July 2, 2004

2004 Tour de France

The start of Le Tour is just hours away and I am already on the edge with anticipation. No matter the outcome, I guarantee that it is going to be an epic battle. Far more dramatic and compelling than any over-hyped “reality show” could force feed viewers.

Kudos to the Outdoor Live Network (OLN-TV) for their live unabridged coverage. I or my STeVo will be there from Liege to the Champs-ElysÃ©es in Paris!

June 28, 2004

WinFS is a Database Platform

Samuel Druker the Microsoft Development Lead for WinFS speaks on Channel 9 in video and in the threads about how WinFS will mean much more than simply full-text searching. (via Philipp Lenssen)

Quotes from Samuel regarding WinFS differences with respect to the current crop of Personal Search Tools:

“X1 (and enfish and lookout) do the job for full-text search on the stuff they know about in the particular application they support. However, WinFS is a database platform. As I said in the other video, it’s a storage platform. Developers write new apps, those apps use schemas to describe the user’s data and rely on the system repository to hold those items. Full-text search is just one thing that you can build on that. Much more important, IMO, is what the database guys call query and relations.”

June 28, 2004

Revamped MSN Search (soon)

My buddy Martin over at BA-Insight (who incidentally kicked-off a great new blog on enterprise search) sent me a link to this article on CNET about comments Bill Gates made during a media briefing in Sydney Australia regarding the new revamped MSN Search capabilities Microsoft is set to release in July. Here are some interesting yet not surprising quotes from the article.

“Microsoft’s chairman told a media briefing here that the company had “several milestones with its search site” on the way.”

June 25, 2004

Billy G’s Blog

The Seattle Times has an article saying Bill Gates may become a blogger (via Anil).

“Yes, the world’s richest man may start his own blog, one of those online diaries that have been the rage among techies for the past three or four years.”

As funny as it is to think of a secret Bill Gates Blog, I think it also sends a clear message to corporations at large that there’s viability in utilizing blogging to connect with customers, partners and employees.

June 24, 2004

NewsGator Closes Series A Funding

I just wanted to say congratulations to Greg!

“DENVER, CO – June 23, 2004 – NewsGator Technologies, Inc., a leading developer of content aggregation tools and services, announced today that it has closed a round of funding with Mobius Venture Capital.”

I’ve been evangelizing NewsGator since I started using the early betas back January 2003. Keep up the great work!

June 21, 2004

Broadband Syndication Synergies and P2P

Today, there was a /. post about a new MythTV plug-in called Torrentocracy that extends the included MythNews RSS Aggregator to support RSS Enclosures and Bit Torrent.

Torrentocracy is not the first to mesh RSS Enclosures, Bit Torrent and PVRs.

In fact, NewsGator released NewsGator Media Center Edition back in April and two weeks ago, Ray Slakinski’s Nucleus application, which can be used in a similar way on just about any environment.

I’ll definitely give Torrentocracy a test on my STeVo. However, what I’ve been thinking about is the next iteration of these tools…

June 17, 2004

Blinkx Contextual Search

Om Malik praises the new contextual desktop search tool called Blinkx, which is currently available in a downloadable beta client as well as a web only interface.

Om goes on to cite some attractive examples such as…

“BlinkX is all about contextual search…Say you are reading through a big Microsoft Word document… the BlinkX bar at the top of the page, will retrieve relevant news item links with brief summaries… The software basically reads the entire document and builds a contextual link database on the fly.”

June 14, 2004

Earning Money without Patients

Granted it has been a 15 year vesting period and the payout is a partly $1.2 million or E1 million in comparison to other web pioneers, but Tim Berners-Lee finally gets his due with the Millennium Technology Prize from the Finnish Technology Award Foundation.

Great quotes: “Rather than patenting his idea for the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee and colleague Robert Cailliau, working at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva), insisted on a license-free technology. If they hadn’t, Berners-Lee says, the Web wouldn’t be the interoperable linkup that it is. “There would have been a CERN Web, a Microsoft one, there would have been a Digital one, AppleÂ’s HyperCard would have started reaching out Internet roots,” he said. “And all of these things would have been incompatible.” (links via MIT Technology Review and Scripting News)

June 10, 2004

Parenting Blog

Weblogs, Inc. new Blogging Baby weblog is like Slashdot for Parents (sans all the MSFT bashing ;-)

Of course there are a few RSS feeds too — no Atom feed though.

June 9, 2004

BitTorrent While You Sleep

Ray Slakinski put together a wicked little Python application called Nucleus, which will monitor a BitTorrent Tracker RSS file for .torrent files that match a series of keywords.

Once a match is found, the file is queued for download.

Using cron or the Windows Scheduler, you can program Nucleus to fire in the middle of the night downloading while you sleep :-)

In Ray’s example, he is using it to grab TV shows, but I suppose you can use it to grab any .torrent file — assuming of course that your tracker of choice has an RSS feed.