Google has released a beta version of their new desktop search software.

Very interesting, and I haven’t even run a search yet. I’m particularly intrigued with how they are handling RSS feeds with their “Web Clips” feature

The new version starts out hiding as a little search field in the Windows task bar, but if you click on the little widget next to the search field, it expands into a strip that stretches from the top to the bottom of the right side of your screen. This strip is broken up into sections. Some of the sections have an options button, other’s don’t seem to allow customization.

* *E-mail:* Displays the title, sender and time of recent e-mail. It can watch your Gmail account and/or your desktop e-mail client. You can appearantly filter what shows up, but it isn’t obvious to me how I’d exclude some of my e-mail accounts.
* *News:* Shows headlines from various news sources. There is no obvious way to personalize this. It may draw on the settings of my personalized google home page, but they don’t call attention to that fact.
* *Web Clips:* This one is very interesting. It seems to be an RSS/Atom Feed aggregator, but with a twist. Rather than requiring you to add a feed, it seems like it is automatically adding feeds from site’s I’ve visited recently. It was already populated the first time I saw it, so it must have gone back over my history or browser cache. If you click on the options for the section, it shows a list of feeds. You can add to the list by entering a URL, or by pushing a button that will add feeds for recently visited sites. You can also tell it whether or not you want it to automatically add feeds for frequently visited sites. I wonder if it works the other way, culling sites you no longer visit frequently.

I’m a big fan of watching user behaviour and then using that information to present them with options of things that they might want to do.

* *Scratch Pad:* A little spot to type notes. Could be very handy, I often find myself opening notepad to use as a scratch pad.
* *Photos:* Seems like its a mini-slideshow. I can’t tell for sure because all my photos are on a fileserver, which it doesn’t support (yet), and I’m not in the mood to take two seconds to copy some over to my computer. From the settings, it looks like it can also pull photos out of RSS feeds.
* *Quick View:* Very strange. It’s a list of recently viewed web pages, documents and other files. According to options, I can choose to have the list show recently accessed items, or frequently accessed items with some recent items thrown in.
* *What’s Hot:* A list of topics. It looks like they are using Technorati and BlogPulse to find recently hot topics.
* *Stocks:* It should be obvious, or was the Tech Bubble too long ago?
* *Weather:* Yup.

_Update_: “Google’s overview”:http://desktop.google.com/features.html#sidebar fills in some details I might have missed at first glance.

3rd party developers can create their own plugins. I’ve installed one to show my AdSense statistics, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

The “Web Clips” is an interesting innovation. I’m not sure the rest of it is all that novel, given Pointcast, ActiveDesktop, Konfabulator, Sidecar, etc, but it does seem nicely done.

More later, probably.

Interesting, and it only took them how many years?
Warner Music readies CD-free ‘e-label’ | CNET News.com

[…]artists will release music in clusters of three songs every few months rather than a CD every few years.
[…]
The e-label will permit recording artists to enjoy a “supportive, lower-risk environment” without as much pressure for huge commercial hits, Bronfman said. In addition, artists signed to the e-label will retain copyright and ownership of their master recordings.

I’ve used a variety of blogging tools over the years. I think I started with Livejournal, then used Blogger. A few years back, I exported all my posts out of Blogger and imported them into MovableType which I’ve been using ever since.

A year ago a lot of people transitioned off of MovableType when they changed their licensing terms with the release of MovableType 3.0. Many people stuck with MovableType and made the upgrade to 3.0 and beyond, but I stayed put. Until recently, that is.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to install “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org because I was thinking about a blogging project that would force me to pay for a MovableType license. That project is still in limbo, but a couple of hours ago I finished the process of migrating my blog from MovableType to WordPress. This is my first post in WordPress.

The process was pretty painless, thanks in large part, I think, to all those people who made the switch before me and were kind enough to write about it. A lot of that learning is boiled down “on the WordPress wiki”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_from_Movable_Type_to_WordPress, which covers the basics of importing your posts and comments, and getting your feeds redirected so people don’t miss a post.

The best information I found wasn’t on the Wiki though, it was on a blog. Scott Yang has detailed information on what you can do to make sure that “links to your old MovableType pages still work with WordPress”:http://scott.yang.id.au/2004/06/wordpress-migration-notes/. This is important for all the people who visit your site from seach engines and links on other people’s sites.

I wanted to go a little further though, I wanted to switch to a new URL naming scheme for my posts that uses the post title, rather than relying on the post ID# MovableType and WordPress generate. I also wanted to make sure the posts using the new URLs maintained the same search engine rank they originally had, which would require issuing permenant redirects to the new URLs when people and search engine spider’s visited the old URLs. I wrote Scott about it and he pointed me to another post announcing a “plugin he created to do permenent redirects”:http://scott.yang.id.au/2005/05/permalink-redirect/. It seems to work like a charm.

Update 8-21-06: I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 a while back, and a month or so later it finally sunk in that old MovableType-style URLs had reappeared in my javascript based traffic counter. When I investigated I realized that the redirect was no longer working, it was going to the WordPress 404 error page. It seemed to be an issue with a conflict between the new and much simplified mod_rewrite rules introduced by WP 2 for creating clean URLs and the rewrite rules I was using to redirect from the MT style URLs. After some poking around, I gave up and rolled back to the older .htaccess file with its more byzantine rules for clean WP URLs.

This week I started playing with WordPresses static pages feature, and was annoyed to find it didn’t work because it needed changes to the rewrite rules, so tonight I started experimenting again and figured out that I could get the redirects for MovableType-style URLs working with the simpler but more flexible ruleset for clean URLs if I modified them to “break” after a match by adding the “L” flag to each of them.

RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{6}).html$ index.php?p=$1 [R=301,QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2}).html$ index.php?m=$1$2 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^index.rdf$ index.php?feed=rdf [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index.xml$ index.php?feed=rss2 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^atom.xml$ index.php?feed=atom [R=301,L]


Since when is a “lead program manager” an executive position?

bq. “Microsoft exec defends RSS rebranding – Computerworld”:http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/development/webservices/story/0,10801,103961,00.html

bq. An MSN executive is defending Microsoft’s rebranding of RSS into “Web feeds” after a flurry of Microsoft bloggers accused the software giant of trying to recast the Web site syndication technology in its own image.

bq. In a recent post on his Web log “Torres Talking,” Mike Torres, MSN Spaces lead program manager, made a clear distinction between the branding of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology and the underlying technology itself.

I’m not sure why, but at some point I subscribed to the RSS feed for “this weblog”:http://www.tjacobi.com/. Tonight, I unsubscribed. The only reason I didn’t unsub sooner is that I’d gotten in the habit of avoiding looking at the feed.

Tonight though, I took another look, and it was horrible. Each item in the feed is mostly crap. There is a very short excerpt of the post, followed by an invitation to comment, a search box, a list of related articles AND an advertisement! Actually, make that two advertisements, one for a sponsor and one soliciting other advertisers.

I don’t know if it’s working for him or not, but its not working for me.

# If you are going to advertise in your feed, at least give me the full freaking text.
# If I’ve subscribed to your feed, you should assume I’m a regular reader, and that it benefits absolutely no one for me to see the same advertisements multiple times a day for weeks on end.
# The related items is a neat idea, but its silly to put in anything other than a full text feed. For one thing, it wastes screen space, for another thing, if I’m actually interested enough to click on a related article, I’m probably going to be clicking through to the website anyway to see the full article.
# Drop the search box, if I really care about what you have to say on a subject that occurs to me while reading your content-lite RSS feed, I’ll probably click through to your freaking site.

Of course, visiting the site isn’t much better than reading the feed. There is a big Google AdSense block across the top, followed by an extremely deep masthead/logo with an inexplicable photo of a shirt collar a tie that looks like it was lifted from a Land’s End Men’s catalog. The right hand column has a wide Google AdSense block followed by more ads of various sorts. The main column is contains the blog posts, each accompanied by one or more “Sponsor links” and links to related articles.

“Quick Online Tips”:http://pchere.blogspot.com is another feed I subscribed to at some point that was rubbing me the wrong way recently. The feed only has teasers, but it is happily ad-free. Click through though, and what I see isn’t inspiring. On my laptop, all I see of any consequence is the title of the post. Other than that, I see the blogger navbar, the title bar for the site. Nothing too bad, yet, but scan a little further and you realize that the content is crowded out by the advertising. There is a Google linkbar above the post title, below that, a big google AdSense block. On the right there are a couple of little graphical ads. I have to scroll to see the post content, along with more ads on the side, followed by another big AdSense block. It doesn’t take many visits for me to tune out the advertising, and after a few more visits, I’ve tuned out the whole site, feed and all.

I mention these not just to bitch, but to remind myself to be careful. I’ve been experiementing with AdSense on this blog. I started with an vertical AdSense strip on the right-hand side of my archive pages and recently added a horizontal strip between the bottom of the post and the comments on the same pages, and I’ve been thinking about trying something in my feeds on a trial basis (most likely not). I don’t honestly think I’ll ever go as overboard as some of these people, but I really don’t want to come anywhere close.

Boeing’s 737 is appearantly in competition with a model from Brazil’s emergent Embraer.

bq. Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Lockheed looking at Embraer, Boeing for spy plane
Lockheed Martin Corp. is looking at the Embraer 190 and the Boeing Co. 737 as candidates for a new Army spy plane, the company said Friday.

Granted, its a specialized sale, but it again illustrates that, a decade ago, Boeing should have been worrying, not just about Airbus, but about “the little guys”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000602.html. They didn’t, and now they are feeling the heat.