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    14 septiembre

    Summer vacation

    I had no desire to blog while on vacation in beautiful Newport Beach, CA. How could you when you were staying here?
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    Sure I could have sat on the patio only 4 feet from the beach and used my laptop but I was too busy chasing children, surfing, swimming, grilling and drinking light beer.
     
    Talulla could not get enough of the "real" ocean and spent as much time as possible in the water. Here she is checking out the surf.
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    Practing on the big board....
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     My beautiful family at sunset.
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    The 33rd street beach gang with Grandma Jean and Grandpa Lou.
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    22:03 | Agregar un comentario | Vínculo permanente | Agregar al blog | Travel
    30 junio

    John Edwards @ Gnomedex

    I am liking the way he talks and here it goes… If he runs again in 08 I will actually register with a political party and become a.. Democrat.

    Never thought I would say it but there it is.

    22:20 | Agregar un comentario | Vínculo permanente | Agregar al blog | Gnomedex

    TechMeme hacked?

    Has TechMeme been hacked? Chris poses that question in this post. Is it tsrue?
    18:01 | Agregar un comentario | Vínculo permanente | Agregar al blog | Gnomedex

    @Gnomedex

    Will be here at Gnomedex at home in Seattle for the next couple days. It will be interesting to hear John Edwards speak... about blogging?

     

    Unfortunately some of the sessions overlap with important world cup matches. You don't have many chances to see Brazil avenge the '98 loss to France.

    5:07 | Agregar un comentario | Vínculo permanente | Agregar al blog | Computers and Internet
    12 junio

    NY Times on book search

    I am late getting to this post but still had some thoughts.

    The New York Times recently had an interesting article from Kevin Kelly on book search in the  NY Times Sunday Magazine. The whole concept of the web as disruptive force on traditoinal media models is really interesting when thinking about book publishing as it is quite different than the situation with other media.

     

    TV, magazines, newsapers and other forms of media have at least path where they can migrate the existing business models (however painful it may be) to the web where they are then accessed by the public. The book business is still at the point where the web only serves as another sales channel and not necessarily a place to consume the book content itself. 

    Earlier in my career I spent time advising a division of a major educational publisher on moving parts of their business on the web. This was a rather frustrating experience at times. Somewhat like Google (in my own small way) I workd to convince them that they should digitize all of their back catalog and then we could figure out exactly how to build a business model around it. The cost was not small, as no one offered it up for free at that time, and the management of the company could not fully understand how breaking up all of their assets into bite sized digital chunks would help their business. At the end of the day, they still wanted to sell more books.


    18:25 | Agregar un comentario | Vínculo permanente | Agregar al blog | Computers and Internet
    12 mayo

    MSNBC.com News Search

    I am guest blogging for the MSN Search team next week with a post about building a new MSNBC site search.
     
    Sneak peek below....
     

    MSNBC.com News Search

    On April 19th we released a new version of site search for MSNBC.com built entirely on the MSN Search platform. This is a great improvement from our previous site search solutions and one we think that people will find really useful for searching news.

    Take a peek at http://msnbc.msn.com and try searching for a few of the topics in the news like E3, gas prices or (my personal favorite) Britney Spears. To provide results we have taken advantage of both the news and web indexes. When something is current in the news you will find recent results in the top section of the first page. For topics that do not have any recent coverage on MSNBC we also provide results from our archive.

    Implementation was pretty simple for our engineering team. We used the MSN Search API to retrieve a few different sets of data for each query we receive and then assemble them when rendering the results. We took advantage of some of the advanced query operators to scope the results right for news.

    Each query uses a set of pre-defined operators to set the correct domain and allows us to filter the results a bit to return specific types of pages. Adding a few extra SearchTags to all of our pages allows us to do things such as return only stories and filter out category pages from the results. Also adding the path to a photo as a SearchTag enables us to add thumbnails to the results on the fly.  If you have never heard of SearchTags you should definitely check out this post.

     

    The end result of all of this is that it makes it much easier for us to add new features without having to totally change our whole application. For example will be able to easily add advanced search options in an upcoming release as all the functionality is already in place, we now just need the UI. We have just started down the path of making news search on MSNBC into a great experience and will continue to add features such as advanced search and photo search over the next couple of months.

    We are reading every piece of feedback we receive so if you have any comments or feature suggestions just let us know:
    http://feedback.search.msn.com/feedbacksearch.aspx?productkey=msnbcsearch&P1=dsatmsnbc&P2=msnsearchblog&P4=AE

    -- Kelly Amsbry, Product Manager

    On behalf of the MSNSBC.com News team

     

    1:01 | Agregar un comentario | Leer comentarios (2) | Vínculo permanente | Agregar al blog | Computers and Internet