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

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 9 of 72.

OS X Leopard Server

The next version of Apple’s server software, codenamed Leopard Server, includes a few new features for the early adopter web crowd and their organizations. Ruby on Rails, podcast production, wikis, blogs, and grid computing are just some of the features built-in to the new server OS. The new features redefine what’s possible away from a Microsoft-centered world of Exchange and Sharepoint, opening new possibilities through a combination of open-source software, industry-standard protocols, and Apple’s friendly interface and design. Small workgroups using Macs or Windows should be able to rack an Xserve and be happy. Web server Leopard server has…

Google will power Fox Interactive search and advertising through 2010

Google will power search and advertising across Fox Interactive’s online properties for the next three years. The deal includes guaranteed minimum revenue share payments from Google of $900 million based on Fox Interactive Media meeting its traffic numbers and “other commitments.” Fox Interactive Media includes social network MySpace, news sites Fox News and Fox Sports, gaming network IGN as well as content distribution and advertising on local TV stations owned by Fox Broadcasting. The agreement calls for Google to power web, vertical and site specific search for MySpace.com and the majority of Fox Interactive Media properties. Google will be the…

Wall Street Journal launches personal homepage

The Wall Street Journal launched a new personalized homepage with Dow Jones content modules as well as customized content from any RSS feed. The new site uses Yahoo! UI Widgets extensively, the first time I have seen the libraries on a high-profile site. My WSJ does not seem to currently support Atom 1.0 feeds….

Spliced feed networks with ads

Brad Feld blogged yesterday about a new FeedBurner effort to place ads on more feeds through the creation of aggregated feed networks. A single curator selects a few feed URLs to create a mega feed for a topic or musing. FeedBurner sells targeted ads inside of the aggregated feed and its various forms of syndication — HTML, RSS/Atom, JavaScript widget, etc. — on a CPM basis. Who other than FeedBurner gets paid for these ad impressions? It seems like another attempt to mine the seemingly free gold laying on the riverbed named user-generated content. The idea isn’t much different than…

Speaking at SES San Jose next Wednesday

I’ll be at the Search Engines Strategy conference next week including speaking on a blogger panel on Wednesday from 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Google CEO Eric Schmidt kindly agreed to be our opening act, warming up the crowd for 45 minutes as they recover from a night of drinking (but not much dancing) at the Googleplex. If you’re at the conference or one of the evening parties say hello and let’s talk about search. I’m still hoping Yahoo! will rent out Great America on Thursday night so I can ride Top Gun over and over again….

WordPress.com adds paid upgrades

Free blog hosting site WordPress.com introduced its first paid feature this morning, allowing customers access to their CSS for $15 a year per blog. Free members can still access 40 built-in templates for free and customize their image header and sidebar widgets. Payments are processed through PayPal. The site is currently testing custom domain mapping, a likely next upgrade. The combination of custom CSS and domain mapping a la carte upgrades puts Automattic’s WordPress.com in direct competition with Six Apart and its TypePad product currently charging $90 a year for a similar feature set….

Black Hat presentation exposes RSS and Atom risks in the wild

Robert Auger and Caleb Sima of security firm SPI Dymanics gave a 50-minute security briefing on RSS and Atom feed vulnerabilities at yesterday’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Their talk, Zero Day Subscriptions: Using RSS and Atom feeds As Attack Delivery Systems, detailed how many blogging systems and feed aggregators do not block against malicious code insertion by third parties and often run at elevated permission levels on a user’s machine, exposing an entire operating system to a potential scripting attack. I wasn’t there, but News.com summarizes some of the topics covered in the talk. Auger listed Bloglines, RSS…

WordCamp kickoff party at Taylor’s Refresher tomorrow

WordCamp is this Saturday, bringing together bloggers and developers using the open-source PHP blogging product for a day of discussion and learning. We’re kicking things off on Friday night with dinner along San Francisco’s waterfront for anyone who is in town. Join us for dinner at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher at the Ferry Building. We’ll be outside on the patio starting at 7 p.m. enjoying the sun and some good local food. The team from Automattic will be on hand to encourage increased use of BBQ sauce on everything. You can tryout one of San Francisco’s first municipal WiFi nodes…

Caltrain WiMax tests a success!

Intel and Nomad Digital tested WiMAX on Caltrain yesterday, the first step towards rolling out high-speed Internet on the full rail line from Gilroy to San Francisco. The test was successful at 79 mph between Palo Alto and MIlbrae, allowing the network to go live within the next two months. The system uses Sensoria mesh network receivers on the train to provide a WiFi bridge and wireless base stations placed every few miles along the track. Caltrain will offer the wireless service for free, and anyone living or working near the Caltrain line might have a nice fat Internet connection…

Google Reader observed namespace data

Mihai from the Google Reader team just posted some interesting data about observed namespaces across all feeds tracked in their system. The namespace data provides information not only about popular ways of expressing data, but also gives insight into blog software market share within a sample such as Google Reader subscriptions. Dublin Core as the top namespace is not too surprising. What jumps out is the number of feeds using the default configuration on a variety of platforms, giving a glance into market share. Blogger – 12% FeedBurner – 4% Windows Live Spaces – 4% LiveJournal – 2.5% Technorati and…

Windows Live Spaces launches

Windows Live Spaces has just launched, tying new social networking features into the blogging service. The new release features an integrated friends module tied into your contacts defined in Messenger and elsewhere, and adds new customization options using Microsoft Gadgets. The new friends integration is the real hotness, allowing users to define their relationships and see more information about the people who matter most. The friends module shows Messenger presence and status messages and adds a “gleam” next to any contact with a recently updated space. Friends lists are browsable within a Spaces web page as well as within that…

Flash 9 and the MySpace effect

Adobe released version 9 of its popular Flash player in June, boasting 10x performance increases and a variety of new video, audio, and security filters. MySpace worked with Adobe on new security settings for Flash embeds on its sites and required its members upgrade to the new plugin version for access to Flash content on the site. The new player release combined with the MySpace required upgrade created a lot of confusion around the future of embedded widgets on MySpace and other popular web properties. I spoke with Emmy Huang, senior product manager of the Flash 9 plugin at…

Google launches open source project hosting

Google has just launched project hosting inside of its Google Code effort. The Google Code Project Hosting center allows any developer to create and host a new project powered by Google management and hosting tools. The new service features a reworked backend for Subversion built on top of Google’s Big Table file system. The robustness of Google’s backend will power the code repository. The site features a new issue-tracking system utilizing AJAX techniques for quick and responsive feedback for its users. The issue-tracking interface is similar to Gmail’s table layout, and allows customization through open tag fields. Developers on…

Rasmus Lerdorf on scaling web apps with PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O’Reilly’s Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency. The full slides from Rasmus’s talk are available online and I recorded audio of the entire session from the front row. Rich web applications make better use of browser user interfaces through the use of less visible round-trips to the server (through AJAX or other methods). These new…

OpenDarwin shutting down

Mac OS X open-source community site OpenDarwin announced it will shut down in the next couple months. The site was the center of discussion and development of WebKit (the code behind Apple’s Safari browser and Nokia’s Series 60 browser), DarwinPorts, and other projects. It’s too bad the projects will now all disperse, and I can’t help but wonder if the move was influenced by something to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in a few weeks….

Technorati redesigns for the MySpace crowd

Summer is here, meaning it must be time for a new site design from Technorati. The four major Technorati redesigns have each tried to welcome a different type of crowd to the site without alienating existing users. When the site went online in November 2002 the target audience was alpha-bloggers and Linux Journal readers. The company was incorporated in May 2003 and saw its first big redesign in the summer of 2004 focused on the new users visiting the site for real-time information in the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. In 2005 the site redesigned again, aiming for…

NY Times on Google’s lack of focus

Saul Hansell of The New York Times examines Google’s current product offerings and feature gaps and comes away a bit puzzled. According to quotes in the article Google goes for the wow factor with stand-alone products that do not integrate well with the work of others. Marissa Mayer says it’s a lot easier to get engineers to spend time developing new features than fill in a feature gap. Sergey Brin says he is now encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products instead of as stand-alone products. Former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider is quoted saying Yahoo!…

International search landscape

DeWitt and I were chatting over breakfast yesterday about the future of search. What will be the big changes in search over the next 5 years? What are the growth markets in terms of index size, users, repeat visits, and new interfaces? The first thing that popped to mind was the international landscape of the Internet and the always-on world wide web taking hold in developing nations. According to comScore numbers from May, 14% of the world’s total population age 15 or older are online. Bump that number up a bit if you include Internet cafes and mobile phones, a…

Zune blogs powered by TypePad

The two Microsoft blogs discussing the upcoming Zune product suite, Zune Insider and Madison and Pine, are powered by Six Apart’s TypePad blogging software. That’s Apache on Linux using Perl and PostgreSQL. Microsoft is heavily into “dogfooding” everything, from Windows Mobile smartphones to the latest build of Vista. It’s good to see the Xbox team step out and blaze their own path….

Google Base search adds RSS

Google Base now provides an RSS feed for its search results. Every search contains a link to the RSS feed and a feed icon on the top right portion of the page. A search for Pearl Jam is a good example. (via Search Engine Watch) I’m surprised the results are provided in RSS and not Atom, as Google seems to prefer the later. It’s good that Google added the feed icon as well, drawing attention to the link….

MySpace upgrades to Flash 9

MySpace recently required all widgets upgrade to Flash Player 9 (ActionScript 3) and disable internal links.

Ask adds RSS smart answers

Search engine Ask.com now displays the last three feed items at the top of the search result page for strong title matches. A search for “BoingBoing” displays the popular blog’s last three posts complete with a link to the individual item, a 98-character summary, and the publication date. There are a few bits of polish missing from the implementation. I’d like to be able to directly access the source feed and subscribe right away. It would also be cool if every feed title from my subscription list was part of my own personal smart answers, increasing the personal relevancy…

BloxPress personalized blog sidebars

BloxPress is a theme and template engine for WordPress that allows viewers of your blog to configure their own widget modules in your sidebars. If Bill likes to view the last 10 comments and Jane likes to see your latest Flickr uploads, they can have both at once with their own configuration. Individual user preferences are stored in a cookie and anyone can create their own “blocks” for the system. Check out the demo to see the system in action. It’s too bad the blocks do not seem to interoperate with any other widget definition format. I’m glad Spaces…

Panama is a bad code name

Yahoo’s stock declined 22% today after the company missed analysts’ quarterly estimates and announced its new advertising system, codenamed Panama, was delayed. I think of many failures when I hear the term “Panama” but the first thing that popped to mind in Yahoo’s case is Scotland and its Darien scheme. Towards the end of the 17th century Scotland realized it was falling behind the rest of Europe and undertook a few initiatives to modernize the country and better compete with the new economies of Europe. The Company of Scotland was created to establish new trade routes with Africa and the…

Windows Live Feed Platform has a blog

I’ve been working on an online feed syndication platform at Microsoft since late-April, and now the project finally has a blog. I decided to start the conversation by discussing some of the key concepts and ideas behind the project, and some of its planned features. The first post focuses on synchronization, sharing, and portability. Is it possible to develop a product or platform in the open? Partially. I won’t disclose what’s shipping when, or what product will be first up for integration, but I can be open about our approach to some common problems and expose some integration points for…