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December 2005 - Posts

My 2006 predictions

Right, enough cataloging of everyone else's 2006 predictions ...with about 4 hours to go before the start of my 2006 (flakey drum roll please)...I now unveil my own, er, predictions... My Eleven Techie / Web and One non-Techie 2006 Prediction(s) 2006 Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 31, 2005 7:16 PM by alexbarn | 4 Comments
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Unzen again...

For Christmas I bought myself a Zen Microphoto (well, technically I received it as present). At first I was pretty happy with it, but things went awry. Four things specifically. First, the Microphoto touch controls were useless. And I mean useless . I Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 31, 2005 12:21 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Long Tails and Zipfian distribution

Chris Anderson has posted on the relation between the Long Tail and the Zipfian distribution . It reminded me of a comment Jakob Nielsen wrote in response to my Long Tail post ( 'How RSS thickened my Long Tail' ). Jakob wrote: "It's quite likely that Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 31, 2005 2:18 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Who would you have for dinner?

Erid Dolecki asks : "If you could choose two people to have dinner with, each on their own on different evenings, who would they be and what would you have for dinner?" What a great question. Now, before I answer, I want to make clear that I'm not interpreting Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 31, 2005 12:00 AM by alexbarn | 5 Comments

I'm blogging this at 36,000 feet

I'm blogging this at 36,000 feet. No dramas though . If it goes pear-shaped between now and touchdown, I'll let you know . Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 29, 2005 6:52 PM by alexbarn | 1 Comments

Dave Winer is up to something new for 2006

Via Kevin I heard that Dave Winer is up to something new for 2006 ...OPML at the heart of it is seems.... Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 29, 2005 5:01 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Stars of CCTV?

The Stars of CCTV? "When the Austrian government passed a law this year allowing police to install closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces without a court order, the Austrian civil liberties group Quintessenz vowed to watch the watchers. Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 29, 2005 4:41 PM by alexbarn | 2 Comments

'This appeared to be some kind of sealed fish or meat product, certainly not a state-of-the-art MP3 player.'

"This appeared to be some kind of sealed fish or meat product, certainly not a state-of-the-art MP3 player." A story about an iPod and some kind of meat . Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 29, 2005 4:26 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments

2005 predictions, how did I do?

As Business Week's Rob Hof has noticed , I've been trying to keep up with all the 2006 predictions going on this month. But it's no good if you look forward, only not to look back, and see how you did in retrospect. If you see what I mean. So, here is Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 29, 2005 4:01 PM by alexbarn | 3 Comments

Microsoft's Social Computing Group

Bernarn Moon writes up an interview he had with Lili Chen , Microsoft's Social Computing Group group manages and discussed with her some of the cool stuff her group is working on in the space of social computing, blogs, virtual worlds and a couple of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 28, 2005 7:37 AM by alexbarn | 2 Comments
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Microsoft in 2005

Beta News has a good review of 2005 from a Microsoft perspective - it reminds me of how much has been going on this last year including some major product lauches (Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, Xbox 360, Windows Live, 64-bit Windows, MSN Spaces Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 28, 2005 6:48 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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'Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?'

"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" -- Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business division This and other gaffes of 2005 . Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 27, 2005 4:34 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Podcast feedback

David Swedlow has posted his reaction to a couple of podcasts he's been listening to that Joshua and I put together.. On the Structured Blogging podcast : "But here's what I notice the most about this last podcast: no Attention! What the hell guys? Such Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 27, 2005 3:51 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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How much information?

I love this time of year. It gives me chance to get through some of books I've been been meaning to read and some podcasts I've been eager to listen to. One of these books is The Social Life of Information , originally published at the end of the last Read More...
Posted Monday, December 26, 2005 11:36 AM by alexbarn | 5 Comments
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the meaning of five nines

Phil Wainewright provides a reminder of what all these nines mean : 99.5% — 43.76 hours (an entire working week, and more) 99.7% — 26.30 hours (more than three working days) 99.9% — 8.77 hours (more than one working day) 99.95% — 4.38 hours (half a working Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 24, 2005 2:59 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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Wonderful Writeable Web

Bob Wyman on Tim Berners-Lee's ('TBL' - father of the Wonderful, Writeable Web) first blog post : "The idea of a read/write web had been motivating the work of many hypertext developers like TBL long before the web was born. But, the last 10 years experience Read More...
Posted Friday, December 23, 2005 4:00 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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my Flickr network

My Flickr network seen through Flickr Graph . Read More...
Posted Friday, December 23, 2005 2:11 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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RSS Aggregation in Outlook 12

Michael Affronti, Microsoft's Outlook program manager: "RSS Aggregation in Outlook is aimed at providing the user with a consistent look, feel, and experience while interacting with RSS feeds and related information. While RSS can be a complex technology Read More...
Posted Friday, December 23, 2005 1:27 AM by alexbarn | 2 Comments
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Pro-am revolution

I met up with some interesting people last night in London. I did a quick straw poll and asked what percentage of the RSS feeds they subscribed to were generated by professional writers (by professional writers I meant news organizations, journalists, Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 22, 2005 12:41 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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my tag cloud

Here's my tag cloud, ripped from my Technorati profile page . API ... Attention ... attention.xml ... AttentionTrust ... Blogging ... identity ... microformats ... opml ... opmlfreak ... opmlwishlist ... RSS ... screencast ... semantic web ... SSE ... Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 22, 2005 2:01 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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Trended search data

Google's Yu Chen has posted info about how see you can view your trended Google search data: "To use it, you have to turn on Personalized Search and be signed in to your Google Account while you search. (If you don't have a Google Account, it's easy to Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 22, 2005 12:42 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Don't talk and drive

Don't talk and drive. Well, don't talk about stuff that's hard to talk about, that's the message that Dave Munger's post conveys about how the cognitive demands of conversation can affect our awareness of the world around us. So much for effective multi-tasking.. Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 22, 2005 12:10 AM by alexbarn | 2 Comments

the Del.icio.us Lesson

Joshua Porter is continuing the Structured Blogging (SB) conversation with Joe Reger . In thinking through what it will take for SB will take off or not, he's come up with an acid test, what he calls the Del.icio.us Lesson - "From now on I’m going to Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 11:48 PM by alexbarn | 4 Comments
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I've become predictable

I've become predictable. At least that's what Paul Montgomery says - he's laid out his 2006 predictions , one of which includes me ranting on about one of my favourite topics, attention, and one of my favourite thinkers on the topic, Steve Gillmor . He's Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 9:10 PM by alexbarn | 2 Comments
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visualizing conversations

Anjo Anjewierden has analyzed some interelated blogs posts and drawn up the data - the visualization of blog conversations. "Left to right is time (the data was 2004 posts of KM bloggers ). Top to bottom is chronological order of a blogger entering the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 4:37 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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OPML, the Attention lense

James Corbett : "...by sharing an OPML based Reading List Piaras would be providing an "attention lense" which could be applied to many services going forward. Take Kevin Burton's TailRank for instance. It allows me to build my own Memeorandum and import Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 4:22 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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Musical Attention

Ed Batista of the AttentionTrust: " Last.fm is one of my favorite " attention data " use cases. After installing their plugin, your iTunes playlist metadata is shared with Last, which creates a set of charts that depict your listening habits, a list of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 4:19 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Why I'm not missing London...

Why I'm not missing London...tube hell. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 3:44 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments

Web services 101 - REST vs SOAP (or 'Simple' vs. 'Complex')

Richard MacManus outlines the difference between REST and SOAP Web Services . Bottom line: one is 'Simple' the other is 'Complex'. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005 2:54 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Outsourcing life decisions

Back in June I asked my blog readers to help me decide what to eat one night...I was stuck, not sure whether to go for either Chinese, Indian, Wendy's, KFC or Pizza. One concerned commenter pointed out that none of the above were particularly healthy. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 20, 2005 11:27 PM by alexbarn | 4 Comments
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Zen

I'm off to catch a plane soon. Long-haul flight, so need something to do. Instead of lugging CDs around (believe it or not this is how I have listened to podcasts while on the road, so sad) I decided to get digital. (!) Went to the Circuit City and saw Read More...
Posted Monday, December 19, 2005 1:41 PM by alexbarn | 5 Comments
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What is a modern marketer?

What is a modern marketer? Riya has a modern marketer called Tara Hunt . Her official title is Online Marketing Manager at the start-up that's still in Alpha, but she's done it all on a shoestring - when you don't have a $100 million dotcom marketing Read More...
Posted Monday, December 19, 2005 8:35 AM by alexbarn | 2 Comments
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Blogware interop scenarios

Here are the scenarios I care about when it comes to blogware interop : Background (these are scenarios , I'm not actually in this situation!): I run a blog. It runs ok, the software misses some features, but I'll make do, because I have so much invested Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 18, 2005 10:43 PM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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Well, it is time for a change for me.

Well, it is time for a change for me. On January 16th I'll be starting my new job (moving outside of MSDN and TechNet team but still within Microsoft and still at Redmond) within the Data Programmability (DP) team (within SQL / WinFS). I'll blog more Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 18, 2005 6:16 PM by alexbarn | 5 Comments
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MIX 06

Gerardo Dada points out a new Microsoft event taking place in Las Vegas, MIX 06 : "Microsoft is organizing a new event called MIX 06 in Las Vegas on March 20-22nd, 2006. A lot of things are going on the web including new business models, new technologies Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 18, 2005 5:23 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Structured Blogging podcast Part 2

Joshua has posted the second part of the Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger. Tags: structured blogging , microformats , semantic web , Blogging , Web2.0 , RSS Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 18, 2005 5:16 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee is now blogging

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is now blogging . Via Justin Thorp . Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 18, 2005 12:54 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Time names Gateses, Bono 'Persons of 2005'

Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, were named Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” along with Irish rocker Bono for being “Good Samaritans”: “For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 18, 2005 8:40 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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My memecloud (of old)

I found this sitting in my archive somewhere. It's a sketch I drew up in August 2002 and published to an old blog (since died), called 'memecloud'. This was my 'memecloud' - a collection of memes that were dominating my thought-space at the time. I used Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 17, 2005 10:44 AM by alexbarn | 2 Comments
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10 tips for dating a geek

Emily Hambridge has advice for those wanting to date a geek . My favourite: \5. If you love him you will be standing by with a lot of caffeine. Yup. Via Jack William Bell . Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 17, 2005 10:23 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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My top 20 web moments of 2005

Richard MacManus continues the end of year wrap-ups with his Top 10 Web 2.0 Moments . In a nutshell : 10. Ask Jeeves buys Bloglines 9. The Return of Amazon (Mechanical Turk and Alexa Web Services) 8. Microsoft embraces and extends RSS with Really Simple Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 17, 2005 1:11 AM by alexbarn | 2 Comments
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Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger

You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news , but not all the reaction was rosy . So Joshua Porter and I thought we'd give Read More...
Posted Friday, December 16, 2005 7:55 PM by alexbarn | 4 Comments
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Ray Ozzie: 'the platform of the Internet really is the data'

ACM Queue has published an interview with Microsoft's CTO Ray Ozzie. Worth a read. " WK Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, coined the phrase “the architecture of participation,” meaning a lot of amateur and casual programmers piling on and building Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 15, 2005 8:04 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments

IE RSS icon - 'we'll follow Mozilla'

The Microsoft RSS team has an update on the RSS icon to be used in future versions of IE. How they came to the decision may surprise some: "My last post shared some of our conceptual designs of the feed icon and expressed some of the criteria that we Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 15, 2005 6:48 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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It is *my* Attention data and identity

Assaf has provided a thought-provoking post about Structured Blogging . He discusses merits of XML / HTML vs. Microformats and has other critisisms of Structured Blogging (SB). I've quoted this portion of his post (my bold) because it really nails the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 14, 2005 7:44 PM by alexbarn | 5 Comments

On importance and authoritativeness

I've waiting for an excuse to point to the Fat Cyclist (I'm not being offensive - that's the blog's name). Anyway, the excuse for blogging about Fat Cyclist today is that the blog's author has now realised that he is in fact more important and authoritative Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 14, 2005 7:00 PM by alexbarn | 3 Comments
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Darknets vs. Lightnet

Jason Boog interviewed J.D. Lasica and Lucas Gonze last week for his Darknets vs. Lightnet piece in Publish , studying the ways that online publishers will interact with the Napster generation. The Lightnet meme is gaining momentum...It has been interesting Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 14, 2005 9:41 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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2006 - a Structured Blogging year?

Jeff Clavier covers the Structured Blogging initiative announced yesterday: "Marc Canter is on stage to announce the launch of StructuredBlogging.org , a non-profit initiative supporting the development and deployment of micro-formats in blog posts. The Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 14, 2005 9:08 AM by alexbarn | 4 Comments
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Michael the monopolizer

Technorati's Niall Kennedy has posted about their experimental server called Technorati Kitchen : "an area where we can post projects we have been working on that we do not feel are ready for integration on the main site. The first project available in Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 13, 2005 5:38 PM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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IRSS - Individualized RSS

Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend Rok Hrastnik's RSS Industry Night Roundtable (Rok invited me but I couldn't make it - he got way better than me - I put him in touch with Sanaz Ahari of Start.com and Sean Lyndersay of the Microsoft RSS team who are Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 13, 2005 4:56 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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MSN Messenger history visualization

MSN Messenger history visualization : "an interactive data visualization displaying the timeline of several textual conversations simultaneously, enabling the discovery of utterance lengths & specific reoccuring keywords. the application reads up Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 13, 2005 8:03 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Attention and Identity, Podcast Part 2

Here is Part 2 ( mp3, 27mins 26mb ) of the two-part Attention and Identity podcast recorded with Joshua Porter , Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip and Kim Cameron, chief identity architect at Microsoft . Part 1 (background) ( mp3: 29 mins, 28mb ) Part 2 ( mp3, Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 10, 2005 6:43 PM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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Blog plagiarism

Steve Rubel has complained that there are two sites reproducing his blog posts without permission. One of the sites, Advertising news & Information, has posted his complaint on its blog, automagically, I presume. Earlier this week I mentioned that Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 10, 2005 4:19 PM by alexbarn | 3 Comments
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PowerPoint to OPML

Interesting. Came across Charlie Wood's post this morning about a new service called opmlworkstation.com . Jim Moore's RSS Labs is the team is behind the new venture ( the same crew behind opmlsearch.com ): "Why convert PowerPoint into OPML? My own rationale Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 10, 2005 7:28 AM by alexbarn | 4 Comments
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Attention and Identity with Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron, Podcast Part 1

A couple of weeks ago Joshua and I had a conversation about attention data (as podcasts ). In that conversation we kept touching on the topic of online identities and their management, so we thought we'd invite two pioneers of the identity space, Dick Read More...
Posted Friday, December 09, 2005 7:57 PM by alexbarn | 8 Comments

Another OPML Editor (supports SSE)

MindJet unveils an OPML Editor product that supports SSE: "The Mindjet Labs has just released a new Mindjet MindManager Pro 6 OPML Editor . The Editor enables users to open, edit, and save Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) files in MindManager Read More...
Posted Friday, December 09, 2005 7:03 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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'I was in the pub the other day...'

I loved the start to Johnnie Moore's latest post , and then it got better: " James Cherkoff and I were in the pub yesterday, celebrating a recent success... to say nothing of marking the birth of his first born, daughter Maggie." Congratulations James! Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 08, 2005 11:23 PM by alexbarn | 1 Comments

The weather? Toast.

Information aesthetics : "a toaster that parses meteorological information from the web & then browns bread with an image of what weather to expect, readable & consumable on the way to work" Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 08, 2005 11:11 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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This is your life (in OPML)

Steve Sloan : "OPML allows us to organize all of our content, and the content of anything else that can be linked to into hierarchies that make it easy to find information by topic. And, we get to choose the topics and those hierarchies can be linked Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 08, 2005 10:33 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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How company blogs can improve consumer relations

Chris Anderson, ex-editor of Editor in Chief of Wired magazine and chief pusher of the Long Tail meme ran into some issues relating to Xbox 360 as a Media Center extender. The bad news is that the usual support channels weren't able to help out. The good Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 08, 2005 12:59 PM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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'the chance of a standard being adopted is inversely proportional to its complexity'

George Moromisato of the Microsoft RSS team : "the chance of a standard being adopted is inversely proportional to its complexity" Bingo. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 07, 2005 9:36 PM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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Virtual Earth v2 APIs for Windows Live Local

Alex Daley has posted news that the MSN Virtual Earth site (now called Windows Live Local) will go 'live' on the web tomorrow (Thursday, December 8th). Press release here , coverage here and here . When it goes live (it hasn't yet!) you'll find it at Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 07, 2005 9:01 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Going to the rsstroom will never be dull again

Thanks Tommy , I now know what I'd like in my Christmas stocking this year - an rsstroom reader. DJ Spyhuner has the 'scoop' : "The 'rsstroom reader' is a bathroom gadget that prints news feeds onto your T-P - that's right, your TOILET PAPER! The best Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 07, 2005 6:54 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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Quote of 2005?

I think this a gem. Seattle PI reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, said: "consumers were drawn online by free content but this needed to change" Isn't that just lovely. A great way to wrap up 2005. You can Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 06, 2005 5:09 PM by alexbarn | 5 Comments
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Xbox Live Dashboard, the screencast

John Porcaro points to a screencast created by Amanda Murphy showing off the Xbox Live Dashboard. Tags: screencast , xbox 360 Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 06, 2005 10:41 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments

RSS and PR

Dr. Georg Kolb, a VP at PR firm Text100 emailed me this evening regarding a post I published in October. In a nutshell, I had criticized some of the advice George was quoted to have given about RSS communications in this 06 Oct PR Week article ('Technology: Read More...
Posted Monday, December 05, 2005 9:24 PM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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Debugging Microsoft.com

Channel 9 video : "Chris and Jeff debug one of the largest Web sites in the world: microsoft.com. Millions of pages. More traffic than Slashdot.org. A huge data farm. We have an interesting conversation about how they do it all." Via, er, Slashdot . Read More...
Posted Monday, December 05, 2005 6:43 PM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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The Ricky Gervais podcast

You might know Ricky Gervais from the original UK Office comedy series . Behold, The Ricky Gervais podcast . This is going to be a hit. " Episode 1 December 5 2005 In which Ricky, Steve and Karl discuss ...the pros and cons of technological invention, Read More...
Posted Monday, December 05, 2005 5:03 PM by alexbarn | 2 Comments

How to make your own web mashup

John Musser : "Have you ever looked at a mashup and thought you’d like to try your hand at making one someday? But perhaps you weren’t entirely sure where to begin, or, since you’re busy, how to get from concept to completed mashup quickly? Then you may Read More...
Posted Monday, December 05, 2005 6:58 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for HTML

Danny Ayers: 7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for HTML , in reference to this . Danny, very good. ;-) Have updated the 2006 predictions post accordingly. Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 03, 2005 8:52 AM by alexbarn | 0 Comments
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OPML 中文

OPML in Chinese, or OPML 中文 . Via my del.icio.us inbox . Tags: OPML Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 03, 2005 7:01 AM by alexbarn | 1 Comments
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Simply fired

Time for some weekend fun. SimplyFired.com is running a competition . How do you win? You need to send in an 'amusing' video relating to a termination experience. I'm entering the contest, but not with a video of my own. I'm nominating this r