Some searches provide very few clicks to sites ranking in the lower part of the search result because the user intent is not strong or the user intent is strongly aligned with the top result.

Google recently signed a deal to distribute Sony and BMG videos over AdSense.

I just noticed that the Jolt Product Excellence Awards nominations were just announced. A few .NET related ones caught my eye… Congratulations to: IronPython – Development Environments .NET Framework 3.0 - Frameworks Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express and XNA Framework – Development Environments and Frameworks Read More......(read more)

Hi everyone, I'll have an entry written soon about this past weekend and Day 1 of Lotusphere, but for now I wanted to provide you a link to my first batch of photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanlepo/sets/72157594494787529/ . Here are some samples...

This years theme, "IT Revolves Around You", and guest speaker Neil Armstrong.


Opening act, and notice the blog in the background!

Manning's focus is on computing titles at professional levels. The publisher works with authors to coax out of them the best writing they can produce. They also consult with technical experts on book proposals and manuscripts, and may use as many as two dozen reviewers in various stages of preparing a manuscript. The abilities of each author are nurtured to encourage him or her to write a first-rate book. Manning books are known to be designed without gimmicks with the main goal of elegance and readability. Dave Crane's 'Ajax in Action' is one of the best-selling AJAX books in the market.

10:48 PM

So much for the grand plans of wrapping everything up before I went to sleep tonight. Luckily, so many other people have already done such a good job that I don't really have any slack to pick up. There are some excellent Flickr pictures showing up now too.

If you want my take, me and Bruce (and Devin Olsen) just did a podcast wrap-up that will be posted soon, if not already. Listen early, listen often.

Right now, I've got my balcony window open and am listening to Jamfest as I'm typing. Very nice (I'm staying in the Swan, and it's in the big tent outside -- that's a picture of my balcony view on the right, if you're interested).

Lotus Component Designer
Oh yeah, one of the sessions I went to today was on Lotus Component Designer, and it was very interesting. Looks like they put a lot of time into making sure that it's very "developer friendly" -- not in the sense that there's lots of cool code you have to write, but in that you can do a lot of things just by drag-and-drop and filling in property boxes.

For example, here's how they showed you could turn a Lotus Notes database design element (from an old database) into a component to be used with other components on a Composite Application:

• open Component Designer
• choose the Notes database
• choose the design element (form, view, whatever)
• it now becomes available as a new component in the sidebar
• then you just take components you want -- maybe other database elements, maybe Eclipse or Portal components, who knows -- and drag them on the page you're designing (drag it top, bottom, left, right -- then resize)
• optionally use Property Broker to "wire" the components together -- the wiring tool allows you to drag (draw a wire) a Component Property to another available Property on another component

And there you go. You have a composite app page. Very easy, no programming at all.

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2:42 PM

BTW, here's a picture of the band that played just before the opening session:

Volker already has a video up on YouTube.

Also, Bruce hit the Publish button on our podcast with Mary Beth Raven and Jeff Eisen on the TakingNotes site, so go there and take a listen. So that's where episode 47 went...

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1:42 PM

In other news, I was "live blogging" on the Lotusphere Live site during the opening session. I'll summarize later, but you can check out the comments on Ed Brill's site for some immediate reactions and links.

I also just "live blogged" (sorry, I just have to put that in quotes) the brand-new-this-year IBM blogger press conference. Again, summary later, but go to Lotusphere Live and click on the Taking Notes "room" for some immediate thoughts and whatnot.

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1:30 PM

First things first, it has been suggested to me that a link I put up yesterday was not supposed to be "live" yet. It was just something I heard someone talking about in a bar, and when I came back to my room I tried it and it worked. I apologize if I got anyone in trouble.

It didn't occur to me that anyone would have a public website that they wouldn't want other people to visit.

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My first computer was a Mac Plus. Loved it. My second computer was an AT&T Unix PC running System V. Loved it long time. My third computer was a Sparc running Solaris or SunOS. Loved it. At work I run...

This January 23 (11AM EST) I?ll again be interviewing Career and Performance Consultant Emma C. Hamer on one of the most critical issues of content

The Curse of Schematron seems to have lifted: this curse was that who ever worked upgrading the common XSLT implementation of Schematron 1.n to fit the new ISO standard would suffer from serious illness until they stopped work, at which...

This weekend was a really exciting one for the VS Web Tools team. On Saturday they checked in their new HTML and ASP.NET WYSIWYG designer into Visual Studio. This designer is a major, major improvement over previous HTML designers within Visual Studio, and will be a shared component used by both Visual Studio and Expression Web Designer going forward. Among other things, the new HTML designer provides: Split View Support (the ability to have both HTML Source and WYSIWYG design open simultaneously) Extremely rich CSS support (CSS property window, CSS inheritance viewer, CSS preview, and CSS manager) Dramatically improved view switching performance (moving from source->html design mode is now nearly instantaneous) Support for control designers...(read more)

The second Elite Retreat will be held in San Fransisco on March 19th and 20th.

Implementing the title element in your ExpressionEngine templates is easy once you’re getting more familiar with the EE tags. For those still learning the first steps in EE, this will help you creating nice dynamic titles. I also share a tip on how to avoid a messy title bar in case the URL is broken. Learn and enjoy! ;)

Assign a variable

First thing you need to do is assigning a variable to your weblog's name. This will make things easy if you want to (re)use this name in your template.

The name of my (main) blog is "veerle_blog". So I assign the variable "my_weblog" to this name. Everywhere I use the variable "my_weblog" in the EE tags, EE will know that I'm referring to my main blog, "veerle_blog".

Implementing the EE title element

Between the opening and ending tag I've placed the following EE tags:

Let me clarify this. If you look at the titles of my pages, you'll see it's divided into 2 parts: the name of the blog and the title of the article separated by a pipe. In the first part I call the "weblog:info" tag where I use the variable "blog_title" which will display the "Full Weblog Name" name. In the second part I call the "weblog:entries" tag where I use the "title" variable which refers to the title of the article.

Avoiding messy title bars

A while ago I added an extra parameter to solve the layout errors when someone doesn't enter the full URL or if the URL got broken. This was simply done by adding require_entry="yes" in each EE exp weblogs:entries tag.

If you don't use this parameter, things will get messy in the title bar of the browser if the URL is broken. Adding this parameter solves the issue.

Good quote from Kurt Cagle on XML-DEV "Simplicity is good - it makes interoperability far easier. However, simplicity in one place usually comes at the expense of complexity somewhere else." The trick is to move the complexity to areas that...

Right now search relevancy algorithms are heavily tied to overall authority, but given enough time publishers and search marketers will undermine that measure of relevancy the same way that keyword density and raw PageRank died off. If the algorithms shift toward topical neighborhoods will you still rank well?

The more closed off a data source is the greater potential value you can exploit from understanding it.

Review of Gord Hotchkiss's second Enquiro Eye Tracking study.

Too tired to blog properly. Some bullet points:

• LOTS of people here. Very crowded. Lunch today was packed, and I think they ran out of chicken. And dessert.

• Bill Buchan's birthday yesterday, but we had cake and presents at the Welcome Reception tonight. Everyone loves Bill (and he's so lovable, how could you not?).

• Steve Castledine and Declan Lynch armwrestled to see who had the better blog template... I'll leave you in suspense as to who won.

• Did a podcast tonight with lots of other people in Bruce's hotel room. Should be entertaining, if we can get the levels right.

• I may be Live Blogging from the Opening Session tomorrow morning. Still no idea who the opening speaker is.

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Below are the slides + demos for the two breakout talks I presented this past Friday at the CodeMash conference : ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and Tricks This talk covered ASP.NET UI, AJAX, Caching and Deployment Tips and Tricks, and Visual Studio 2005 tips/tricks. Click here to download the slides+demos for this talk . You can learn more about the Visual Studio build performance optimization suggestions by reading this past post of mine on improving build performance . You can also find several dozen more ASP.NET and Visual Studio Tips/Tricks of mine on my Tips and Tricks summary page . Building Data Driven Web Applications using LINQ This talk provided a drill down of LINQ (which will ship later this year), and demonstrated some of the dramatic productivity...(read more)

Hi. I would like to announce my business. I do legacy document conversion and pubs tools. This is the site about my business:

As the Daily VodCast notes , I recently had a chance to sit down with James Vastbinder, an ISV Architecture Evangelist here at Microsoft, and talk about what it is like to be a small-medium ISV today and how AJAX affects their work. This is an exciting time to be an ISV – the pace of technological innovation and, more importantly, the changing nature of social dynamics on and off the web are creating interesting opportunities every day. Check out our conversation on channel 9 (or download it for later viewing…) Read More......(read more)