June 18, 2003

Nobody Uses Advanced Search

Tim Bray’s second installment on search…

“Every search engine has an Â“advanced searchÂ“ screen, and nobody (quantitatively, less than 0.5% of users) ever goes there. This drove us nuts back at Open Text, because our engine was very structurally savvy and could do compound/boolean queries that look like what today weÂ’d call XPath. But nobody used it.”

I used it quite a bit. In fact, the advanced search pare was what I would bookmark on most search engines. However, indeed, I was certainly in the minority.

June 17, 2003

Rumor: Microsoft looking to buy Accenture?

Cringely writes in his latest InfoWorld column:

“…one of my moles reported that Team Redmond might be looking to buy Accenture, the $11 billion consulting company. Apparently, Microsoft and Accenture have been engaged in some intense talks, with folks frequently flying back and forth between Redmond and New York, particularly during March and April. “

June 17, 2003

“You have a marketing problem&#8221...

Steven Vore pulls out a great quote from George Gilder’s book Telecosm, which I think seems so relevant to the music industry — namely the RIAA. (link via McGee’s Musings)

“When your product is stolen by thieves, you have a police problem. When it is stolen by millions of honest customers, you have a marketing problem.”

Oh how I hope the music industry is listening. Unfortunately I highly doubt they would see the relevance.

June 16, 2003

Office 2003 beta 2 “refresh”

PCWorld reports “Microsoft is on track to release its “refresh” of Office 2003 beta 2 to testers before the end of the month, a company spokesman said Friday.”

This is good news, because I’ve been having problems with Outlook 2003 freezing occasionally. Otherwise, the other apllications in the Office 2003 beta have been stable.

June 16, 2003

Search is Commoditized

A quote from Tim Bray’s first in a series on search technology:

“All search engines work more or less the same, and offer more or less the same APIs, and provide more or less the same quality of result.”

Interesting. I can’t wait till the next installment.

June 13, 2003

Word 2003 as an RSS Viewer

Mike Gunderloy has written up an article that demonstrates how to use Word 2003 as an RSS viewer. Mike did this cool hack by transforming an RSS feed into into Words own XML flavor, WordML — Of course using XSLT and a little VBS. (via Lockergnome)

June 13, 2003

Spike You!

Catherine rants about Spike Lee’s suit against SpikeTV. I’ll have to add to Cat’s “Spike” list with Elvis Costello’s album Spike from 1989.

And what about all those dogs named Spike? What will we do?

June 12, 2003

Retro Computing Magazines

I’m certainly feeling nostalgic with all the retro talk lately about early experiences with computing technology.

Given the reflective talk, it’s not surprising to see a mention of some of my favorite computing magazines like
Softside,
Antic and of course Creative Computing

In fact, I still have a few issues of Creative Computing and Softside from the late 70’s early 80’s. Perhaps when I post my “Newly Digital” experiences, I’ll include pictures of these zines.

June 12, 2003

OneNote as a Wiki front-end

It just occurred to me that Microsoft’s OneNote, the application “for capturing, organizing, and collaboratively sharing information”, would work well as a front-end to a Wiki.

For example: A Wiki server could act as repository for publishing shared OneNote pages that in turn can be collaborated on either via the browser (in the true Wiki sense) or within the OneNote application itself.

IMHO, this type of integration would push Wiki’s into corporate environments where knowledge management seems to involve too much post-processing work.

June 11, 2003

FrontPage 2003 as a blogging tool

I didn’t see this feature in the latest beta of FP 2003, but according to this article on CRN FrontPage 2003 will include a blogging tool.

However, what I also found interesting is that FP 2003 will also “incorporate a full WYSIWYG editor for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSLT)”,

Very cool!

Hmmm… Perhaps I missed that in the beta. (note to self: re-check FP 2003 beta)