Was just reading about a new tool released by Microsoft Research; SNARF; this tool integrates with your email client in order to allow you to sort (social sort) your email based on how often you send or receive emails from contacts. Sounds like a nice idea to me, will try it out now.

To get it go here

And for the article on PCWorld about it, see here

Will post my experiences soon...

Ferrit is now online at last. Initial rumors (at least the ones I heard) were that it will be an alternative to TradeMe. But it doesnt look anything like TradeMe yet. It looks more like a supersized online shop to me - not a bad idea either - perhaps with more products available for sale it could kick off well.

Only think I dont like from my first impressions is that they site display is a bit too busy.

Update: ok, I've just registered an account with Ferrit to check what benefits members get, well the main thing is that you can create a list of items you like and then get redirected to the store whom the product belongs to so that you can buy it. The list is also handy if you want to share it with friends and family (perhaps the reason for this is for people to find Christmas gifts ...etc for others) again not a bad idea.

What I find interesting is that you cannot checkout items into a shopping cart and pay for them and get them shipped to you, so it seems ferrit is more like half an online shop. I expect another benefit of the registration is being spammed  by the retailers participating in Ferrit (hopefully this wont happen!)

Update 2: Just refering to that last paragraph above, Ferrit will be introducing sales and more in later phases of Ferrit. Tim posted about this before here

Microsoft is now developing RSS into making it a two way street. I firstly read about this on Ray Ozzie's (MS CTO) blog here and now just found an article about this on PCWorld.

"Microsoft is extending the popular RSS 2.0 Web syndication format to make it "multidirectional," allowing it to be used for synchronizing information such as contacts and calendar entries across different applications, the company says.

Web sites that support Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. When content on a site is updated, the RSS feed informs the subscriber, often with a summary of the updated content and a link to it."

See the full article here

Today while I was looking at some books in Whitcoulls, I came accross the following book and surely it got my attention!

I guess it should be an interesting read but I don't think I would buy it, maybe will look for it in the library. Anyone read it? Does it tell much that tech aware people wouldnt know?

More info about it can be found here if you are interested.

I just read that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's CTO has started blogging. It's nice to see senior people at large corps like MS blogging.

I'm sure his blog will be an interesting read. See it here and here is a little bio of Ray.

I previously blogged about my first impressions on Windows Live here

Well so far I've been very happy with it - kudos to the Windows Live team. The reason I like it so much is that it puts together several things that I do every day.

But what I would REALLY like to see made available (my Windows Live Christmas wish list) is:

The ability to integrate any email account to the page and not just Hotmail or Windows Live Mail Beta.

I really dont think this is very hard to achieve, and would love to be able to plug-in several email accounts into it.

The next other thing I wish would happen is Image Search, I occasionally find this feature very handy in Google when working on some projects and looking for specific images ..etc

So Sean I know you mentioned that you are trying to convince you're family to have Windows Live as their homepage. Well here's a promise from me, if any of the above features on my wish list become available, I promise to have www.live.com as my homepage

I just added a Google Search Box to my blog, and at first it wasn't working, but thanks to Nic it now is.

The reason the Search Box wasnt working is due to having nested forms as the Search box code is wrapped with form tags.

The solution - in dasblog anyway - add a </form> tag to separate the forms, technically not correct (X)HTML but who cares...!

Thanks Nic for the solutions

This looks really funky!, probably not as good as the ipod family yet, but looks very stylish, should be seeing more of it soon I reckon.

For details about it see the Sony website here

So not only was Nov 7th the launch of VS 05 and SQL 05 but also DotNetNuke 3.2 & 4 !

From the DNN news letter

"Nov 7, 2005 — Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc., a premier Microsoft technology solutions provider, is pleased to announce the immediate availability of two new major release versions of DotNetNuke®, the premier open source Web Application Framework for the Microsoft ASP.NET platform. These releases bridge the compatibility gap between ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 and offer a number of powerful new application features."

See the full article here

Time for some more DNN play by me

Just  been playing around with the newly launched Windows Live www.live.com and my first impressions is, very nice! Integrating a search engine along with other things such as email and news feeds is just very very handy to me.

Having RSS feeds and a good search engine integrated in one place, plus a simple, easy to navigate interface is just great.

More thoughts to come soon

Nigel blogged about the new generation of Microsoft Certifications here. It's interesting that they are becoming more focused on skills ...etc

This presents me with a wee problem though, I am currently studying for MCAD and am not too far from sitting the first exam.

Now the question is, should someone like me go through the entire 03 MCAD certificate or should I do the first exam and then start focusing on the new generation stuff??

I think I will go for both! Is that a good thing to do, what do you guys think?