Day: July 15, 2004

One last set of SENT links

I think this will likely be my last post about SENT for a while. Please forgive my enthusiasm; I rarely win anything, even simple things like video games, so getting my pic selected as an NPR phonecam contest winner has me a bit giddy.

  • The article and audio for the NPR discussion of the Day to Day phonecam contest award winners has been posted. Best quotation about my photo, starting at 2 minutes and 40 seconds: “Alex: It’s a fairly ordinary landscape… some very interesting shadows in the foreground… Xeni: You think of phonecams as crude devices, but the images in this photo are–they’re very saturated colors, very rich. You almost feel like you could bite into them, they’re so bright.” Lest you ever doubt your ability as a photographer, just get Xeni to describe your photos. Also, thank god it was a bright day when I took the photos, since I have absolutely zero control over exposure or saturation or anything with the camphone.
  • Another winner, Mark Beck (who took the very album-cover-looking barbed wire photo), is a photoblogger, and apparently a serious photographer. I couldn’t find any links for David Berge (pig photo) or Jim Younkin, who took my favorite of the four, the firefighter looking across at the bus.
  • Unbeknownst to me, there was also a spread about the contest in mMode Magazine (the 3G phone culture magazine of the phone company formerly known as AT&T wireless). The spread, in PDF on the SENT site, features two more of my photos.
  • In addition to Xeni, other exhibit organizers included Caryn Coleman and Sean Bonner (the collective known as Sixspace). Sean is also the creator of the wonderful mug below.

Let a thousand RSS badges bloom: RSS roll-out continues across Microsoft.com

Following up on the launch last week of the Microsoft.com blog portal and our RSS platform technology, I wanted to point to the first product site to consume the new capabilities: the Exchange Community site and newsgroup listing. My boss, Kevin, blogged all the things about this release that are cool (dynamically managed no-maintenance content feeds that automatically expose RSS). Bink.nu also has a pointer.

What you basically should know is (a) this is the first manifestation of the vision that I sketched in our original post about RSS blooming across Microsoft.com like a field of little white-on-orange link badges; (b) there will be a lot more of these coming as our version 1.0 community pages adopt the new publishing technologies and get lots of RSS goodness.

From an RSS perspective, this page exposes the following new feeds:

Plus two more that may or may not prove useful: Most Active Exchange Newsgroups and Exchange Blogs. (We don’t know how frequently the listings will change or if people will want to use RSS this way, but we’ll be interested to see if it works for you.)

Feedback, as always, greatly welcomed, especially by Dave Morehouse who is going to be working to roll a lot more of these out across our server-focused sites.