Entries tagged with blogs - Channel 10

Get All the Microsoft Blogs at BlogMS

sarahintampa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:42:00 GMT

At Microsoft, there are a lot of product and support teams blogging – so many, in fact, that it can be hard to keep up with them all. If you tried to subscribe to all the sites on your own, you could be overwhelmed by the sheer number of posts. Well, now there’s a better way to keep up with Microsoft news. A new resource called BlogMS makes it easy for you to follow all the Microsoft blogs by offering regular weekly and monthly updates from product, support and other specialist teams within Microsoft. The site tracks over 130 blogs in total! Every week and calendar month, BlogMS will also publish a full summary of all the latest articles in a single blog post on this site as well as offer a report which you can download. During the week, blog alerts will be issued to highlight important announcements. Here’s the list of all the blogs the site is tracking, but if you want to check out all the Microsoft produced blogs, you can go here to the Microsoft Community Blogs site. We hear that we have Brandon LeBlanc from the Windows Experience Blog to thank for getting this list started, so thank you, thank you, Brandon (and everyone else who ended up contributing to this site) for making our lives easier.

Zemanta Plugin for Windows Live Writer

sarahintampa — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:10:00 GMT

Zemanta is a technology used by bloggers that inserts automatic links, adds relevant photos, adds links to related articles, and automatically tags your posts. The technology is available either as a browser plugin or a server-side plugin that supports either WordPress, Movable Type, or Drupal. However, I recently learned that it’s available as a Windows Live Writer plugin, too!

After installation, the Zemanta plugin will appear in the right sidebar of WLW where you can see the content it is suggesting for your post. (You have to write at least 300 characters before it will provide any suggestions.) The plugin works on Live Writer versions 12-14. You can see what version you run by going to “About” from the “Help” menu in Live Writer.

To try the Zemanta plugin for yourself, you can download it from here.

MSN Environment Launched

sarahintampa — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:59:00 GMT

For eco-warriors and environmentalists, there's a new channel on MSN that will be of interest: MSN Environment. On this site, you can read news and blogs, watch videos, get eco-friendly tips, plus get access to tools like a carbon calculator and a water usage meter. The site is only on MSN UK (for the U.S., we have MSN Green instead), but there are certainly features on the site that will appeal to everyone interested in these issues.

If you want to follow various sections of MSN Environment, there are several RSS feeds to choose from, including:

Environment Blog: Matthew Yeomans is the co-founder of Custom Communication an online media consultancy that provides environmental reporting. He reports for MSN on The Climate Report blog.
Environment Features: All the feature stories from MSN Environment Editor including analysis.
Environment Photos: All the photo stories from MSN Environment Editor including analysis.
Environment News: Updated throughout the day with breaking and feature news stories
Environment Videos: Stand alone features from VideoJug
Green Living : Reports on Green Living

(via vnunet)

Wordpress + Virtual Earth = Awesome Maps for Your Blog

sarahintampa — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:09:00 GMT

A new Wordpress plugin lets bloggers easily insert Virtual Earth maps onto any Wordpress blog. Using the plugin is easy - you just install it to your plugins folder as you would any other, but the best part is that the plugin is compatible with Windows Live Writer! When you use Live Writer to post to your blog, the "Insert" --> "Map" option becomes a Virtual Earth map instead of a static one. To see an example, check out the plugin authors' blog or to get started, you can download the plugin here. For users of the latest version of Wordpress (2.5), the download is here instead.

TechFest 2008: BLEWS - What the Blogosphere Tells You About News

Tina — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:59:00 GMT

What a great time for BLEWS...while blogging about politics is at an all-time high, BLEWS simplifies the debates for you...here's what I found out at TechFest 2008.

While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps.

BLEWS also offers a “see the view from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social Media platform, adding both link analysis and text analysis of the blog posts.

Missing Dr. Bill? Visit HealthBlog

bcrounse — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:35:00 GMT

To my loyal readers/listeners/viewers on Channel 10;

You may have noticed that I haven't posted anything lately to my Blog on Channel 10 (other than the video we just did with my colleagues at Microsoft Research). Don't fret. I haven't abandoned my rants and raves on the healthcare IT industry. We just decided that it didn't make sense anymore for me to duplicate the material I've been writing for my other more widely read blog, HealthBlog, on Channel 10. So if you've been missing me, link yourself over to HealthBlog and catch up on all that's new in healthcare. Better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Best always,

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

Wordpress.com keeps knucklehead domain setup off your desk

Jesse — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 21:41:00 GMT

In the world of the blog, search juice is the drink of the Gods. Anyone's web presence is most easily measured by the history and persistence of one's search results. Now the squad at Automattic made it that much easier to start down the road to juicy Web supremacy.

Now one of the most favored places to host a blog, wordpress.com, will register and map your domain for you. If you already own a domain they'll walk you through updating your DNS table entries and handle the forwarding for you. If you're starting from just a good idea, you can have them register your domain and do the forwarding for the price of the first Secret Machines album.

Windows Live Writer makes blogging more accessible

Jesse — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:25:30 GMT

The beta version of Windows Live Writer dropped this past Friday, and today we bring you a walkthrough with the man in charge, J.J. Alaire. This latest Microsoft tool for bloggers has lit a fire over at Techmeme, and we're certainly very excited to start using it at 10.

Live Writer is being built to play nice with just about everyone's blogging platform, though this first beta focuses on compatibility with Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, and Wordpress (as if that list doesn't already have you covered). Go grab the Live Writer download now and help bring blogging out of the in-browser dark ages.

John Edwards at Gnomedex

Tina — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:28:00 GMT

John Edwards spoke at Gnomedex to listen to the audience and learn more from them on how to open up the process of voting and choosing government officials. Of course blogging and podcasting came up, but also mobile texting as well as a reality tv show following the candidates' campaigns from inside the bus.

I'd watch that :)

Links: Gnomedex, One America Committee

BlogHer '06

Laura — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 04:00:00 GMT

What happens when all of your favorite female bloggers come together to mix, mingle and network? Well, check out my trip to the BlogHer convention to find out.

Links: Be Jane, Blog Business Summit, Minnie, Mixed Media Watch, Rain City Studios, Robert Scoble

7 Day Software : NewsGator

Jesse — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 06:15:00 GMT

Every so often we highlight the tools that have passed our seven day rule (thanks Jeff for turning the phrase). These are things that quickly become indispensible in our work and play online. Whether they be applications, services, or any collection of code that grows on us, if we’re still using it after a week’s worth of trial, it’s worth shelling out some cash to have it in our arsenal.

Does it significantly improve over an existing solution or solve a lingering problem?

Feed aggregation is a tempestuous beast, and finding the right combination of whip and chair is no easy task. Traditionally you've had two types of solutions; web and desktop. Web aggregators have been slow, poorly designed, or weighed down by advertising. Desktop aggregators on the other hand tend to be resource hogs, only function on Windows or Mac OS X, or provide no AFK solution.

NewsGator is the best solution we've found that addresses both sides of the feed-reading coin. NewsGator provides solid desktop applications for both platforms in the forms of FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Mac OS X. And of course, if you find yourself at a foreign machine with only the glow of bandwidth to keep you company, you can browse all of your feeds using the NewsGator Online web interface.

Does it play well with my other applications, or does it clobber them?

FeedDemon took up very little of our available desktop power throughout our initial tests. It worked quietly in the background, keeping us briefed while giving most of our processing power to editing video for 10 and battling the Microsoft email leviathan. NetNewsWire did just as well on our MacBook at home.

Does it have an effective UI, or is the experience awkward and weird?

The interface is clean, with minimal screen clutter translating into maximum reading real estate. When a feed is selected from the list, it remains highlighted while displaying it's articles with plenty of space between each one, and simple icons for reading, clipping, and emailing below each article. One particular nicety here; NewsGator doesn't mark all of a feed's items as read just by selecting that feed, something that has annoyed us with other RSS readers before.

Does it support multiple platforms and devices?

NewsGator Online will synchronize with either FeedDemon on Windows or NetNewsWire on Mac OS X. There's also support for HTML-capable mobile devices, any POP3 email client, and even a version that will run in Windows Media Center (perfect for the couch potato info junkie). This is as close to the nirvana of a hosted, amended OPML file as you can get.

Does it make me more productive and entertained?

Having an end-to-end solution for managing feeds is by far the most impressive value-add with NewsGator. Whether we're at home or at work, adding a new feed was a quick and painless process--in some cases it was as easy as punching a NewsGator button on the site itself. Even when we were out and about sans mobile device (GASP!), amending our feed list was as easy as finding the first open web terminal, logging into our NewsGator Online account, and typing in the URL.

Does it allow me to move my data around easily?

RSS, Atom, and OPML are each first class citizens in NewsGator. From the online interface we were able to expose our OPML file for the world to see. Also, from either FeedDemon or NetNewsWire we were able to export to a single OPML file, which will make testing any future aggregators a breeze. Hopefully in future updates the NewsGator Online interface will write an OPML file for easy download, even though we couldn't imagine using the web reader without a desktop counterpart.

Does it quickly become part of my daily digital routine?

As if feed aggregation wasn't already intertwined with our DNA, NewsGator made the activity more seamless and second-nature than checking email. The statistics on how much information we were able to ingest as compared to traditional web browsing must be staggering. Perhaps NewsGator could build in those sort of reading statistics (hint hint)?

Links: NewsGator

Technorati CEO Dave Sifry on blogs, tags, and finding faster than Google

Laura — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:01:23 GMT

Do you read blogs? Do you write a blog? Are you having trouble pronouncing the word blog? Well Dave Sifry spends every day as the head of Technorati making it easier for the blogosphere to soak up every minute of free time you’ve got, as well as keeping up with what the world says about your personal ramblings. We got his thoughts on microformats, tags, and corporate bloggers, all from the comfort of ~~Plaid~~ Silicon Valley.

Links: Dave Sifry's Blog, Technorati, Whats a blog?