Apple releases new stuff, new blog search engine opens

February 28, 2006 By

Some guy named Steve Jobs was on stage this morning announcing stuff for some computer company in Cupertino. Didn’t ya hear? I know none of the blogs were covering it, right? ;-)

Anyway, I was just talking with Greg Hartnett, president of Best of the Web. He’s an Apple fan, by the way. But that’s not why we’re talking here. They just turned on a new blog search engine and directory. Now, how does this differ from Technorati?

It has far fewer blogs in it. Huh? All the blogs were hand picked by 69 editors.

So, let’s go to Technorati and do a search for “Steve Jobs”. 65,168 posts. Pretty good, but there is some spam there on the first page. Particularly one post named “Bill Gates Wants to Be Steve Jobs” is repeated several times.

Do the same “Steve Jobs” search on Best of the Web and it only finds 174 results. Now, that might sound like a mismatch, but the Best of the Web searches are often higher signal.

Anyway, I need to try it more to see if it’ll be a significant competitor for my blog search time with Technorati/Feedster/IceRocket/and all the other blog search engines.

So far I think this one needs more work, but it shows some promise. What do you think? The engine is here: http://blogs.botw.org/.

Update: I’ve done a few more searches and early returns on my comments show that this isn’t ready for prime time. It shows that blog search is hard to do.

Filed Under: Blog Stuff, Blog Tips, Bloggy Mountain High, Second Life

Check this out: Virtual Earth Streetlevel

February 28, 2006 By

Remember how A9 took a car with a few cameras on it down streets of major cities and let you see what the storefront looked like at a particular address? Well, we thought that was cool so wanted to take it to the next level.

Virtual Earth Streetlevel.

That link will take you to a Channel 9 video of Streetlevel that shows off what we did (and you’ll meet the team behind it). They took a van with 10 cameras to Seattle and San Francisco (more cities coming soon) and built quite a remarkable AJAX app. Lots of fun. Drive your own car down the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and you can search for the closest Starbucks, too! It’s like playing a video game. Driving through tunnels is a lot of fun!
How many images? Seattle alone is 10 million images. What a database!

You can check it out for yourself at http://preview.local.live.com/. More info is on the MSN Search blog.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Marc Canter, Microsoft Office

More details on Origami

February 27, 2006 By

News.com has more details on the Origami. I’m getting a good look on Monday morning. Right before the team hops on a plane to go to the CeBit conference in Germany.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, OS

New York, New York! (Danny wants better RSS in his SPOT watch)

February 27, 2006 By

I’m writing to you from a bus heading toward Manhattan. I love my Verizon card. It’s like having wifi EVERYWHERE!

Anyway, I’m up for a midnight snack tonight. Anyone game? Call my cell phone at 425-205-1921. I’m staying at the Sheraton Towers.

Update: well, that didn’t take long. Someone just called and we’re meeting in the lobby. I love having readers around the world. :-)

Update 2: it got even better. The guy who called was Jackson Fox of lulu.com. I took him to Times Square where we hit Roxy’s and had dinner. As we were finishing our cheesecakes the phone rang again. “Hello, this is Matt Cutts.” (He works at Google and is probably Google’s best known blogger SEO expert). We quickly figure out he’s at the Hilton, head over there and meet up in the lobby. He quickly drags us through the bar where a bunch of SEO types ran us through a gauntlet. Matt checks over the crowd and sees if he’ll get any more spam tricks out of the increasingly drunk geeks who try to figure out how to improve their Google ranking for their day jobs.

Did you know that there are about 5,000 attendees at this conference? Are search engines a big deal? Damn, who knew?

Anyway, Matt and Jackson and I settle in for a non-alcoholic talk (not by choice, mind you, but the bar was closed). We start comparing notes (we’re on a panel discussion at 9 a.m. in the morning).

Now, the conversation was going pretty good at about that time. Comparing notes and having fun and sharing information. But then Danny Sullivan walks in (for those who don’t know, this is his conference — he is the guy who started Search Engine Watch years ago and built a multi-million industry around it).

He could do anything, but what does he do?

He walks up to us and gives me s**t about his SPOT watch that he just bought. Turns out the RSS aggregator that the SPOT system has isn’t all that great (he wants me to get on the team about the RSS features, or the lack thereof). I tell him I’ll make sure the team hears about his feature request. Danny then launches into a sales pitch for the SPOT watch to Matt. Turns out Danny’s into Swatch watches and showed us off all the features of his new watch.

Hey, BillG, you should have Danny on stage with you at next year’s CES. But I digress.

He pulls up the stock quote feature on his SPOT watch. Looks up GOOG (the stock quote for Google). Looks at Matt and says “you had a good day.” Then pulls up MSFT. Looks at me and says “you had a good day too.”

Dude, you have no idea. Hint: it had nothing to do with the stock price.

Then he asked me to spill the beans on the Origami. Heheh. Very funny Danny!

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Geeks, Second Life, Service

Ouch, what if Microsoft designed the iPod box

February 27, 2006 By

Just saw this on Channel 9′s forums: what if Microsoft designed the iPod box. It’s a video. It hurts. Ouch.

How do you improve yourself? 1) Be honest with yourself about what you do. 2) Repeat.

Honesty hurts. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

I’m off to New York. Behave yourselves!

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Dev Tools, Microsoft Office

The danger of not letting your bloggers know… (more Origamisms)

February 27, 2006 By

What’s the danger of not letting your internal bloggers know about your product release plans? They might not be able to help keep your announcements in proper perspective. But, that’s OK. Todd Bishop, of the Seattle PI did more work over the weekend to dig into the details behind the Origami project. He learned that there isn’t going to be a product release on March 2, but that we’ll learn more details. John Markoff of the New York Times has more details too. And Memeorandum is tracking a bunch of comments.

Kent Newsome asks “will it walk the walk?”

Whenever hype gets ahead of an announcement, the answer has to be: no.

But, then, you gotta realize that I totally agree with Joe Wilcox who says that the best companies underpromise and overdeliver. ;-)
Maybe I should have posted that no one will want an Origami and that it sucks raw potatoes.

Seriously, let’s keep our hype in check, OK? Where’s the snarks when we need them? Calling Christopher Coulter, calling Christopher Coulter!

Oh, and marketing teams, I know you don’t want to let bloggers in on the secret, but when you don’t tell us what’s up we can’t help you keep expectations under control. Now everyone expects Origami to be bigger than the Xbox. I’d much rather expectations were dialed down a bit.
To bloggers outside Microsoft: it’s not healthy when things get hyped up so much. Whenever a company does this (whether it’s the one I work for, or another company), ask some tough questions. I have a ton. What is this? Who will want it? When will it be purchasable? When will there be decent quantities on the shelf? What are its limitations? Who’ll think it sucks? Who’ll think it rocks? Are any real customers using it yet? What will the price be? What will the real price be (after you deck it out to work properly?) When will we be able to get our hands on one? Does it have a chance in the marketplace? Why? Will Patrick Scoble want one of these instead of a video iPod? Why? (And, yes, as soon as I have one in my hands I’m gonna show it to Patrick and see if we have a clue).

Anyway, it’s gonna be a fun week. And not just because of Origami stuff. See ya in New York!

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Games, OS
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