Top-left: The older days of Apple who have recently sidled next to Intel; Top-right: So-called Microsoft’s Hardware Department; Bottom: Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM (*NIX)

A very unusual story comes from eWEEK. Microsoft have apparently demonstrated Linux to their audience.

While the answer is unclear, Microsoft Corp. surprised many of the attendees at its annual worldwide partner show here this weekend by allowing a third party to present a “hands-on lab” that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software…

…the lab let attendees, many of whom were not familiar with Linux, experiment with KDE (K Desktop Environment) as well as see the Apache Web server in action…

Quite frankly, I consider this to be yet another attempt at being cocky. It was not too long ago that Microsoft paid one of the most popular bloggers in the world to evangelise their company and software products. They also scheme to adopt a large group of bloggers who will preach about Microsoft ‘goodness’. Biassed journalism — now isn’t that something that Microsoft can buy? I also wonder if they demonstrated Linux on some antiquated Debian distribution.

any interesting tools are being pointed out by Jeff Veen and the latest such tool is the personalised tags cloud, which is currently in beta (testing) phase. This Web-based tool, which goes by the name TagCloud, inputs a collection of RSS feeds (as OPML) which reflect on your interests. It then counts the frequency of words within (essentially tags) while excluding stop words like “and” or “since”. Tags reflect on what happens in your own ‘cyber-sphere’ — the means by which you become better orientated. By looking at the cloud, you get a preview of what you’ll see plenty of once entering your browsing cycle.

Owing to his recommendation I built myself a cloud (seen above). The many news feeds make London the primary tag in my case. I later discovered a flaw: if a single feed contains a term which repeats itself over and over again, that term (tag) can dominate.

ahoo officially offer delivery of search results as RSS feeds. They join MSN Search in providing this type of service. Is it possible that Google’s competitors are willing to proliferate as much bandwidth as it takes just to challenge Google and steal some of its avid users? No doubt RSS feeds of this nature consume a lot of traffic and get a very low clickthrough rate from feed subscribers. In fact, people with interest in such a service are often pre-occupied with SEO and keep track of SERPs or news of one particular niche.

The news is rather disappointing for Google enthusiasts. As they offer no analogous service (Google Alerts instead), I set up about 5 feeds from MSN search (no clickthrough though, ever), 2 from Yahoo! Finance (since February 2005) and 5 from Yahoo! News. Google appear reluctant to provide feeds so I ended up using a workaround. There are similar workarounds for eBay or even static HTML pages.

An insightful little article has been released to discuss changes in Google’s advertising strategy, which ‘chokes’ companies relying on Google AdWords.

…A simple description of the way the new algorithm works is that you bid for a position of 5. As it turns out, depending on the region your ad is shown in, you could end up in position number 1 or position number 20…

…The net result of this algorithmic change is that Google is getting richer and advertisers are getting taken to the cleaners with increasingly poor advertising results for their money…

Google’s advertising programme has recently reached the headlines. They are being sued for making no effort to prevent click frauds. Such frauds result in monetary gains for Google and affiliated sites at the expense of advertising businesses. What makes the story more severe is the attempts to turn such lawsuits into class action with potential for many millions in compensation.

n a life that involves subscription to many feeds, it is worth knowing which ones are the most popular. The Radio Community Server collects some statistics and ranks the Top 100 RSS feeds based on the number of subscribers. Below is the top of the list:

All the rest can be found at the aforementioned site.

Feeds slowly become the substitute to the Web browser

Caution Firefox enthusiasts

here is an alpha version of Firefox, codenamed Deer Park, which is used to test future releases of the Mozilla browser. The following page explains a little further about the purpose of the package. My advice is to avoid the use of Deer Park as it interacts badly with your Firefox profile and can conflict with your current settings, extensions and themes in particular. The Deer Park page clearly states:

Deer Park Alpha 1 is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.x should not use Deer Park Alpha 1.

here comes a time in the lifecycle of an application when reliable and non-lossy export facilities need to be implemented. Unfortunately, ego of developers sometimes leads to good import facilities while there is only limited or no support for export of user data. Del.icio.us are one example which was previously mentioned. Another such example is Microsoft Outlook et al. Microsoft are reluctant to allow easy data export, which implies no trivial escape from proprietary. Thunderbird, however, does a terrific job importing all data (mail and settings) from Outlook or Outlook Express. OpenOffice.org acts upon Microsoft Office proprietary reasonably well too.

WordPress are currently working on export facilities that simplify and bridge the gap between the administration panel (application) and the data (SQL). It is wonderful to see export facilities realised, which demonstrates no ego among the software developers. This allows users to ‘dance’ between platforms at will. There is always a certain feeling of freedom knowing that taking on one certain application cannot result in a vendor lock-in.