Sam Ruby writes

 Ted Leung: If I'm looking for thought leadership from the community, in the Java community, I'm looking towards the non Sun bloggers -- these are the folks doing AOP, Groovy, SGen, Prevalence, WebWork, etc. This shows the rich ecosystem that has grown up around Java. If I look at the .NET community, I pretty much look for the MS bloggers.

Let's not confuse cause and effect here.  There used to be plenty of .Net bloggers who didn't work for Microsoft. 

It seems Sam and Ted have different ideas of what thought leadership is from me. When I think of thought leadership I think of ideas that add to the pool of common practices or impact the way developers work and think. Examples of thought leadership are the ideas in the GoF's Design Patterns or the writings of Joel Spolsky.

I read a lot of blogs from Microsoft and non-Microsoft people about .NET development and I see more thought leadership from non-Microsoft people than I do from Microsoft people. What I see from Microsoft people is what I'll term accidental thought leadership. Basically if I'm the developer or PM that designed or implemented component X then it stands to reason that I'm better placed to talk about it than others. Similarly if I'm one of the folks designing or implementing future technology Y then it stands to reason I'd be the best placed to talk about Longhorn/Indigo/Avalon/WinFS/Whidbey/Yukon/etc. Also the other thing is that it more interesting to read about upcoming future technology than it is to read about how best to use existing technology which is why people tend to flock to the blogs of the folks working on future stuff and ignore the Microsoft bloggers talking about existing technologies until they need a workaround for some bug.

Personally, the only real thought leadership I've seen from the 200 or so Microsoft blogs I've read have come from folks like Erik Meijer and Don Box. I see a lot of Microsoft people blogging about SOA but to me most of them are warmed over ideas that folks like Pat Helland have been talking about for years. When I think of thought leadership in the .NET world I'm more likely to think of Sam Gentile or Clemens Vastersr than I am to think of some blue badge carrying employee at the Redmond campus.  

What I do find interesting is that a Sun employee, Simon Phipps, is actually trying to use this to score points and claim that the lack of Sun bloggers with insightful posts is due to a "wide community as you'd expect from the openness of the JCP". When Microsoft folks weren't blogging and directly interacting with our developer community people railed because they felt the company was aloof and distant from its developers. Now we try to participate more and it is a sign that “it's a closed-source dictatorship - no amount of pushing up-hill will fix that”. I guess you can't win them all. :)  

I recently started using Real Player again after a few years of not using it and it does seem a lot less user hostile. It seems that this is the result of some internal turmoil at Real Networks. Below are links to some interesting readings about behind the scenes at Real and how it ended up affecting their product

• Real Obnoxious
• Real Reply
• Real Proof

This seems to have been making the rounds in a couple of popular blogs.

MSDN has a number of Developer Centers for key developer topics such as XML Web Services and C#. There are also node home pages for lesser interesting [according to MSDN] topics such as Windows Scripting Host or SQLXML. Besides the fact that developer centers are highlighted more prominently on MSDN as key topics the main differences between the developer centers and the node home pages are

1. Developer Centers have a snazzier look and feel than node home pages.

2. Developer Centers have an RSS feed.

3. Developer Centers can pull in blog content (e.g. Duncan Mackenzie's blog on the C# Developer Center)

I've been working on getting a Developer Center on MSDN that provides a single place for developers to find out about XML technologies and products at Microsoft for about a year or more. The Developer Center is now about two weeks from being launched. There are only two questions left to answer.

The first question is what the tagline for the Developer Center should be. Examples of existing taglines are

• Microsoft Visual C# Developer Center: An innovative language and tool for building .NET-connected solutions

• Data Access and Storage Developer Center: Harnessing the power of data

• Web Services Developer Center: Connecting systems and sharing information

• .NET Architecture Developer Center: Blueprint for Success

I need something similar for the XML Developer Center but my mind's been drawing a blank. My two top choices are currently “The language of information interchange” or “Bridging gaps across platforms with the ubiqitous data format”. In my frivilous moments, I've also considered “Unicode + Angle Brackets = Interoperability”. Any comments on which of the three taglines I have in mind sounds best or suggestions for taglines would be much appreciated.

The second issue is how much we should talk about unreleased technologies. I personally dislike talking about technologies before they ship because history has taught me that projects slip or get cut when you least expect them to do so. For example, when I was first hired fulltime at Microsoft about two years ago we were working on XQuery which was supposed to be in version 2.0 of the .NET Framework. At the time the assumption was that they'd both (XQuery & the next version of the .NET Framework) be done by the end of 2003. It is now 2004 and it is optimistic to expect that either XQuery or the next version of the .NET Framework will both be done at the end of this year. If we had gone off our initial assumptions and started writing about XQuery and the classes we were designing for the .NET Framework (e.g. XQueryProcessor ) in 2002 and 2003 on MSDN then we'd currently have a number of outdated and incorrect articles on MSDN. On the other hand this does mean that while you won't find articles on XQuery on MSDN you do find articles like An Introduction to XQuery, XML for Data: An early look at XQuery ,X is for XQuery, and XQuery Tricks and Traps  on the developer websites of our competitors like IBM and Oracle. All four of those articles contain information that is either outdated or will be outdated when the W3C is done with the XQuery recommendation. However they do provide developers with a glimpse and an understanding of the fundamentals of XQuery.

The question I have is whether it would be valuable for our developers if we wrote articles about technologies that haven't shipped and whose content may differ from what we actually ship? Other developer centers on MSDN have decided to go this route such as the Longhorn Developer Center and Web Services Developer Center which regularly feature content that is a year or more away from shipping. I personally think this is unwise but I am interested in what the Microsoft developer community thinks of providing content about upcoming releases versus focusing on existing releases.

...Pimps at Sea.

Thanks to Thaddeus Frogley for the link.

RSS Bandit provides users with the ability to perform searches from its toolbar and view the results in the same UI used for reading blogs if the results can be viewed as an RSS feed. This integration is provided for Feedster searches and I was considering adding other blog search engines to the default. Torsten had given me a RSS link to some search results on PubSub and they seemed to be better than Feedster in some cases. So this evening I decided to try out PubSub's weblog search and see if there was a way to provide similar integration with RSS Bandit. Unfortunately, it turns out that one has to provide them with an email address before you can perform searches.

I guess they aren't in a rush to have any users.

I always thought that dis records created by dueling MCs over conjured up beefs designed to sell records (e.g. the Nas vs. Jay-Z beef) I was surprised to find out that the same thing now happens with R&B songs. From an article on MTV.com entitled That Eamon Dis Track? Ho-Wopper Now Claims He Was Behind It we read

The beef between R&B singer Eamon and his so-called ex-girlfriend, Frankee, continues to heat up on radio, as stations across the country follow up his hit "F--- It (I Don't Want You Back)" with her dis track, "FU Right Back." Frankee's song, which uses the exact same music as "F--- It (I Don't Want You Back)," calls Eamon out as being lousy in bed, having pubic lice and generally sucking as a boyfriend. And Eamon loves every word. In fact, he claims he approved the song before the public even heard it.

Not only does he say Frankee was never his girl, he said she was handpicked by his staff to record a response to "F--- It  (I Don't Want You Back)" in order to create the illusion of a feud (see "Eamon's Alleged Old Flame Burns Him With Dis Track"). "There was a big tryout, and I actually know some of the girls who wanted to do the song, but I never met Frankee in my life," Eamon said. "I think it's corny to death, but it's funny."

I've listened to both songs, Eamon's is the better record although Frankee's version is kind of peppy.

Speaking of faked endings there's the article I read this afternoon on Yahoo! about the finalists on the reality show 'Last Comic Standing' were pre-picked which has caused some of the judges such as Drew Carey and Brett Butler to fire barbs at NBC. Brett Butler claimed "As panel judges, we can say that (a) we were both surprised and disappointed at the results and (b) we had NOTHING to do with them". It seems there was some fine print which indicated that the judges where just there for window dressing and the finalists were pre-picked. I guess this just goes to show you that you should always read the fine print.

There's currently a semi-interesting discussion about software patents on the XML-DEV mailing list sparked by a post by Dennis Sonoski entitled W3C Suckered by Microsoft where he rants angrily about why Microsoft is evil for not instantly paying $521 million dollars to Eolas and thereby starting a patent reform revolution. There are some interesting viewpoints voiced in the ensuing thread including Tim Bray's suggestion that Microsoft pay Tim Berners-Lee $5 million for arguing against the Eolas patent.

The thread made me think about what my position on filing software patents was given the vocal opposition to them on some online fora. I recently have gotten involved in patent discussions at work and I jotted down my thought processes as I was deciding whether filing for patents was a good idea or not. Belows are the pros and cons of filing for patents from my perspective in the trenches (so to speak).

PRO

1. Having a patent or two on your resume is a nice ego and career boost.
2. As a shareholder at Microsoft it is in my best interests to file patents which allow the company defend itself from patent suits and reap revenue from patent licencing.
3. The modest financial incentive we get for filing patents would make for buying a few rounds of drinks with friends.

CON

1. Filing patents involve having meetings with lawyers.
2. Patents are very political because you don't want to snub anyone who worked on the idea but also don't want to cheapen them by claiming that people who were peripherally involved were co-inventers. For example, is a tester who points out a design flaw in an idea now one of the co-inventers if it was a fundamental flaw? 
3. There's a very slight chance that Slashdot runs an article about a particular patent claiming that it is another evil plot by Microsoft. The fact that it is a slight chance is that the ratio of Slashdot articles about patents to those actually filed is quite small.

That was my thought process as I sat in on some patent meetings. Basically there is a lot of incentive to file patents for software innovations if you work for a company that can afford to do so. However the measure of degree of innovation is in the eye of the beholder [and up to prior art searches].

I've seen a number of calls for patent reform for software but not any that have any feasible or concrete proposals behind them. Most of the proponents of patent reform I've seen usually argue something akin to “Some patent that doesn't seem innovative to me got granted so the system needs to be changed“. How the system should be changed and whether the new system will not have problems of its own are left as excercises for the reader.

There have been a number of provocative writings about patent reform, the most prominent in my memory being the FSF's Patent Reform Is Not Enough and An Open Letter From Jeff Bezos On The Subject Of Patents. I suspect that the changes suggested by Jeff Bezos in his open letter do a good job of straddling the line between those who want do away with software and business method patents and those that want to protect their investment.

Disclaimer: The above statements are my personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. 

As pointed out in a recent Slashdot article some researchers at HP Labs have come up with what they have termed a Blog Epidemic Analyzer which aims to “track how information propagates through networks. Specifically...how web based memes get passed on from one user to another in blog networks“. It sounds like an interesting idea, it would be cool to know who the first person to send out links about All Your Base Are Belong To Us or I Kiss You. I can also think of more serious uses of being able to track down the propagation of particular links across the World Wide Web.

Unfortunately, it seems the researchers behind this are either being myopic or have to justify the cost of their research to their corporate masters by trying to compare what they've done to Google. From the  Blog Epidemic Analyzer FAQ

2. What's the point?

There has been a lot of discussion over the fairness of blogs, powerlaws, and A-list bloggers (You can look at the discussion on Many2Many for some of the highlights). The reality is that some blogs get all the attention. This means that with ranking algorithms like Technorati's and Google's Page Rank highly linked blogs end up at the top of search pages. Sometimes (maybe frequently) this is what you want. However, it is also possible that you don't want the most connected blog. Rather you would like to find the blog that discovers new information first.

The above answer makes it sound like these guys have no idea what they are talking about. Google and Technorati do vastly different things. The fact that Google's search engine lists highly linked blogs at the top of search results that they are tangentially related to is a bug. For example, the fact that a random post by Russell Beattie about a company now makes him the fifth result that comes up for a search for that comapny in Google isn't a feature, it's a bug. The goal of Google (and all search engines) is to provide the most relevant results  for a particular search term. In the past, tying relevance to popularity was a good idea but with the advent of weblogs and the noise they've added to the World Wide Web this is becoming less and less of a good idea. Technorati on the other hand has one express purpose, measuring weblog popularity based on incoming links.

The HP iRank algorithm would be a nice companion piece to things like Technorati and BlogPulse but comparing it to Google seems like a stretch.

Torsten just finished creating a German version of RSS Bandit. This should make it into the next release which should please our various German users. As Torsten mentioned we are looking for volunteers to do other languages. We will need at least two volunteers per language so that there can be some degree of error checking and the like.

To get started with translating RSS Bandit, only one file a number of files need translating and these include RSSBanditText.resx, the resource files for the main GUI, and the resource files for the various dialog boxes. An example of a translated version of that document is Torsten's German translation; RSSBanditText.de.resx.

Folks at work have been cracking up about the Rick James skit on a recent episode of the Dave Chapelle show. Linked below are two video clips from the show. Pure comic genius.

Chappelle's Show: MORE of Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories

Rick James asks the philosophical question “What did the five fingers say to the face?” in this all-new Charlie Murphy-inspired clip.

Eddie Murphy's brother Charlie tells the tale of Rick James: Habitual line-stepper.

You will need to download RealPlayer to view the video clips. Speaking of which it seems Real Player is much improved from the last time I used a couple of years ago.