Day: April 22, 2003

Microsoft devs talk blogging clients

Don Box notes that he and Chris Sells (new at Microsoft as of yesterday) have been discussing blogging infrastructure. They both think that blogging from Word, rather than an HTML editor or InfoPath, is the right way to go. They appear to be discussing how to architect it. Don may not be aware, but there’s some interesting prior art in the Word macros that Simon Fell constructed (using PocketSOAP) to talk to the Manila API or to Radio. I don’t know what API Don’s blogging infrastructure supports, but using a slim SOAP client it should be trivial to send XML message packets from Word.

BTW, there are a ton of Microsoft bloggers blogging about, well, blogging, but also RSS, .NET, web design, and other topics near and dear to my heart. Some of the other interesting guys are Tim Ewald at MSDN, Dare Obasanjo, Chris Anderson, Scott Guthrie… and soon Robert Scoble.

(Man, I oughtta get around to adding a Microsoft department to this blog.)

Eulogies for Nina

Greg writes a eulogy for Nina Simone, who passed away yesterday at 70:

This Is Not the Greatest Post in the World…this is just a tribute — a tribute to Nina Simone, the legendary and fiery-tempered jazz vocalist…you could start anywhere in her catalog and not go wrong. I’m only glad I got to know her work. A roommate hipped me to her when I first moved to Chicago, and I’ve been listening to her ever since.

Eric Olsen at Blogcritics rounds up some great biographical sketches, including one from Salon: “‘To Love Somebody’ was my introduction to Simone, and I’ll never forget the way she berated her musicians during the intro to ‘Revolution.’ She harshly tells them, ‘Hold it! This is louder than usual. Let it groove on its own thing.’ Cool. I thought. This woman can kick butt…”