June, 2008

Lots has been written about Bill Gates leaving Microsoft today and the Microsoft.COM home page says it all

A video did the rounds from CES earlier this year, but today is *THE* day.

I’ve met Bill a few times during my career at Microsoft and we hosted him in Australia way back in 2004 - Billg heading Downunder in June, People attending Bill Gates Breakfast in Sydney,  Questions to ask BillG , More questions for BillG, Behind the Scenes of the BillG Breakfast, Press comments on BillG's visit, Local Bloggers give their thoughts on BillG Breakfast, More local bloggers add their thoughts to the BillG breakfast.

Not much else left to say, but arrivederci

I have been feeling like something had been missing.

I arrived in Seattle in August and went through Autumn, (or as they say here Fall), Winter and then Spring.

Aha! I’ve missed Summer!

Totally is the first day of summer (as well as the longest day of the year aka the Summer Solstice) and things are finally warming up, compare to back in Sydney.

for those metric challenged folks, here it is ‘old school’

Yeah Baby!

The house is pretty quiet at the moment.

Moira and 3 of the kids have been in Australia on holidays for 2 weeks so far, leave me at home with Rigo, my 16 year old.

Sure, we’ve been getting up to the usual shenanigans, eating out every night, staying up late, watching bad TV, drinking root beer, downloading stuff and general living the high life as only 2 geeks can.

Rigo is full of stories and he has been inspired again to blog. His latest thoughts can be found at http://antonyarrigo.blogspot.com.

Now that he has finished school for the summer, I expect he will have lots more stories to share. I’m not expecting he will follow in the footsteps of blogging phenom Long Zheng, but a dad can only dream.

Published with BlogMailr

I was chatting with Rohan Thomas (a Developer Evangelist based in Malaysia) this evening.

He asked me how I got the DiggThis button my blog. I told him I would do a post about it.

So, how did I get that Digg This button onto my blog?

Easy really.

It was Windows Live Writer with the help of a cool little plugin which was in the recent SDK Technical Preview release

In the SDK Technical Preview you’ll find the following:

• New SDK Features.doc – Detailed descriptions of the new plugin types. (Start here!)
• SDK Reference.chm – Reference documentation for the entire Windows Live Writer API.
• Samples – Source and binaries for two sample plugins:
  • Twitter Notify – Prompts you to make a Twitter status update after publishing a post
  • DiggThis – Automatically adds a DiggThis button or badge to each post

So Rohan – now you know my secret.

BTW -- I’m really looking forward to see what other cool plugins will appear.

I got an unsolicited email last week from BuzzNumbers.

The email had the following intro

Welcome to your buzz numbers email notification service deliverying you reports about your online social media mentions.

And it provided a list of articles and blog postings where my name had been mentioned.

I didn't think much of this. It looked like spam.

Later in the day, I got an email from someone I did know (Nick Holmes à Court) who put this BuzzNumbers thing into context for me.

Turns out BuzzNumbers is an analytics and online reputation monitoring service that he has been developing and I was a test subject.

Cool!

More about the service from the site

Online Media Monitoring

BuzzNumbers scans and monitor all known online media channels real time for your brand or business name. BuzzNumbers is available as a Web Based platform and supports Email Notifications and RSS integration.

Online Influence Analytics

BuzzNumbers Analytics enables you to measure and track which online sources have the greatest influence. Look through News, Search Engines, Blogs, Podcasts, Video, Social Media, Forums and more and understand where you have the most online influence. BuzzNumbers Analytics offers reports across Domains, Countries, Sources, Keywords and more.

BuzzNumbers Conversation Explorer

Use BuzzNumbers Dashboard to view filter, sort and explore all online conversations about you, your brand and your company. You might be suprised who, where and what people are saying about your brand online.

Way cool. And there’s a blog too. How Web 2.0!

Always nice to see startup activity from Downunder!

Good Luck with the venture Nick

**UPDATE**

Nick sent me a note this morning.

He is offering a free 3 month account until September 2008  to gather feedback. Email him at nick @ buzznumbershq.com and tell him Frank sent you

He also tells me that BuzzNumbers.Com has been built using the MS Stack : ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, SSIS, Analysis Services 2005

Yay for .NET :)

I keep getting hassled by my sister, Rita Arrigo.

She says I never link to her blog

Maybe that’s true.

Now, it’s time to right a wrong

Here’s a link to you sis!