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.

June 7, 2004

Digital Photography Composition Tips

Another Photography-related link found via /. points to a recent post on the Digital Photography Blog where they have assembled a collection of Photography Composition Tips found on the net.

Most of these are obvious to the professional photographer, but being that I’m not, I found many of the tips helpful.

Like for example, these tips on taking night or low-light digital photographs. (which, BTW makes me want to apply the Firmware Hack to my D300 so I can “enable” ISO 3200 ;-)

June 3, 2004

Canon EOS-300D Firmware Hack

UPDATE: June, 16 2004: New beta version B7.1: download here

Yesterday the news of the Russian Canon EOS-300D Firmware Hack hit /.

Spurred largely due to the 300D’s similarities with the 10D, rumors of the potential for hacks have been widely discussed in the forums on DPreview.

I’ve been passively following the 300D firmware hacks for weeks to get the skinny.

Yet I’m still on-the-fence with regard to installing a hacked firmeware upgrade due to the fact that it will void my warranty.