Like I’ve said before, I’m (almost) eating my previous words, and recognize that Windows Live Writer is a pretty good tool.   There are two more things I forgot to mention in the previous post:

Writer still leaves turd in your blog… and in your feed. So this morning I could clearly see how of my favorite bloggers downloaded the new release.  This Technorati search currently finds 4682 instances of “turd”.  Google Blog Search finds over 14K occurences.  How come Microsoft still did not find a way to detect stylesheets without this mess?  (incidentally the detection still fails on my blog system)

There’s another kind of turd … or is it more?   Every time you use the new “Insert Tags” feature, it inserts a cryptic line like this, along with your tags:

0757417C-982D-2b12-91E1-4F057A8CCCA8:c712360d-e4e6-4711-831a-05fdf7d8a894

The part before the “:” is constant (for your installation I suppose), the second part varies post by post.  What is this?  Is Big Brother watching us again?   Call me paranoid, but in the wake of the HP Scandal I wouldn’t be so surprised….

Update (9/29):   OK, I’ve cooled off.  I don’t think this is Big Brother in action… after all it’s so easily detectable, and Microsoft has enough trouble in this are to know better. But then, WTF is this?  Why do I need a unique ID in my blog posts?

9/28/2006 5:43 PM GMT
download:  745 kb/s  upload: 64 kb/s  ping: 670 ms

What’s wrong with these numbers?  Zero.  That is, a zero missing from the right of the download/upload speeds, and an extraneous zero at the end of the ping speed.

My initial reaction to the first release of Windows Live Writer (geez, what a name….) was a big yawn.  Yes, a nice offline blog-editor, but we already have Ecto, Blogjet, Qumana, Zoundry, w.Bloggar … etc. so unless the new one is significantly better than the existing solutions, why change? 

A few smaller glitches aside the showstopper for me was the lack of any support for Technorati tagging. “Bloggers do tags. An editor without tagging is not a Blog Editor. It’s that simple.”   Users came to the rescue and he Tag4Writer and Flickr4Writer plug-ins by Tim made Writer a lot more useable; so I gave in and tried it.

Today there is a new release and for the second time in a row I’m seeing that Microsoft actually listens: they’ve added tagging support, fixed a bunch of bugs, and even made startup faster - oh, and now I can insert emoticons .   I’m starting to like it, and using it now - that is when I’m not posting entirely online, using Zoho Writer. 

It’s still not perfect though: Writer failed to download the standard template associated with my blog, so right away there goes the “WYSIWYG in your blog’s style” - about the only differentiator this thingie would have, if only it worked.

Most importantly, although this is now a pretty good editor,  the key question from my previous post still stands:

“Why a separate product again? Has it occurred to anyone that blogging is NOT a separate activity from anything else: it’s all about writing content, that ends up published in a particular form. A large part of blogging is reading, note-taking… see where I am heading? Microsoft already has a pretty good (albeit expensive) overall notetaker, OneNote. Why not just blog-enable OneNote and release it free? That would have been a pretty good move.

Of course that still leaves us with a few other Microsoft editors: Word and Wordpad. Here’s where this should be heading: 90% of Word users don’t need the sophisticated features, so let them have a decent, relatively simple editor/notetaker (Writer/Wordpad/OneNote combined) for free, while anyone else who needs fancy editing can buy Word.

Watch my word: the market is heading that direction, whether Microsoft recognizes it or not. And if they don’t, the folks behind Zoho Writer and Writely certainly do.

Wow, this was a fast JUMP to $.  

Three months ago at the second Techdirt Greenhouse event  I had a lot of fun co-moderating the Media discussion with Keith Teare.  Prior to the discussion we saw a 5-minute presentation by JumpCut’s  Byron Dumbrill, and I definitely wasn’t the only one who felt blown away.   As much as I am a fan of “moving to the Cloud“, I thought the last applications to stay on the PC are photo and especially video processing, due to the resource requirements.   Most of us there were amazed to see how much video-editing 3-month-old Jumpcut could do all online…

Fast forward (pun intended) 3 months, and see Jumpcut being  acquired buy Yahoo.

Congratulations to the Jumpcut Team!

Tags: Jumpcut, Yahoo, acquisition, startups, startup+exit, startup+acquisition, video+editing, online+video, online+video+editing

Bill Clinton leads the pack - well, at least at the Zoho Poll set up to rate potential 2008 Presidential Candidates, even those who can’t be elected, like Bill Clinton or the Pope.  Incidentally, the Pope has better rating then George W. Bush.   Vote now!

Tags: politics, elections, presidential+elections, presidential+candidates, humor, zoho+polls

Tags: Google, humor

After Vaporware, here comes VaporStream!    OK, let’s get serious:

“E-mail has a problem - it creates a permanent, time-stamped record that is out of our control” -  starts the intro to VaporStream, just launched at DemoFall.

Am I hearing reading right?  Is this really a problem?  I’m having a hard time thinking of legitimate reasons why a business would need to send email that’s not really email but a self-destructing image, without header information and generally untraceable.

Then again, some businesses may just welcome this. Too bad.

Tags: vaporware, vaporstream, privacy, email, HP, demofall

“The study published in the Journal of Labor Research Thursday concluded that drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more than teetotalers, and that men who drink socially bring home an additional seven percent in pay.

“Social drinking builds social capital,” said Edward Stringham, an economics professor at San Jose State University and co-author of the study with fellow researcher Bethany Peters.”  (full article here)

What can I say … I surrender:-)   Want to do even better?  Forget beer, drink red wine, for the health benefits. Oh, and to support the local economy - at least us, Californians

Tags: social+drinking, drinking+study, compensation, compensation+study, networking, beer, wine

Good reading:

“Real Overhead: The percentage of your workforce that does not interact with either the product or the customer

This is always a fascinating conversation with customers. In my last startup we had 2.6% of the workforce in this category. 97.4% was interacting with the product or the customer. I just worked with a Fortune 500 client where this ratio is around 25-35% (they can’t quite figure it out). In their case thousands of people do something else but what makes the company create value.”

Full article at Right Place @ Right Time

Tags: Enterprise+Overhead, Overhead,  Productivity, Corporate+Overhead

Wallop: Too late, too little.   Check out OM’s poll:

• Its years too late (27%)
• Just in time to save us from MySpace (13%)
• Stop the Social Network madness (60%)

Thank you for voting! Total votes cast: 45

Tags: wallop, wallflop, microsoft, social+networks, social+networking, myspace, facebook, friendster, socializr