Archive for March, 2006

SLI is exhibiting at eComXpo next week, April 4-6, 2006. This is a virtual trade show for search, affiliate and interactive marketers. There are some fantastic speakers presenting and it is free to attend. So if you would like to find out more about our products and services then please come and visit. With our staff spread around the globe we are going to attempt to man the booth 24/7 so you should be able to drop in at any time.

This is our first virtual trade show - and I am very interested to see how it goes. I love the fact I don't have to travel. I'll be calling into the booth regularly and we're giving away one of our brass telescopes - call into our virtual booth to be in to win.

Free registrations for attendees.

Immigration is no simple issue. The variety and number of searches we're seeing around the topic tell us that people are looking for answers and up-to-the-minute news about this hot-button issue. While the U.S. Congress debates different versions of immig

Here at the Buzz, we've been wearing our eclipse glasses around the office for weeks. Even before today's big solar event, which darkened a large swath of Africa and Asia, searches related to the total solar eclipse skyrocketed. "Eclipse" climbe

We cry a lot. Starbucks out of soy milk? Get a hankie. TiVo misses the end of "According to Jim"? Here come the waterworks! What can we say, we're an emotional wreck. Our therapist tells us that talking about it helps, so we've listed several se

Have you ever watched a DVD and when it was over, popped in that extra disk that contained "Special Features" such as an interview with the director? Consider this "Behind the Video" segment that extra disk and revel in this personal interview with the creator of the video "What Mocks a Good Movie".



Click here to watch "What Mocks a Good Movie"
Writer/Director/Producer: Scott Spencer

1) Why did you make this video?

"It was my entry to the CampusMovieFest, a great competition that gives college students a camera, an Apple laptop, and one week's time to make a five minute movie from start to finish. The film ended up winning 2005's Atlanta regional competition, defeating hundreds of other
teams."

2) Who should watch it?

"The film is a solid comedy on its own, but anyone that's suffered through watching a bad student film will really appreciate the parodies found in 'What Mocks a Good Movie.' LEGO fanatics, stop-motion animation fans, and the cult followers of Adult Swim's 'Robot Chicken' will enjoy the project too."

3) Money, fame, power - which do you hope this video brings?

"Perhaps all three someday? The hardest part about working in film or television is getting your foot in the door. I think that writing/directing this movie and investing 52 hours over one week to film it should prove I've got talent and drive. Now I just need the right opportunity."

4) What's next (from you, the video creator)?

"I finished my Mechanical Engineering degree at Georgia Tech last year, deferred admission to law school, and have recently been working on the sets of various movies and TV shows. I'd be happy to answer questions about this film and fan mail would be awesome so email me at scott.d.spencer@gmail.com."

Last summer, at Gnomedex 5.0, we announced the Simple List Extensions (SLE), which allow RSS and Atom feeds to be marked up with new tags that allow sorting/filtering and what we call "list semantics." There’s been a lot of feedback from the community and the specification has been updated and posted to a permanent location on MSDN.

At Mix06 last week, Dean Hachamovitch gave the keynote address on Next Generating Browsing, during which he showed off great live examples of feeds that implement the Simple List Extensions, built by Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and MSN Spaces.

Amazon
The Amazon Web Services team did some great work in setting up RSS feeds for wishlists. Just go to amazon.com, find anyone’s wishlist and click on the fancy orange icon at the top of the page.

Here’s a live video from Mix06 showing these feeds in action. Jeff Barr posts more details over on the Amazon Web Services blog.

eBay
In addition to the feeds from eBay stores that they've had for a few months, eBay is now providing RSS feeds on search results (Arturo Zacarias posted the details on the eBay announcements list).

The search results and the existing store feeds are SLE-enhanced to allow very granular filtering on different categories and filters. This is one of the best examples to date of using the sorting and filtering to their fullest.

Pick an item you've been trying to find and just type it into the search box on ebay.com and subscribe to the feed using the button at the bottom of the page.

Yahoo! Music
Yahoo! Music has been providing RSS feeds for their Top Songs, Albums and Videos for some time. Now these feeds are enhanced with SLE to provide sorting and filtering controls, as well as to indicating that these feeds are really lists. SLE-supporting aggregators will treat these kinds of feeds in the way that the publisher intended – as a single entity. We’ll post later today about how exactly this "list semantic" works.

Here’s a direct link to the Yahoo! Music Top 10 Songs list. Ian Rogers posts more on the Yahoo! Music blog.

MSN Spaces
The folks over at MSN Spaces quietly added SLE support to all of their feeds earlier this month. Mike Torres blogged about what they've done. Here’s an example using his feed. This really shows how SLE can be used to enhance even blog feeds.

 

Needless to say, I’m very excited to see RSS used in these cool ways on sites as diverse as these, and I'm even more excited to see SLE being used to make these feeds even more useful to users.

On a related note, SLE has been getting some other mentions around the blogosphere. Charlie Wood predicts: “As more enterprise applications become RSS-enabled, I predict that an RSS reader that doesn't support Simple List Extensions will become as retrograde as a web browser that doesn't support tables.” I have to say that I agree completely :).

There’s no better way to find out how these Simple List Extensions work than to install IE 7 Beta 2 Preview (updated March 20 – check out the cleaner feed view!), and just click on the examples above. They all show off the sorting and filtering features of SLE amazingly well.

Thanks to everyone involved in getting these feeds online!
- Sean

For all of our German speaking readers who wish you could read Inside AdSense in your own language, we're pleased to announce that we've launched a sister blog, Inside AdSense: Das offizielle deutsche AdSense-Blog. In addition to covering optimization tips, features and announcements, the new blog will post information especially for German publishers.

Subscribe today so you don't miss a post! Just send a blank message to inside-adsense-de@googlegroups.com. You'll then receive an email with instructions for completing your subscription.

Posted by Michaela Tomberger - AdSense Publisher Support

It's taboo to talk about how much the guy in the next cubicle makes for shuffling stacks of paper. But thanks to the annual Forbes list of best-paid athletes, you can talk ad nauseum about how much moolah Tiger Woods makes for hitting balls with a graphit