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December 2004 - Posts

Scooblog on Corporate Transparency - Part 4: OSS Transparency Comparison and Conclusion

Posted Friday, December 31, 2004 10:20 AM by jledgard
Before continuing on, I suggest reading Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 of this series. The OSS Transparency Comparison IMHO, this is the least interesting part of my digression here but probably the most likely to be slashdotted. Nothing like doing your Read More...
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Scooblog on Corporate Transparency - Part 3: What Customers Stand to Gain

Posted Thursday, December 30, 2004 9:10 AM by jledgard
Before continuing on I suggest reading Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. Measuring Customer Gains of Your Transparency Before digging into the subjective measurements I’d like to post a couple of disclaimers. Transparency is not something that every customer Read More...
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Scooblog on Corporate Transparency - Part 2: The Costs of Commonly Perceived Fears

Posted Wednesday, December 29, 2004 11:46 AM by jledgard
Before reading this I suggest reading Part 1 of the series . Commonly Perceived Fears People face a natural fear of increased openness. Some simply aren't inclined to talk about what they are working on, some are scared that there isn't a good way to Read More...
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Scooblog on Corporate Transparency - Part 1: What Comprises Transparency?

Posted Tuesday, December 28, 2004 8:32 PM by jledgard
I'm a big believer in corporate transparency as a means to increase trust and communication with customers. Can a big corporation be better at transparency than a open source group today? Where should groups at Microsoft or other corporations draw the Read More...
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Scooblog Presents: 16 Predictions for 2005

Posted Monday, December 27, 2004 9:36 PM by jledgard
It was a family tradition to always read the predictions from a tabloid magazine on New Years Eve as a form of entertainment. It seems that predictions are going around , it’s always fun attempting to guess the future, and I’m currently in-between rounds Read More...
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We Got Your Back: Measuring Success

Posted Monday, December 27, 2004 12:45 PM by jledgard
One reason that my team (Developer Division Customer Connection Team) exists is to ultimately raise developer satisfaction. Its our belief that we can effect satisfaction by improving the product group team connections with their customers. Its always Read More...
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IOD: New Blogger Alert/Feed on MSDN

Posted Monday, December 27, 2004 11:51 AM by jledgard
I'm going to soon be unsubscribing from a lot of blogs. The number of Microsoft blogs has gotten insane and trying to keep up with the main feed is next to impossible. I'm going to start being selective, but I'd still like to know when a new blogger comes Read More...
9 Comments

Recent Developer Community Wins

Posted Wednesday, December 22, 2004 12:02 PM by jledgard
Internally I try and send out mails that recognize cool contributions Microsoft people have made to the community every other month. In the latest issue I wrote a little poem to go with the mail. It's been suggested that I post this to my blog as well. Read More...
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What I've Learned about my Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone

Posted Monday, December 20, 2004 11:22 PM by jledgard
Ok, I know I just raved about my new phone like every other MS employee. No, they are not just dropping them off at everyones door. Yes, they do give us a pretty good discount on them. I spent a lot of time over the last few days trying to learn everything Read More...
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Read Dirty Laundry and Join the Mobile Revolution Anyway

Posted Monday, December 20, 2004 5:08 PM by jledgard
Scoble is taking some heat for this post and his letter to Bill about creating an interesting music player that a fellow "softy" described as the " Most Insulting Blog Entry of The Year ". Judging from the comments and the trackbacks, Ed is not the only Read More...
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Thanks Neil, for explaining why my GPRS is "Always On"

Posted Friday, December 17, 2004 11:49 PM by jledgard
Just a quick shout out to Neil Enns (PM on the Visual Studio Devices team) who resolved my concern that I couldn't disconnect my new Audiovox smartphone from the GPRS network. Apparently , once the connection is established to the data network the Smartphone Read More...
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IOD: Help us Improve Developer Chats

Posted Friday, December 17, 2004 6:00 PM by jledgard
I've been involved in several chats hosted on MSDN recently. Today I was talking to someone internally who was also working on scheduling chats for his team. We both complained about the overhead involved in scheduling and running a chat at Microsoft. Read More...
8 Comments

Comment Moderation on Until the SPAM Storm Blows Over

Posted Friday, December 17, 2004 9:41 AM by jledgard
Some of you have noticed (I've been IM'd and e-mailed) that I've turned on comment moderation. I have no intentions of making this permanent, but recently I've been having to delete 50-100 blog comment spam messages each day. This far outweighs the cost Read More...
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IOD: Easy Local Information Archive for Good Blog Posts

Posted Thursday, December 16, 2004 2:54 PM by jledgard
Part two of yesterdays idea ... I read a lot of feeds. I try to only keep them around for 30 days. But I haven't found a great way to archive the best content or best feeds in a way that lets me get that information back again. Some might suggest that Read More...
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January is "Be Nice to a Recruiter Month"; Spread the Word

Posted Thursday, December 16, 2004 2:48 PM by jledgard
Apparently, starting in 05, January is " Be Nice to a Recruiter Month " and Chris has already started spreading the word . You never know, it could be good for you down the road. I've learned you at least don't want to be on a recruiters bad side. Gretchen Read More...
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IOD: Desktop Search for the Blog Content I keep

Posted Wednesday, December 15, 2004 11:45 AM by jledgard
I installed the MSN Desktop Search suite yesterday. The outlook integration is nice, I like the easy search on the task-bar, but I disabled the web toolbar since I mostly use the google version for web search still. The content that seemed missing was Read More...
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"A Festivus for the Rest of Us"; Sandy Examines the True Meaning of Community

Posted Monday, December 13, 2004 9:51 PM by jledgard
Sandy looked up community on Wikipedia . Then she questioned whether Feedback Driven Development is community... "So when you look at the activities p&p is doing, are they really “community”? Certainly the group of customers that we are trying to Read More...
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Enter to Win the Bug of the Week Award

Posted Monday, December 13, 2004 9:35 PM by jledgard
I took some heat before for suggesting that people should file their bugs against the VS Betas on the Feedback Center as part of the Smart Client bug reporting challenge. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment because I'm going to link the our ongoing "Bug Read More...
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Something Useful can be done in 1 Day Per Week

Posted Monday, December 13, 2004 9:28 PM by jledgard
Yeah, the Google Suggest thing is pretty cool, but what was more interesting to me was that this proved that something useful can be done with the 20% "google time". In an earlier post Dare had questioned if it was only a myth that this time could be Read More...
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An older Idea sees the light of day: RSS->Mp3 for your Ipod!

Posted Thursday, December 09, 2004 2:31 PM by jledgard
No, it's not podcasting, " FeedSpeaker " is actual text to MP3 conversion from an RSS feed. Now if they add a regular scheduled checker and support multiple feeds to multiple MP3 files you could create some awesome RSS generated playlists to listen to Read More...
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Conventional Revolution is only Evolutionary Over Time

Posted Wednesday, December 08, 2004 3:06 PM by jledgard
Jonathan Schwartz, from Sun, examined IBM's Departure from the PC Industry and takes current subscription trends to make the case for a zero cost PC over time. "the devices are sold to consumers as part of subscription calling plans, whose long term value Read More...
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Short Read Link: Comparing Social Networking to Online Communities

Posted Wednesday, December 08, 2004 12:25 PM by jledgard
http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000834.html They offer some good reasons for anyone implemented a community driven application to think through the role of profile and identity in your application and what pieces of that information can help the community Read More...
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IOD: Cassette Adapter with Remote Control Capabilities

Posted Tuesday, December 07, 2004 10:58 AM by jledgard
My commute seems to get longer each morning so I just can't help but trying to think of ways to make it better. I use a cassette adapter to hook my iPod into my car stereo. My car has built in controls for the stereo on the steering wheel, but it's frustrating Read More...
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IOD: Local Road Traffic Report Via those "Your Speed" Signs

Posted Monday, December 06, 2004 2:49 PM by jledgard
Continuing with my driving theme from Friday ... Why not link those "Your Speed" traffic signs on local roads up to a traffic monitoring web site? From there you could see the "Average speed for the last X Car" reports that would give you a good idea Read More...
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IoD: Left/Right View Rear Cameras in Cars for Backing Out of Parking Spot

Posted Friday, December 03, 2004 11:23 AM by jledgard
This probably falls into the "I just haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it exists" catagory... Why don't cars have cameras pointing to the left and right of the bumper so that you can see oncoming vehicles when you are pulling out of a parking spot and Read More...
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IOD: Roll-Up Sections on Wiki Pages

Posted Thursday, December 02, 2004 4:34 PM by jledgard
From our team meeting today when we were discussing how to share status across our own team and other teams that are interested in the work we are doing to enable their customer connection oppertunities... We decided there should be a way to define a Read More...
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IOD: Standard Searchable FAQ Repository

Posted Wednesday, December 01, 2004 4:37 PM by jledgard
Again, more of an idea that people I work with have been throwing around... but imagine if every different sort of question asking and answering service had the ability to tag a question with it's answer... somewhat like our chat transcripts. These Q/A Read More...
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Putting those Halo 2 RSS Feeds to Use

Posted Wednesday, December 01, 2004 3:00 PM by jledgard
I've been subscribed to my own Halo 2 RSS feed for a while now. At first I thought it was super cool, but recently I've struggled to find a good use for it other than noting "Wow, I played over 100 games of halo this weekend" by the new post count. Well, Read More...
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