Rolling Stone Federated Search

RollingStone.com just deployed a new federated search feature, showing top results from the Rolling Stone Archive along with the regular site search.

My team member David Benson created the search service used in the federated search, a stand-alone Archive search page, and all the necessary glue to automatically direct users back to the intended content after authenticating.

The end result is a great way to tie the archive deeper into the Rolling Stone site, and to provide historical context to a user’s search:

When clicking on an archive link, if not authenticated, you are presented with an upsell/login page.

Once signed in you are then shown the article you clicked on:

Or if you clicked the View All items link, the full archive search, with facet filters and sorting options:

Enjoy!

Surprise, surprise: Microsoft tries to steal Xobni's lunch

Watching the Scobleizer's interview with Microsoft Office Product Manager Chris Bryant showing new functionality in Outlook 2010 it's pretty obvious that Microsoft is not just going to let Xobni have all the fun with social networks and conversations - it will now be baked in...

Remind me why Xobni didn't take Microsoft's money when MS offered it to them?

There’s also lots of additional goodness in Outlook, let’s just hope they’ve cleaned up the ‘extra linebreak’ “function” as well.

3 steps to a better Tech Crunch (feed)

I know I’m not alone in having a lack of confidence in the journalistic ability of Michael Arrington’s employees over at TechCrunch – MG Siegler’s outrage over Microsoft’s latest (rather sad) marketing efforts is just the latest to draw annoyed comments.  With 20-30 posts per day, it gets pretty time-consuming just trying to filter the good stories from the bad, since all that Google Reader gives you is the headline and the start of the body:

Wouldn’t it be nice to also know who wrote that headline so that you knew better how to interpret it?  Well, you can do so quite easily, in three simple steps.

Step 1: Create a Yahoo Pipe

Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit

 

Step 2: Configure your Pipe

Add the following modules:

• Sources – FetchFeed
• Operators – Loop
• String – StringBuilder (drag onto the Loop module)

Configure and connect as below, then save.

 

Step 3: Subscribe to your new feed:

 

Or, if all that’s too complicated, you can just subscribe to the Pipe I created:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/austegard/tcwa

PS! Here’s a filtered feed for Michael Arrington posts only:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/austegard/tcma

Microsoft News: Dick Hardt joins Microsoft

Good news from out of the cold, damp north: Dick Hardt of OpenID and amazing slide-deck fame is joining Microsoft.  This should speak well both of Micorosft’s current attention to claims based authentication, as well as improving the chances of Microsoft creating truly first class identity solutions.

“I will have the title Partner Architect and will be working on consumer, enterprise and government identity problems. My open source, open web and digital community experience will continue to guide my thinking. For me, this is an opportunity to work on the identity problems I have been toiling over for the last six years, but now with massive resources.”

http://identity20.com/?p=171

And in Unrelated News… Vista still sucks?

I’ve had an interest in Citigroup lately, and so I found this headline in BusinessWeek interesting:

As the story usually goes, my part-magpie brain then zoomed in on the first of the MORE FROM BUSINESSWEEK stories – is Vista still considered slow and dangerous – really?  But, check the date:

Why is BusinessWeek suggesting I read a 20 month old article about software when I go to read a current financial article? (I mean we all hate the UAC feature in Vista, but this is bordering on persecution…)

For that matter, why does it suggest an almost as-old story about the failure of a REALLY old business?

I’m Free. Free Falling.

No more visiting electoral-vote.org every morning:

from xkcd.com

Morgan Stanley/Mary Meeker: State of the Web Economy

Mary Meeker Web 2.0 Presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web 2.0)

Presentation in PDF Format
(Via TechCrunch)

Yay.

Now I want to see some change. No excuses.

Insanity

…and that’s all I have to say about that.

The Pendulum Swings/It's All Clinton's Fault

With all the blaming of Pelosi/McCain/Obama for the failure of the bailout bill, it is kind of odd that someone hasn’t brought up every Republican’s favorite whipping boy, Bill Clinton; after all, his HUD was part of starting the whole mess, as reported nine years ago today:

New York Times, September 30, 1999:  ‘Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending’

Of course it was all well intentioned – a backlash against allegations of racial discrimination by Fannie and Freddie.  The result?

“The action […] will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.

“Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

“In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

“In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.”

You can’t cry about a deregulated market not working when the government has its hands all over the cookie jar, tweaking here, muddling there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The U.S. Government Engineered The Current Economic Crisis
• Putting The Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac Situation In Context
• Bailout: What's in it for homeowners
• Why the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can't be allowed to fail.
• How housing rescue bill can help you
• Freddie, Fannie accounting under legal scrutiny
• American Pendulum

CNN: Campbell Brown on the 700 Billion Bailout

Gratuitous video embed:

MOSS: Goodbye 2000 limit, Hello 3000?

Image via CrunchBase

The rule of thumb for SharePoint lists has always been “no more than 2000 items in a given container”.

Now in the recently released White Paper “SharePoint Performance Optimization - How Microsoft IT Increases Availability and Decreases Rendering Time of SharePoint Sites”, the following is stated in the Best Practices section:

“Manage large lists for performance  
Having large lists by itself is not necessarily a performance issue. When SharePoint Server renders the many items in those lists, that can cause spikes in render times and database blocking. One way to mitigate large lists is to use subfolders and create a hierarchical structure where each folder or subfolder has no more than 3,000 items.”

The 2000 items was always a soft limit, of course, but interesting to see MS now saying 3000…

Related articles by Zemanta

• SharePoint: Improving Performance
• Microsoft releases some of promised Office documentation
• Microsoft's response to Google Chrome? SharePoint

Dunnowhatthisis: The New Yorker

Regarding today's controversy - Should we really be surprised that the New Yorker has no discernable sense of humor?

Announcing Charlotte Annabelle Austegard

'Lottie' was born this morning at 8:36, weighing in at 8lbs 1oz and measuring 20 3/4"  (3645g / 53cm).  Baby and Mommy are both doing well.  Big brother Erik and Daddy are both very happy (maybe Daddy more so).

OLPC: XP on the XO

So, my OLPC XO has been sitting on top of a bookshelf gathering dust for the past 2 months.  Besides the low WAF, the device, in its current form just isn't useful for me.  This is less a criticism of the XO than an admission that I am not the target demographic.

That said, I would like to actually use the thing again.  My primary issues with it, as is, are (off the top of my head):

• No battery life management (I can't make it sleep - I have to turn it off)
• Browser (90% of my use) is kludgey
• I strongly dislike the Sugar interface in general
• The e-book format buttons are not currently useful - I want to browse the web in e-book format, can't do that now
• ..and of course the neon green which my wife hates.  (I guess maybe I could paint it...)

That's why I welcome the news that MS is introducing a version of Windows for the XO.  It's hard NOT to improve on what's there at present.

But of course, time will tell whether a) I can get it, and b) it'll be any better.

We call this 'Democracy'

Webb opens, closes vacant Senate session

The U.S. Senate was called to order for 11 seconds on Wednesday as the last political scuffle of the year between the White House and the Democratic-led Congress played out.

Nearly all the senators left the Capitol for the Christmas holiday last week, but Democrats are keeping the Senate in session to block President Bush from making any recess appointments -- a constitutional mechanism that allows the president, during congressional recesses, to fill top government posts for up to one year without Senate confirmation.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, opened and then immediately gaveled the Senate session to a close. He spent 57 seconds in the chamber.