Why Did Google Want Blogger?

Why Did Google Want Blogger? Wired News quotes Chris Cleveland, CEO of Dieselpoint, who thinks Google intends to take advantage of the fact that RSS is easier to index than HTML. In addition, changes.xml at weblogs.com would enable Google to know minute-by-minute which blogs have been updated and need to be re-indexed, allowing better search results in near real-time.

An interesting theory, but I'm not sure why Google had to buy Blogger in order to do this...?

 22 Feb 03 12:25 PM · Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

Walter Bagehot: "The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything."

 22 Feb 03 12:15 PM · Comments (0)

Scott Guthrie Eats Dog Food

Dogfooding and Showstoppers: Fascinating piece by Scott Guthrie about how Microsoft uses beta products internally (a practice known as "eating their own dogfood," or "dogfooding") to shake out bugs. The most interesting tidbit, I thought, was that msn.com has been running on ASP.NET for about a year.

 21 Feb 03 8:10 AM · Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

Alice Kahn: "For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three."

 21 Feb 03 8:04 AM · Comments (0)

Fun with Page Templates

I've been meaning for some time to post an overview of ASP.NET page-template techniques; Adrian Bateman has saved me the trouble:

Page template techniques with ASP.NET:

• Creating a Page Template by inheriting from the System.Web.Page class (V2).
• ASP.NET Page Templating Example
• Page Template Paradox - separating design and content?
• Page Template Generator

Mike Borromeo describes another clever technique in this article: He uses a UserControl for the page template, and exposes an ITemplate property (the same interface ASP.NET uses for templated items in the DataGrid and DataList controls) for the page-specific content. This is the approach I've used in my content management system.

Update: Paul Wilson has a fairly comprehensive list of page template resources here.

 19 Feb 03 11:48 AM · Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

Tom Stoppard: "Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."

 19 Feb 03 6:30 AM · Comments (0)

Portland.NET

It occurs to me that my hometown of Portland, OR has become rather a hotbed of .NET talent. Some of the .NET luminaries who hail from PDX:

• Bob Beauchemin
• Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart
• Scott Hanselman
• Chris Sells

Did I forget anyone? I'd like to make it to a nerd breakfast one of these weeks so I can hang with these guys, but I can't drag myself out of bed at that hour. (Don't they know that nerds are night people?)

 17 Feb 03 9:17 AM · Comments (1)

More Gallows Humor

Dave Barry: "What if, for the past year or so, terrorists, working in U.S. factories,
have been putting lethal biochemical agents on... duct tape?"

 13 Feb 03 10:07 PM · Comments (0)

Gallows Humor

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it with my own ears: At this morning's VSLive! keynote, Alan Cooper managed to successfully pull off a joke about the recent space shuttle disaster! The amazing punchline: "I heard that they're blaming the Columbia disaster on liberals -- they say it's a left wing problem."

A video of the keynote is available here.

 12 Feb 03 11:20 PM · Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

Erica Jong: "Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."

 12 Feb 03 11:06 PM · Comments (0)

...or is that Extinguished?

At its annual Readers Choice Awards ceremony at VSLive! in San Francisco this evening, Fawcette Technical Publications presented four of its long-term speakers with the "Power of Ten Distinguished Speaker Award." The recipients -- Dan Appleman, Keith Pleas, Jonathan Zuck and Yours Truly (that's me on the far right) -- have been speaking at FTP conferences since their inception in 1993. Thanks, FTP! (Unconfirmed reports suggest that one or more of the Limited Edition award certificates may soon be available on eBay.)

 10 Feb 03 11:30 PM · Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

Stan Dunn: "And that's the world in a nutshell, an appropriate receptacle."

 10 Feb 03 11:03 PM · Comments (0)

PalmOS to support .NET

PalmOS v6.0 to support .NET
Source: Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Radio Weblog

  7 Feb 03 12:00 PM · Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

Laurence J. Peter: "In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular."

  7 Feb 03 11:56 AM · Comments (0)

Dave Barry

Dave Barry has a Blog! And it's every bit as amusing as you might expect.

  3 Feb 03 8:54 AM · Comments (0)

Quote of the Day

Edward De Bono: "Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain."

  3 Feb 03 8:53 AM · Comments (0)