the entries on the first few pages (read: the most popular) dedicated to these exasperating tech snafus. It can make for some pretty ugly reading. Imagine what they might say if they actually paid for the service?

But if you look at Blogger's status page, which lists service outages, you can see why they are so mad.

It seems that Doc Searles may have been onto something about Google quiting innovating in Blogger.  


 

My friend Derek, who's the dev lead for MSXML (the XML toolkit used by practically every Microsoft application from Office to Internet Explorer), has a blog post entitled XML use in the browser where he writes

C|Net has an article on what people have started calling AJAX. 'A'synchronous JavaScript and Xml. I have seen people using MSXML to build these kinds of web-apps for years, but only recently have people really pulled it all together enough, such as GMail or Outlook Web-Access (OWA). In fact, MSXML's much copied XMLHTTP (a.k.a. IXMLHttpRequest) (Copied by Apple and Mozilla/Firefox) was actually created basically to support the first implementation of OWA.

I've been thinking about what our customers want in future versions of MSXML. What kind of new functionality would enable easier/faster developement of new AJAX style web applications? XForms has some interesting ideas... I've been thinking about what we might add to MSXML to make it easier to develop rich DHtml applications. XForms is an interesting source of ideas, but I worry that it removes too much control. I don't think you could build GMail on XForms, for example.

The most obvious idea, would be to add some rich data-binding. Msxml already has some _very_ limited XML data-binding support. I have not looked much into how OWA or GMail work, but I bet that a significant part of the client-side jscript is code to regenerate the UI from the XML data behind the current page. Anyone who has used ASP/PHP/etc is used to the idea of some sort of loop to generate HTML from some data. What if the browser knew how to do that for you? And knew how to push back changes from editable controls? You can do that today with ADO.

Any other ideas? For those of you playing with 'AJAX' style design. What are the pain points? (Beside browser compatibility... )

If you are building applications that use XML in the browser and would like to influence the XML framework that will be used by future versions of Microsoft applications from Microsoft Office to Internet Explorer then you should go over to Derek's blog and let him know what you think.


 

Categories: XML

A recent favorable review of RSS Bandit on About.com pointed out a missing feature that I've seen more and more of our users asking for. The bottom line of the review reads

RSS Bandit is a nice and very capable feed reader that lets you browse news in an organized fashion. Its flexibility, virtual folders and synchronization abilities are great, but it would be even greater if it integrated with Bloglines and NewsGator Online, too.

Although we have various options for using RSS Bandit from multiple computers, many users find them inaccessible because they don't have access to an FTP server or a WebDAV server. Also in certain cases, one may not want to install RSS Bandit on a machine that was being used temporarily but instead use a Web application which could then be synchronized with RSS Bandit later on.

The main reason I didn't include syncing to Bloglines in the Wolverine release is that the Bloglines sync API is not very rich. RSS Bandit users can flag posts, delete them, mark read posts as unread and so on. None of this functionality is supported by the Bloglines sync API. Similarly users cannot add or delete feeds using the Bloglines sync API. This means that there really isn't any way I could fully synchronize the state of an RSS Bandit instance with a person's Bloglines subscriptions. It seems the API was designed with the assumption that the user would be using Bloglines as their primary RSS reader not the other way around.

The way FeedDemon got around this problem was to create a separate channel group for Bloglines subscriptions which has limited functionality compared to other channel groups but is synchronized with the user's Bloglines subscriptions. This looks like the only reasonable approach as opposed to waiting indefinitely for the Bloglines sync API to develop more functionality.

The above argument also applies to syncing with the Newsgator Online service.

In the Nightcrawler release I'll ensure that we provide syncing to both Bloglines and Newsgator Online. However this will be via synchronized channel groups which won't be compatible with the existing synchronization mechanisms that use FTP and WebDAV today.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

April 12, 2005
@ 05:21 PM

This morning I found an interesting article about the growth of blogging entitled The Blogging Geyser: Blogs Blast from 31.6 Million Today to Reach 53.4 Million by Year End. Below is an excerpt about various blogging services which I found interesting  

Perseus prepared a segmentation of the key blog hosts by analyzing the sites on two dimensions - momentum (new user accounts averaged over the life of the service) and longevity (length of time operational) - establishing four key segments: Leaders, Challengers, Upstarts and Niche Players.

The leaders (high momentum, long-time players) were BlogSpot, LiveJournal and Xanga, all launched in 1999. At the end of the first quarter of 2005, each had between 6.6 and 8.2 million accounts. The primary challenger (high momentum, new player) is MSN Spaces , which launched in North America in December 2004 and was closing in on 4.5 million accounts at the end of the first quarter .

Upstarts (moderate momentum, new players) included Six Apart's TypePad and Greatest Journal among others. Niche players demonstrated longevity but little momentum.

Blogging Is A Feature, Too

One of the newer aspects of blogging is that it's now an added feature being incorporated into other web applications. Social networking sites like the reinvented MySpace.com and teen sites like Bolt.com now offer blogging as a standard feature of their online accounts. Blogging appears to be used by just 4.7 percent of Bolt's 4.5 million accounts and by a somewhat greater percentage of MySpace.com's 12 million accounts. While neither service has been included in this study, they are testaments to the continued expansion and growth of web logs.

A lot of us working on MSN Spaces have been pretty humbled and impressed by how quickly the service has grown. During the beta period the service was acquiring users at the rate of about a million signups a month. When the site had about 4.5 million users we were seeing about 160,000 to a 180,000 updates a day which is about 4% of blogs being updated a day. These numbers compare quite favorably with LiveJournal's statistics which currently show they have 6.7 million blogs with 350,000 to 370,000 updates a day which is about 5% of blogs being updated a day. Given that LiveJournal is one of the most active and tight-knit blogging communities on the Web, it seems that MSN Spaces is definitely doing some things right.

Given that the service is now out of beta along with MSN Messenger coming out of beta I expect that its growth rate will increase over the next few months. It is pretty exciting to realize that the stuff I'm currently working on as part of my day job will directly affect millions of people. 

Totally...freaking...awesome.   

PS: A minor clarification to the article. Spaces actually launched in 14 languages and 26 markets worldwide last year, not just North America. 


 

Categories: MSN

April 12, 2005
@ 04:44 PM

This is primarily a bug fix release that fixes a couple of issues that weren't caught in beta testing for the previous release.

Download the installer from here. Differences between v1.3.0.26 and v1.3.0.29 below.

----

FEATURE: The 'Take over proxy settings from Internet Explorer' feature now supports proxy configuration scripts.

FEATURE: Traditional Chinese translation added.

FIXED: Application would crash on startup with the following error message; "ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Length cannot be less than zero"  

FIXED: Dates in the RFC 822 format not containing the seconds caused problems

FIXED: Search scope settings in search folders are lost after restart of the application

FIXED: A web search engine cannot be removed from the list of defined search engines

FIXED: Column layouts not synchronized during remote storage

FIXED: RSS 2.0 feeds with extension elements before the <rss> element could not be read

FIXED: HTTP Digest authentication was not supported for feeds

FIXED: Enable Alert Windows for New Items setting resets on remote feedlist download or on restart

FIXED: Feed Desktop Alerts now display the newest item(s) first

FIXED: Feeds with invalid value in the HTTP "Last-Modified" header could not be read.

FIXED: Application would crash with the following error message; "NullReferenceException caused in WinGuiMain.SaveUIConfiguration() at ThreadedListView.FeedColumnLayoutFromCurrentSettings()"


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

April 10, 2005
@ 04:47 PM

There are some words that when I read in prose, such as blog posts, immediately let me know the author is either a pretentious windbag or just plain clueless. The most recent addition to this list is Web 2.0. For an example of what I mean, read Technorati, Bloglines, and The Economics of Feeds.

I suspect a lot of the people yacking about Web 2.0 now are the same ones who were gushing about the New Economy a few short years ago.

Despite my dislike of the term, it is likely I'll be at the Web 2.0 Conference this fall.

*sigh*


 

Categories: Ramblings

Jonathan Pincus contacted me a few days ago about being part of a birds of a feather session on "20% Time" at the 15th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy. It will be held at the Westin in Seattle at 9PM on Thursday, April 14th.

It seems there'll be someone from Google there as well which should interesting. I'd like to hear how Google handled some of the issues raised in my post Some Thoughts and Questions About Google 20% Time.


 

Categories: Technology

I saw an link to an interesting site in Robert Scoble's post Paul remixes Google Maps and Craig's List in interesting new way  where he writes

What happens when you mix Google Maps with Craig's List? Paul Rademacher shows us.

This is a cautionary tale for Microsoft: them who has the best API's will get used in the most interesting new ways.

Like Ballmer says: developers, developers, developers, developers, developers...

Actually this has little to do with APIs given that there is neither an official Craig's List API nor is there a Google Maps API. This looks more like a combination of HTML screen scraping for getting the Craig's List data and good old fashioned reverse engineering. I suspect Paul didn't have to do much reverse engineering in the Google Maps case because Engadget already published an article called HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map which shows exactly how to build your own applications on top of Google Maps.

Despite that this is definitely a cool hack.

This shows one of the interesting side effects of building an AJAX site. You basically have to create an API for all the Javascript callbacks from the web browser back to the server. Once you do that, anyone else can call this API as well. I doubt that the Google folks anticipated that there would be this much interest in the API the browser uses the talk to the Google Maps server.

PS: Is anyone other reader of Scoble's blog irritated by the fact that he can't point to anything on the Web without throwing some Microsoft spin on it?


 

Categories: Technology

I just stumbled on a post by Phil Gyford entitled With great audiences where he discusses whether bloggers have a responsibility to do more fact checking once they grow to having a large audience. Phil writes

With this greater audience comes a greater responsibility. If 100,000 people are reading your words you need to be more certain about what you say than if it’s just for a bunch of mates. I can’t help feeling that Boing Boing has stepped past the hazy mark where it can get away with publishing off-the-cuff posts about events in the world without spending some of the time and money we assume those ads are generating on checking facts. Let’s look at a couple of examples that might have benefited from more research.

In January there was a post about a man who was arrested for attempting to hack a tsunami appeal website. For Boing Boing the juicy story wasn’t that the man was arrested (as reported by BBC News a week earlier) but that he was arrested for using an unusual browser, which the company managing the donations mistook for a hacking attempt. It’s a great story, but Boing Boing’s basis for this report comes from a source on an unnamed mailing list. Cory’s introduction to the mailing list quote reports the event as fact, not rumour, and this no doubt contributed to hundreds of other weblogs in turn reporting the event as fact.

Leaving aside the mindless gullibility of all these other webloggers, when readers start assuming what you post is fact this is probably a sign that you should be checking those facts a little more.

The second example is Boing Boing’s post about a high-school principal who “banned blogging” because it “isn’t educational”. Part of the blame lies with the source story at the Rutland Herald whose over-eager sub-editors misleadingly headlined the story “High school bans blogging”. In fact the school banned a single website and the principal simply issued a sensible warning about children weblogging — as with any activity online, kids should be careful with the information they make public.

But Boing Boing got carried away with the newspaper’s headline, repeating it in theirs even though a cursory read of the newspaper article reveals that no one “banned blogging”. The newspaper claims the principal doesn’t think blogging is educational, and Cory could certainly have criticised him for this alone, although it would make for a less dramatic post. The repetition of the lie about the principal banning blogging, rather than his apparent opinion, is possibly also what prompted a reader to suggest people should email the principal to complain.

A professional publication should have called the school to verify the story before simply republishing it. Otherwise the publication would, perhaps, end up criticised on Boing Boing like the Indian news agencies that blindly repeated a hoax in February.

I found Phil's post via Clay Shirky's post Banning blogging, 'Toothing, and Yoz. Clay Shirky seems to agree with Phil and goes one step further to admonish bloggers who simply echo what they read on the Web without applying critical thinking to what they are reading. He also points out that Boing Boing is not alone in this behavior by writing

My employer is a victim of the half truths and rumors Slashdot spreads on an almost weekly basis. There are lots of stories about Microsoft that are now part of the IT culture which are mainly rumors started on Slashdot. A few months ago the MSN Spaces team was the target of a flood of critical posts in the blogosphere after a misinterpretation of the terms of use for the service were posted to Boing Boing. This doesn't seem much different to me than supermarket tabloids that are always reporting rumors about  Brad & Jen, Nick & Jessica or J-Lo & P.Diddy. 

The most interesting response to Phil's post I've seen is Danah Boyd's post in defense of BoingBoing (or why i'm not a journalist) which argues that Cory and Xeni (Boing Boing editors) are simply blogging as a form of self expression and the fact that they have a large readership should not be considered a responsibility by them.

Maybe I'm just a corny comic book geek but I've always felt "With great power, comes great responsibility". To each his own, I guess.


 

Categories: Ramblings