A few weeks ago I had a chat with Robert Rebholz about folksonomies, RSS and information overload. It was a rather fun discussion and he let me know about a tool he'd built called the OPML-o-mater. The way the tool works is described below, 

The OPML-o-mater delivers a personalized list of RSS feeds in an xml format called OPML. OPML files can be imported by any competent RSS Reader/Aggregator.

You want the feeds from the OPML-o-mater because they're known quality feeds -- at least they were when we entered them. Even if you already have all the feeds you need, it might be worth a look to discover if we've one or two you didn't know about.

In general it works this way:

• We've tagged the feeds.
• You select the tags that describe your interests
• The OPML-o-mater finds and displays feeds associated with the tags you've selected
• You pick the feeds you want
• Press the generate OPML button
• Save the OPML file to your local machine
• Import it into your feed reader

More specifically, we've tagged all the feeds. The first column of the OPML-o-mater lists the tags. You select a single tag from column one that describes an area of interest for you. Column two displays the tags that were also used anytime the tag you selected was used to describe a url (bear in mind that a single feed/url may have many tags associated with it). In column three the feeds associated with the selection made in column one are displayed.

I think this is a very interesting way to solve the "How Do I Find Interesting Blogs?" problem which plagues users of RSS readers today. I currently am subscribed to 158 feeds in RSS Bandit. Given that there are tens of millions of blogs out there, I am sure that there are literally thousands of blogs I'd love to read if I just knew about them. The tough question for me has been how to find them and then how to integrate that process into RSS Bandit in an automated way. 

What would be cool would be for the OPML-o-mater to evolve into the equivalent of http://del.icio.us/popular/ for RSS feeds and then for it to expose an API that tools such as RSS Bandit could integrate into part of their user experience. This idea is interesting enough that I wish I had the time and dedicated server resources to build it myself.  

The live.com folks recently blogged about a recent change to the site to support inline images which states

we've been listening to your feedback and one of the main things you've been asking for has been more pizzazz on the page. we just shipped something that hopefully adds a little bit of that :)

now you can view embedded images in rss feeds inline on your live.com page:

- if you have 5+ headlines you get a smaller image that rotates every 20 seconds

- if you have 1 headline you get a larger image

 

we'll let a picture do the rest of the talking :)

As you can tell from the screenshot, the change definitely jazzes up the look of the page.

Sometimes I've seen the U.S. media take the simplistic view that "democracy" is the answer to all of a country's problems. I often chuckle to myself when I notice that in many cases the term "democracy" when used by the American press is really a euphemism for an American friendly government and way of life.  This is one of the reasons why I am unsurprised by the inherent contradiction in stories like Bush Says U.S. Won't Deal With Hamas which is excerpted below

Stunned by Hamas' decisive election victory, President Bush said Thursday the United States will not deal with the militant Palestinian group as long as it seeks Israel's destruction.

"If your platform is the destruction of Israel it means you're not a partner in peace," the president said. "And we're interested in peace." He urged Hamas to reverse course.

Hamas has taken responsibility for dozens of suicide attacks on Israel over the past five years but has largely observed a cease-fire since the election of Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian president last year.

Bush left open the possibility of cutting off U.S. aid to the Palestinians. He called on Abbas, a U.S. ally, to remain in office despite Fatah's defeat by Hamas in parliamentary elections. Abbas, elected separately a year ago, said he was committed to negotiations with Israel and suggested talks would be conducted through the Palestine Liberation Organization, a possible way around a Hamas-led government.

I guess that's one way of to finding out what the U.S. government really thinks about exporting democracy. American foreign policy has always been about supporting governments which support its policies regardless of whether they are democracies or brutal dictatorships. Heck, just a few months before the events of September 11, 2001 the United States government gave aid to the Taliban because they took a hard line position in the war on drugs.

Lots of people talk about democracy without really understanding what it means. Spreading democracy isn't about making the more places share American culture, it's about giving people the freedom to choose their way of life. The hard part for the U.S. government is that sometimes their choices will be different from the ones Americans would like them to make.

The team I work for in MSN Windows Live has open developer and program management positions. Our team is responsible for the underlying infrastructure of services like Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Favorites, MSN Spaces, and MSN Groups. We frequently collaborate with other properties across MSN Windows Live including the Live.com, Windows Live Local, Windows Live Expo, and Windows OneCare Live teams as well as with other product units across Microsoft such as in the case of Office Live. If you are interested in building world class software that is used by hundreds of millions of people and the following job descriptions interest you then send me your resume

Program Management Architect
The Communications Core platform team for Windows Live services is looking for an experienced, enthusiastic and highly technical PM to jump start a brand new service that helps developers adopt our platform at a very rapid pace. You will be responsible for building a platform where developers can easily take advantage of emerging technology from our large scale services (e.g. Messenger, Hotmail, Contacts, Storage services) and empower quick schema and API changes for a rapid TTD (Time to Demo!). Designing, developing, deploying, evangelizing and supporting this so called “Sandbox” environment will require excellent cross-group working skills as you will have to interact extensively with business planning, dev/test, operations, and partner support teams. It will also require a high level of technical depth in order to intimately understand and create clones of the back end services involved as well as extensive web services and API knowledge. We are looking for someone with core technical skills, a services or high scale server background; experience with API development, web services and a passion to win developers from the competition.

Program Manager
If you are an experienced Program Manager with strong technical skills and a strong desire to work in an enthusiastic fast paced environment then this job is for you! The Communications Core Platform team for Windows Live services owns the data store serving hundreds of millions of end users with billions of contacts, files and photos. Our systems handle tens of thousands of transactions per second. Our team owns core MSN and Windows Live platforms, including ABCH (storing Messenger and Hotmail contacts, groups and ACLs) and MSN Storage (storing files, photos and other data types). We are looking for a creative, self-driven, technical Program Manager who is interested in designing and shipping the next generation of back-end components that drive this massively scalable service in the midst of stiff competition from Microsoft's toughest competitors. You will be responsible for defining and writing technical specifications for new features, developing creative solutions for difficult scale and performance problems, driving the capacity management framework, working with teams across the company on critical cross-group projects, working extensively with development and test to drive project schedules and ultimately shipping new versions of the service that provide tremendous value for our customers and partners.

Software Development Engineer
400 million address books. 8 billion contacts. A gazillion relationships! That is the magnitude of data the Windows Live Contacts team hosts today (and it is growing fast!). The service (called the ABCH) doesn't just host contacts and address books but provides a platform for building rich permissions and sharing scenarios (sharing objects to individuals, groups or social networks). Now imagine, if this treasure trove of data were accessible via programmable APIs to all the developers in the world. Imagine the scenarios that it could enable. Imagine the interesting applications that developers around the world would build.

This is what we want to provide as part of the Windows Live vision. We are looking for an experienced software developer who can spearhead our effort in providing APIs (SOAP, DAV, REST) to our contacts and permissions service that can be used by third-party developers and ISVs.

The ideal candidate will have at least five years of demonstrated experience in shipping commercial software. The candidate should be a solid developer with above average design skills. The candidate should have a very keen sense of programmability, security and privacy and be willing to go the extra mile to make sure a users' data isn't compromised.

Email your resume to dareo@msft.com (replace msft with microsoft) if the above job descriptions sound like they are a good fit for you. If you have any questions about what working here is like, you can send me an email and I'll either follow up via email or my blog to answer any questions of general interest [within reason].

As Mike Torres notes, a BIG update to MSN Spaces just shipped. Below is a list of some of the features from his post. The ones I worked on have been highlighted in red. :)

• Spaces Search.  This is an incredibly cool feature that lets you find interesting spaces based on keyword, a user's profile information, or by clicking on most popular interests across all of spaces.  You can also run a search from any space just by clicking "Search Spaces" in the header above.  One thing to mention about the search feature is that it will be ramping up for a few days - but you can help make it better!  Learn more about this on The Space Craft.

• Mobile Search from Mobile Spaces!  Search for spaces from your mobile device.  Mike Smuga will be talking about this more over on his space soon.

• Your own advertising on your space (as an option) to make money from clicks - powered by Kanoodle!  (This feature is only available in the United States and Canada at this time.)

• Book lists with Amazon integration.  Automatically insert information from Amazon.com directly into your book list - and again, make money through Amazon Associates when people end up buying the book!  It's very cool (by the way, our book is called Share Your Story if you want to add it to your book list :)

• Better blog navigation.  This feature is one of those things we needed to do.  You can now "view more entries" at the bottom of the page, and navigate through Previous and Next pages while looking through blog entries.

• Customized blog entry display.  Choose how you want your blog entries to appear, by date or entry title.  This is a great feature for people who write essays or incredibly insightful posts once a month.  Date isn't really important in this case, whereas sorting by entry title may make more sense.

• Integrated Help.  Confused?  Click the Learn link in the header above to figure out what to do next!

• Enhanced Profile including General, Social, and Contact Info sections.  Each section will have it's own permissions so any part you would like to limit access to (say your personal contact information), you can do it.  There's also an updated profile module for the homepage with an actionable photo; anytime you see someone's picture anywhere you can right-click (or click on the down arrow) to view their contact card, space, profile, and more.

• Live Contacts Beta!  Brand new feature which you'll see popping up throughout Windows Live in time.  What is it?  It's the ability to subscribe to automatic contact updates.  When your friend changes his or her address or phone number (in their Profile mentioned above), your address book will be automatically updated if you are subscribed to updates.  This is crazy cool.  Learn more here (an overview will be posted soon)

• Which reminds me: Spaces now has contact cards like MSN/Windows Live Messenger!  Just right-click on someone's profile photo (or click on the down arrow) and select "View contact card" to see a preview of their space.

• Better commenting for blogs and now photos as well!  This feature also has an (optional) clickable profile photo that you can leave behind when leaving a comment.  And there's a mini text editor so you can format your comments (something I'm really glad we did!) kinda like blog entries.  Note that if you would like to turn off photo comments, you can do this in Settings.

• Photos are no longer limited to 30MB; you can now upload 500 photos per month without worrying about running out of storage space.

• MetaWeblog API (OK, this one is from December – but it's still cool).  Read more here.

• Better URLs!  Sometimes the little things matter the most.  This is one of those things.  Say goodbye to /members/.  You can now be reached at http://spaces.msn.com/[username].  For example, http://spaces.msn.com/mike now works!  We also have cleaner paths to pages, so if you want to give someone a link to your blog or to your photos, you can send them to http://spaces.msn.com/[username]/blog or /photos.

• Xbox Live integration.  Themes, recent games module, and gamer card integration!  This feature has been the single biggest reason my gamer score is now clocking in at 500 instead of 0.  If you're into Xbox Live, these features rock!  Check out my theme and gamer card and you can see why.

• New themes and categorized theme picker.  We now have well over 100 themes!

• Do you like email or mobile publishing?  You can now publish from 3 email addresses instead of just one.

• For those of you with private spaces (you know who you are!) people can now request access to spaces via anonymous email.  I like to think about this as "knocking on the door of someone's house".

• Privacy controls (communication preferences) for who can request access to your space and to your contact information and how.  Check it out in Settings.

• We doubled the size limit on the HTML PowerToy.

There's a lot of good stuff in this release and its great to be able tp work on shipping these features to our tens of millions of users.

Thanks to the recent news of the US Department of Justice's requests for information from the major web search engines, I've seen a number of people express surprise and dismay that online services track information that they'd consider private. A term that I've seen bandied about a lot recently is Personally Identifiable Information (PII) which I'd never heard before starting work at MSN.

The Wikipedia definition for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) states

In information security and privacy, personally identifiable information or personally identifying information (PII) is any piece of information which can potentially be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person.

Items which might be considered PII include, but are not limited to, a person's:

• Full name (if not common)
• National identification number
• Telephone number
• Street address
• E-mail address
• IP address (in some cases)
• Vehicle registration plate number
• Driver's license number
• Face, fingerprints, or handwriting

Information that is not generally considered personally identifiable, because many people share the same trait, include:

• First or last name, if common
• Country, state, or city of residence
• Age, especially if non-specific
• Gender or race
• Name of the school they attend or workplace
• Grades, salary, or job position
• Criminal record

When a person wishes to remain anonymous, descriptions of them will often employ several of the above, such as "a 34-year-old black man who works at Target". Note that information can still be private, in the sense that a person may not wish for it to become publicly known, without being personally identifiable. Moreover, sometimes multiple pieces of information, none of which are PII, may uniquely identify a person when brought together; this is one reason that multiple pieces of evidence are usually presented at criminal trials. For example, there may be only one Inuit person named Steve in the town of Lincoln Park, Michigan.

In addition, there is the notion of sensitive PII. This is information which can be linked to a person which the person desires to keep private due to potential for abuse. Examples of "sensitive PII" are a person's medical/health conditions; racial or ethnic origin; political, religious or philosophical beliefs or affiliations; trade union membership or sex life.

Many online services such as MSN have strict rules about when PII should be collected from users, how it must be secured and under what conditions it can be shared with other entities. However many Internet users don't understand that they disclose PII when using online services. Not only is there explicit collection of PII such as when user's provide their name, address and credit card information to online stores but there is often implicit PII collected which even savvy users fail to consider. For example, most Web servers log IP addresses of incoming HTTP requests which can then be used to identify users in many cases. It's easy to forget that practically every website you visit stores your IP address somewhere on their servers as soon as you hit the site. Other examples aren't so obvious. There was a recent article on Boing Boing entitled Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists which showed how to obtain sensitive PII such as people's political beliefs from their wishlists on Amazon.com. A few years ago I read a blog post entitled Pets Considered Harmful which showed how one could obtain sensitive PII such as someone's email password by obtaining the name of the person's pet from reading their blog since "What is the name of your cat?" was a question used by GMail to allow one to change their password.  

The reason I bring this stuff up is that I've seen people like Robert Scoble's make comments about wanting "a button to click that shows everything that’s being collected from their experience". This really shows a lack of understanding about PII. Would such a button prevent users from revealing their political affiliations in their Amazon wishlists or giving would be email account hijackers the keys to their accounts by blogging about their pets? I doubt it.

The problem is that most people don't realize that they've revealed too much information about themselves until something bad happens. Unfortunately, by then it is usually too late to do anything about it. If are an Internet user,  you should be cognizant of the amount of PII you are giving away by using web applications like search engines, blogs, email, instant messaging, online stores and even social bookmarking services.

Be careful out there.

From the press release Microsoft Expands Internet Research Efforts With Founding of Live Labs we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Jan. 25, 2006 —Microsoft Corp. today announced the formation of Microsoft^® Live Labs, a research partnership between MSN^® and Microsoft Research. Under the leadership of Dr. Gary William Flake, noted industry technologist and Microsoft technical fellow, Live Labs will consist of a dedicated group of researchers from MSN and Microsoft Research that will work with researchers across Microsoft and the academic research community. Live Labs will provide consistency in vision, leadership and infrastructure as well as a nimble applied research environment that fosters rapid innovations.

"Live Labs is a fantastic alliance between some of the best engineering and scientific talent in the world. It will be the pre-eminent applied research laboratory for Internet technologies," Flake said. “This is a very exciting opportunity for researchers and technologists to have an immediate impact on the next evolution of Microsoft's Internet products and services and will help unify our customers' digital world so they can easily find information, pursue their interests and enrich their lives."

The Live Labs — a confederation of dedicated technologists and affiliated researchers in pre-existing projects from around Microsoft — will focus on Internet-centric applied research programs including rapidly prototyping and launching of emerging technologies, incubating entirely new inventions, and improving and accelerating Windows Live™ offerings. This complements the company’s continuing deep investment in basic research at Microsoft Research and product development at MSN.

Ray Ozzie, Craig Mundie and David Vaskevitch, Microsoft’s chief technical officers, will serve as the Live Labs Advisory Board. Ozzie sees Live Labs as an agile environment for fast-tracking research from the lab into people’s hands. "Live Labs is taking an exciting approach that is both organic and consumer-driven," Ozzie said. "Within the context of a broad range of rich usage scenarios for Windows Live, the labs will explore new ways of bringing content, commerce and community to the Internet."

You can check out the site at http://labs.live.com/. It's unclear to me why we felt we had to apply the "Live" brand to what seems to be a subsection of http://research.microsoft.com/. I guess "Live" is going to be the new ".NET" and before the end of the year everything at Microsoft will have a "Live" version.

*sigh*

Today while browsing the Seattle Post Intelligencer, I saw an article with the headline Google agrees to censor results in China which began

SAN FRANCISCO -- Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country's free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the Internet's fastest growing market.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company planned to roll out a new version of its search engine bearing China's Web suffix ".cn," on Wednesday. A Chinese-language version of Google's search engine has previously been available through the company's dot-com address in the United States. By creating a unique address for China, Google hopes to make its search engine more widely available and easier to use in the world's most populous country.
...
To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit Web content that the country's government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisons on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.

Although China has loosened some of its controls in recent years, some topics, such as Taiwan's independence and 1989's Tiananmen Square massacre, remain forbidden subjects.

Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

"We firmly believe, with our culture of innovation, Google can make meaningful and positive contributions to the already impressive pace of development in China," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's senior policy counsel.

Google's decision rankled Reporters Without Borders, a media watchdog group that has sharply criticized Internet companies including Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com for submitting to China's censorship regime.

No comment.

Brian Jones has a blog post entitled Corel to support Microsoft Office Open XML Formats which begins

Corel has stated that they will support the new XML formats in Wordperfect once we release Office '12'. We've already seen other applications like OpenOffice and Apple's TextEdit support the XML formats that we built in Office 2003. Now as we start providing the documentation around the new formats and move through Ecma we'll see more and more people come on board and support these new formats. Here is a quote from Jason Larock of Corel talking about the formats they are looking to support in coming versions (http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2006/01/new_wordperfect_1.html):

Larock said no product could match Wordperfect's support for a wide variety of formats and Corel would include OpenXML when Office 12 is released. "We work with Microsoft now and we will continue to work with Microsoft, which owns 90 percent of the market. We would basically cut ouirselves off if you didn't support the format."

But he admitted that X3 does not support the Open Document Format (ODF), which is being proposed as a rival standard, "because no customer that we are currently dealing with as asked us to do so."

X3 does however allow the import and export of portable document format (pdf) files, something Microsoft has promised for Office 12.

I mention this article because I wanted to again stress that even our competitors will now have clear documentation that allows them to read and write our formats. That isn't really as big of a deal though as the fact that any solution provider can do this. It means that the documents can now be easily accessed 100 years from now, and start to play a more meaningful role in business processes.

Again I want to extend my kudos to Brian and the rest of the folks on the Office team who have been instrumental in the transition of the Microsoft Office file formats from proprietary binary formats to open XML formats.

Sunava Dutta on the Internet Explorer team has written about their support for a Native XMLHTTPRequest object in IE 7. He writes

I’m excited to mention that IE7 will support a scriptable native version of XMLHTTP. This can be instantiated using the same syntax across different browsers and decouples AJAX functionality from an ActiveX enabled environment.

What is XMLHTTP?

XMLHTTP was first introduced to the world as an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5.0. Over time, this object has been implemented by other browsing platforms, and is the cornerstone of “AJAX” web applications. The object allows web pages to send and receive XML (or other data) via the HTTP protocol. XMLHTTP makes it possible to create responsive web applications that do not require redownloading the entire page to display new data. Popular examples of AJAX applications include the Beta version of Windows Live Local, Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and Google’s GMail.

Charting the changes: XMLHTTP in IE7 vs. IE6

In IE6 and below, XMLHTTP is implemented as an ActiveX object provided by MSXML.

In IE7, XMLHTTP is now also exposed as a native script object. Users and organizations that choose to disable ActiveX controls can still use XMLHTTP based web applications. (Note that an organization may use Group Policy or IE Options to disable the new native XMLHTTP object if desired.) As part of our continuing security improvements we now allow clients to configure and customize a security policy of their choice and simultaneously retain functionality across key AJAX scenarios.

IE7’s implementation of the XMLHTTP object is consistent with that of other browsers, simplifying the task of cross-browser compatibility.  Using just a bit of script, it’s easy to build a function which works with any browser that supports XMLHTTP:

if (window.XMLHttpRequest){

          // If IE7, Mozilla, Safari, etc: Use native object
          var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest()

}
else
{
if (window.ActiveXObject){

          // ...otherwise, use the ActiveX control for IE5.x and IE6
          var xmlHttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
          }

}

Note that IE7 will still support the legacy ActiveX implementation of XMLHTTP alongside the new native object, so pages currently using the ActiveX control will not require rewrites.

I wonder if anyone else sees the irony in Internet Explorer copying features from Firefox which were originally copied from IE?