How To REALLY Get A Company's Attention

Forget blogging, tape a letter to their door!  Looks like Nick Starr was tired of not having IMAP for Gmail and decided to go right to the source.  Thanks for Steve Rubel's tweet.

Two Microsoft Licenses Now OSI Approved.

 

Am I blind, or is noone talking about this?  Microsoft finally getting two approved official Open Source licenses is big news.  With the approval the two licenses are being renamed:

Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL) -> Microsoft Public License (MS-PL)

Microsoft Community License (MS-CL) -> Microsoft Reciprocal License (MS-RL)

 

via sburke, and now numerous other MSDN blogs now as well.

 

Seriously this must be being treated pretty low key, it's certainly not being trumpeted from the towers like it should.  I heard many pundits say it would never happen...

Fun with Twitter.

Dan Hounshell announced his new little side project RandomTweets.  Basically it's similar to bash.org or qdb.us but for Twitter.  Right now Dan is using the API to pull random tweets and then manually sorting through them for humor or inspirational value.  He states his intention is to make the site more community driven in the future, but he's got some pretty funny stuff up there already. You should check it out!

Twitter Updates Look.

Twitter, while being a canonical Web 2.0 poster child, has never really looked the part.  After their database upgrades Sunday they've very stealthily updated their look.

The first hints that something was afoot was the mysterious disappearance of the "back" button to few your followee's previous tweets.  Well that's back with a much slicker looking interface.  It's a much classier look, less "done in the backroom" and more "done by an actual designer".  Well done! It's a subtle change to be sure, but something that is easy on the eyes makes it easier to use.

Also, be sure to stop by my twitter page and say hi!

The Microsoft .NET Framework Source Available for Developers!

Scott Guthrie just made an exciting post, starting with .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 the .NET libraries will have source available!  This is quite the boon to developers, the ability to drill down to source level while debugging should lead to more accurate code.  Of course there could be a downside, namely developers coding around implementation details rather then the exposed methods.  But regardless this is a very cool move by Microsoft.  It's being released under the Microsoft Reference License which doesn't give you a whole lot of rights (none really, other then to look at the source), but it's something.  Considering how important the framework is to Microsoft this is a bold move.  For a truly permissive license check out Mono, here's hoping there's no "patent/copyright" pollution there either...

MichaelDotNet's Leaderboard

If you haven't heard, Techmeme has a new feature, the "Leaderboard".  TechCrunch is heralding it as the defeating the last stronghold of Technorati.  Robert Scoble is lamenting the "death of blogging".  Techmeme itself says the list consists of "Techmeme's top 100 sources, including blogs, non-blogs, and everything in between", so they're not trying to be the sort of "Blog Authority" everyone else seems to be trying to make them. 

I don't think Technorati nor blogging in general have anything to worry about.  Technorati is suppose to be aimed squarley at blogs, in this case I'm defining a blog as "The single and unfiltered voice of an individual".   Techmeme's Leaderboard is solely a list of the most newsworthy sites in a particular month, some of which just happen to be blogs. 

The best authority for the top bloggers is, of course, the bloggers themselves.  Until Google starts to release an aggregated form of their users's Reader Stats (which may indeed herald the end of Technorati), we'll have to turn to each other and Technorati will show us that.

In the interest of promoting tech blogs that deserve to be noticed, I provide you with my current personal "Tech Blog Leaderboard" based on my personal Reader trends:

 

• MSDN Blogs:  Surprised?  You shouldn't be, Microsoft employs alot of smart people, this is the best way to find out something you didn't know before.  And it's not necessarily Microsoft specific all the time.
• Worse Then Failure:   Geeky humor, and great examples of what NOT to do for coders.
• Slashdot:  Still a good resource after all these years, not a blog, yet still not on Techmeme's Leaderboard either...
• CodingHorror:  Everyone in development should be subscribed to this blog.
• Scobleizer: Cause Robert Scoble always has neat stuff.
• Robert's Shared Items:  Doing all the crawling/subscribing so I don't have to.
• Jon Skeet's Coding Blog:  Man knows his C#.
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Cause deep inside we're all evil geniuses.
• Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen:   I mean, doesn't the fact he's not on the Leaderboard make you question it just a bit?

That's just a sampling, alot of webcomics and non-tech blogs in my reader too. 

What are some of your favourite/regular tech blogs? Is there anyone that I'm obviously missing that I just HAVE to subscribe to?

CodeMash 2008 Registration Is Open!

Be sure to go and register now!  The sooner you do the cheaper it is.  I want to CodeMash 2007 and it was one of the most awesome experiences I had, be sure to check out my blog entries detailing last year if you want an idea of what it's all about.  It's inexpensive, it's at a waterpark, it's easy to get to, people are friendly, what more reason do you need?  Do you live to code? Why aren't you already registered!?