Recently Grant split his blog into personal and work.  I’m doing a similar thing by splitting my blogging activities into 2 separate blogs.  They are:

This blog that you are reading now and my new blog.

They are both hosted on Live Spaces, but my new blog will be focused solely on articles about the Live platform.  So expect to see me blogging over there about things such as:

• Live @edu
• Managing small businesses on the Live platform
• Live ID
• and a raft of other Live-focused topics

So if Live is of interest to you, please add the URL for my new feed into your aggregator.

Back in February, I posted a blog entry when my blog views reached 50,000.  Today I was surprised to see that they have now passed the 100,000 mark! 

Recently I’ve been talking about some of the cool uses for Live Spaces but, in this post, I’d like to talk about a pet peeve of mine - the lack of work that is put into development and communication from the Live Spaces team about upcoming features

I’d like to use this article/post as a place where I can keep a list of the things that the community believe we need to improve Live Spaces.  If you have any items on your wish list please add them as comments and I’ll add them into the table.  Then hopefully we can send them off to the team and lobby for a response of some kind from the Spaces team.

One of the first questions that I had when I started using Windows Live Spaces last year was “How do I remove spam comments from my Live Spaces blog”?  It took me a while to work it out because the process for getting to the right screen to delete these comments is not necessarily that intuitive.  So here are the steps that you can go through if you need to delete comments from your Live space.

The Problem

As someone who likes to keep my blog free of spam, I’ve always been in the habit of removing the wretched stuff promptly – partly because I believe that spam has a habit of leading to more spam.  So let me take you through the steps that are required to remove just one of these spam comments from my Live Spaces blog.

The Solution

Step 1 – Identify the comment as spam

The first thing that I like to do is to click through to view the full comment, just to be sure that the comment is actually spam.  In the case of the comment below we can see that it clearly is spam.

Step 2 – Get the date of the blog entry

Now that we’ve identified the comment as spam, we need to get the date of the post so that we can locate it when we switch into Summary mode in just a moment.  For the post that we are concerned about here, we can see that the date is the 27 January.  

Step 3 – Switch the Blog View into Summary View Mode

In order to delete the spam comment from your blog you must switch into the Summary View mode which you can do from the navigation controls located on the left side of the page.  You can also select the month of the post that you are interested in to quickly navigate to the correct set of entries.

Step 4 – Select the spam comment to mark it for deletion

Once in Summary View mode you can scroll to the location of the post and then click on the Comments link to expand out a view of comments for that particular post.  Once you have the comments displayed, simply check on the checkbox to the left of the offending comment to mark it for deletion.

Step 5 – Delete the spam comment

Now that you have selected the comment for entry, scroll back to the top of the page and click the Delete selected items link to delete the comment.

You will be asked to confirm that you wish to delete the entries that are selected.

A Proposed Solution

Because most of the spam that I get is easily identified on the home page comments module, a feature that I’d love to see is the ability to delete comments directly from within that view.  The following image shows my proposed solution for doing that.

It would also be good if spam could also be removed directly from within the post as you were reading it as shown in the following image.

Over the years I’ve used many methods for managing my Favorite web sites on the Internet.  While each new method has provided it’s own set of features, each has fallen short of becoming my favorite Favorite method :-)

Today I thought that I’d share how (and why) I’m currently using Windows Live Favorites to manage all of my Internet favorite sites.

Before we get into an explanation of Windows Live Favorites, let’s take a look at the trusty browser-managed favorite’s, and see where they fall short:

• They are not automatically backed up.
  This often leads to losing favorite’s whenever you rebuild your computer or purchase a new one.
• They are not synchronized across computers. 
  If I work from a different computer then I no longer have access to my favorite’s.
• They are not centrally managed.
  Even though I can copy my favorite’s and manually share them around on all of my computer’s, if I make a change on one computer, this change is not replicated to all of my other computer’s.

Windows Live Favorites solves each of these issues by allowing me to manage your Favorites from a centrally hosted location online. 

Another reason that I love having my Favorites stored online is that it makes them so much easier to use in other ways – such as sharing them between my other web applications.  Here’s an image of my Favorites being displayed via a module on my Live Spaces portal:

Windows Live Favorites allows me to manage your Favorites both through the traditional ‘Folders’ paradigm or through the use of tagging.  Let’s take a peek at the following screencast to see how simple it is to use Windows Live Favorites:

So now the only thing that I need to remember to access my Favorites from wherever I am is: http://favorites.live.com.

Staying connected for me means that my friends get to read my alerts and find out where I am and what I’m up to whatever I’m doing.  To keep them informed I constantly update my ‘status’ on various social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and of course richer content goes in my blog. 

In the past, getting my status alerts updated has meant visiting each site separately and making updates.  Thankfully the tools are getting better and much of this stuff is now getting automated as the sites start to integrate and tools make it easier to share my updates around.

A few moments ago I published an article on my blog about how I had downloaded the latest version of Live Writer and the associated SDK.  One of the sample applications that comes with the SDK is a plug-in that cross-posts your published articles as a tweet on Twitter.

To highlight how well this works for sharing information with my circle of friends, within 4 minutes of me posting that article, one of my friends read the tweet on Twitter and instantly posted a comment against the blog post to let me know that they were sold on this feature and that they were heading off to download the new version right away!

For me, staying connected means sharing information and experiences.  By using Live Writer and the new Twitter Notify plug-in, the job of managing my community updates just got easier!

I’ve just downloaded the latest version of Live Writer and the SDK for developing against it.

There’s a few changes to the UI of the new Writer application but by far my favourite is the tabbed interface for switching between views of your posts.

One of the things in the SDK which has generated some interest so far are the new events that you can hook when developing Plug-ins for Writer.  There’s an event that you can handle prior to publishing and one which fires post-publishing too.  This potentially opens up many scenarios for adding value to markup prior to posting and doing things after you’ve posted - such as notifying your social networks that you’ve posted.

In fact the SDK comes with a sample Plug-in called Twitter Notify which sends a tweet after you’ve posted alerting your Twitter friends of your new post.  In fact, I’ve just installed it prior to writing this post, so if it worked, then a tweet should be appearing on my Twitter account shortly

Update: Sweet, it worked :-)

Band of Horses - Ode to LRC

 The Shortwave Set - No Social

Jimmy Recard - Drapht

http://www.myspace.com/drapht

The Presets - This Boy's In Love 

This video has caused quite a stir in Australia based on discussion around the perceived 'gay' and 'sexuality' overtones.

Yesterday I vented about the so-called 'alpha users' and how they have recently turned on Twitter.  You can read that post here:

The 'alpha crowd' have started calling the death of Twitter

Today I read 2 blog posts which have resonated with this theme.  First I read this post by Rob La Gesse:

Robert Scoble has a "Social Problem"

In that post, Rob shows that his thoughts are similar to my own on the subject. 

The lessons to be learned here are that you shouldn't always blindly follow people who are paid to write about new technology when they talk about new technology.  Robert, ReadWriteWeb, and many others with them are 'talking their own book'.  This would actually be illegal in financial circles!  And as many people have said before me: if you talk your own book for so long and for so often you'll end up believing your own crap.

The next post that I read was from Scoble himself:

Should services charge “super users”?

I don't think that it's about super users at all really.  For me I actually just question the integrity of the opinions of these people.

In his article Scoble is clearly pimping FriendFeed these days, and much of his bias against Twitter is now showing up as a bias for FriendFeed.  In 6 months time who knows what he'll be saying about either of these free tools. 

If Scoble truly did care about the 'industry' then it wouldn't actually be a question of one implementation over another, and it certainly wouldn't come down to an issue of whether 1 company was a tad faster. 

If Scoble really did care about the business uses of this software ("no business “utility” if I can’t make infinitely large friend lists and use those lists in the same way I use email) then surely he'd be less interested in massive numbers ("FriendFeed which lets 11,000 people interact with me in a public") (he passed the 20,000 mark on Twitter not long ago) and more focused on services?  But no.  For Scoble it is almost always about having the biggest numbers.

Technology and innovation bloggers such as Scoble and ReadWriteWeb seem to have too much of a vested interest in keeping things moving for the sake of drawing eyeball's for me to really take what they say too seriously.

It seems that many of the so-called 'alpha users' have started to turn their back on Twitter lately.  I've seen articles like this on ReadWriteWeb and also on other blogs too.  I think that the main source of angst is that sometimes Twitter tends to go down - and perhaps finally that they suffered a DB crash.

I find comments such as this one by ReadWriteWeb totally absurd:

Our beloved Twitter has been digging its own grave for several months now. Recently, the service has experienced an absurd amount of downtime. There have been numerous posts calling for Twitter to be replaced

These alpha freeloaders are calling for a free application to be replaced?  Who the f*ck do these people think they are?  If you are using Twitter so often that having it out of your life for a few minutes causes you to have a brain fart, then perhaps you need to either get a life, or do some work.  I agree with this comment from the Twitter 'Man Down' post:

Twitter is free - I miss it when it's down but cut 'em some slack....

I believe that a lot of the call for change probably comes from the fact that these 'alpha-types' like to lead the way.  They felt like they led us to Twitter, told us that we need to use the service to follow 5000 others, and now they are bored and need to feel important all over again.

I like Twitter, I use it 20 or 30 times a week, and it's fun.

Weezer - Pork and Beans

James - Getting Away With It

Readify's new State Manager for WA, Andy Lamb, has things well and truly up and running over in the west.  Per Andy's post from today, we will running an RDN in Perth later this month:

On the 29th May in Perth, come and see our free seminar Silverlight with Alister Jones and Reactive Programming with LINQ by Paul Stovell.

If you are in Perth, this is a great opportunity to drop in and learn about what's going on and to be a part of our successful RDN series of talks.

Cajun Dance Party - The Race

Flight Of The Conchords - Robots (Radio Version) Music Video

Very mild superpowers

The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name

"A Weekend Read" is my weekly link list of interesting blog articles that I've seen throughout the week.  To learn more about the "A Weekend Read" series, take a read of this post.  OK, onto this week:

Teaching/Learning/Talent

None

Knowledge Management

Objects That Blog: Expanding The Architecture Of Participation -

Healthy Wealthy and Wise

None

Leadership

Who Gets The Ax in a Recession? - A good formula for looking at yourself and your staff in tough times.

Why Quantitative Measures Often Make Performance Worse, not Better - interesting discussion about performance targets.

Technology/Development

Functional Programming in C# - Higher-Order Functions - a nice clear post by co-worker Andrew Matthews.

Microsoft Announces Changes for Accessing Hotmail with Outlook Express - goodbye Outlook Express, hello Windows Live Mail.

Customise Your Outlook Today Pane with Cut-and-Paste HTML - this is pure gold. 

Miscellaneous

Astronomy Picture of the Day: A Protected Night Sky - Amazing picture.  I'm currently using this as my desktop background.

Mile-High Skyscrapers and Floating Cities That Never Were - gallery of imaginary cities.

Concrete Blonde - Tomorrow Wendy

Cajun Dance Party - Amylase

Lights & Music - Cut Copy

Cut Copy's new song 'Feel the Love' is also worth listening to.

"A Weekend Read" is my weekly link list of interesting blog articles that I've seen throughout the week.  To learn more about the "A Weekend Read" series, take a read of this post.  OK, onto this week:

Teaching/Learning/Talent

Boss problems? Don’t Leave, Train Your Manager! - useful techniques for me both as an employee and as a manager.

Knowledge Management

Tell me how we’re connected? - long'ish article which talks about how KM contributes to locating skills within an org.

Deciphering Social Networks - Thesis - I haven't fully read this as yet, but it looks interesting.

Are Social Networking sites KM? - another interesting article.

Healthy Wealthy and Wise

The Unusual ROI of Going Green: From Saving to Eco-Friendly Index Funds that Beat the Market - some interesting prompting about where to invest for the coming green bubble.

Leadership

100 Year M.B.A Birthday. Is it a “Right Brain” World & Age of the M.F.A.? - I wasn't sure which category to put this under.  I decided upon the Leadership category because of the focus on the MBA program.  The stuff about right brain/left brain and computers is pretty interesting.

Technology/Development

Shockwave traffic jam recreated for first time - there are some really cool modelling animations about traffic and city activity on this site.  This link is to 1 particular one.

Miscellaneous

Top 10 Wired Reader Night Photos, Decided by You - some nice night photo's

TUTT 54: Definitely Not Coming Out - more TUTT goodness from Ben and Josiah

Top 50 Worldwide Most Influential Blogs of April

BLANKSPACES - Mitch has been doing some great blogging about co-working on his current trip up the west coast of the US.  There's a post about another co-working location that he wrote here.

How to manage expectations - Dilbert style :)

Overqualified - LOL.  "Don't overdo it" :)

Tip: Download YouTube Videos in Zuneable Format - sweet!

Fanboy Supercuts, Obsessive Video Montages - this is a link to an amazing set of fan videos.

Millencolin - Detox

Bloc Party - Hunting For Witches

The Wombats - Kill The Director