MSN just launched The Podium '08 as part of their 2008 US Presidential election coverage. The Podium '08 brings together data on presidential candidates for voters and election followers to explore by topic and compare candidates head to head on specific issues. What's interesting about The Podium is...

Hey, whadayaknow: John and the Popfly team will be at the O'Reilly Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo. As a hard core tinkerer myself (don't ask what's in my garage, ask what's not!), I've been following Make: magazine since discovering it last summer. It seems likely that Maker Faire will take a...

Today John Montgomery 's NPT team launched Microsoft Popfly , a web-based development environment for building web applications with little or no code. John shares some background and history on his blog , but what you really ought to see first is the Popfly video on the Overview page. Seeing is believing...

I was installing a new label printer at home a little while ago and noticed mention of a developer SDK in the readme docs. (Yes, some people actually read the readme) I know from experience that getting text to land right side up on a target as small as an address label can be a pain in the neck using...

LiveInABox is a collection of sample projects that show how to use the many Windows Live Services in your own web apps. It's a 4MB MSI that sets up the sample web apps to run on your localhost IIS server, so you can modify and experiment with them on your local machine. You'll still need to be online...

We've just rolled out an update to the Windows Live Contacts control, adding language support for German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese! That's on top of the English, French, and Japanese we hacked together by hand earlier. If my fingers are correct, that's 9 languages covering several...

This month's rev of the Windows Live Contacts Control adds a new "tile" view that displays the photos of your Windows Live IM contacts in the control, and makes starting an IM session with them a simple one-click operation. The top part of this screenshot shows the new tile view. The bottom part is another...

I'm pleased to announced the beta release of a new kind of web component: the Windows Live Contacts Gadget ! What's it for? The contacts gadget is client-side JavaScript that enables end users to use their Windows Live contacts (from Windows Live Mail/Hotmail and Messenger) with third party (non...

Here's an interesting mashup: Michael Scherotter (the MindMap guy) has added address lookup and route finding to MindManager using Virtual Earth web services. He says the idea came to him at Mashup Camp , and took root in planning a family vacation. It's an interesting cross-pollination in part because...

Mashup Camp brought together some 400 people interested in developing web applications quickly by combining mutiple data sources or services in interesting ways. This being my first "unconference", I found the just-in-time and minimal organization of the camp an interesting study in the balance of forces...

This discussion, led by Johannes Ernst, sought to explore ways to improve the user experience in maintaining personal information across multiple web sites. Multiple logins on multiple sites are more than just a nuisance for the end user - a typical pattern of behavior is that end users tend to use...

Mashup Camp is rolling along, purposefully on the edge of giddy chaos. It's an interesting mix of people - independent (for pay) developers, corporate devs, passionate hobbyists, venture capitalists, press, and service providers. Everybody is interested in what everybody else is doing, and which ones...

I'm off to Mashup Camp this week! Monday and Tuesday are pegged for Mashup University, with a more traditional conference session structure, and the unstructured (or just-in-time structured) mashup camp is on Wednesday. I'm told that last year's camp was nothing short of a web geek tech orgy, so these...