Thanks to Marc Canter's post, And what about the Aggregator Vendors? I'm reminded that there is still work to do before I've turned RSS Bandit into a satisfactory podcast client. With the basic code for downloading podcasts now implemented I've now turned my mind to how to get the downloaded rich media content onto a user's device and/or media player of choice. For the most part, I'm assuming that people are either using iTunes (version 6 or later) or Windows Media Player (version 10 or later).

Getting the music or videos onto a playlist in the users media player seems to be mostly straightforward. I've found C# sample code for creating playlists in iTunes and creating playlists in Windows Media Player. The tricky part has been figuring out how to get the music onto the users portable media player  (e.g. their iPod or Creative Zen) as opposed to their PC hard drive and creating a playlist on the device that includes the newly downloaded file. Doing the first isn't that bad if the device can be mounted as an external hard drive because the user can just specify that RSS Bandit should download files to a folder on that external drive. On the other hand, none of the sample code I've seen talks about creating a playlist on the portable media player. Any help here from my readers would be greatly appreciated. 

PS: I briefly considered embedding an instance of Windows Media Player in RSS Bandit but that seems like overkill compared to just having a [Play] button that opens the file in the user's preferred media player for that file type.

 

Robert Scoble has a blog post entitled New audience metric needed: engagement where he writes

I was just reading Jeneane Sessum’s post about the latest Ze Frank/Rocketboom dustup and she’s right, we need to measure stuff other than just whether a download got completed or not. She says we need a “likeability” stat. I think it goes further than that.

There’s another stat out there called “engagement.” No one is measuring it that I know of. What do I mean?

Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see.

Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.

I've heard Frank Shaw state anecdotally that blogs are more 'influential' than traditional media websites. You get more click-throughs from being mentioned in a popular blog than from being mentioned in a more popular technology website. I'm interested in theories on why this is the case. Could it be that bloggers are more 'influential' over their audience than traditional media? Are blog readers more 'engaged' as Robert puts it?

PS: I read Jeneane's Sessum's post to be quite irritating. The smug assumption that if you like something then it must be more popular or at least 'better' on some made-up axis than what everyone else likes is a hallmark of the blogosphere echo-chamber. You see the same kind of egotistical thinking in Stowe Boyd's post criticizing Yahoo! bookmarks in comparison to del.icio.us.

 

In his blog post entitled Yahoo Bookmarks Enters 21st Century Mike Arrington writes

Yahoo is unveiling an entirely new Bookmarks product this evening at new.bookmarks.yahoo.com - new interface, new back-end, the works. A screencast created by Yahoo developer Tom Chi is here which gives an excellent overview of the service (Chi also created the background music for the screencast). Compare that to the existing Bookmarks product (screenshot is here) and it’s clear how significant the overhaul is.

Yahoo Bookmarks, while invisible to most cutting edge web users, still claims around 20 million active users (compared to only 1 million for del.icio.us).

Until today, Yahoo Bookmarks (which is a separate product from del.icio.us and My Web) stored only the URL, title and comment for a particular bookmark. The new product caches all text on the page, stores a thumbnail view, and allows both categorization (folders) and tagging of each bookmark.

There are two things that I found striking about this announcement. The first is that Yahoo! has three bookmarking products; del.icio.us, My Web and Yahoo! Bookmarks. The second is that it looks like my shunning del.icio.us while continuing to use Yahoo! Bookmarks isn't so weird after all, there are twenty times more people using Yahoo's regular bookmarking service compared to its social bookmarking product.

At this rate it looks like del.icio.us is destined to be a niche service unless something radical is done such as merging Yahoo! Bookmarks and del.icio.us into a single service. Of course, given the user outcry when Netscape.com revamped to be more Digg-like, the folks at Yahoo! may not have the stomach for this.

Faint heart never won fair lady. 

 

In the past few months there have been a couple of announcements from the big search engines such as Yahoo! and Live Search on the topic of enabling people to build their own custom search engines. Google has finally showed up at the party with their own offering which was unveiled today. Below are my thoughts on their offering versus that of Windows Live.

Google Co-op

In his blog post entitled Review: Custom Search Engine Matt Cutts of Google writes

Google just announced something that I’m really jazzed about: Google Custom Search Engine. Several people mentioned that Google’s Accessible Search was built by using Google Co-op under the hood. Co-op has opened much of that power up to the public, so that anyone can build a custom search engine.

Most custom search engines (whether it be Google’s free sitesearch or Yahoo! Search Builder) only let you select one site to search, or you can offer websearch. Even Rollyo only lets you search over 25 sites.

This new offering lets you easily add hundreds (thousands?) of urls. You can search over ONLY the sites you choose, or (my favorite) you can apply a boost to the sites you choose, with regular websearch as a backfill. That’s really nice, because if your chosen urls talk about a subject, you’ll often get matches from those urls, but if the user types something completely unrelated, you’ll still get web results back. So it’s a true custom search engine, not just an engine restricted to showing matches from some domains.

You can also choose to exclude results from different sites. As far as I can tell, this happens in pretty close to real-time, even for complex url patterns. For example, I added the pattern “google.com/*” and started to get results from the Google directory, so I excluded “google.com/Top/*” and the Google directory results went away immediately.

There is also a screenshot included in Mike Arrington's post at TechCrunch entitled Google Co-op Launches which is excerpted below

This isn’t new - Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo already have similar products. But Google is also offering, as an option, to bundle the service with Google Adsense ads and share revenue with websites that embed the custom search engine into their site. Only Eurekster currently shares revenue with users. Yahoo’s product, which got a lot of press at launch, has barely been mentioned in the nearly three months since then.

I didn't even realize that Yahoo! had an offering in this space until reading the TechCrunch entry. This doesn't seem to have gotten that much blogosphere love.

Live Search Macros

The Windows Live Search team wrote about the changes to the Search Macros feature originally announced in March in their blog post entitled Create your own search engine (an update to Live Search Macros) which states

Search Macros are personalized search engines for any topic area of interest.  You can create them, use them, share them with friends or discover macros created by the community on Windows Live Gallery.

I’d like to use this post to give you a basic overview of using and creating macros.  We’ll use future posts to dive into more of the nitty gritty on specific macros features.

Finding and using macros

Users of the first Macros release told us that using a macro was difficult and not very user friendly.  In this release, every macro now has its own homepage and human readable URL.  This makes them much easier to use, bookmark, and send to friends over email or IM.  For example, check out the homepage for the Reference Sites Search Engine macro (at http://search.live.com/macros/livesearch/reference):
...
Enter a search term on this page and press Enter. You’ll be taken to the main Live Search page to see your results.
...
On the results page you'll see that the macro’s name appears in the search bar at the top of the screen.  This enables you to switch back and forth between Web, Images, Local, QnA and your favorite macros.

Here are some macros to try:

•   Search top reference site on the Web with the Reference Sites Search Engine
•   Search all content on the Microsoft Developer Network with the MSDN Search Engine
•   Search all of the latest video game information with the Video Games Search Engine

You can also find many more in the Windows Live Gallery!

Andy Edmonds from the Live Search team has written a couple of blog posts about the cool things you can do with search macros such as Search Macros Recap: DiggRank and the Power of Trusted Networks

Macros are often compared to Rollyo or other site bundling search offerings, but I hope the blog post describing LinkFromDomain, LinkDomain, and featuring other operators, sets the record straight.  Defining a set of sites to search is cool, and an idea well due to be commonly available. To be fair, Rollyo's UI and integration is slick, but  Micah Alpern hacked up a search of his blog, the blogs he linked to, or the web at large with a Google API hack back in 2003!

Using the link domain operators, you can go well beyond a simple set of sites.  You can:

• keep a living list of the sites that link to you and search them
• keep a living list of the sites you link to and search them
• do the same for a set of trusted sites

Access to other advanced syntax differentiates further from simple site search amalgamations.  Heck, Scoble pontificated about a search engine that excluded blogs that participate in pay per post.  While I didn't figure out a way to focus this on only those PPP bloggers who don't disclose their interest, I think it's impressive that the basics can be done at all.  It's called macro:andyed.realBloggers, and uses -inbody:counttrackula.com to exclude sites that use the PPP tracking script (I think!) and hasfeed: to restrict to blogs (or other pages with syndication).

Super Hubs: DiggRank
The promise of personal networks of trust in information retrieval is not fully realized by the macros offering, but it's an important step in the right direction.  For super-hubs, like Digg or Delicious, linkFromDomain captures some really interesting human attentional residue.

Let me introduce macro:andyed.DiggRank. Try it for:

• coffee
• George Bush
• midterm elections

The Bottom Line

I tried out both services as well as Yahoo! Search Builder and they all seem to have some room for improvement. Both Google & Yahoo! have primarily built a way to add a custom search box for your site. Windows Live Search is primarily about adding your own customized search results to your search engine of choice. I think both scenarios should be covered by all the services. I think Live Search should give me the option of adding a search box on my blog that is powered by a search macro I wrote. Similarly, I'd like to be able to perform custom searches from the Google or Yahoo! search UI without having to remember how to get to http://google.com/coop/cse/ or http://builder.search.yahoo.com/. I have to agree with Sergey Brin here, Features, Not Products. This is yet another Google service that I have to perform a Google search for before I can find it and use it (others are Google Music Search and Google Blog Search).

One thing I do like about Google and Yahoo!'s options is that they provide a more user friendly UI for creating complex searches than Live Search which provides you with direct access to the search operators. This is more powerful and desirable to geeks like me but it is not very user friendly for the non-geek. A checkbox with 'prefer search results from these sites' is preferable to crafting a search query with "prefer:http://www.25hoursaday.com AND prefer:http://www.rssbandit.org".

The management page for Google Co-op needs a lot of work. It is sparse in the typical Google way but it also doesn't seem coherent nor does it give you enough information about what you can or should be doing. The management page for Yahoo! Search Builder is a lot more coherently organized and aesthetically pleasing. The search macro management page for Live Search also could do with some improvement, primarily in simplifying the process for creating complex macros.

PS: Revenue sharing is a nice touch by Google and I'd be quite surprised if Yahoo! doesn't follow suite soon.

 

I found the time to start on integrating the ability to download podcasts in RSS Bandit today. One of the things I realized is that we can't make the blanket assumption that every enclosure we see in an RSS or Atom feed is a podcast. I decided that instead of only exposting enclosures as podcasts, it would be more generic and maybe more useful to treat them as file attachments to feed items.

Below is a screenshot of what this looks like

There are other bits of UI we have to add such as a download queue and a podcasts inbox. I've also been thinking of adding the option to enqueue downloaded podcasts in iTunes or Windows Media Player. I wonder if the Zune player will provide an API so I can add that as an option as well. I should ask around at  work.

I also explicitly decided against any sort of podcasts directory functionality. If we don't typically use 'blog directories' why do we need feed directories? We're about two weeks from being done with this feature after which we'll ship a beta of the Jubilee release. My current thinking is a beta before Thanksgiving in the U.S. and the final release just before the Christmas holidays.

 

I got an email over the weekend from a friend of mine who's leaving Microsoft. I wasn't surprised to see him leave Microsoft, given that the every project he's worked on at Microsoft has either been cancelled mid-project or end of lifed in that release. After being at Microsoft for five years, I've now begun to see the signs that a project is likely to crash and burn early on. Below is a top five list of signs your software project is in trouble I compiled as part of my 'parting career advice' to my intern.

1. Schedule Chicken: This is typically a sign that the project's schedules are unrealistic. A project with unrealistic schedule is either an indication of poor communication between layers in the product team or even worse, bad management that punishes the messenger when there is bad news (e.g. poor initial estimation of project length). The main problem with schedule chicken is that you can be "date driven" or you can be "quality driven", you can't be both.

2. Scope Creep: Requirements changing as a software project progresses are natural. They can change due to feedback from the customer after they get to try out a prototype, due to changes in the competitive landscape or because the original requirements had hidden conditions which were not discovered until after implementation. When things get bad is when the goals of a project are changed or increased significantly without a corresponding significant change to the expected timeframe for delivery. WinFS merging with Object Spaces is my canonical example of scope creep at Microsoft.

3. Underresourced: You don't bring a knife to a gun fight. So you shouldn't expect that 3 developers and $50,000 will be able to compete with the Googles and Microsofts of the world. Similarly, if you work at a big company and you have a handful of folks working on a product where competitors have large teams or entire companies working on the same problem space, you're probably in over your head.  

4. Second System Syndrome: Once you ship a software application, it instantly becomes legacy code. To a developer this means there is something newer and sexier that can solve the same problem in a more elegant way. Eventually a project is started which is intended to replace the existing product which customers are finding useful. This is often a double whammy. The new project is hamstrung out of the gate by having to meet customer expectations on backwards compatibility, performance and new features in comparison to the old product. This burden is often a crushing weight on the second system which eventually collapses under the strain. In addition, the old project is often abandoned or at best put in "maintenance mode" with only a skeleton crew working on it even though it pays the bills.  

5. No Entrance Strategy: There is a lot of talk in the software industry of exit strategies but a lot of the time software products do not have an entrance strategy. How do you get people to use the application? How do you get the first 100,000 or 1 million users? Sometimes in big companies, there is also the corporate strategy tax to consider when deciding whether a product has an entrance strategy or not. When I was on the XML team at Microsoft, there were folks on the team working on a project they called X#. The project was basically C# with extensions to handle relational and XML data access as operations native to the programming language. I attended an internal presentation about the project and when asked what the deliverable from the project would be, the team members actually showed a Photoshoped image of a Microsoft Visual C# box which read Microsoft Visual X#. Of course, this was at the time Microsoft was taking heat for introducing both C# & Visual Basic.NET at the same time. It was unlikely that Microsoft would ship a third similar language anytime soon. The project was killed, resurrected  and morphed a couple of times. The story eventually ended happily with a lot of the innovations in the language eventually showing up as .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) (aka C# 3.0). That was one instance with a happy ending, a counter example is the new file system for Windows being cancelled a few years after it was announced to be shipping separately from the operating system. A file system that doesn't ship with the operating system doesn't sound like a product with an entrance strategy to me. How about you?

 

Jeffrey Zeldman has a blog post entitled Web 2.0 Thinking Game where he writes

A few weeks back, The Economist was calling “Web 2.0″ a trend. Their phrase was, “hot Web 2.0 trend.” The magazine now intends “Web 2.0″ to be understood as a sort of second edition:

This week’s pairing of Google and YouTube may come to be remembered as the moment “Web 2.0″—ie, the web, version two—came of age.

Clearly “Web 2.0″ means different things to different journalists on different days. Mostly it means nothing—except a bigger paycheck. But let’s simplify what The Economist is saying:

Web 1.0: AOL buys Time Warner.
Web 2.0: Google buys YouTube.

Put another way:

Web 1.0: New media company buys old media company.
Web 2.0: New media company buys new media company.

If we’re stuck with this meaningless Web 2.0 label, let’s at least have some fun with it. Here’s my new game. I’ll start, you finish:
...
Web 1.0: Users create the content (Slashdot).
Web 2.0: Users create the content (Flickr).

Web 1.0: Crap sites on Geocities.
Web 2.0: Crap sites on MySpace.
...
Web 1.0: Karma Points.
Web 2.0: Diggs.

Web 1.0: Cool Site of the Day.
Web 2.0: Technorati.com.
...
Now you try it!

There are a lot of funny ones in the comments as well such as

Web 1.0: Old folks have no clue.
Web 2.0: My parents just left a comment on my blog. - Charlie

Web 1.0: Rational Unified Process implementing J2EE
Web 2.0: “Getting Real” using RoR - Kevan Emmot

Web 1.0: 20,000 Hits on my webpage!
Web 2.0: Ive been dugg 1000 times on Digg! - Regnard Raquedan

Web 1.0: Pamela Anderson
Web 2.0: Paris Hilton - Chase

Here're a couple of my own, let's see what you guys come up with

1. Web 1.0: Netscape IPO
   Web 2.0: Google IPO
   

2. Web 1.0: My startup just IPOed, I'm gonna be rich
   Web 2.0: My startup just got bought by Google, I'm gonna be rich

3. Web 1.0: Napster
   Web 2.0: YouTube
   

4. Web 1.0: Yahoo! Bookmarks
   Web 2.0: del.icio.us
   

5. Web 1.0: Java applets
   Web 2.0: Widgets
   

6. Web 1.0: Beth Goza
   Web 2.0: Niniane Wang

 

From a tech support article on the Apple website entitled Small Number of Video iPods Shipped With Windows Virus we learn

We recently discovered that a small number - less than 1% - of the Video iPods available for purchase after September 12, 2006, left our contract manufacturer carrying the Windows RavMonE.exe virus. This known virus affects only Windows computers, and up to date anti-virus software which is included with most Windows computers should detect and remove it. So far we have seen less than 25 reports concerning this problem. The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free. As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

If all else fails, Blame Microsoft!

PS: Found on the Channel 9 forums.

 

From the ACLU press release President Bush Signs Un-American Military Commissions Act, ACLU Says New Law Undermines Due Process and the Rule of Law we learn

WASHINGTON - As President Bush signed S. 3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law, the American Civil Liberties Union expressed outrage and called the new law one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history.
...
"The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions.  Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act."

It's a good thing the American media is keeping on top of all the important issues like which gay Republicans were having inappropriate relations with heir male interns instead of mundane bits of legal mumbo jumbo like the death of Habeus Corpus.

 

Joshua Allen has a blog post entitled He Bought Houses for the Whole Village where he writes

In China, nearly everyone has at least one story about, “someone from village ‘X’ started a business and got really rich, so he bought houses for the whole village.”  I’ve heard several variations, from people in different walks of life, over the past couple of years.  Although the details vary widely, the stories are sometimes true, and follow that same basic pattern.

I began to wonder, why is this such an appealing story for people to tell one another, and do we have similar stories in America?  That is, what kind of “good fortune” story is likely to get quickly passed from mouth to mouth among Americans?

I found it interesting reading to see Joshua trying to map this concept to American examples and failing to find a good comparison. Similar stories are quite common place in Nigeria or at least were when I still lived there almost a decade ago. There are lots of reasons why such occurences are common in places like Nigeria & China but not in places like America. My impression is that the top two are

1. Deeper Sense of Community: People from the same village in Nigeria typically share the same ancestors, the same culture spanning hundreds of years and speak the same language. Neither cities nor small towns in the America have the same history or depth of connectedness between people living in the same area. This sense of community also makes it more likely people will feel an obligation to helping their people from their village when they have good fortune. The closest analog to that sense of obligation being widespread in America has been college alumni associations. When I first moved here I found it surprising that people are more likely to spend money helping the school they went to college than their home town.
   
2. A Little Goes A Long Way: In Nigeria, most of the affluent people are a generation or less removed from living in huts in some remote part of the country. When my dad grew up, the richest man in the village was the guy with a bicycle and a radio. In a country where 70% of the population lives on less than $1 a day, it doesn't take much [by American standards] to better people's lives. In comparison, the average income in the U.S. is around $100 a day.
   

The rest of the reasons are mainly variations on the two mentioned above. The reason that in America

our word of mouth heroes are people who spend their money on incredibly stupid stuff.

as Joshua puts it can mainly be explained by the first point above. In Nigeria, you are expected to help those from where you came from as well as spend money on incredibly stupid stuff. In America, there isn't an expectation to help your roots except for looking after your parents and sending in donations to your college alumni association.