I recently started reading Chris Pratley blog. Chris is the Microsoft OneNote Group Program Manager and it appears he has been publicly blogging for only a weeks. Yet in just a few entries, Chris not only provides unique insight into MSFT’s product development practices and techniques, but I also feel that the blog broadens the user community’s perspective of the product.

Specifically, you can also see how this type of public communication about a product (and an excellent one I might add) can spawn user feedback that will undoubtedly influence the product’s direction.

Of course, user feedback in a public forum is noting new, mailing lists, newsgroups et al, have been the venue for this fodder for many years.

However, I think the blog format enables a contextual history and candidness that seem to get lost in any of the aforementioned formats. Perhaps it’s merely the signal-to-noise ratio or the initial monolog-ish nature that a blog entry carries, but whatever ‘it’ is, I think more people in Chris’ position should follow suit.

As an aside, product blogging from the inside is nothing particularly new, Macromedia has been doing it for over a year as well as many-many smaller shops, but I think seeing Microsoft do it so well seems to legitimize the format to the point where Product Blogging or Service Blogging for that matter should be a requirement of any successful management team.

Alain Briot, described as one of the most successful landscape photographers working in the U.S. today, takes his Canon 300D Digital Rebel to Paris and details his intriguing conclusions on Luminous Landscape, such as the following:

“In evaluating the final results from my two weeks photographing in Paris, and while actually looking at prints done from my 300D images, I find these prints to be comparable to 4×5″, in terms of sharpness and overall image quality, in size up to 11×14 and maybe even larger”

Thanks for the link Les! (When will we see your photoblog? ;)

This time by IBM luminary Sam Ruby. The post details the start of his experience building a dedicated MythTV box based on Debian, but the wisdom will eventually…

“… be automated, published, and shared.”

“But, first I have to get it working repeatably…”

We expect nothing less from you Sam ;-)

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It sounds like Tom Walsh over at Newsforge and I share many of the same first experiences and conclusions in regard to building and using a Home Theater PC (HTPC) based on MythTV.

Tom Walsh writes: “Would I say that anyone could put together their own PVR? No! It takes a level of competency and comfort with Linux to attempt such an undertaking. You need a good deal of patience with often time-confusing documentation. But if you persist, ask questions of those in IRC, and purchase high-end hardware, I am confident that you too will be satisfied with your results.”

I agree. Although, I’m still having some minor problems like “tinny” audio that appears randomly on recorded programs, but I’ve read that it’s fixable with a driver update. Plus I need to upgrade to the latest MythTV (.14) relase.

Overall however, we’re still very happy with our “STeVo” and our TV viewing habits have certainly changed in a good way — like for example we’re watching less (especially commercials!!)

Prognosticator Dave Pell of Davenetics and NextDraft fame is at it again, this time with Electablog (RSS feed too), which Dave describes as…

“electablog provides a daily (and sometimes nightly) slicing and dicing of the mad dash that is America’s election cycle. Think of it as C-Span meets the Daily Show meets the little girl from Whale Rider meets Dennis Miller before he lost his mind.”

Dude! When do you sleep?

Jim Rapoza over at eWeek laments over the sorry state of customer facing corporate search. Here are some good quotes from Jim’s article:

“…there is one thing about the Web that remains poor: site search capabilities.”

“As we said in the 1997 article, if visitors or customers can’t find what they want on your site, they will often simply leave.”

“The search capabilities on most company and content-oriented Web sites are as bad now as they were several years ago. In fact, eWEEK Labs was dismayed to find that we could have easily rerun an article we wrote back in June 1997 on how to improve site searches…”

“… However, RSS could also be used on sites to create channels for commonly searched categories of content. Users could then subscribe to or occasionally open these channels to get updates of information changes on a site.”