Young Turk's Ramble: Blogging Technology

Testing the BlogFuse Facebook Application Creator

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:01:45 GMT

Yesterday, I ran into an interesting blog entry from Glen on LifeDev. In it, he described a creator for "an application that will republish your blog’s articles to your readers’ Facebook profile, giving them a way to easily track and share your blog’s articles among their friends..."

What a neat idea, bringing "my blog to my profile" from RSS-to-notes into a new level. I tested it out this morning. The creator worked as advertised, helping me create an application for my blog (or up to 10 blogs) without doing any coding. So, what does this do?

First, it adds your blogs as an application into your profile. This is not a big deal as the notes already do this.

But next, it provides an application on profiles where your friends can share your articles...

..and spread the application, further adding to the viral effect.

Very simple, but very nice for content publishers and all the "pro bloggers" out there.

You can click the link below to add my application and test the idea out. You will likely see this post as the first one inside the application (nice awkward loop).

This reminded me of some efforts Chris Keating was undertaking on our platform, but we have some ways to go on this front.

Technorati Tags: app,applications,blogfuse,blogging,blogging tips,facebook,facebook applications,web

Talking about NPR: Social networking with your boss?

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:34:24 GMT

My boss is my friend on Windows Live Spaces and knows where my profile is on the social networking sites. Does yours?

In response to Karen, who wrote:

This morning I was driving into work and caught an interesting story on NPR's Morning Edition. The story was an interview with Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times columnist, who was advising people to not social network with your boss because of the implications on your career as ultimately your boss does hold your employment fate in their hands... [...]

It makes me wonder then, how do other people really feel about it? Is your boss your friend on WL Spaces, Facebook, Myspace, etc? Does your boss know where your profile is on any of these sites?

Caglayan Arkan blogging

Fri, 04 May 2007 14:02:44 GMT

Caglayan Arkan, Microsoft's GM for Turkey, is blogging on Windows Live Spaces. A good number of Microsoft executives, some more active and some less like Ray Ozzie, are blogging; and plenty of Turkish professionals, mostly working on technology, are on the web. However, this is the first Turkish executive that I know of who is laying it out. Check his initial entry (in Turkish) here.

I am "on10" today

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:06:23 GMT

On10.net did a short video interview with me, where I briefly talk about our newest Windows Live Agent, the Muse, and demostrate some video functionality. You already heard about Muse here, but might not have seen all the great multimedia features we have recently introduced. Specifically, I showcase our Soapbox gadget, then demo the universal video gadget with YouTube, then cast some embarassing snowboard pictures of the Spaces team at Stevens Pass from Mixpo (all this functionality available to you now).

You can see the video on the On10.net page today or download it at this link. As always, let me know what you think here.

Introducing the Muse

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:20:55 GMT

Pooja and I had a nice chat with Kip Kniskern last week to show him the Muse, the first version of a new Windows Live Agent for our Messenger users. If you would like to find out more, Kip wrote a nice summary about it here and even included some of our conversation as an MP3 file, which goes into the what and why. You can add Muse to your contacts through musebot@live.com today. Looking forward to your feedback on this.

Gadgets, yes, yes, gadgets

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:04:24 GMT

I have been getting a lot of questions about what one can or cannot do with Windows Live Spaces these days. Some of the most frequent ones are whether one can embed videos (yes) and whether one can have video gadgets (yes). In fact, since we now support gadgets from Gallery on Windows Live Spaces, a lot of coll toys can be brought to life by us and by external developers. Check out some examples here.
If you have some cool gadget ideas, we would love to hear them.

my Expo listings finally have pictures

Sat, 27 May 2006 01:19:12 GMT

I recently added my Expo listings here and was plagues by problems loading jpg images. It looks like the bug has finally been fixed, and the module is rendering properly. Check it out on the leftmost column of the home page.

Katleen's Rio Stories

Thu, 04 May 2006 22:58:17 GMT

Katleen, one of Seattle's part time musicians who taught me a good deal of stuff at VamoLa, has been keeping a great blog about her experiences in Brazil. I was in NYC this week for Spaces and spent a portion of the plane ride catching up on her entries. The blog is a pleasure to read, not only because of my interest in samba, but also because it showcases blogging technology's potential: keeping in touch, discovering new things and people (check her comments), and so on. Check it out. A great job, Kathleen, except I wish it were on Spaces; then I could do a trackback to it from here.

Cool: FeedYes

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 23:48:18 GMT

FeedYes tries to create an RSS feed from any webpage, whether they offer a feed or not. I will test it out this week. This could be a very cool way to monitor some web content.

"Blog Establishment" in New York Magazine

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 22:56:56 GMT

New York magazine has an interesting article on blogs and Shirky's power-law distribution in the blogosphere. Good bedtime reading.

Spaces new version live!

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 01:03:29 GMT

We have just gone live with a bunch of cool toys for your space. You can find a great overview here.

As you can tell, I lost no time replacing my old reading list with one powered by Amazon. Play with the new site, and let us know what you think.

Spaces performance

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:23:58 GMT

If you were as frustrated with the site's performance as I was this week, you probably were itching to ask someone: what on earth is going on?!? Mike has some comments.

As you can guess, we use our technology (not only Spaces of course, but a lot of our technology) daily at Microsoft. And we get as upset, if not more upset because we worked hard on it, when it does not work as it was supposed to. I --for one- am happy to browse spaces without waiting again.

We play with a lot of others' technology, too. I am particularly spending a lot of time with social software these days. I'll try to spare some time and tell you about the cool stuff I found.

I added a blogroll to my page this week, too, so that you can see some of the ideas I am looking at. Check it out.

that flight mode

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:15:14 GMT

We have all heard, particularly at Microsoft, how blogging is changing the face of media, entertainment, journalism and PR. Jeremy Hermanns' entry about his experience on the de-pressurized Alaska Flight #536 took the point to a new level and is now turning into a PR issue, so much so that Scoble just blogged about Jeremy's entry (here), rather his own experience on the plane! Others are also picking it up.

So why am I tagging this as blogging technology? Because it was interesting to see the commenters argue about Jeremy's use of a mobile device on board. I believe that this is a bigger problem for cell towers on the ground, than the airplane itself (which, mind you, had a hole in the fuselage at this point), even if the signal was on. But come on people: that "flight mode" have its uses. If you are calm enough to turn it on...

this is how you claim your blog at Technorati :-)

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:46:23 GMT

Here is a quick tip: embedding some code such as this Technorati Profile will "claim" your blog at Technorati. Check their site for the steps.

Rajesh Setty has a list of similar registeries to complete if you would like to spread your blog in his blogging starter checklist.