Alex Barnett's blog

I have a few 'non-technical' friends who think RSS (Really Simple Syndication) sounds like interesting idea but say it all sounds a little bit complicated. So, I've created a 'how-to' screencast (Flash movie), 'Using RSS 101' . The screencast shows how...

Mary Jo Foley pointed out an article that I thought was a little odd to say the least. "It seems to have become trendy to sound the death knell for Microsoft these days. I guess I'm not quite as much of a purveyor of doom and gloom when it comes to the...

How many times have you heard, "hey drop IE, it is full of security holes. Try Firefox, it is secure."? I'm not saying IE hasn't had its own problems, but Firefox has had security holes in past, has security holes today and will in the future. To say...

Completely off topic here, but Prince Charles is to marry Camilla Parker Bowles in April according to BBC News. Nothing to link to yet, but will update. Update III Confrimed now that Camilla won't be queen, but will be titled HRH Duchess of Cornwall....

The Attention Economy and the Net by Michael Goldhaber was written in 1997, at a time when the Net itself was getting plenty of attention. At its heart, the theory was based on the following idea Goldhaber articulated in a Wired article that same year...

I got some good feedback on the screencast introducing RSS to beginners . So, I've created a new screencast showing the various ways I use Technorati and Tags. I cover searching keywords and urls, searching for, creating & embedding Tags into blog...

As I'm in Redmond this week, I'm allowing myself get a little nostalgic (I've only been with the company less than 3 years, but hey)...here are some links relating to Microsoft's 30 years. The PC Timeline at PC Museum : "April 1975 Bill Gates and Paul...

Inside Google has pointed out Gizoogle , a bit of internet sillyness. Gizoogle is a 'Snoop Dogg Search Engine', complete with a Translizzle translator . Some Translizzled quotes: Original quote sourced from The Quotation Page Quote Translizzled Any sufficiently...

Now I know why Jeremy Allaire has been so quiet for so long.... he's been busy creating a new company, officially launched today - Brightcove . "The theme of the "democratization of media" is one that goes all the way back to my origin interests in the...

Seth Goldin reminds us that the Internet is still its infancy, and cites 10 reasons why he believes that there's about to be a significant flourishing of Net companies and business successes. Penetration. (read: population) Bandwidth. Tools. (read: ease...

What do Microsoft and Viagra have in common? Trouble with spam rings . eWeek : "Microsoft Corp. and Pfizer Inc. on Thursday announced parallel lawsuits against two international spam rings pushing a variety of drugs, especially those purporting to be...

Robert Scoble has gone mental on his linkblog . 128 posts since I last refreshed his linkblog RSS feed (12 hours ago!). How am I expected to keep up?

Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, we are all forever indebted. Via Techworld.com "Cerf and Kahn developed the notion of an Internet Protocol (IP) while working on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project in 1973. The next year they published...

After two weeks of silence, and a bit of speculation , Mark Jen (now ex-Google blogger) say's ' Hi '. Scoble hands out advice to any bloggers mentioning their employer: "The thing I like about working at Microsoft is that I can talk smack about my boss...

Steve needs help : "Right. This is your last chance to save bowblog's three-column layout . Most of you (the Explorer users, basically) don't even know this is a three-column web site because, for you, the third column displays somewhere down there (underneath...

I think I'm having one of those dreams... first I'm dreaming that Slashdot published interview with Microsoft , then, and this is a cracker, Bill Gates announced Internet Explorer 7 .

The Register's Peter Abrahams caught up with Jean Poali last week in London . Jean is an XML legend - co-creator of XML and a significant player in the worldwide XML and SGML community since 1985, now senior director of XML architecture at Microsoft....

Via Activewin.com "Linux enthusiast at the RSA Conference in San Francisco has reluctantly concluded that Microsoft produces more secure code than its open source rivals. In an academic study due to be released next month Dr Richard Ford, from the Florida...

A new blog by the CTO of Eyetools . A couple of interesting posts there already, this one describing the dynamics of UI design . Old Page Design New Page Design Eyetools Heatmaps™ showing group viewing trends on each web page ( Eyetools Heatmap Legend...

Did I think I'd ever see the day? Slashdot interviews Microsoft, via Mike Hall : "I thought you might like to read the interview on Slashdot with Martin Taylor , Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy – Slashdot asked readers to submit their...

Mark Jen, the Google blogger who got fired for blogging (he confirms this below) just posted his side of the story . Seems Mark is taking a non-bitter, philosophical view of it all... "on january 28th, 2005, i was terminated from google. either directly...

Bob DuCharme at O'Reilly on trackback alternative, Tagbacks: " Shelley Powers came up with an interesting alternative to trackback: "tagback," in which she creates a unique tag (in the folksonomy/flickr/del.icio.us/technorati sense of the term "tag,"...

News is out that Microsoft is to acquire Sybari Software Inc . But why Sybari? Microsoft's CIO, Ron Markezich, explains why and how Sybari has been protecting Microsoft's own infrastructure in a interview with the MS press team . "About a year ago we...

Chris Pirillo and Steve Gillmore discuss Attention.xml on the Chris Pirillo Show . Chris also gets to spend a little time with Sean Alexander , a Group Product Manager at Microsoft (focussed on Longhorn's consumer market) and talks MSN Remote Record ...

Bruce Schneier , who runs a blog on weblog covering security and security technology: "This is a really interesting technical report from Microsoft. It describes a clever prototype -- called GhostBuster -- they developed for detecting arbitrary persistent...