Archive for June, 2009

Back at MIX09 in March, we talked about our work with Careerbuilder.com, and today we are pleased to report that at the annual Society for Human Resource Management Conference, Careerbuilder.com announced the availability of Applicant Explorer, a new application built on the Bing API that helps recruiters find qualified candidates in the fraction of the time it once took. Rather than manually sorting through applicant resumes and then searching the web for additional information to fill out a candidate profile, Applicant Explorer uses the Bing API to supplement CareerBuilder’s resume database with online results from public sites including social networking sites, blogs, corporate websites and forums.

 

CareerBuilder selected the Bing API because it enabled the company to help recruiters customize their search criteria and dynamically sift through large amounts of data quickly, providing a more complete picture of an applicant. The end result is great news for recruiters: hundreds of data sources at their fingertips and the ability to do thorough comparisons more quickly and easily. Click here for a video overview of Applicant Explorer or to read the press release here.

 

If you haven’t checked it out yet, we want to make sure you know that the Bing API is free, with unlimited queries, as long as you meet our Terms of Use.

 

We encourage you to use our forums and our newly introduced Bing Toolbox to access tools and resources, and don’t forget to provide your feedback to help us keep improving. We look forward to hearing from you and seeing what you’re doing with Bing!

 

Cheers,

Angus Norton, Senior Director, Bing

For those of you who manage your organization’s desktops using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) Internet Explorer 8 will be made available via this technology starting August 25, 2009.  Internet Explorer 8 will be made available as an “Update rollup” and will be applicable to all supported languages.

Is my organization affected?

If your organization uses WSUS and has it configured to auto-approve Update rollup packages, upon acceptance of the Internet Explorer 8 End User License Agreement (EULA) by the WSUS administrator, Internet Explorer 8 will install automatically on computers running Internet Explorer 6 or 7 on supported operating systems.

What should I do if I auto-approve Update rollups but want to control when I deploy Internet Explorer 8?

To give you control over how and when Internet Explorer 8 is deployed in your environment, perform the following steps:

Before August 25, 2009:

1. Turn off auto-approve for “Update rollup” packages in WSUS, and approve the updates manually.  Note: Even if Auto-Approve for “Update rollup” is on, you will still be required to approve the Internet Explorer 8 EULA before Internet Explorer 8 is deployed to downstream clients.

After August 25, 2009:

1. Synchronize your WSUS server.
2. Decline the Internet Explorer 8 update packages.
3. If you typically auto-approve update rollup packages, you can re-enable automatic approval for “Update rollups.”

What other Internet Explorer 8 updates will be available via WSUS?

Cumulative security updates for Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility View List updates will also be released via WSUS as they become available.

To deploy Internet Explorer 8 today, visit the Internet Explorer TechNet Center – among other useful resources you’ll find an Internet Explorer Deployment Guide and information about the Internet Explorer Administration Kit which explains how to generate a MSI installer and distribute it using Systems Management Server or Group Policy.

Eric Hebenstreit
Lead Program Manager

by Mike Krumboltz

It's no secret that Bernie Madoff doesn't have many friends right now. In fact, newspapers can't seem to write his name without describing him as "disgraced." But what might come as a surprise is that his wife, Ruth, may be even more of a social pariah—not for what she's done, but rather for her silence regarding her husband's tremendous fall from grace.

Mrs. Madoff is aware of the brewing rage directed toward her. On Monday, she released a statement after her husband was sentenced to a staggering 150 years in prison. The statement acknowledged that her silence may have been interpreted as "indifference or lack of sympathy for the victims of my husband Bernie's crime." However, Mrs. Madoff writes that this is "exactly the opposite of the truth." She continues, "Not a day goes by when I don't ache over the stories that I have heard and read."

Still, while Mrs. Madoff hasn't been charged with any crime whatsoever, there are still those who believe it's open season on the Manhattanite. The New York Post recently published an article reporting that Mrs. Madoff was spotted riding a New York subway. Upon being recognized, Mrs. Madoff, obviously annoyed, asked the Post photographer if she was "having fun embarrassing [her]—and ruining [her] life."

But that wasn't the first public awkward moment suffered by Mrs. Madoff. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that her hair salon, where she used to receive highlights every six weeks, told her not to return. The Times reports that Mrs. Madoff "is viewed as an unrepentant beneficiary of ill-gotten wealth, a petite and well-dressed embodiment of the collective, bloated greed that helped topple the stock market and the housing industry." Whether or not the public scorn is justified seems to be beside the point.

For whatever it's worth (probably not much to the victims of her husband's fraud), Mrs. Madoff has given up her claim to millions of dollars in joint assets. According to an agreement with United States prosecutors, Ruth will be left with $2.5 million. Sounds like a lot of money, but The Wall Street Journal reports that Mrs. Madoff may "still face claims" from government agencies like the SEC and trustees that are liquidating Bernie's assets.

Assuming she invests with a non-crook, Mrs. Madoff can expect to earn about $125,000 per year on her $2.5 million settlement. Adjusting to life on a fixed income will require a significant change in lifestyle. Still, that's a problem that many of her husband's victims would surely love to have.

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by Vera H-C Chan

Did an ex-boyfriend of Maria Belen Chapur leak the illicit email exchange to a South Carolina newspaper? Or could there be yet another nefarious figure lurking in the already muddled tale of governor Mark Sanford?

Chapur, a former TV producer, confirmed in a June 28 statement that she is the Argentinian Other Woman. Her 200 words mostly focused on "evil act" of email hacking, which she blamed for destroying people's lives (as opposed to the affair itself). While she says she has a "firm suspicion" of who it is, she does clear the "one friend with whom I shared days in Brazil in the Rolex Regatta."

That should absolve the ex. The New York Times had pointed to him as the culprit just a day earlier, based on the word of Chapur's former boss. Rather than a man scorned and out looking for revenge, her former boyfriend also received the chain of lovelorn pillow talk which included Chapur's description of him as a "very nice guy, great heart" and her admission, "Unfortunately I am not in love with him. You (Sanford) are my love." Ouch. (Sanford, for his part, nobly declared he didn't want her to walk away from "some guy (I take it the younger guy you mentioned at dinner) because of me — and what we both have to see as an impossible situation," in between quoting I Corinthians 13 and referencing "The Thornbirds.")

Whoever sent the emails to The State, the action turned out to be moot. As mentioned in a previous post, the newspaper couldn't confirm them. It posted the exchange only after Sanford made his famous ramble to Argentina via the Appalachian Trail.

So why did Chapur's former boss, a Buenos Aires TV exec, accuse the former beau? Who hacked into her Hotmail? Should The State (and everyone else, including us) be ashamed of publishing the emails six months late, or publishing them at all? Whatever the answers, the South Carolina saga ain't over yet.

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This is the first of a series of posts from YouTube's news and politics blog, Citizentube. -Ed.

YouTube is the biggest video news site on the Internet, and at no time in our site's history was that more apparent than in these last two weeks of the crisis unfolding in Iran. As hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens took to the streets of Tehran to protest the national elections, the government kicked out foreign journalists, leaving citizens themselves as the only documentarians to the events unfolding there. We've been highlighting many of these videos and keeping track of the latest developments on our YouTube news and politics blog, Citizentube.

Though the circumstances in Iran are unique, this isn't the first time that citizens have played a crucial role in reporting on events around the world. Burmese citizens uploaded exclusive video footage to YouTube during the protests in Myanmar back in 2007; people in China's Sichuan province documented the devastating and historic 7.8-magnitude earthquake of 2008 in real-time; and eyewitnesses to the shooting of young Oscar Grant by Oakland police forces captured the event on their cell phone cameras and uploaded videos to YouTube for the world to see. Citizens are no longer merely bystanders to world events. Today, anyone can chronicle what they see and participate in the news-gathering process.

Though it's the phenomenon of citizen reporting that YouTube is probably best known for, we also have hundreds of news partners who upload thousands of videos straight to YouTube every day. You can see lots of these on our news page at youtube.com/news. Many of these organizations have used YouTube in unique ways, like asking the community to submit questions for government officials, providing a behind-the-scenes look at traveling with the Obama press corps and accepting video applications for a reporting assignment in West Africa. We believe the power of this new media landscape lies in the collaborative possibilities of amateurs and professionals working together.

And so today, we're launching a new resource on YouTube to help citizens learn more about how to report the news, straight from the experts. It's called the YouTube Reporters' Center, and it features some of the nation's top journalists sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting. Learn how to prepare for an interview; or how to be an investigative reporter from the legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward; or how to report on a global humanitarian crisis from Nick Kristof of the New York Times. All of the videos are available on the YouTube Reporters' Center channel.

Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

1. Stonewall (Searches increased by 2,034%). Hundreds of thousands of people marched in the NYC gay-rights parade to mark the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
2. Honduras (+672%). World leaders are urging the country to reverse its coup that ousted the president.
3. World's ugliest dog (+384%). A dog in serious need of dental work claimed this year's title.
4. Shia LaBeouf (+317). The star of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" could have the dubious honor of being in the "worst reviewed" hit.
5. Fourth of July recipes (+142%). Yes, it's almost that time. Here are some recipes to get you thinking, including patriotic red, white, and blue potato salad.

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If you develop iPhone or Android applications, we're happy to let you know about the beta launch of AdSense for mobile applications. Participants in the beta will be able to display text and image ads in their mobile applications to earn revenue. We've seen positive results in our trials, and we're excited to roll this out to new developers to continue supporting the growth of mobile applications.

You can visit our new microsite to learn more about AdSense for mobile applications, see our beta requirements, or sign up. If you're selected to participate in the beta, we'll be in touch with you shortly with next steps for getting started.

You can also learn more about the program by watching the video below, in which Howard Steinberg, Director of Business Development at Urbanspoon, describes how he tested AdSense for mobile applications:



Posted by Alex Kenin - AdSense for Mobile Applications Marketing

The big news from the YUI team last week was the release of YUI 3.0.0 beta 1, moving YUI 3 one important step closer to GA. What follows is some of the other news coming from the YUI community over the past few weeks. As always, please use the comments section to let us know what we’ve missed.

• Timr — a New Timetracking Web-app with Significant YUI Elements: Thomas Einwaller wrote in to tell us about Timr, a new time-tracking web application with a slick, rich, YUI-intensive interface including Panels, DataTables and much more. If your job requires you to track time-on-tasks, and you want a web-based system with support for mobile, check out Thomas’s project at Timr.com.
  
• How Happy is Dav? Harley-Davidson Using YUI: If you know YUI engineer Dav Glass, it will not surprise you to learn that he’s the one who discovered that YUI is in use on the Harley-Davidson website.  Check out their Harley-themed YUI AutoComplete in the main search box at the top of the page.
  
• Ara Pehlivanian on YUI 3 — New SitePoint Article: Ara, coauthor of a couple of excellent JS tomes, provides a nice introduction to YUI 3 and his take on why it might be of interest to developers.  His conclusion: “YUI 3 is a completely different animal than its predecessor. Along with a new syntax, you gain a faster, lighter, easier, and more flexible library—ready to take on your most ambitious web projects.”  Check out the full article for more.
  
• IBM DeveloperWorks: “Weaving a Better Web Page with YUI CSS”: From Martin Streicher, writing for IBM DeveloperWorks, who covers both Blueprint and YUI in this article: “YUI Grids provide CSS for both fixed-width pages and fluid-width pages, and it provides for arbitrarily deep nesting of columns. You can also position and move columns arbitrarily, so you can quickly and simply reorder the content on the page with CSS. For instance, you can move navigation from left to right with one CSS change. Further, you can augment YUI Grids with Yahoo’s own JavaScript library to add interactivity. You can read more about the YUI JavaScript library separately. This article focuses on Grids’ stylesheets, which can work independent of a JavaScript library.”  The article is free online and available as a PDF.
• Dav Glass’s “y’all Getter Done” T-shirts for YUI 3: File this one in the “just for fun” category… Dav, who is a YUI engineer by day, has branched off into t-shirt design with a YUI shirt available on Zazzle. Pictured is Dav wearing the shirt, which is a reference to Larry the Cable Guy and reads “y’all, getter done”.  Note that “redneck” is not an actual YUI 3 module, so this code won’t really run in a standard YUI 3 implementation.  But it’s funny nonetheless.
• Detecting if the User is Idle with JavaScript and YUI 3: From YUI contributor Nicholas C. Zakas: “Web developers have been interested in whether or not a user is idle since the Ajax explosion hit. With the introduction of more dynamic, highly interactive web interfaces came the desire to know if the user was actually doing anything at any point in time. Thus, the quest for determining if the user is idle began.”  Read on for full details on his blog. (Original source.)
• Cerberus Helpdesk 4.2 Using YUI Charts, TabView, and More: Cerberus Helpdesk is a CRM application offering both paid and free versions.  It’s UI features a variety of YUI components, from Panels to TabViews to reports enhanced by YUI Charts.
  
• Matt Snider on Using YUI EventProvider and Custom Events: Matt Snider, lead frontend on Mint.com and author of the upcoming YUI Storage Utility, blogs about Adam Moore’s YUI Event Utility components including Custom Events and EventProvider: “By using [the EventProvider] interface, developers no longer need to worry about whether or not a given CustomEvent exists when subscribing to it. Thereby, making coding easier, while allowing a developer the opportunity to not create CustomEvents that never fire. Additionally, EventProvider normalizes interactions with CustomEvents attached to objects, since the same methods will be attached to each object. Lastly, the events are bound to the augmented object, so although you might instantiate hundreds of EventProvider augmented object, each sharing an event named ‘update’, only the callback functions subscribed to the current object will execute when the ‘fireEvent’ function of that object is called. In summary, when using EventProvider the event names need only be unique on a single object, not across all objects (as with CustomEvent).” The full article is on Matt’s blog.
• Screencast of YUI DataTable Use on ResumeBucket: We mentioned ResumeBucket in a previous “In the Wild”, but they’ve posted a screencast that does a nice job of showing off Jenny Donnelly’s YUI DataTable in use in their messaging center.  Check out DataTable being used for user-managed tabular data here.
  (Original source.)
• Eric Ferraiuolo’s Facebook-style Overlay in YUI 3 & CSS 3: Writes Eric: “While wandering-around the Internet looking for examples of overlays in web application interfaces I thought of a challenge: create a working Facebook–styled overlay. I’m in the process of creating an application-wide design for overlays and needed some inspiration. Facebook uses overlays extensively and they have a distinct style [that others imitate, maybe even me  ]; I set-out to re-create this style.  Not wanting to mess around — I whipped up a working example of Facebook-styled overlays using only YUI 3 and CSS 3; things are nice and easy to do when you use the latest technologies.”  Check out his blog post for the full story. (Original source.)
  
• Dayshift’s Wrapper for YUI Charts: From the article: “If you use YUI Charts as suggested in many examples you’ll need configuration code for each individual chart which, if you have more than 2 or 3 charts on a page, can make your code appear cluttered. With the ChartsAjax class, all the chart options can be set with JSON data built dynamically on the server and retrieved from one AJAX call. This includes not only data for the datastore but also styling and column definitions.”  Check out the blogpost on Dayshift for the full example code.
• Using YUICompressor with Capistrano and Rails 2.3+: Tony Perrie wrote up some notes on using YUI with Capistrano and Rails; check out his tutorial here.

At Google we seek to serve a broad base of people — not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home. It's important to reach users wherever they are, with the information they need, in areas with the greatest information poverty. In many places around the world, people look to their phones, rather than their computers, to find information they need in their daily lives. This is especially true in Africa, which has the world’s highest mobile growth rate and where mobile phone penetration is six times Internet penetration. One-third of the population owns a mobile phone and many more have access to one.

Most mobile devices in Africa only have voice and SMS capabilities, and so we are focusing our technological efforts in that continent on SMS. Today, we are announcing Google SMS, a suite of mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes Google Trader, a SMS-based “marketplace” application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs.

We are particularly excited about Google SMS Tips, an SMS-based query-and-answer service that enables a mobile phone user to have a web search-like experience. You enter a free form text query, and Google's algorithms restructure the query to identify keywords, search a database to identify relevant answers, and return the most relevant answer.












Both Google SMS Tips and Google Trader represent the fruits of unique partnerships among Google, the Grameen Foundation, MTN Uganda and local organizations*. We worked closely together as part of Grameen Foundation's Application Laboratory to understand information needs and gaps, develop locally relevant and actionable content, rapidly test prototypes, and conduct multi-month pilots with the people who will eventually use the applications have truly been a global effort, and created with Ugandans, for Ugandans.

We're just beginning. We can do a lot more to improve search quality and the breadth — and depth — of content on Google SMS, especially on Tips and Trader. Google SMS is by no means a finished product, but that's what's both exciting and challenging about this endeavor.

Meanwhile, if you're curious about what Google is doing in Africa, learn more at the Google Africa Blog.

Update: Corrected link to YouTube video for "rapidly test prototypes".
____
*BROSDI, (Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative), Straight Talk Foundation, Marie Stopes Uganda.

Posted by Joe Mucheru, Head of Google Sub-Saharan Africa, & Fiona Lee, Africa Project Manager

by Jon Brooks

Let's face it, it was a tough week mortality-wise: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and of course Neda Agha Soltan. This weekend, however, three teen sports phenoms had people looking to the future, and their stories proved to be some of the most popular in Buzz...

New kid in tennis town
Wimbledon story lines: You’ve got your Federer, your Williams sisters, your Melanie Oudin, your—whoa. Who in the name of Björn Borg is Melanie Oudin? Well, she’s a 124th-ranked 17-year-old from Marietta, Georgia, and she stunned an ailing Jelena Jankovic—the former No. 1 and current No. 6—in the third round Sunday. That prompted a Yahoo! network-high 7,100% surge in searches for the fresh-faced blonde. While ESPN’s Pam Shriver called her win the biggest breakthrough for an American woman since Serena Williams took the 1999 U.S. Open, her vanquished opponent was less impressed. "She cannot hurt you with anything," Jankovic said. "If I felt a little bit more fresh at the end of that second set, I could have won in two sets." Oudin will play Agnieszka Radwanska in the fourth round Monday.

Just a few years past his learner's permit...
Joey Logano, 19, took the rain-shortened Lenox Industrial Tools 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway to become the youngest winner in the history of the Sprint Cup series, breaking Kyle Busch's record by a year and three months. Logano replaced the veteran Tony Stewart on the Joe Gibbs Racing team last year. Said Logano of his victory: “Obviously, it’s not the way you want to win your first race, in the rain. But 20 years down the road, when you look in the record books, no one will know the difference. A win is a win and I’ll take them any way I can.” Hmm. Pretty savvy for a kid.

Tiger's niece
Potentially bad news for the LPGA crowd: Tiger Woods has a niece ... and she plays golf. Rounding out our trio of teen titans is Cheyenne Woods, who will be a sophomore at Wake Forest University next school year. Woods missed the cut by four strokes in her professional debut Saturday at Wegmans LPGA tournament, but at 18 she's got a lot of golf left in her. Cheyenne was trained by her grandfather, Earl Woods, who also famously coached his son into one of the world's great athletes. Cheyenne won back-to-back Arizona state golf championships in 2006-07.

Also buzzing this weekend...

• New clashes were reported in Iran. 
• While it didn't have quite the same cultural impact as the passing of Michael Jackson, the death of TV pitchman Billy Mays generated a huge number of searches Sunday.
• Searches for the Stonewall riots were also up this weekend. Sunday marked the 40th anniversary of the event that is considered the start of the gay rights movement. 

 

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