Today Maryam, Patrick, and I went to see Sanaz’s new office at Microsoft. She is lead program manager on Live.com’s home page. Not a small job. Anyway, during the interview we were talking about what makes us say someone “gets it.” We bandied about a whole bunch of things. She told us a few questions she asks in interviews about Flickr and Del.icio.us to see if people going for jobs on Live.com have kept their skills and interests both up to date and aligned with those who “get it.”

I remember other places where we’d use similar terminology.

“Are you on the Cluetrain?”

Anyway, I just got a pre-release version of Gina Trapani’s LifeHacker book (my publisher, Wiley, sent me one). This is the owners manual for the always on, always connected person. Official title? Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day.

What does it have? 88 tips for being more productive, living life better, and using your computer and online systems to their fullest extent. This is the most useful book I’ve seen in years.

From now on I’ll be able to tell if you care about being productive by asking whether you’ve read this book. If you don’t care about getting things done you won’t get it.

He says blogging killed FrontPage.

The thing that really killed FrontPage? Microsoft’s marketing team tested the name on a range of developers and Web designers/builders. They all derided it. The marketers learned there was no way they were going to be able to continue with the FrontPage brand. So they killed the brand.

Does the code live on? Yes. Sorta.

The Microsoft Expression Web product is really a continuation of FrontPage. But it’s been totally rebuilt. Why? Cause FrontPage had a reputation for changing code, for not respecting standards, and for forcing its own style on the development team. Those problems are all gone now.

You can see the new Expression Web demoed and meet the team in interviews on ScobleShow.

Anyway, it’s time to go get dressed for Chris and Ponzi’s wedding. I hear their vows will appear on Chris’ blog at about the same time that he and Ponzi are saying them to each other.

I’m not going to blog, but Jake Ludington and I were thinking about how we could stream video. We won’t know if that’s possible until we get to the place and see if there’s any good Wifi. Either way, you’ll get a report later.

UPDATE: there’s more over on Digg. The comments there are a good example of why I don’t get much value from Digg. Too much noise and very little knowledge.

I told you Jeff Sandquist is smart and is one guy I could rely on at Microsoft to get shit done (he was my boss when I was at Microsoft). He just convinced Jon Udell to come to Microsoft. Wow. I think it’s funny that Jon asked himself whether he’d be Microsoft’s new “Scoble.” Hell, I was trying to be as good as Jon Udell was (and I came up short — he’s a coder that can explain how to program to other people, and has far more influence among developers than I’ll ever hope to have).

In other Microsoft news, Mike Sax says Microsoft just signed away custody of its third-born child: All the file formats for Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are now under the custody of ECMA, an independent standards body.

One other thing about Jon Udell: to me he was InfoWorld. He’s the only reason I’ve been following that brand. It’s a HUGE loss for InfoWorld.

I haven’t commented much on the other hire that Jeff Sandquist made: Larry Larsen. But he rocks too. This team has raised my expectations for what will happen at Microsoft now. Two rock stars from the journalism world. Larry worked for Poynter Institute and is a major geek.

One thing I’ve learned: a manager is judged by the quality of people he hires and/or keeps happy. Jeff Sandquist has two three grand-slam home runs. (I forgot about Rory, thanks Dare for reminding me).

Yes, Rex, Microsoft just acquired a superstar media brand.

Techmeme link.

Ahh, I see Yahoo has reorged while I flew home. It’s all over TechMeme. My analysis? Yahoo’s struggling to figure out how to monetize its users. I feel for them. Google disrupted Yahoo by going with text-ads and turning down the billions in banner advertising that was out there. Yahoo, like Microsoft, is struggling to deal with that disruption.

Trick is, I’m willing to click on blue-underlined content. Steve Broback noted this way back in 2000 when I still worked at Fawcette. The world hasn’t changed since then. I filter banner ads out. I don’t even see them. I certainly don’t take action based on them. Little blue underlined text? Much better cause it gets you to click. To take action. And they are easier to put next to content that makes sense.

Yahoo has two things going for it. 1) Audience. I watch how people use computers and they still go to Yahoo. A lot. 2) Brand. They have new hot brands like Flickr and Del.icio.us along with big old brands like Yahoo itself.

I wonder, though, if it’s too late to give up banners and go text-ads ala Google style? It probably is for Yahoo. And the hottest advertising market in 2007 are going to be in video and mapping. Both places that Yahoo isn’t really known for.

Translation: they might be reorging the chairs on the deck, but fundamentally Yahoo isn’t making the kinds of Google-stopping moves it needs to make.

Ahh, so someone at Microsoft made a mistake and didn’t correctly use an image from Niall Kennedy’s feed from Flickr (or didn’t pay attention to the Creative Commons license agreement). So, what did Niall do? Did he call up one of his former co-workers at Microsoft and explain that he was pissed and get the problem taken care of nicely and behind closed doors? No.

He replaced the image with a porn image, Todd Bishop at the Seattle PI reports.

I’m sure that gets everyone 16 and under to laugh, but is that really the best way that Niall could have gotten the image taken down?

I don’t think so. Unprofessional, especially for someone who used to work at Microsoft.

Remember Niall, maybe someday this Web 2.0 bubble will end and you might need to go back to a company and look for a job. I know that doesn’t seem probable right now, but I’ve been there.

Burn bridges if you want, but I’ve learned over and over that people remember this kind of treatment and it certainly never disappears from Google. All three of my last job interviews had people looking over Google for unprofessional stuff like this to bring up in the interviews. And, all big companies have people who used to work at Microsoft so that bridge you’re blowing up? Might turn out to be the one you need to cross in the future.

UPDATE: Someone on the RSS team just IM’ed me and said that the RSS team was never contacted about this issue.

While Ask is copying Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo with its AskCities, Quintura has something that’s far more worthy of a Digg or TechMeme-style overhyping. It’s visual search and I saw it at the Firefox party in London last Friday, just like Ewan McIntosh did, and it’s pretty damn cool.

What does it do? You search on something, say “Amsterdam” and it presents a tag-cloud, built with Flash, that shows you other possibilities around that query.

Yakov Sadchikov, founder, told me that Quintura has gotten popular among SEO types because it shows you keywords that other methods don’t show you. I’ve played with it a bit and it sure is an interesting new way to search.

Adobe’s John Dowdell has the best question (and best set of links) about Microsoft’s new “Blend:” why do it and not support Flash?

Because of what Blend lets Microsoft do: get Macromedia stuff out of the Windows development process.

Huh?

Remember all those “Longhorn rules” posts I made about four years ago? Do you know where they came from?

I do. And I’ll never forget the software development lesson that was harshly handed to me.

Microsofties (before I was an employee) showed me some prototypes of Vista. I didn’t know they were prototypes, though. Later, after becoming a Microsoft employee, I found out that all we really saw were Macromedia Director-based movies.

They looked so cool. Tom Koch, today, and I talked about that MVP meeting where we saw those prototypes and how good they made us feel (almost everything that we saw back then was totally changed in the final release).

This actually was NOT a good thing for Microsoft. Why? Because when you build up expectations and you aren’t able to meet them you look pretty silly.

But behind the scenes things were even worse.

Why? Because executives bought into the Flash and Mirrors song and dance too. They thought what they were seeing was possible.

The problem was, developers weren’t involved. Only people who studied interaction, design, and Macromedia Director.

Problem is, anything you create in Director has to be thrown out and rewritten in C++ (if you work on the Windows team).

That meant a whole bunch of time is wasted, plus it’s very possible that what you are dreaming of is simply not possible. It’s also possible that development teams, that don’t understand interaction design, will change your “experiences” and totally munge things up.

So, could Flash ever be “force fit” to be the UI of Windows? Not according to the engineers who’ve studied the problem.

They needed a system that could be used to design real pieces of Windows, if not the entire UI, and handed off to a developer, or team of developers, without having to have the developers touch the UI at all.

You can see this in my early Channel 9 videos with the Sparkle team (which became “Blend” today).

Blend is based on .NET 3.0, and goes beyond anything possible today in Flash or Adobe products — at least as it comes to the combined design and development team.

I saw how a designer built the original Longhorn clock and a developer coded the interactions behind it using Sparkle in a fraction of the time it would take using other approaches.

Does Microsoft care about cross-platform and all that other stuff? Yeah. But it’s only secondary to Microsoft’s need to make the Windows development process much smoother. The executives never want to go through another schedule slip like they did with Longhorn.

Blend will let the Windows team designers get rid of Macromedia stuff. At least that’s the hype.

How will we know the hype is real? Show me those Vienna prototypes and let me play with them! (Vienna is the code name for the next version of Windows).

UPDATE: TechMeme is all over Expression Blend.

If you’ve been watching http://blogs.msdn.com/ which is where most of the Microsoft employees blog, you’ve seen at least a dozen mentions today of Microsoft’s new Sparkle, Expression, um, sorry, now named “Blend.” I only let one of these through to my Link Blog, but I was just realizing how brilliant this is.

Google counts links from blogs in its search engine. So, if Microsoft wants to get something higher on Google, all it would have to do is call upon its bloggers. It’s probably the best SEO network the world has ever seen (Microsoft has more than 3,000 bloggers, with at least 500 active ones).

Internally, how does this work? The bloggers at Microsoft have a mailing list. Someone goes on the mailing list and says something innocuous, like “hey, the Expression team just announced Blend” with a URL underneath and there’ll usually be a few dozen posts in an hour.

Don’t think this matters? Well, if you search Google for Martin Luther King, you’ll notice the result set has changed quite a bit from two weeks ago (when a bunch of bloggers decided to “Google Bomb” an anti-King site to make it lower on the list because we felt it wasn’t really the most relevant result that should come up when you search for Martin Luther King).

Anyway, this kind of “blog farm” can dramatically change results on Google and other search engines in a way that SEO’s just simply can’t match.

Oh, and even better, they set the agenda that everyone has to link back to. Yes, even the bloggers will go higher. A search for “Expression Blend” on Google’s blog search shows dozens of bloggers talking about the new name and release.

As to Blend and its chances in the marketplace? More later.

Hmmm, wonder why Google’s brand in my brain is going up and not down?

You have to look no further than the new “AskCity” which is all the rage this morning over on TechMeme.

First, a little aside. Why can Google do maps with one input box while Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask need two? That’s lame. Major kudos to Google. It simply is easier to use. And, yes, this is a major reason why I use Google instead of the others. Why? Cause I’ve done hundreds of map searches and invariably I put the wrong thing in the wrong box. Hey, I’m a “stupid Americun.” But Google makes me feel smart ALWAYS.

But, then, I ask Live.com, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and AskCity to find me Amsterdam on a map. Just type “Amsterdam” into any of these and see what it does.

Google, Yahoo, and Live do just fine, but AskCity takes me someplace in the United States. Lame. Strike two.

The bar has gotten higher for local services. If you aren’t international you won’t beat Google. Even for a “stupid Americun.”

Oh, and Google was faster than the rest of them too.

We’re meeting at hotel Wiechmann at 7 p.m. and then heading to Dauphine for dinner at about 7:30. Peter van Teeseling is arranging the dinner. Tom Koch, who keeps the wonderful Outlook Express tips and tricks website and is one of my favorite Microsoft MVPs, might meet me later this afternoon will meet me at 4:30 p.m. at Anne Frank’s house. Hopefully we fit a tour of Anne Frank’s house in there too (I should be over there at about 3:30 p.m.).

Tomorrow, Tuesday, is a travel day, we’re heading back to the states, will be back in the evening, so will be offline.