Alex Barnett tagged me with the " 5 things meme " some weeks back. Here we go: I spent several weeks every summer going to cemetery conventions with my grandparents. I've heard all the jokes, this is a business of complex long term planning and sales...

With the morning buzz on wikipedia and search , and a snowy day in Redmond, I spent a moment to craft the Live.com version of wikiseek.com with a macro, andyed.wikiout. Try it for: bruce sterling inflation web 2.0 Try it out at http://search.live.com...

The OPML generator revealed an interesting use case -- tracking the blogosphere's opinion on specific topics or products through comment feeds. However, this is typically not what folks want to add to their normal subscription list. I've refined control...

A couple months ago, I learned about Microsoft's official process & support for community, open source projects centered around www.codeplex.net . At that point, the site was pretty empty, but it's turned into very active development repository. A...

One of my more fanciful macro creations as I experimented with LinkFromDomain over the last few weeks was a 7 degrees inspired hack using Seattle internet poster boy Chris Pirillo . Macro:andyed.aintNobodyIfYouAintPirillo restricts matches to content...

In case you couldn't tell, in microsoftie speak, I'm super excited about (advanced) search macros . I've created about 50 macros, the best of which I selected for the macro directory on this site. Almost all of these macros feature LinkFromDomain heavily...

What does it do? : This app runs your query against the Live Search API with the feed: syntax , returning RSS feeds, and assembles an OPML file. You'll get the chance to choose from the results before generating the subscription list. What is OPML? :...

I've written about the challenges of capitalizing on at-scale user feedback both academically and on the search blog (busted post alas, edit when fixed) . One way to listen to users is to open up your bug tracking system to the world, as done by Mozilla...

Windows Vista offers a operating system level implementation of gestures called Flicks especially tuned for pen usage on tablets. There's an important difference between this implementation and gesture implementations like Optimoz for firefox: there is...

Arstechnica, one of the sites that made my " techy " news macro, has posted a nice review of Vista audio enhancements . Bass tweaking sounds great, and one feature is quite interesting from a psychological perspective: Speaker fill Speaker fill is...

Nate put together a nice collage of some layered UI work we did back in the late 90s next to a recent ship from Apple: The webgraphics UI allowed a user to see all 10 titles and hover in to see details. The time explorer uses a cleaner mapping of y...

Wow, academic work covered by News.com ; well, it is research by sone of MSR's most talented information retrieval folks and the search competitive space seems to be a media favorite. One of the works discussed by News.com explores a nalysis of user behavior...

Google Blogoscoped covers a recent Matt Cutt's video session where the question of searching only personal homepages is addressed. We also recognized this need and crafted a macro for this purpose at Live Search. Here's what it looks like: prefer:intitle...

Robert Cringely offers some interesting curmudgeoning on the recent buzz around a study that showed a longer lifetime of news articles on the web than in print. In his words: "this news stickiness is bad, very bad, because it means we read less and ultimately...

The office 12 Excel blog is one of my favorite MSDN blogs, along with Alex and the popular favorites . The latest Excel post delves into the design process with a focus on the incremental formalization of artifacts. I love that Microsoft's embrace of...

I'm excited about the work coming from External Research & Programs: Microsoft Live Labs: Accelerating Search in Academic Research 2006 RFP Awards. One of the projects, from Suresh Bhanani and Lada Adamic at UMich, is going to take on deep clickstream...

Some searchs failed to discover the correct URL for the MetaWeblogAPI on blogs.msdn.com easily, hence this post. The correct url is: blogs.msdn.com/metablog.ashx There are a slew of great posting tools to choose from these days: Performancing Flock...

Some good folks at the University of Hamburg published an update to some long standing historical numbers in web usage research that reveal the way users are browsing the web has changed dramatically over the last few years. Here's the punchline: ...

The browser cache is a largely untapped treasure of personally relevant, high revisit probability content. Opera 9, as pointed out by Simon Willison , is the first browser to support offline browsing from the browser cache. There's more that can be done...

So I'm coming up on two years at Microsoft. While I've experienced a few low points of blogging since ' 99 , none have been as severe as my time at Microsoft. Given my involvement in open source and the Mozilla project in yesteryears, I've been hesitant...