scooblog by josh ledgard

This afternoon was time that several teams had set aside to work on their career discussion documents via the new http://careercompass tool. Apparently everyone was really enthusiastic about working on their careers and the site is currently down. I'm...

Scoble is right . All the research, value proposition positioning, and market playbooks can't save you from looking like a copycat. Waiting that extra year or even months to perfect something for the web certainly doesn't win you any customer mindshare...

John's blog postings on testing open source projects where recently picked up by Mary Jo . Not bad PR for the work our team has been doing and good lessons to read if your team is looking at taking components open. Our team has learned many lessons about...

Brain, a PM on the forums.Microsoft.com site, discusses the element of adding game like systems into discussion forums. While over at the www.asp.net site they've recently created a new point system. What do all the web dev guys think about their system...

My favorite are letters sent to me at Microsoft, but that personally address Bill Gates in their request for employment. "Dear Mr. Gates, I would be honored to be in your employ"... sent to me. More bad cover letters .

Feels like this concept is more tested than I imagined. There are some good comments from the post I made last week . I also got an offline pointed to this presentation: http://shufflebrain.com/etech06.htm This covered a lot of the concepts that I'd been...

While I was in China the forum engineers pointed us at some of the more popular forums. These forums had an interesting Virtual economy. Rather than simply rewarding points for participation users could also exchange their reputation between one another...

I can't keep up with Gretchen's blogs anymore. She has the www.jobsyntax.com company and blog. She is also blogging and marketing for www.jobburner.com . Then, this week, we decided we wanted a site for personal blogs. I really don't want to bore you...

They have been giving each other thumbs up or thumbs down. Then, in a rewrite of history, Digg was invented and if you believe the sites rabid fans figured out that you could give content thumbs up or down for content rating. Oh, I forget, they added...

Via the Yodel Blog We call it a Suggestion Board — you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg -style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users. In addition to reading feedback from other users...

I removed the "My Blog Log" list of recent readers from the side of my page. That group, now at Yahoo, has some work to do in order to deal with the SPAM. For the last couple of days my recent reader list has included ads for "free online pharmacies"...

We are looking at ways to improve both the page load times and discovery of the forums on the default http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn page. The proposal we are looking at is to collapse all the forums on this page by default and to use script (rather...

I know these posts haven't been very technical or work related, but trust that we're actually doing business here. In fact, meeting with the community support team went very well. Ok, here are some interesting pictures from the last couple of days. ...