Why Did Google Want Blogger? Wired News quotes Chris Cleveland, CEO of Dieselpoint, who thinks Google intends to take advantage of the fact that RSS is easier to index than HTML. In addition, changes.xml at weblogs.com would enable Google to know minute-by-minute which blogs have been updated and need to be re-indexed, allowing better search results in near real-time.
An interesting theory, but I'm not sure why Google had to buy Blogger in order to do this...?
Walter Bagehot: "The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything."
Dogfooding and Showstoppers: Fascinating piece by Scott Guthrie about how Microsoft uses beta products internally (a practice known as "eating their own dogfood," or "dogfooding") to shake out bugs. The most interesting tidbit, I thought, was that msn.com has been running on ASP.NET for about a year.
Alice Kahn: "For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three."
I've been meaning for some time to post an overview of ASP.NET page-template techniques; Adrian Bateman has saved me the trouble:
Page template techniques with ASP.NET:
Mike Borromeo describes another clever technique in this article: He uses a UserControl for the page template, and exposes an ITemplate property (the same interface ASP.NET uses for templated items in the DataGrid and DataList controls) for the page-specific content. This is the approach I've used in my content management system.
Update: Paul Wilson has a fairly comprehensive list of page template resources here.
Tom Stoppard: "Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
It occurs to me that my hometown of Portland, OR has become rather a hotbed of .NET talent. Some of the .NET luminaries who hail from PDX:
Did I forget anyone? I'd like to make it to a nerd breakfast one of these weeks so I can hang with these guys, but I can't drag myself out of bed at that hour. (Don't they know that nerds are night people?)
Dave Barry: "What if, for the past year or so, terrorists, working in U.S. factories,
have been putting lethal biochemical agents on... duct tape?"
I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it with my own ears: At this morning's VSLive! keynote, Alan Cooper managed to successfully pull off a joke about the recent space shuttle disaster! The amazing punchline: "I heard that they're blaming the Columbia disaster on liberals -- they say it's a left wing problem."
A video of the keynote is available here.
Erica Jong: "Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."