It Needed To Be Said

It Needed To Be Said, courtesy of Channel 9.

Pew on Blogging

Yet another Pew Internet Report, this one on bloggers! Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers. Actually I find these reports quite interesting. Even though some of their findings are sometimes well, duh! moments, it’s always neat to see numbers as evidence. This one is a sample of 233 bloggers. Of interest:

Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as a primary topic of their blog.

Naturally. Unless it’s your job, maintaining a blog devoted solely to a single topic/theme without going off on tangents is a lot of work.

The most distinguishing characteristic of bloggers is their youth. More than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30. Like the internet population in general, however, bloggers are evenly divided between men and women, and more than half live in the suburbs. Another third live in urban areas and a scant 13% live in rural regions.

Diversity is nice.

• 55% of bloggers blog under a pseudonym, and 46% blog under their own name.
• 84% of bloggers describe their blog as either a “hobby” or just “something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on.”
• 59% of bloggers spend just one or two hours per week tending their blog. One in ten bloggers spend ten or more hours per week on their blog.
• 52% of bloggers say they blog mostly for themselves, not for an audience. About one-third of bloggers (32%) say they blog mostly for their audience.

I pulled these from the summary section, but the rest of the report is worth skimming through as well. Oh, and page 22 has the list of popular blog tools. MSN Spaces is not on that list. Another surprising thing is:

RSS does not have a strong presence yet, even within the blogosphere. Only 18% of bloggers in our survey say they offered an RSS feed of their blog. Nearly 6 in 10 (59%) say they do not have an RSS feed for their blog content, and close to another quarter (23%) say they do not know if they had a feed, or did not answer the question. It is worth noting that bloggers are not behind the curve when it comes to this new technology.

Essentially the report says this: although a great deal of bloggers are heavy internet users, not all of them are. Got that?

Related:
Who Are All These Bloggers?, Slate
Pew Blogger Study, Guy Kawasaki

E-mail Losing Ground to IM, Text Messaging

E-mail losing ground to IM, text messaging
Young people driving switch to instant gratification communication

E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder — a parent, teacher or a boss — or to receive an attached file.

. . .

But when immediacy is a factor — as it often is — most young people much prefer the telephone or instant messaging for everything from casual to heart-to-heart conversations, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

. . .

"Adults who learn to use IM later have major difficulty talking to more than two people at one time — whereas the teens who grew up on it have no problem talking to a bazillion people at once," Boyd says. "They understand how to negotiate the interruptions a lot better."

Good, short, article (albeit a little shallow). And it speaks the truth: old people like to e-mail (no offense), and young people like to IM. Personally, I’m not big on the who text’ing thing–mostly due to the fact that not only am I slow at messaging on my phone (I refuse to use ugly non-English shortcut IM lingo), but I have to pay to do it as well??

The strangest feeling I had gotten while working on Messenger Server was that most people on the team don’t get IM. Sure, they work on the product day-to-day and churn out new features to make those 204 million users happy, but they don’t get it. They don’t live it, don’t breathe it. They aren’t IM addicts online 24/7 (maybe that’s a good thing) who use it as their primary means of communication. (Actually I’m not online 24/7 either since the last thing I do at night is shut off my computer–although the first thing I do in the morning is turn it back on.) I’m not certain of the composition of the Messenger Client team–probably they are much more in tune with customers than we/they (Server) are. We need fresh blood. Hire a bunch of kids (actually they’re already doing this–how do you think I got hired? 😉 ) that are soley devoted to IM. One of the interview questions should be, "What’s your score on one of those IM Addiction Tests? Hell, a portion of the interview should be conducted over the IM product of the candidate’s choice. Take longer than 5 seconds to reply? IM in paragraphs? Goodbye. If you don’t know what you make inside and out, if you don’t live and breathe it all the time, how can you advance its frontiers? While you’re at it, might as well fire a bunch of people to slim down the team (I was thinking it’d be cool to make a Mini-Messenger blog, but I suppose that’s another topic for another time.)

Oooh, I got derailed. Sorry, I hadn’t made a rant in a while. I guess I’ve been itching to do one. Anyway, e-mail losing ground to IM. Yeah.

Skeptic

I’m really liking the Dead 2.0 blog, its claim to fame coming yesterday from 11 Suggestions For Not Being a Dot-Bomb 2.0. It’s got a ton of cynicism with a touch of pessimism. And from that post, Companies/Products on TechCrunch. Holy crap. That’s a lot of Web 2.0 companies. And for those keeping count of the number of tags on that page: Google = 37, Yahoo = 24, Windows Live = 9. Hmmm.

Along Came a Platypus

 

From LiveSide:

Windows Live Storage: Live Drive, Sky Drive, SDrive, Project M?

 

Lots of buzz around a first peek at Google’s GDrive plans, and speculation on the Windows Live "response" has been in the news as well.

A bit of clarification on the Windows Live plans, as we know them. The project known as "Live Drive", while it’s getting a lot of press, will not provide the same types of services as the peek at GDrive seems to imply Google is proposing. Live Drive will offer a "FolderShare" like ability to access files from a remote computer – provided there is an internet connection between computers, and that the computer being accessed is running, as we reported here. Windows Live Search (the desktop one) is planned to be able to search across these remotely accessed files, providing remote access, and search capabilities, but no actual "in the cloud" storage.

That function is to be provided by another project, we’re hearing it called SkyDrive, that will allow some of the 2gig (or more) Windows Live email storage to be used for file storage and access. This is more what GDrive is thought to offer, but it’s not "Live Drive", at least not at this point. How it will interface with Live Drive remains to be seen, of course.

SDrive, the code name for Windows Live Messenger Sharing Folders, also offers file sharing and file synching between computers, this time from one Messenger user to another. Expect this sharing to be expanded, sharing files within circles of friends, for example.

And yes there’s one more Windows Live file sharing product in the works, this one called Project M. The project, now a part of Windows Live, is planned as a WinFX based graphical front end to file sharing, manipulation, and storage. The first peek at this product has come in the form of MicrosoftMax, the image manipulation proof of concept. Project M seeks to expand that narrow focus, providing a "graphical UI for all of your data from the web, your devices, your file systems, your e-mail stores, etc."

Whether or not these services reach the market in their current forms is unclear, as they are largely pre-beta projects. How they fit together, overlap, duplicate each other, or clash is also unclear at this point. It is clear that file sharing, file synching, and file storage in the cloud are getting lots of attention within Microsoft.

It really is crazy how we (Microsoft) often duplicate efforts.  This whole storage/file-sharing issue is one that I’ve heard and raised many a time.  Because we’re such a monolithic company, individual teams will often go out and recreate software from the ground up, suited for their own needs, instead of leveraging the work another team has created.  Usually the sentiment is that it’s not only faster to reimplement than to try to glue/extract, but in reimplementing, you can tailor things to work the way you want them to.  Oh, and LiveSide forgot to mention that SharePoint in Office 2007 has filesharing/storage capabilities as well.  Not to mention Groove (which is also bundled with Office 2007).  Case in point.  (I’m not passing judgement here; I know first hand that sometimes it just is really hard to try to extract code from another code base.)

 

I’ll be interested to see and play with GDrive when it does come out.  Not to mention how the pre-beta projects within Windows Live pan out as well.  It’s definitely going to be a very interesting year ahead in this space.  What a horserace!  Stay tuned…

Windows Live Mailboxes

There is a plethora of internal marketing that goes on inside of Microsoft. We’re so big that teams have to dream up of (sometimes strange) ways of getting the word out so employees can use/dogfood the product. Whether it be useless posters (everyone), or ice sculptures (MSN Travel), or llamas (MSN Search), I’ve always thought that these were a big waste of money. Especially the little flyers and stickers that show up in your (physical) mailbox and go straight to the recycling bin.

Anyway, last week I bumped into a blue and white mailbox by the door of the cafeteria. It’s a gimmik for the Windows Live Mail team, obviously. And they’re so cool. (Way better than the nasty old orange mailbox I have at home, anyway.) I’m so tempted to just take one for my own use. What do they do with these things after it’s over anyway?

They look like this, except with the front cover and flag painted baby blue, with the "Windows Live Mail" logo on the side.
 

[ I was away for a while and then came back, and I’m still sort of "out of it." Hopefully I can find more random stuff to post about. ]