Scoble the tiresome sycophant strikes again

February 28, 2006 By

I get the Channel 9 guy into the picture with Matt Cutts of Google. I bet that’ll get him razzed in the office next week. Matt wrote up the panel discussion we were on together on his blog. Tim Stay has even more complete notes.

I was on KUOW radio tonight (that is the local public radio station and the show I was on is their business and technology show — The Works with John Moe). Fun show. You can listen (Real Networks required). I talked about my book and about the importance of NOT being a tireless sycophant.

So, who called me a sycophant? That’s Declan Kennedy. He gave me, and Microsoft major s**t for not supporting Web standards and generally, well, being evil. Says “Try turning up to actually confront a blogger about the problems inherent in their company’s approach to the computing industry, and you’ll more than likely just get shouted down.”

Hmm, not my experience at all. What did I do? I emailed the team that did the Mix contest and said “fix the code.”

But what do I know? I’m just a tiresome sycophant.

More work to do.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Microsoft Office, Mix07, Web

Technorati saves Maryam’s day

February 28, 2006 By

Google didn’t help Maryam (my wife). MSN Search didn’t help. What did?

Technorati!

What happened? Maryam desperately wanted to see one of her favorite authors but the show was sold out. She tried all the usual tricks, but finally she found someone with tickets on Technorati.

Along these lines, lots of people have been telling me their skepticism of Edgeio, which is a service that lets you sell things right from your blog. “Sounds like a recipe for spam,” one guy told me today when we were talking at lunch.

But Maryam’s experience is exactly why I’m interested in Edgeio’s potential.

Hey, MSN, when are we gonna get blog search of our own?

Filed Under: Blog Stuff, Blog Tips, Education, Second Life, TED

Xbox team blogs!

February 28, 2006 By

The Xbox team is now blogging. Albeit a cautious, PR-filtered blog. Actually John Porcaro takes that topic on on his own blog, which is how I learned about the new blog.

One HUGE problem with this blog? They don’t identify themselves as the official Xbox team blog in their title tag. Guys, you NEED to think through your title tag a lot more than what you’ve done. Call me if you need some help. Or read my book (it’s a tip in the book).

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Xbox

Hell to get colder: Slashdot has headline that says “Why Vista won’t suck”

February 28, 2006 By

Does this mean the world as we know it is about to end? I just was over on Slashdot (I’m listening to Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo give his presentation here at Search Engine Strategies and he lost my attention*). Anyway, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this headline: Why Vista Won’t Suck.

Is Slashdot’s editors feeling OK? How did this headline slip through the system? I’m not sure.

But, the article it points to on Extreme Tech is a pretty in-depth look at Windows Vista.

*Sorry for the lame inside joke. Jeremy’s talk was on attention. I couldn’t pay attention. Heheh.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, Microsoft Office, Windows Vista

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
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