Although this sounds backwards we've completed the UI integration for podcast download settings per feed but not for global podcast download settings for RSS Bandit. Below is what the "Attachments\Podcasts" tab on the properties dialog for a feed looks like currently

I decided that we would make the "Create a playlist for downloaded podcasts in iTunes" and "Create a playlist for downloaded podcasts in Windows Media Player" would only be global settings which can't be specified per feed. Are there any obvious settings that are missing from this tab that you'd like to see? 

 

I haven't really been blogging much about Windows Live over the past few weeks mainly because none of what I've wanted to write seems like it was worth an entire post. Below is a brain dump of most of the items I've wanted to blog about and haven't for whatever reasons.

• One of the ideas I'm dabbling with now is how reputation and trust play into social networks particularly in the context of Windows Live. A couple of the things I've been considering are how to define reputation in the varous contexts we have in Windows Live and then how to represent it to users. So far, I've been looking across the various Windows Live services and seeing what they have in place today. When I first looked at a user profile in Windows Live QnA, I thought it was kind of weird that people have 3 reputation values attached to them; their Reputation which is on a five star rating system, their QnA Score and their Level. I read the explanation of scoring and the reputation system which makes sense but seemed to me to be somewhat complicated. I brought this up with Betsy Aoki who works on the team and she pointed out that this isn't much different from the XBox gamer card and people seem to understand that. I dunno, that still feels fairly complicated to me. Also, I'm not sure if the paradigm that seems to work for a video game reputation system translates well to other contexts (e.g. buyer/seller reputation in Windows Live Expo). What do you think? 

• I heard we've released a beta of Windows Live Barcode which sounds like a pretty cool service. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work in either IE 7 (beta 3) or Firefox 1.5. I suspect that this wasn't ready to beta but was discovered by some clever sleuths. Unfortunate.
  

• I think I finally understand why the business folks would rather call the service Windows Live Local instead of Windows Live Maps. It's an attempt to indicate what the preferred user behavior should be. A maps website isn't very lucrative from a business perspective because when someone is looking for a map it means they know where they are going and ads won't be interesting to them. On the other hand, when someone goes to a local search website they are likely looking for a business near them and ads are very relevant at that point. Now I get it. However I still think we should rename the service to Windows Live Maps. :)

• Speaking of Windows Live Maps Local, the team is once again taking feature requests for the next version of the product. My #1 feature would be the ability to overlay movie theater locations and movie times on a map. My #2 feature would be simplifying the UI and making it easier to (a) get a permalink to a map and (b) navigate to my collections. Let the team know what you think. A lot of the improvements in this version of the product came out of direct user feedback.
  

• Mary Jo Foley has an article entitled Microsoft earns a mixed report card for its year-old Live initiative which gives some perspective from Microsoft outsiders on the entire "Live" initiative. As usual the #1 complaint seems to be that our consumer branding story is still very confusing with the existence of both MSN services and Windows Live services living side-by-side. Maybe we'll do better with regards to this on our second birthday.

• The Windows Live Expo team have posted some information updates to the Expo API. It looks like the API now allows you to do searches using any combination of City, State or Zip Code which fixes my main problem with the API. Thanks Samir. :)

• The Windows Live Messenger 8.1 beta is now available. Learn more about it in Nicole's post Messenger 8.1 Beta says: Hello World. Nothing major in this release, just a couple of nice touches such as improvements to the Contact Card and being able to use the same display picture across multiple machines instead of the picture being tied to your PC. The Messenger team continues to be my second favorite Windows Live team*. Keep on rocking.

*My favorite Windows Live team is the Windows Live Local crew.
 

Mark Cuban just posted an interesting take on the recent purchase of YouTube by Google by a media industry insider. Below are some excerpts from the post Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal, it is interesting reading and gives some insight on how business is conducted in Corporate America today.

> I'm an experienced veteran in the digital media business and thought
> I'd share my version of events that happened at Youtube. Some of this
> is based on talks with people involved and some is speculation based
> on my experience working in the industry, negotiating settlements and
> battling in court.
...
> In the months preceding the sale of YouTube the complaints from
> copyright owners began to mount at a ferocious pace. Small content
> owners and big were lodging official takedown notices only to see
> their works almost immediately reappear. These issues had to be
> disclosed to the suitors who were sniffing around like Google but
> Yahoo was deep in the process as well. (News Corp inquired but since
> Myspace knew they were a big source of Youtube's traffic they quickly
> choked on the 9 digit price tag.) While the search giants had serious
> interest, the suitors kept stumbling over the potential enormous
> copyright infringement claims that were mounting.
...
> So the parties (including venture capital
> firm Sequoia Capital) agreed to earmark a portion of the purchase
> price to pay for settlements and/or hire attorneys to fight claims.
> Nearly 500 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price is not being
> disbursed to shareholders but instead held in escrow.
>
> While this seemed good on paper Google attorneys were still
> uncomfortable with the enormous possible legal claims and speculated
> that maybe even 500 million may not be enough -
...
> Google wasn't worried about
> the small guys, but the big guys were a significant impediment to a
> sale. They could swing settlement numbers widely in one direction or
> another. So the decision was made to negotiate settlements with some
> of the largest music and film companies. If they could get to a good
> place with these companies they could get confidence from attorneys
> and the ever important "fairness opinion" from the bankers involved
> that this was a sane purchase.
>
> Armed with this kitty of money Youtube approached the media companies
> with an open checkbook to buy peace.
...
> The media companies had their typical challenges. Specifically, how to
> get money from Youtube without being required to give any to the
> talent (musicians and actors)?
...
> It was decided the media companies would receive an equity
> position as an investor in Youtube which Google would buy from them.
> This shelters all the up front monies from any royalty demands by
> allowing them to classify it as gains from an investment position.
...
> Since everyone was reaching into Google's wallet, the big G wants to
> make sure the Youtube purchase was a wise one.
...
> The media companies had 50 million reasons to want to help.
> Google needed a two pronged strategy which you see unfolding now.
>
> The first request was a simple one and that was an agreement to look
> the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement
> continues to flourish. This standstill is cloaked in language about
> building tools to help manage the content and track royalties,
...
> The second request was to pile some lawsuits on competitors to slow
> them down and lock in Youtube's position. As Google looked at it they
> bought a 6 month exclusive on widespread video copyright infringement.
> Universal obliged and sued two capable Youtube clones Bolt and
> Grouper. This has several effects. First, it puts enormous pressure on
> all the other video sites to clamp down on the laissez-faire content
> posting that is prevalent. If Google is agreeing to remove
> unauthorized content they want the rest of the industry doing the same
> thing. Secondly it shuts off the flow of venture capital investments
> into video firms. Without capital these firms can't build the data
> centers and pay for the bandwidth required for these upside down
> businesses.

This is very interesting reading and has a ring of truth to it. It definitely explains a lot that has happened with regards to the YouTube sale to Google for such a high price, the announcements of deals between YouTube and major copyright holders at the same time, as well as the fact that a number of video sharing sites got sued but not YouTube.

PS: This latest finaly convinced me to take the plunge and subscribe to Mark Cuban's blog. Great stuff.

 

In a blog post entitled Reinventing HTML Tim Berners-Lee writes

The perceived accountability of the HTML group has been an issue. Sometimes this was a departure from the W3C process, sometimes a sticking to it in principle, but not actually providing assurances to commenters. An issue was the formation of the breakaway WHAT WG, which attracted reviewers though it did not have a process or specific accountability measures itself.

There has been discussion in blogs where Daniel Glazman, Björn Hörmann, Molly Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman and others have shared concerns about W3C works particularly in the HTML area. The validator and other subjects cropped up too, but let's focus on HTML now. We had a W3C retreat in which we discussed what to do about these things.

Some things are very clear. It is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of HTML. It is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. And also all the other stakeholders, including users and user companies and makers of related products.

Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.

The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.

Wow. It's good to see the W3C reacting to all the negative criticism it has received on its stewardship of HTML in recent times. A few months ago I linked to a number of the complaints from the markup geek crowd that  Tim Berners-Lee references in my post entitled W3C Process is Broken? Film at 11. Although it was clear the writing was on the wall, I didn't expect the W3C to change its course anytime soon. The inertia within that  organization is just that massive. With browser makers and Web developers being disenchanted with the W3C, this is the only thing they could do if they planned to remain relevant in the world of Web standards. Kudos to TimBL and the rest of the W3C crew for making this course correction. 

PS: I really need a personalized meme tracker. The linked post didn't make it onto TechMeme but it did make it onto the meme tracker on Planet Interwingly. I suspect it would have made it onto my list of 'interesting posts' if I had a personalized meme tracker running over my feed list as well.

 

I read an interesting pair of posts about Web startups competing with big companies like Google and Microsoft over the weekend. The first was a post by Bill Burnham entitled Search Applications: Search Startups Are Dead, Long Live Search Startups where he writes 

In response to a question about the prospects for the myriad of search start-ups looking for funding Peter basically said, and I am paraphrasing somewhat, that search start-ups, in the vein of Google, Yahoo Ask, etc. are dead.  Not because search isn’t a great place to be or because they can’t create innovative technologies, but because the investment required to build and operate an Internet-scale, high performance crawling, indexing, and query serving farm were now so great that only the largest Internet companies had a chance of competing.

Priced Out of the Market
While the comment might strike some as self-serving, the fact of the matter is that it is true.  Any start-up trying to displace Google, Yahoo, or even MSN or Ask (or for that matter any VC trying to fund them) should just get in their car (or hop on a plane) and go look at Google’s new server farms at The Dales in Oregon.  And if that doesn’t convince them they should head up the Columbia river a bit and check out Microsoft and Yahoo’s digs.   The costs to compete in core search , are now simply to high.

Bill then goes on to argue that the opportunity may lay in building applications on top of the APIs provided by the big software companies such as the Alexa Web Search Platform instead of trying to compete head to head with companies that have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building out their search infrastructure. In a post in response to Bill Burnham, Tim O'Reilly agrees that "we're entering the platform phase of Web 2.0, in which first generation applications are going to turn into platforms".

Dave Winer comes to the same realization but with a different conclusion in his post Someday search will be old too where he writes

Many years ago, when the Internet was still the domain of geeks, researchers and college students, the smart folks often said that the opportunities for new software companies were over, it simply required too much scale to compete in an industry dominated by Lotus, Microsoft and Ashton-Tate. Now it's clear how ridiculous that was, even though it was correct. The next layer comes on not by building on the old layer (a trick, the guy you're building on will eat your lunch), or re-doing what they did (what the naysayers correctly say you can't do), but by starting from a different place and building something new, and so different that the old guys don't understand it and don't feel threatened by it.

Dave seems to be disagreeing with Bill Burnham and Tim O'Reilly that building on the platforms provided by the big software companies is a good idea because the companies can turn around and compete with you. Although I can see Dave's point, simply having the same base platform doesn't mean you can build the same application. We all have access to Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP but how many people have or can build something like Flickr? You should definitely examine the risks when building on any platform but eventually you have to be ready to face off against a competitor that may have access to the same or a similar platform as you. You're development platform cannot be your only differentiator.

I do agree more with the spirit of what Dave Winer is recommending than what Tim O'Reilly  & Bill Burnham are. If I ever founded a startup, it would take advantage of the knowledge I have of what big companies like Microsoft are good at and what they aren't. For example, YouTube would never have come out of Microsoft because the company would have been too scared of lawsuits. Of course, now that YouTube has money they are getting hit up from every angle so that fear does make sense for a big company but not a small startup especially if the exit strategy is to flip it. 

 

I had some DNS issues last week because I forgot to renew my domain name registration. According to my FeedBurner statistics page, one of the consequences of this lapse on my part is that I've lost about 1,000 subscribers to my feed on Rojo. It looks like they may have decommissioned my feed in their service once the domain name stopped resolving after a couple of hours. This seems like a reasonable thing to do.

I've sent some mail to the Rojo folks through their feedback email address but don't hold out much for ever getting a response. It may be that there is nothing for them to fix since the relationship between my feed and the subscribers may have been deleted from their database once my domain was considered to be gone.

Anyway, if you are a Rojo user wondering why my feed disappeared from you subscription list, now you know. 

 

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.