Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 8 of 72.

Microsoft AdCenter classifies web users into 18 categories

Microsoft’s adCenter online advertising product includes behavioral targeting, a way to predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information based on search queries and web browsing behavior. Yesterday Microsoft began incorporating behavioral targeting into adCenter, classifying users into 18 “audience segments.” Web users tracked by Microsoft are currently identified in one or more categories including mobile users, Internet power users, gamers, movie watchers, new/expecting moms, parents, and several categories encompassing travel searchers, and auto buyers and researchers. Once a user is classified, a site such as Live.com can suggest the best homepage gadgets for an expectant mother, gamer, or…

Six Apart acquires Rojo Networks

Blogging company Six Apart has acquired online feed aggregator Rojo Networks. Rojo technologies will be integrated with the Vox blogging tool allowing users to browse updated content and create more blog posts. Rojo co-founder Kevin Burton confirmed the news on his blog this morning. A press release from Six Apart names former Rojo CEO Chris Alden as executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type and former CTO Aaron Emigh as executive vice president and general manager of core technologies. Chris Alden is the fifth general manager of Movable Type in the last year. The press release is…

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant on Microsoft core values

I just found out about two clips from The Office stars Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant about life as a Microsoft employee (thanks Kevin!). The same jokes hold true for most big corporations, but listening to Ricky’s responses to Microsoft’s core values really cracked me up. Ricky Gervais interviewed on Microsoft core values Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant conduct a Microsoft performance review My favorite clip is Ricky’s response to being “open and respectful in all of our dealings.” He recommends firing people with consistently bad ideas and making your good ideas work for you….

Narrowcasting with customized homepages

Personalized homepages have been around for over 10 years and recently have gathered increased attention as a new generation of personalized homepages enter the space. The programmed personal homepage is changing, with cobrands and individual users increasingly taking command of their own content. Users might customize their homepage with cookie-stored preferences, a logged-on account, an affinity group such as a Dell computer, a broadband connection from AT&T, or a membership in the Sierra Club. In the future these pages might change over time, adapting to the changing online interests and behavior of each user. In this post I will provide…

Programmed personal homepages over the last 20 years

The web is changing, but it all starts with your personal home page. What is the first thing you see when you start your browser? Is it useful and tailored to you, or a collection of advertisements and meaningless promotions for portal services? The recent $15 million funding of one-year-old startup Netvibes combined with the ramp-up of Microsoft’s Live.com and iGoogle are changing the worldwide web doorway into a customized experience combining many brands and services. In this post I’ll summarize the history of pre-programmed start pages and take a look at where we might be headed in the near…

Watching a Firefox beta rollout

I visited Mozilla HQ this afternoon to discuss product strategy and positioning with a few full-time staffers. My visit happened to coincide with the release of Firefox 2 beta 2, giving me a brief glimpse into a world where your every move is both public and frequently reported (accurately and inaccurately) to a tech news hungry audience. A few news sources read the Firefox 2 status meeting notes from Tuesday and noticed beta 2 should go live today, August 31. Each release includes internationalization into 40+ languages, so rollouts are handled in stages as each piece is integrated and…

Eric Schmidt joins Apple’s board

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now an Apple Computer board member. He joins Fred Anderson of Elevation Partners, Bill Campbell of Intuit, Millard Drexler of J. Crew, Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, politician Al Gore, and Jerry York of Harwinton Capital. The group was already interconnected outside of the Apple boardroom. Al Gore is a Google advisor and Google invested in Current TV, Gore’s television station. Bill Campbell was an early management advisor to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and helped hire Eric Schmidt. Arthur Levinson is on Google’s Board of Directors. Are closer times ahead for these two powerful brands?…

Danny Sullivan leaving Search Engine Watch

Search industry pundit Danny Sullivan is leaving his popular Search Engine Watch website and Search Engine Strategies conferences at the end of this year. Danny is viewed by the community as synonymous with both brands, and an independent expert in all things search since he’s been following the industry for over 10 years. I’m sure lots of search companies are contacting Danny right now to apply his specialized knowledge within their walls. I hope he does his own thing and takes full ownership stakes, but I have a feeling a big company might snatch him up. Yahoo! took Danny to…

Foo Camp geek out

I spent last weekend at Foo Camp hosted at O’Reilly’s headquarters in Sebastopol, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. The 200-person event was 3 days of non-stop conversations, sessions, and planning with the occasional break for food or a few hours sleep under a cubicle desk. I was blown away by the quality of conversations and intellectually challenging ideas and formulations each day. A few things stood out, and I’ll summarize a bit here before I forget Friday, Day 1 On Friday evening I discussed oil futures and web-scale micropayments with economist Hal Varian. Hal wrote Information Rules,…

Flickr adds itself to your map and calendar

The Flickr team introduced new features today allowing its users to easily associate an uploaded photo with location and event information. The geolocation drag-and-drop interface and search (shown above) is powered by the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API. Event integration is handled through a special event tag generated by sister Yahoo! site Upcoming.org. The Organize interface is heavily influenced by Aqua Dock on Mac OS X. Photos dragged off the map disappear in a poof and the currently selected picture within an info is magnified relative to objects surrounding it. You can drag-and-drop images onto the map within Flickr’s interface…

NewsGator Enterprise 1.4 adds desktop client sync

NewsGator released version 1.4.1 of its enterprise feed management server yesterday afternoon. Users of the new version can now use NewsGator desktop clients FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or Inbox to interact with their feeds. Much better than a corporate intranet page in my opinion, but it’s good to give people choices. The new version also has better support for detecting and highlighting enclosures, placing files into special folders such as “My Podcasts.” Hopefully new products and updates to enterprise feed readers will create a new market of viewers for the blogosphere, connecting a larger population with automated news delivery….

TechSessions: Media Distribution

SF Tech Sessions meets this Wednesday evening in San Francisco to learn about the latest trends in distributing large media files. Local technologists, podcasters, videobloggers, and anyone else doing their part to clog the tubes should come by CNET headquarters starting at 7 p.m. this Wednesday to learn more about the latest distribution technologies. Media producers should have as many choices as possible when publishing their work and not rule out high-quality, high-definition content. San Francisco companies GUBA and Red Swoosh are two examples of newly launched products alleviating the bandwidth and distribution strain while delivering more content choices to…

Jason Goldman leaving Google

Jason Goldman, product manager of Google Blog Search and Blogger, is leaving Google at the end of this week. No more commutes from San Francisco, but he’ll instead be on a jet plane traveling the world for a bit before starting somewhere a bit smaller. I could have taken time off or switched to a different project, but I feel that after I’m finished doing the nothing I’ve got planned, I’m going to want to do something somewhere small. And, to be honest, I can’t really imagine being at Google but not being involved in Blogger. Jason’s departure comes shortly…

DeWitt leaves A9

DeWitt Clinton changed the way you search through your browser in the past few years. The OpenSearch format powers search in Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 and helps you discover new sources of information with easy to aggregate data whether you’re looking for a CPAN library or searching my weblog. DeWitt is stepping down as software development lead for Amazon’s A9 search engine today to pursue new projects. One new project in the works is the completion of the OpenSearch 1.1 spec and launching a new independent community-oriented home for OpenSearch on the web. I’ve been a beta tester…

Yahoo! Autos digging for feedback

A few members of the Yahoo! Autos team created a new feedback and suggestion system during a recent company Hack Day incorporating some of the bubble-up recommendation system to their own support and feedback loops. Instead of submitting yet another request for motorcycle coverage on the site, the existing request is shown on the Yahoo! Autos feedback page allowing anyone on the Internet to +1 the recommendation. (via Y! Cool Thing of the Day) I like the idea of the public-facing repository in an easy to browse and understand format. The multiple votes cast into a particular feature bucket should…

Rewriting Digg feeds using Atom 1.0

Digg currently uses RSS 2.0 as a lightweight API, adding their own namespaced elements to explain Digg-specific values within the XML. The current Digg feed reinvents some elements (digg:category???) I feel could be better marked up with existing standards and namespaces. I’ll use Digg’s data in this post to show how some complex data and relationships can be expressed using Atom 1.0. Current Digg Technology feedSample Rewritten Digg Technology feed in Atom 1.0 Simplifying drives adoption It’s important to express your data inside pre-defined elements and attributes when possible for easy parsing by the many feed libraries used by…

Forbes on PubSub’s business history

Forbes provides a summary of PubSub’s business history, from the company’s founding through it’s recent collapse. “$4 million is down the drain, and PubSub can’t even afford to file for bankruptcy. No one has filed suit–yet.” PubSub is still online, so someone must be paying the continued hosting costs….

Let your users kick it old school

I moved off Blogger shortly after Pyra Labs was acquired by Google, but I tried out the new Blogger today anyways, to see what had changed. It was a walk down memory lane best experienced with a Blogger sweatshirt, my reward for being a Blogger Pro member for a few months before they sold. Wouldn’t it be cool if Blogger Pro users had some sort of special badging in their templates to let people know they are an old school G? I might even be less likely to change blogging platforms because I like the way that special piece of…

Google WiFi is live, local coupons for everyone

Google switched on its public WiFi network in Mountain View less than an hour ago, its first experiment in location-based services covering 11-miles of tech-saavy real estate in the heart of Silicon Valley. Each WiFi user must have a Google Account and Google can pinpoint your location on the network based on your current access point. Every Google account is GTalk enabled, including the just announced new GTalk client with free file transfer and voicemail. Every resident of Mountain View can now have free Internet access, email, voicemail, and much more. Google also announced its first killer app for location-based…

Facebook Developer API

Social networking site Facebook has opened up access to its service via a set of RESTian APIs, giving developers access to a user’s profile data, friend list, inbox, calendar, photos, blog posts, and more. The API could be used to create a desktop or mobile version of a user’s Facebook data or easily migrate them to a new social network, photo site, or calendar. (via GigaOm) Web applications are limited to 100,000 requests a day and desktop applications are restricted to 5 requests per second….

AOL acquires Userplane

AOL acquired Userplane today, a 12-person startup in Los Angeles powering text, voice, and video chat for MySpace, IGN, Honda, Date.com, and others. Userplane is the first startup featured at SF Tech Sessions and later acquired but I know they won’t be the last. Attendees of April’s tech session had a sneak peek at the MySpace instant messaging integration a week before it was formally announced at Digital Hollywood. Userplane is a small, privately funded team and will continue to deploy white-label messaging solutions to sites around the Web. The network will now federate with AIM’s network, allowing custom accounts…

OS X Leopard includes feed platform?

The developer preview of OS X 10.5 “Leopard” includes an integrated feed syndication platform with Bonjour integration according to a message board posting from a WWDC attendee. The software was distributed to all conference attendees and should be available on your favorite file-sharing network shortly. A new framework is included for publishing and subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, including complete RSS parsing and generation. Local feeds can be shared over Bonjour zero-configuration sharing and discovery. The new framework would provide an easy interface for Mac developers to include feed syndication features inside their products and share user data across…

Comical

I am featured in today’s bLaugh comic (pictured above) playing soccer for France’s national team, or at least wearing their latest kit. I’m kicking a 70’s style Adidas Telstar ball. I have not been in a caricature since high school (prom or sober grad party, I forget which one). Chris told me I beat out Joe Lieberman for today’s spot….

Open Source Lab Rackathon

The Open Source Lab at Oregon State is having a fundraising drive to continue their existing work and take on a few new projects. OSL serves up hosting and download space for Apache, Debian, Drupal, Eclipse, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, PHP, PostreSQL, and many others. A $20 places your name in 10-point font on a piece of paper attached to the server cage for a whole year! Each additional $20 donated increases your font size by 1 point size. OSL sysadmins will have to look at your name for a full year and you’ll be helping a good cause. You…

Leaving Microsoft

I am leaving Microsoft to start my own company. My last day at Microsoft is next Friday, August 18. It’s uncertain whether Microsoft will continue the feed platform work I started, but it’s some good stuff so I hope they do. RSS is the internet’s answer to the notification scenarios we’ve discussed and worked on for some time, and is filling a role as “the UNIX pipe of the internet” as people use it to connect data and systems in unanticipated ways. I joined Microsoft in April excited to change the world and build an Internet-scale feed platform to power…