RSS jobs at Yahoo! and Microsoft

Yahoo! and Microsoft are definitely paying attention to emerging forms of data transport such as RSS. It is evident not only in their product roadmaps but also in the essential tools to help potential candidates succeed in their jobs.

Microsoft mentions RSS in 15 current job descriptions across product groups such as portable media center, marketing, and MSN. Looks like Microsoft has some plans for RSS on mobile devices.

Yahoo! mentions RSS in 12 current job descriptions including what they are calling their “open content (RSS) platform.”

Google currently has no job listings for feed technologies RSS, Atom, or even the word “blog.” Google’s job listings are much more generic and generally do not mention a specific product team.

Product teams at Yahoo! and Microsoft are building and expanding syndication technologies as future product features. It should be interesting to watch the awareness and open platform creation develop.

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Hurricane Katrina on Technorati

I spent my morning summarizing the current happenings around Hurricane Katrina for a new Technorati page on the topic. Some interesting observations with limited citations as I am just braindumping.

  • Bloggers opened their houses to each other sight unseen.
  • Blogs with video and photo coverage quickly exceeded their bandwidth limits and were offline this morning.
  • CNN setup a special citizen journalists page for submissions.
  • Technorati received calls from media outlets this morning in their search of the latest news from the blogosphere.
  • Bloggers lost power and Internet access put kept on blogging through laptops connected to dial-up modems and free trial Internet accounts, mobile phones, as well as PDAs. They wanted to share their unique story however they could, and the comments and advice helped them know they were not alone as some feared for their lives.
  • Many local bloggers were quick to point out the risk loving people who were down by the shore, on their roofs, and generally disregarding all advice and preparedness.

Later in the day more questions emerged from the blogosphere.

  • Is Bush to blame for the hurricane?
  • Is Katrina a result of global warming?
  • When will the New Orleans Saints be able to play football in the Superdome again?
  • How will this event affect the price of oil?
  • Should emergency workers assist people who disregarded evacuation orders and are now stranded?

I am impressed with the blogging and community action around Hurricane Katrina this morning.

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Yahoo! leasing San Francisco office space

Yahoo! plans to lease 200,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco according to the San Francisco Business Times. The new office is located at 475 Sansome Street, near the landmark TransAmerica pyramid.

Yahoo! currently has a HotJobs office in San Francisco and is currently hiring for two account executive positions.

I wonder what teams will be located at this new location. I have thought about working at Yahoo! in the past but the commute to Sunnyvale is just too much for city dwellers like me or people living in Marin or the East Bay. 200,000 square feet holds a lot of people and hopefully some interesting groups will be relocated or expanded to San Francisco.

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Movable Type 3.2 is here

Powered by Movable Type 3.2

Six Apart released the final version of Movable Type 3.2 today, almost a full year after the release of 3.1 on August 31, 2004.

New feature highlights:

  • A detailed user manual.
  • New templates allow default markup compatibility across all Six Apart properties.
  • Trusted commentors, junk folders, and simpler individual archive templates help authors fight spam while jumping through less setup hoops.
  • SpamLookup is a bundled plugin.
  • Reworked administrative interface including color icons and list actions.
  • Bundled with an OpenID server as an extra feature.
  • Atom 1.0 template is included while the RSS 1.0 template has been removed.
  • Separate configurable password for use with remote XML-RPC and Atom publication format clients.
  • Default templates are now available as referenced files inside of your local install.

You can browse the full changelog to find your own favorite features.

Six Apart lowered the price of a personal license to $40: a $30 discount. ProNet still provides a free commercial license to all members, a $200 value.

I am not a big fan of the version number included in the new buttons as they will quickly be outdated as users upgrade to 3.2x. I like my text version of “Powered by Movable Type” driven by a Perl variable in the code.

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Google Talk client now available

Google Talk screenshot

The Google Talk application is now available on Google for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It features voice and text messaging and loads all of your contacts from Gmail. The application is only 900 KB in size.

Google Talk supports voice codecs PCMA, PCMU, G.723, iLBC, ISAC, IPCMWB, EG711U, and EG711A. They are evaluating the Speex codec. They currently use XMPP-based signaling but plan to support SIP signaling in the near future. Google is currently working with EathLink’s Vling product as well as Sipphone’s Gizmo Project for integration with Google Talk.

Google also has a page listing Jabber/XMPP clients compatible with Google Talk.

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Google Talk is live

Want to chat with your friends using Google’s instant messaging platform? Do you have an instant messaging client that supports Jabber messaging and a Google ID? Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Open a client supporting Jabber (AdiumX, Gaim, etc.)
  2. Your server name is talk.google.com
  3. Your username is the same as your Google ID. Example: user@gmail.com
  4. Your password is the same as you use to login to Gmail or other Google login locations.

That’s it! You can add your friends using their full ID and encrypt your messages to be safe. I am sure Google will introduce a nice UI of their own in a few hours with additional features but it’s fun to play with unannounced product. I just tested it out with Matt from AdiumX to Gaim and it works just as it should.

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LinkedIn social hack

Would you like to contact people listed on business networking site LinkedIn without a paid account or even an approval? I have received a few calls from recruiters lately using LinkedIn as a prospecting service but not paying anything for the service.

How? They simply look at my current company and search the web for corporate contact information. A quick call to a receptionist at a small company like Technorati and the recruiter asks to speak with me. It’s not too difficult, and the recruiter just avoided the LinkedIn InMail cost of about $5 an e-mail.

The practice seems to threaten LinkedIn’s business plan as recruiters I have spoken to seem very aware of the service hack.

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Two Google announcements this week

The New York Times reports Google plans to introduce a new version of Google Desktop on Monday and a “communications tool” on Wednesday.

The new Google Desktop will feature live content panels allowing developers to write their own widgets associated with Google Desktop. A beta version of Google Desktop version 2 is now available on the Google Desktop site.

What communications tool will Google introduce on Wednesday? Google mobile? Google IM? We have a few days to speculate.

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Blogs as an e-mail replacement

While at a cafe on Friday afternoon I experienced a new use for TypePad. I was at Ritual Coffee Roasters in the Mission district of San Francisco Friday afternoon when I noticed a gentleman transferring notes from a notepad to entries on his TypePad blog. His girlfriend is currently in Africa as a humanitarian aid worker and he created a password-protected TypePad blog to keep in touch. Blogging had replaced e-mail as their most reliable form of communication.

How do you communicate with someone when you are unsure when they will have access to the Internet in one form or the other? Will they have access to free, web-based e-mail? Viewing a web page is the simplest and most reliably accessible form of communication for this couple.

The man I met would write short notes in his notebook to tell his girlfriend about his day and he later creates a blog entry for each day or major occurrence. His girlfriend only has the opportunity to check his blog about once every two weeks and she leaves comments on some entries.

This couple had a very cool use case and it made me realize how much I take for granted in my daily search for wireless Internet access and the ability to publish and read others.

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