• A couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced Azure, which is their offering in the hot cloud computing business. It's not easy to grasp what it implies, but it is a platform "in the cloud", on top of which there runs services including Live, .NET and SQL services. For now at least, you're dependent on Microsoft's development tool Visual Studio to develop for Azure. Microsoft's new offering does not depart from the usual confusion surrounding all their web-based products. Also I think that it implies some serious lock-in effects. So unless you have already invested heavily in Microsoft technologies, you are better off staying out.
  Ted Dziuba gives an alternative view of Azure, with some interesting points. Though he thinks it is a bit confusing compared to the offerings by Amazon and Google, he still thinks Microsoft could be a winner:     

  Fortunately for Microsoft, decision makers don't choose a hosted application platform based on specifications. They choose based on the number of stock photos of clouds and the amount of sans-serif blue typeface you have on your webpage. In that regard, Redmond is the clear winner. [...]
  This is all within one standard deviation of the average amount of fail in any given Microsoft product. In fact, I think it stands a better chance than Google's or Amazon's offering.

  Tags: cloud computing, Microsoft

• Microsoft's coming operating system Windows 7, might contain something called MinWin, reports Mary-Jo Foley, referring to a webcast featuring Mark Russinovich. MinWin lies at the core of the Windows OS, containing basic services and is a self-contained executable unit, independent of any outside services. Mary-Jo seems uncertain about whether MinWin will actually ship as a part of Windows 7, or if it's just a development project aimed at future Windows version like Windows 8 or even Midori. Possibly it's part of the much awaited from the ground up rewrite of the Windows code base?
  Tags: MinWin, Windows 7
• In another move to increase its customer base, Microsoft has launched BizSpark, a partner program for startups who for free (almost) get access to Microsoft's development tools via a MSDN Premium subscription, web hosting rights and access to the Azure services platform, for a three-year period. The major catch perhaps is that to join you have to connect with a Network partner, which are venture firms and other businesses and organizations focusing on services for startups and entrepreneurs. This can be a trouble if you want to stay independent. Another catch of course is that if you're still in business after three years, you have to start paying the bills from Microsoft.
  Tags: entrepreneurial, Microsoft
• Last week I wrote that Google now is an OpenID Identity Provider (IdP). Some folks argued that Google somehow had violated the specification and "forked" OpenID, something that is now denied in a post by DeWitt Clinton. A point of criticism stems from the fact that Google has used a new feature of the OpenID 2.0 specification known as Directed Identity, which is exemplified by Clinton as follows: 
  

  Directed Identity allows users to enter a generic domain name (e.g.., “example.com”), rather than a fully qualified identity (e.g., “example.com/users/bob”), so that they can use their identity provider to make an informed decision about how much personal information to expose to the RP [Relying Party]"

  Some commenter to Clinton's post argued that OpenID had forked itself by including such possibilities in version 2.0 of the specification. There is also an ongoing debate about whether it is a good idea to allow for email addresses as OpenID identifiers.
  Tags: OpenID

• OStatic writes that the open source Ogg Theora video codec now has reached version 1.0 status. The Xiph.Org Foundation stands behind the open source effort, which includes the Vorbis audio codec, the Theora video codec, and the Ogg multimedia container format, which encapsulates the codecs. Ogg Theora is a good candidate for the HTML 5 video element, though no codec is officially sanctioned by W3C.
  Tags: HTML5
• Lidija Davis writes about Small Basic, a new flavour of the original BASIC programming language from Microsoft, built on top of the .NET platform. The development environment is purely text based, in contrast to the visual environments provided by the alternatives Scratch and Alice. A commenter to Lidija's post also mentions the commercial alternative Phrogram, which I haven't checked out further.
  The help texts and introductions to Small Basic are written in a quite advanced language, hardly comprehensible to smaller kids. You probably should be at least around 12 years old and a bit nerdy inclined to enjoy Small Basic. I think Scratch, which I first wrote about in May, is better suited for smaller kids, 8 and up, whereas Alice seems to be aimed chiefly at college kids.
  Tags: kids, programming

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• How to Count to Windows 7 (and a few more) [Best of October '08 #2-3]

• Robert Scoble writes about the real PR secrets: "PR now stands for 'Professional Relationships'." That is, you should build personal relationships with influential bloggers and journalists to be successful in PR. Obviously this doesn't scale, and is out of scope for most people. Luckily, as Robert writes: "You don’t need PR at all if you have a great product." Loic Le Meur points to the importance of participation and building a community.
  Tags: entrepreneurial
• A serious security flaw was recently detected in the OpenSSL library of the Debian an Ubuntu Linux-based operating systems, affecting several applications involved in secure communications across the Internet, the Apache web server included. The flaw was introduced in the key generation code, effectively reducing the key length from 128 to 15 bit, making a brute force attack very feasible. The flaw has been around for about two years, affecting millions of systems which ever have used the key generation mechanism of the affected operating systems.
  Tags: security
• On the distinction between a nerd and a geek writes Brad Feld, who concludes that "nerds are geeks who make money." David Brooks outlines the history of the words nerd and geek, dating nerd back to 1950, and writing that "At first, a nerd was a geek with better grades." But later, geeks got higher status: "A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked." Coolness seems to be a characteristic of a geek, which might explain why you so often see people describe themselves as geeks, but less frequently as nerds. Brad Feld, by the way, describes himself as a nerd. Geeks are cool and Mac users for the most, I guess. I'm a PC guy, and probably more of a nerd than a geek. It just remains to make some serious money to become a real nerd (like Bill Gates).
  Tags: trivia
• Dave Winer says that to him "Twitter is a publishing medium." Having 9644 followers, Twitter is obviously a useful publishing medium, not so useful however with just a handful of followers.
  Tags: Twitter
• Steve Rubel presents 9 future trends, broken down into three categories based on the likelihood of hitting: Faint Signals (more likely): The Cut and Paste Web, The Attention Crash, Digital Curators, Super Crunching and Collaboration. Watch List: Living Room 2.0 and Geek Marketers. Hallucinations (less likely): Digital Nomads and Data Leaking.
  Tags: trends

• Steve Rubel thinks that FriendFeed is more valuable as an RSS and search tool than a social activity aggregator, and highlights the importance of FriendFeed's imaginary friend feature.
  Tags: FriendFeed
• Continuing the theme on visual programming tools, which in last week's highlights featured Popfly Game Creator, here's two more great free tools for learning kids (of all ages) about programming and physics: The 2D visual physics simulator Phun (see video below), written by Swedish MSc student Emil Ernerfeldt. The visual programming tool Scratch, aimed at kids 8 and up, with an impressive range of language constructs like loops and conditional statements, as well as simple event and message handling! Even though the possibilities seems relatively advanced, I've got the impression that Scratch is more accessible and rewarding to younger kids than Popfly Game Creator.
  
  Tags: visual programming, kids' stuff
• Bernard Lunn comes with some old-school sales tips, including "Close on every call", "Expect mutual effort", "Selling happens face-to-face" and "Ask for the order"
  Tags: entrepreneurial, marketing
• Google Translate now supports 23 languages including Swedish, which according to Google Translate translates into "Google Translate stöder nu 23 språk inklusive svenska" in Swedish, which is pretty accurate.
  Tags: translations
• Piwik, an open source web analytics software based on PHP and MySQL, an alternative to Google Analytics.
  Tags: web analytics
• There have been discussions on creating an open decentralized Twitter, mainly led by Dave Winer. The idea is motivated by the importance some people attribute to the service, and that a single company should not own it. Some even suggest creating a Twitter equivalent of the Domain Name System (DNS).
  Tags: Twitter

• Lessons from the O'Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp – Dare Obasanjo
  He concludes that social graph discovery, as delivered by the Google Social Graph API, is more important than social graph portability. He also suggests that people can be identified using hash values of their email address, which would keep privacy, but still enable discoverability.
  Tags: Social Graph, portability, identity
• A Radical Option For Yahoo: Out-Open Google – Erick Schonfeld
  Yahoo should fully open up its search API to compete with Google in the long run. Currently all major search engines (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Technorati) have commercial and other restrictions on their search APIs, which make them hard for entrepreneurs to build on.
  Tags: search, API, vision
• Web 3.0: Is It About Personalization? – Josh Catone
  The Web 3.0 debate continues. Personalization and recommendation are promises of the Semantic Web.
  Tags: Web 3.0
• Silicon Valley after a Microsoft/Yahoo merger: a contrarian view – Marc Andreessen
  "Build something of value, and the world is yours," and: "The best way to get bought is to not be for sale."
  Tags: entrepreneurial
• MySpace Platform Launches – John Musser
  The world's largest social network opens up to developers. The API builds on OpenSocial, a JavaScript API. Applications available to MySpace users in March.
  Tags: MySpace, OpenSocial
• Is XMPP the 'Next Big Thing' – Slashdot
  The eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol seems to finally take off as a glue to build distributed web applications.
  Tags: XMPP, protocols
• Google Gathers Social Graph Information From The Web, Launches API – Michael Arrington
  The Google Social Graph API can be used e.g. to add friends when joining a new social application. It uses publicly declared connections (links) between people as expressed by XFN and FOAF markup.
  Tags: Social Graph, API, XFN
• How YOU Can Make the Web More Structured – Alex Iskold
  He suggests simple annotations to make a web page accessible to semantic "top-down" analysis: Meta tags, tagging using rel-tag markup, and using standardized class names.
  Tags: Semantic Web, tagging, microformats