I see an increasing number of research efforts going on to get people’s heads around the blogosphere and how to figure out what's relevant and what's not. 4-5 years back it was quite easy to do so, because there were so few of “us bloggers” and you could read pretty much all blogs that mattered in your area of interest withion an hour of your day, but now all of that has grown so much out of proportion that noise and signal blur into a “wodge of stuff” that’s hard to get through or judge. So now people start resorting to bots and lots of statistics to do analysis and my intuition tells me that while that may yield interesting data, a bot can’t really capture the signal amplitude. With that I mean relevance and authority.

I think I’m observing several types of blogs that deserve different attention and weight. Interestingly enough, that isn’t necessarily captured by discoverable metadata such as inbound links or trackbacks or pingbacks. The types I can come up with are the following and it’d be great if you could give me your opinion on whether that resonates with you and whether you have good examples for the individual types. I am giving some examples realizing that some blogs have N+1 of these characteristics. The crosscutting concern here are comments. I am not sure how to think about those yet. Also, this list is not at all scientific; it’s just a (my) perspective. 

“The Authority”
The blog has been around forever and the author has built up so much credibility and following that “everyone interested” is subscribed to the feed. Since that’s so, people are at most giving “Look at that” links and there is no widespread debate because the blog entries are undisputably good and accurate data; most people just consume the feed.

“The Troublemaker”
The blog has been around for a while and the author has build up enough credibility for people to care. The author intentionally takes extreme positions to spark debate and that works and people are linking and voicing opinion. Lots of people are lurking, lots of links if the position is particularly outrageous.

“The Collaborator”
The blog has been around for a while and the author has build up enough credibility for people to care. The author has a reputation to be interested in broad collaboration, raises interesting challenges and ask broad questions that spark constructive debate.

“The Linkblogger”
The blog has been around for a while and the author has built a reputation for being a good observer for what’s going on in blogland. Lots of people are relying on the editorial skill to cut through the noise and are mostly consuming. Inbound links becoming rare over time, because the blog eventually becomes a utility.

“The Magazine”
The blog has been around for a while and the author has built a reputation for being good at figuring out what’s going on in the industry and is essentially a news outlet. Lots of incoming links due to novelty factor.

“The Blip in the Noise”
The blog is sitting on one of the big blog properties (such as weblog.asp.net) and shows up on people’s radar mostly through the consolidated feed. Inbound links may flare up on an interesting post, but otherwise the main blog is just a lonely place. If there are enough blips, people may end up subscribing to the actual blog feed.

“The Googleable Answer”
This is the blog who is #1 to #5 with the answer to something that thousands are having a problem with. Google for 0x800123123 or some HRESULT and you find this person. The author is proud of this post because (s)he "is the answer", not support.microsoft.com.   (look for "dllhost.exe.config" ...)

 “The Shooting Star”
The blog is relatively new or has been ignored but the author has done an astonishing stunt that ended up on Slashdot or digg (etc). Tons of links. Server tanks. People subscribe and lurk for a while and if the author can follow through the blog will end up on somewhere in one of the categories above or otherwise on the category below.

“I want to blog”
The blog has no general relevance whatsoever. Nobody is particularly interested. Sadly, that's the majority.

Another observation that I have is that the blog volume doesn’t directly correlate to relevance. Someone can be silent for 3 months and have huge amplitude and some blogs on people who post every day may not matter at all in the big picture.

(Thanks to Scott Hanselman for the "Googleable Answer" contribution) 

I read that Google runs buses. Headline material in the New York Times. Impressive. Ehh. Here at Microsoft, buses are run by the King County Metro Transit system and we all get a free Flexpass. And our shuttle system is constrained to connections within and between the campus locations in and around Redmond. Of course that's just cost effective, logical and boring and therefore not newsworthy, I guess.  

COM Is Love.

Disagree? Stop reading.

Agree? Still feel it? Well, I just learned that there's a very unique way you can show your love for COM. Own it!

Own it? Yes, I'm completely not kidding. We've got an open position for a Program Manager to own COM+, DCOM, RPC, the WCF/COM Integration, System.EnterpriseServices and all the future goodness that we're going to stick into Longhorn Server and future versions of Windows to keep COM going and make it increasingly integrated with all the goodness that we're working on for the future of distributed systems in the years to come. COM dead? Pfft. 

If you are interested and have difficulties figuring out how to work the job web page (that is the preferred way, however) send me a mail with your resume to clemensv at microsoft.com. And mind that my email address just serves as a proxy here so be as serious as you would be about applying for a job with someone whose blog you don't read... 

Wow! I'm watching the Oscars with my wife and she just thought I completely lost it during the last commercial break. I actually started cheering. Why? I've seen the first Microsoft commercial that made me think ... Wow. The firm starts getting how to do this. Short, witty, provocative, impactful. Cool.  "Wow" Cleveland, 1946. "Wow" 2007. More of that please.

I'm busy at a conference but just stumbled upon Yahoo Pipes via TechMeme and Dare. The little bits I read about it make that quite interesting to me (and put a big grin on my face) specifically because of this piece I wrote in 2003 and which also got some attention back then. I claim prior art

WS-* or REST? Is there an epic battle? How does Microsoft think about a big chunk of the web development community ignoring the beloved WS-* specs and preferring "HTTP programming"? Answer: We think that people make these choices of good reasons and we like and support any way you want to write services. As a matter of fact, we're engaging with the community to make both, the WS-* stack and the HTTP/REST better to work with and make them a safer environment for, well, everyone.

In the spirit of the last statement, Bill Gates has just announced at the RSA conference (and our Chief Identity Architect Kim Cameron blogged) that we're working with JanRain, Sxip, and VeriSign to integrate CardSpace with OpenID and help making OpenID more resistant against phishing attacks by allowing relying parties to request and be informed of the use of phishing resistant credentials. We'll also integrate OpenID into future Identity products. On the OpenID side, you can expect direct support for CardSpace Information Cards on infrastructures that use the OpenID products from these vendors.

If you ask me, that's pretty big. But working here it's not as much of a surprise as it might be for people on the outside. We're very closely looking at what the community is building and asking for and if we see technologies or initiatives out there that gain lots of traction (such as REST programming, JSON or OpenID) I don't see a "wasn't invented here" attitude around anymore around here these days. We'll have REST support and JSON support (and RSS and Atom) in the next version of the .NET Framework and we'll have broad support for OpenID in our Identity infrastructure. At the same time we'll continue to work with industry partners to make the enterprise-messaging features in WS-* work better and, as demonstrated by the OpenID announcement, that "WS-* stuff" actually comes to the rescue of OpenID for phishing defense.

Doug Purdy, the (my) Group Program Manager of the Connected Framework team (owning WCF and WF) just got email:

Dear Douglas, 

Last year you emailed us regarding .NET Framework 3.0. We are emailing you to let you know that we have installed .NET Framework 3.0 on our webservers.

 

We continue to improve our product so please keep an eye out on our service.

 

Have a great day.

 

DiscountASP.NET

- Microsoft Gold Partner

- 2006 and 2005 Product of the Year: asp.netPRO Magazine Readers' Choice

- Best ASP.NET Web Hosting: 2006 and 2005 asp.netPRO Magazine Readers' Choice

- Best .NET Hosting Provider: .NET Developer's Journal 2005 Readers' Choice

How is your ISP doing?

I've spent the last 1 1/2 weeks doing one of the most fun (seriously) work assignments that each Program Manager of our team gets to do every once in a while: Servicing. So until yesterday night (I'm flying home to Germany today) I was in charge of ASP.NET Web Services and Remoting. An even though these technologies have been out there for quite a while now, there are still situations where stuff breaks and people are scratching their heads wondering what's going on. Overall, it was a very, very quiet time on the bug front though.

The one issue that we found on my watch is that you can configure ASP.NET Web Forms in a way that it breaks ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX). We are shipping one ASP.NET Web Page (.aspx) with ASMX and that unfortunate interaction manages to break that exact page with an error that's hard to figure out unless you have substantial ASP.NET knowledge and you have enough confidence in that knowledge to not trust us

If you globally override the autoEventWireup setting in the <page/> config element in the ASP.NET web.config and set that to "false", the DefaultWsdlHelpGenator.aspx page (which sits in the CONFIG directory of the Framework) becomes very unhappy and fails with a NullReferenceException, stating "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." and showing you some code that's definitely not yours.

What happened? Well, the file is missing a directive that overrides the override of the default. The fix is to go edit the DefaultWsdlHelpGenerator.aspx file and add the line:

<%@ Page AutoEventWireup="true" %>

That will fix the problem.

Now, the big question is: "Will you put that into a service pack?". While there's obviously a bug here, the answer is, in this particular case, "don't know yet". Replacing or editing that particular file is a potentially very impactful surgery done on the patched system given that the file is there in source code and in the config directory because you are supposed to be able to change it. Could we touch changed files? Probably not. Could we touch unchanged files? Probably? So how would you surface the difference and make sure that the systems we couldn't patch would not suffer from the particular bug? What's the test impact for the code and for the service pack or patch installer? How many people are actually using that ASP.NET config directive AND are hosting ASMX services in the same application and/or scope? Is it actually worth doing that? Making changes in code that has already shipped and is part of the Framework is serious business, since you are potentially altering the behavior of millions of machines all at once. So that part is definitely not done in an "agile" way, but takes quite a bit of consideration, while it takes just 10 seconds and notepad.exe for you.