Hi, this is Ziv Mador again from the Microsoft Anti-Malware team. This week, the folks over at VirusTotal added the Microsoft anti-malware engine to their service. VirusTotal is a free service that enables users to submit suspicious files to be scanned by several anti-malware engines. If you choose, files that are not identified as malicious are sent to the vendors who supply the anti-malware engines to this service to be analyzed. As of April 27, the Microsoft anti-malware scanner is included in the set of scanning engines used by VirusTotal. This scanner is based on the same technology found in Windows Live OneCare, the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and Microsoft Antigen, and includes our full antivirus set of signatures. We are glad to be participating in this community opportunity.
In our never-ending quest to help you waste your day in better and richer ways, we've added support for video feeds that have Flash players. Mainly, this means you can watch videos from Google Video or YouTube directly in Reader. Here's a few feeds that work well:
Oh, the hours you can waste!
Fun for publishers: If you have a site that publishes videos as Flash files, then you can add support for your site in Google Reader by adding an enclosure to each appropriate item in either your RSS or Atom feed like the following:
<enclosure url="http://example/example-flash-video-player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/> (for RSS feeds)
or<link rel="enclosure" href="http://example/example-flash-video-player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/> (for Atom feeds)
As we've mentioned before our plan is to add support for the Media RSS extension as well, but we had the enclosure support ready today and wanted to let interested publishers play around with it.
Happy watching!
Driving to work, I always notice the florist near highway 237, where a man stands outside waving an arrow-shaped "Flowers" sign. When I think of local businesses trying to attract new customers, I picture this florist. I also think of someone like my midwife, Olga Libova, who delivered my son. Her local business is all about babies. And she too wants an easy way to promote her services to prospective clients.
Being on-call to deliver babies means that she does not have a lot of time to spend on advertising
High Visibility, Easy Set-up
As more small businesses became familiar with Yahoo! Local, they have asked for an easy way to place local ads that will drive foot-traffic to their stores, and phone calls to their services. As consumers of Yahoo! Local, they benefit from immediately seeing the phone numbers to the businesses listed in the natural search results, without having to click further.
And of course, those businesses also want to stand out from the crowd.
Introducing Local Featured Listings
Our team at Yahoo! Local has been working with people like Olga, as well as local real estate agents, florists and more. We created a product called Local Featured Listings, which introduces small businesses to online local advertising.
A Featured Listing is a top-of-page listing that is available at a flat, monthly rate starting at $29.95/month, depending on the business category and location. (A bottom-of-page listing is also available at a discount.) These limited advertising slots are available on a first come, first serve basis.
With an easy sign-up, the small business selects their category, and chooses the local regions where they want to advertise.
A Local Featured Listing is a quick way to start reaching the online audience right in your neighborhood. The listing highlights the business telephone number and provides links to the website, a map and directions which is exactly what consumers want.
Once these small businesses have tried Yahoo! Local, they can learn about the many different advertising products that Yahoo! offers.
Thats the news for now. We have much more to come for local residents and merchants alike. Let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more!
Aytek Çelik
Yahoo! Local Team
In response to our article Inside Microsoft.com Moving Microsoft Update Downloads to x64 we had a great question posed to us about why we use user-mode caching instead of kernel-mode caching in IIS6.0 for the download infrastructure for Microsoft Update.
There are a couple reasons we use user-mode cache versus kernel-mode cache on these servers. The Microsoft Update client makes byte-range requests when requesting data, so when evaluating which type of caching we wanted, if any, to use with IIS6.0 for these download servers the ability to handle these byte-range requests was a prerequisite. In looking at kernel-mode caching it was determined that this would not work for our purposes due to the fact that HTTP.sys only sends the whole response and will not attempt to send range responses, thus kernel-mode cache will not cache the responses, not even the file that the byte-range is part of. This led us to evaluate user-mode caching. User-mode caching will send a byte-range request; however it will not cache just the byte-range but will cache the entire file. Thus we can take advantage of user-mode caching but not kernel-mode caching for this application due the need to serve byte-range requests. For more information you can look at pages 745 of the ‘Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Resource Kit’, ISBN 0-7-7356-1420-2. It is also freely available online http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=80A1B6E6-829E-49B7-8C02-333D9C148E69&displaylang=en, the section cache settings is located under chapter 7 ‘Web Server Scalability’.
Bloglines was unavailable between 7:30pm PDT and 8:00pm PDT today, April 27 2006 due to an unplanned network outage at our datacenter. All Bloglines services have returned to normal at the time of this posting.
Currently, all AdWords accounts are set to Pacific Time. However, in the coming weeks you’ll see a message in your account inviting you to set your account's local time zone. This means your entire account, including all ad serving, reporting, and billing, will be calculated and managed according to the time zone of your choice.
del.icio.us users discover interesting things on the Web every day. We want to make it easier for you to find and connect to these people, so that you can benefit from their knowledge and they can benefit from yours. Today the “inbox” feature lets you subscribe to other users’ bookmarks, but most people don’t know about it and it’s not terribly easy to use in your everyday life.
To make sharing easier, we’ve just released a new feature called “your network”. You can add other del.icio.us users to your network either by visiting their del.icio.us pages or from the your network page itself. Once someone is in your network, you can keep track of their latest saved public bookmarks. And when you save new bookmarks you can easily share them with people in your network just by clicking on their username.
Your network replaces the user subscriptions functionality previously offered by the “inbox”. If you had any existing user subscriptions in your inbox we automatically moved them over to your network, so you haven’t lost any connections you already had.