A9: Competition to Microsoft's "Stuff I have Seen" from Amazon

I have just discovered A9 in my referrers statistics and I haven't still started using it, but for what I see, it really sounds interesting. An excerpt from the site: A9.com personalizes your search experience by remembering your searches and giving you easy access to all your history in several ways:

• Each web search result indicates whether it's new [ New ] or has previously been clicked on [ Clicked 2 weeks ago ]. [learn more]


• Every search you performed on A9.com is stored in the History column and organized by time. You can switch between your previous searches and the sites you've visited. With the A9 Toolbar, the list of all sites you have visited is accessible the same way.


• If you open the history column on a search result page, it will give you search results of your own history followed by a list of your entire history (as well as from your bookmarks and diary…). [learn more]


• Try it out: http://a9.com/amazon?a=oh.

I guess I will be using A9's toolbar instead of Google's for a while.

Tablet: The Personal Computer of the Year 2000, Back in 1988!

Browsing Stephen Wolfram's scrapbook has been so far a fascinating experience, and I am still at page 4 of 8!

Look at this for example:

Tablet: Personal Computer in the Year 2000 (1988)

Besides, I had no idea that he was once with Dany Hillis at Thinking Machines.

Hey, by the way, I nerver understand what those guys do, I am not even an ammateur, but just a fan.

Why do people subscribe to the main feed in MSDN blogs?

As explained by Robert Scoble, people subscribing to the main feed of the MSDN Blogs has been consuming too much bandwidth. Even worse, as Dave Winer states in a later post, it seems to be a nonsense.

Why would anybody want to subscribe to such a gigantic feed? I think I found two driving reasons:

1. Subscribing to the main feed is overwhelmingly easy.

2. Finding the individual blogs I could be interested in, is really hard from the blogger list.

Of course, I very often subscribe to blogs only after I have found them referenced in other blogs. However, if I had to come to the blog list page to find something interesting to subscribe to, the only tool I would have at hand would be Ctrl+F.

Also, just browsing the list is impractical. There are so many Microsoft bloggers today that I don't think anybody with a full time job will browse the list past the names beginning with C.

There are some things I think could be done to improve the experience. These are just a few examples:

- Implement the list as a table.
- Add columns with metadata, for instance traffic (as an heuristic measure of ranking), team or product, position, frequent categories, a gauge indicating technical level,etc.
- Add ways to filter and sort content based on any combination of those columns.
- Add a good full text search engine that returns a link to the blog (or the feed URL) with each result.

Maybe there is already something like what I describe.

My blog is dead, long live my blog!

Just another cliché: One picture worths more than a thousand words.

Tropical Storm Nine

While Buzz Bruggeman is expecting to blog about his second hurricane on Sunday, I am still hopping this will be the second false alarm I blog about (first was Odette last year). Look at the pictures of Tropical Depression 9 I copied from Weather Underground.


Now let me tell you I live in Hispaniola, that big island to the east of Cuba. Now look at this historical chart.


Scary, isn't it? It shows at least one hurricane with a similar path visiting my neighborhood. I cannot see that storm name, but it could be George. So, if it keeps its current direction and grows, it is expected to become a tropical storm on Friday and a Category 1 Hurricane on Sunday. At a first glance I would say it could be on my same longitude by next Thursday.
In any case, good luck Buzz!

Gates pitch on Jobs pitch on MSN Music Store pitch on Video

I have just read MSN Music is off-key, Apple says on CNET's News.com. The article mentions an interview in BusinessWeek magazine in which Bill Gates says that Steve Jobs is wrong in his notion that Internet video rental isn't an important market:

'Ask kids in the back of a car on a two-hour trip, 'Hey, would you like to have your videos there?' My kids would,' Gates said. 'I guess Steve's kids just listen to Bach and Mozart. But mine, they want to watch 'Finding Nemo.' I don't know who made that, but it's really a neat movie.'

Gates seems to have an amazing sense of humour, don't you think?

Robert Scoble reads the Dogme 95 "Vow of Chastity"

I have just suggested Robert to take look at the vow, and he did! Having a chance to interact with Robert in Channel 9 is so cool! I think it is one of the things that make Channel 9 so succesful.

I will also add him to my MSN messenger soon. I just need to wait until he creates his third passport account.

WinFS will be late, Longhorn on 2006, WinFX... Who knows

I have read all the information linked by this post by Chris Sells. I see all is very interesting news. I am not sure, but perhaps there is a possibility that WinFX will be released before Longhorn ships.

All updated questions in the Longhorn Developer FAQ are answered by the old friend of this blog, John Montgomery. I will refreshing my browser on his blog until he posts more details about this.

Does blogging make sense?

Lately, I cannot find anything compelling enough to blog about. It could be because my general mood: it is also becoming difficult for me to talk with people about trivial subjects. The most prevalent feeling I have these days seems to be that I know too little about too much. Besides, I happen to be introverted. So why should I find pleasure in blogging?

Let's try to do the tick of blogging just for the sake of it. I will begin with a recollection of some things that have happend to me these days.

Last happy moment: Today in the Olympic games Argentina won 89 - 81 over the USA "dream team" in basketball. Tomorrow the insolent team representing my country will try to get the Olympic gold medal, for the first time ever. Congratulations Manu and all, you made me cry! By the way Manu, what about transofming your "NEWS by Manu" site in a full fledged blog? Right now, it is so close to a blog that it hurts!

Last enlightment: Rich people spend their lives acquiring assets, while poor and middle class people usually acquire liabilities in the belief their are assets. I readed this a week ago in the spanish version of Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I guess I am just following Chris Sells' lead in my attempt to be a geek that understands money.

So, what happened to the Hotmail upgrade

Time has passed and there is no news about the capacity upgrade to the free Hotmail service. Only yesterday I received a notification of the new 2 GB limit for Hotmail Plus. I have seen no news after the one that said we were going to get 250 MB. I wonder if this is the last word.

Buttercup (pink-candle) is back blogging

She says that she "just didn't feel like posting stuff here". It is weird when you don't know the whereabouts of your blog-friends.