Niall Kennedy's home on the web
About a year ago I said I would switch my blog’s Atom output from 0.3 to 1.0 once Bloglines, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator supported the new format. Bloglines now supports Atom 1.0, so I just flipped my Atom feed over from 0.3 to 1.0.
Everything should transition smoothly.
The state of Washington has declared today and tomorrow RSS days throughout the state. The declaration is in recognition of big companies, startups, and governments within Washington taking advantage of new technologies such as RSS to change the technology sector.
Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 is now available and includes some new feed reading features for users who like to browse their feed items in the browser. The new beta includes a refresh all option, mark all feed items read, and a few other final tweaks on the path to ship.
Sometimes it’s not fun to obey the machine and its update schedule. Advanced information hungry readers can now update all feeds at once, grabbing the latest content before disconnecting from the Internet or to be absolutely sure you’re caught up on all your feeds.
You can now mark a feed as read or unread as you navigate, and set the preference so it persists through all of your feed reading in IE7. All in the quest to help people unbold more content and get that unread count down to zero.
Both features might be considered advanced, designed for people who like to take control of the wheel and steer their reading experience. IE7 is now feature-complete for the feed reading experience but parsing and other issues will continue to be tweaked before final launch. The Internet Explorer team is collecting feedback here.
Vic Gundotra, Scoble’s (former) boss’ boss, is leaving Microsoft to join Google. Vic is taking a year off to allow his non-compete to elapse without legal issue.
Vic is a general manager for platform evangelism and helped build Channel 9, 10, and other general developer evangelism efforts within Microsoft.
Germany plays Argentina this Friday, June 30, at 8 a.m. Pacific time. If you’re at Gnomedex I’ll have a viewing party in my room at the Edgewater. I’m rooting for Argentina.
I’ll be missing Chris Pirillo’s opening statements and Mike Arrington’s discussion, but no way they can’t compete with Germany playing Argentina in Berlin. Sorry Om, I might miss the beginning of your session too.
Given the possible matchups on Saturday such as England vs. Portugal or Brazil vs. Spain/France these will be tough choices for morning sessions.
The next version of Microsoft’s Spaces hosted blogging product will include more social networking, gadget integration, and premium options such as no advertising on your blog. The features were announced tonight in a post on the Spaces team blog.
Spaces has a whole new look (pictured above) with cleaner lines and additional featured content than current spaces blogs. Your IM friends list can be exposed as a blog module showing off all their latest content and online activity. You can add the same gadgets to your blog sidebar that run on the Live.com personal homepage. The new site also makes it easier to navigate your categories and entries, exposing more content to your site visitors to encourage them to stay a while and get to know more about your digital content.
The biggest surprise is the addition of a Windows Live premium account with special features for Mail and Spaces users. Twenty bucks a year gives you more storage space in your online mail and removes advertisements from your blog as well as from Windows Live Mail. Yahoo! offers a premium mail service for $20 that is limited to just the mail property.
I am attending Bloggercon for the next two days, listening, participating and leading conversations on the world of blogging. Some quick observations from the last three hours of the conference:
The live conversation surrounding me is competing with the conversations happening in the blogosphere. If the conversation becomes uninteresting I open my feed aggregator and see what’s new among another few hundred sources of information. (pictured above: Marc Canter sleeping).
Bloggercon is a non-commercial conference focused on users, with no commercial messages or pitches allowed to leave your mouth. A few attendees wore t-shirts with messaging instead, letting the room know about their latest product without even opening their mouth.
Despite the 220+ signups on the Bloggercon wiki the room is about half-full.
Seth Sternberg of Meebo joined me and Om on this week’s edition of Om and Niall PodSessions covering the latest trends and developments in instant messaging. Microsoft and Yahoo! launched new versions of their messaging software this week, including many features I will never use. What do end users want from their instant messaging software?
Seth doesn’t think the big portals have added a new feature that users have been clamoring for in years. Chinese company Tencent has captured about two-thirds of the Chinese market with its QQ client. Estonian company Skype has enjoyed tremendous success with its P2P and encrypted conversation technologies. Meanwhile large companies have relied on acquisitions to stay fresh, such as Yahoo! integrating Dialpad and Microsoft adding FolderShare to their latest releases.
Meebo has noticed a sharp decline in instant message traffic during World Cup games involving England or Brazil. The world pauses to watch the game before returning to their computers for instant analysis.
This week’s PodSession, Instant Messaging. The podcast is 24 minutes in length, a 11 MB download.
Apple is looking for ways to cut down on wait times at its stores’ checkout lines and roaming WiFi-enabled processing stations in the hands of each employee may be the answer. The same employee helping you pick out the right set of headphones for your iPod can scan product barcodes and take payments via credit card right on the spot. Your receipt will sent to you via e-mail just in case you need to make a return or file an expense report.
The handheld devices Apple uses in its store are powered by Windows. More information is available in a NPR Day to Day report on “maverick retailing” filed earlier this week.
Access to Mountain View’s upcoming Google-powered WiFi network will require a Google account when it launches later this year. Users of the public WiFi network will land on a specially configured Google homepage for the city of Mountain View upon successful login with local modules such as weather, news, Chamber of Commerce, and school information.
Requiring an account for every user means almost every person in Mountain View will have a GTalk account. Not only will you be able to likely connect instantly to people you know, but it will also be possible to browse users on nearby nodes if Google opens up the capability.
The new WiFi network was introduced to Mountain View residents last Thursday and includes 350 radios on lamp posts and three aggregation points at Google, Red Hat, and St. Francis High, a local private high school. The three aggregation points are plotted on the map below.
Residents are encouraged to purchase a PePLink Surf CPE device for their homes to boost the outside signal. The municipal network provides up to 1 Mbps connection to its users depending on variables such as distance from the nearest radio and current network usage. AT&T offers residential DSL starting at $13 a month for up to 1.5 Mbps. Local cable company Comcast charges $58 a month for up to 6 Mbps.
